A Visit to Hanshan Temple in Suzhou

Half a year of writing code tired out my eyes and my mind. So on a weekend I drove to Suzhou to see Hanshan Temple.

I didn't know much about the temple beforehand. I had memorized Night Mooring by Maple Bridge in primary school, but back then I never wondered where Hanshan Temple actually was, let alone that one day I would drive two hours just to see it.

The road to Suzhou

I left Yangzhou early on Saturday, getting on the highway at the Shugang Hub: S28 Qiyang Expressway to G4011 Yangli Expressway, then onto G42 Hurong Expressway heading east all the way to Suzhou. The GPS said two hours. The highway was emptier than I expected at eight on a Saturday morning; the only ones in more of a hurry than me were a few trucks.

Maple Bridge

Past the entrance, the first stop is Maple Bridge (Fengqiao).

The bridge is a later restoration. Better to say that up front, so nobody stands at the end looking for the Tang dynasty the way I did. Beside the bridge stands a stone tablet inscribed with Zhang Ji's poem, its face polished shiny by a thousand hands:

月落乌啼霜满天，江枫渔火对愁眠。 姑苏城外寒山寺，夜半钟声到客船。

Moon setting, crows crying, frost filling the sky;River maples, fishing fires, sleep against my sorrow.Outside Gusu City, Hanshan Temple;Midnight, the bell sound reaches the traveler's boat.

Twelve hundred years ago, Zhang Ji — having failed the imperial exam — was sailing home. His boat stopped here for the night. He heard a bell in the distance and wrote these twenty-eight characters. Twelve centuries later I stood at the same spot, sun in my eyes, an old man beside me hunting for a photo angle, the river underneath still drifting slowly.

The statue of Zhang Ji stands next to the tablet, a frail scholar with lowered eyes. A crowd of tourists fought for a good spot in front of it. I waited for them to clear, then snapped one clean shot for myself.

Inside the gate

A twenty-yuan ticket gets you past the unassuming gate; the main hall is behind it.

The Mahavira Hall itself is like any Han Buddhist temple across the country. Three things actually stopped me.

Two ancient camphor trees in front of the hall, supposedly planted the year the temple was founded — fifteen hundred years old, if true. It takes two people to reach around one trunk, and their canopy shades half the courtyard. Standing under them, the day got several degrees cooler.

The statues of Hanshan and Shide inside, nothing like the stern bodhisattvas you usually see. Hanshan is bare-chested and laughing; Shide hugs a broom like a janitor monk who just finished sweeping. A guide with a little flag explained to her group that they're the "Two Immortals of Harmony," in charge of family togetherness. Everyone laughed, and the laugh sounded sincere.

In the rear courtyard, a bell tower holds a replica ancient bell. Visitors can pay to strike it — five yuan for three strikes. I didn't strike it; I just stood below and looked.

Looking up at it, I thought about this: in ancient times the bell marked the hours for the whole city — one strike, half the city could hear it. Now it grants wishes for tourists — five yuan, one line of "family safety." On New Year's Eve, they say, the bell is struck 108 times to ring out a year's troubles, a tradition going back more than forty years. Fifteen hundred years on, it's the same bell; the listeners have turned over again and again, and what they want to hear has changed with them.

Hanshan Villa

The temple has several side courtyards scattered around it. The one worth seeing is Hanshan Villa.

Past its entrance is a long corridor with the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, and poems by various historical figures carved into both walls. I walked along slowly, stopping at the ones I liked. These half-classical, half-vernacular verses line every wall — not great poetry, but the antique feel is real. They wear better than the "life is but a first meeting" quotes on social media.

寒山寺里无寒山，拾得堂前问拾得。 不知谁是寒山客，且向云中觅旧踪。

(At Hanshan Temple there is no Hanshan; at Shide Hall one asks of Shide. Who is the traveler of Hanshan? Let us seek old traces among the clouds.)

At the end of the corridor is a pond. Koi drifted slowly through the water. A child squatted at the edge throwing bread, the fish swarmed, and the kid laughed so hard she nearly fell over.

She knew nothing of Zhang Ji, nothing of Hanshan and Shide, and certainly nothing of "harmony." But the way she laughed was more alive than every poem tablet on the walls.

Puming Pagoda

The temple's pagoda is called Puming Pagoda, five stories, a Tang-style wooden structure. The temple was first built as the "Miaoli Puming Stupa Courtyard" in the Tianjian era of the Liang dynasty — older by far than the name "Hanshan Temple." The pagoda itself has been destroyed and rebuilt many times; the one standing now was modeled on the Tang pagodas painted in the Dunhuang murals. Even the "Tang" is new.

I didn't climb it. I walked a circle around it instead, along the cloister that rings the pagoda, a pond on the far side. The corridor walls are covered with Night Mooring by Maple Bridge transcribed by calligraphers across the dynasties, one hand different from the next — those twenty-eight characters greet you at every turn here.

On the way back, the last line of the poem came back to me. Where Zhang Ji moored his boat for the night was, most likely, somewhere along that canal I had walked beside in the morning.

The road home

Before the exit I passed a wall: every calligraphic rendering of Night Mooring by Maple Bridge lined up side by side, opening with a Song dynasty stele and closing with modern masters — Qi Gong, Shen Peng, Sha Menghai — a whole wall of it. Building an entire calligraphy wall around one poem is something that probably only happens in the Chinese-speaking world.

Everything I had seen that day — the bridge, the bell, the pagoda, the statues — was mostly new: rebuilt in the late Qing, repaired in the Republic era, renovated again in recent years. What's truly old is a piece of land and twenty-eight characters. But that's enough: a thousand years ago someone wrote about this place, and today people still line up to read what he wrote.

The people who came here over those twelve centuries all wanted different things: a failed scholar, monks copying sutras, an official drawing divination sticks, Qianlong on one of his six southern tours. During the war a soldier came too — whether hiding or patrolling, nobody knows. Now it was my turn: I raised my phone, took a photo, posted it. The reasons change; the fact of "having come once" doesn't. That much survived a thousand years.

Back at the parking lot I started the car. The GPS said two hours to Yangzhou, traffic clear all the way. On the highway the sky slowly went dark, and I thought about the bell I hadn't struck. If the sound could carry that far, Yangzhou should be able to hear it right now.

Of course it can't. I rolled down the window and listened for a while anyway.