Discover Beijing
Five Pagoda Temple / Beijing Stone Carving Art Museum
五塔寺(北京石刻艺术博物馆)
A Ming temple whose extraordinary Indian-influenced stone hall is topped by five small pagodas carved all over with Buddhist reliefs - there is nothing else like it in China. The courtyard around it is now an open-air museum of 2,600 steles, epitaphs and carvings rescued from across Beijing.
The story
What makes this place special
Zhenjue Temple - the Temple of the Great Righteous Awakening, universally called the Five Pagoda Temple - was built in 1473 under the Chenghua emperor. Its single surviving structure is a Diamond Throne Pagoda: a square stone base about 7.7m high carrying five pagodas, one at each corner with eleven eave layers and a taller central one with thirteen, about 17m in all. The design is said to have been brought to the Ming court by an Indian monk, named in the record as Sariputra, and derives from the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, though the proportions and ornament are Chinese; legend has five golden Buddhas buried one under each pagoda. The brick and white marble is now rust-stained from iron in the stone, and the surfaces carry carvings of a thousand Buddhas, sutra texts, animals and floral motifs. Fires in 1860 and the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 destroyed all the timber halls, leaving only the stone. It became a national monument in 1961, is the oldest of the six known diamond throne pagodas in China, and now houses the Beijing Art Museum of Stone Carvings.
What you’ll discover
A walled garden behind the zoo, with the rust-coloured stone pagoda standing alone at the centre - every inch of its base carved - and, around it, the open-air stone carving museum: hundreds of steles, tomb guardians, Buddhist figures, stone officials, bilingual Qing grave markers and the stone inscriptions rescued from demolished Beijing sites, standing in rows under trees. You can climb a narrow internal stair in the base and walk out onto the terrace among the five pagodas.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Climb up inside. A dark stair in the base brings you out on the terrace between the five pagodas, which almost no one does - it is the only place to see the carving detail at close range.
- The stone carving collection in the grounds is the hidden value: it is, in effect, the salvaged epigraphy of a demolished city, including Jesuit missionaries' tombstones and foreign-language inscriptions you will see nowhere else in Beijing.
- Walk round the whole base and read the carving as a programme rather than ornament - the thousand Buddhas, the symbols and the Sanskrit are laid out in order.
- It is immediately behind Beijing Zoo and next to the National Library, a few minutes from Xizhimen - entirely easy to reach and almost always empty, which is unusual for a site of this importance.
- The trees in the grounds are old and the garden is one of the quietest in the city; in autumn the ginkgo and the stone make the best photographs here.
- There is little English interpretation. Read about Bodh Gaya and the diamond throne form first, or the pagoda will look like a curiosity rather than evidence of Indian Buddhism reaching Ming Beijing.
When to come
Any weekday; it is rarely busy. Late October for the autumn colour among the steles, or a clear winter day when the rust-coloured stone looks best against the sky.
Getting around
The grounds are flat and largely paved or gravelled, so a wheelchair can see the pagoda from the ground and move among most of the stone carving collection, with some gravel and grass sections that are hard to push. The terrace among the five pagodas is reached only by a narrow, steep internal staircase and cannot be done in a wheelchair or with a bad knee. It is a small site with short distances, which makes it a good low-effort option.
Worth knowing before you go
Walk the full circuit of the pagoda base slowly - the carved registers of elephants, lions and Buddha feet repay close looking, and nobody will be in your way. It sits behind Beijing Zoo, so it combines well with the National Library or a zoo visit.
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