卧龙寺

This guide to Wolong Temple in Xi'an starts at a shiny replica in the bell tower, marked as the Netherworld Bell, and works back to the original cast in 1003 to be rung for the dead. It traces the monastery's founding more than eighteen hundred years ago under the Han dynasty, a Tang-dynasty painting of Guanyin it once sheltered, and the fate of the abbot Langzhao during the Cultural Revolution. Stand beneath the tower and take in the bronze up close, ordinary and a little too shiny.