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Temple of General Peace

The Temple of General Peace (Puning Temple) lies at the riverside of the Wulie River in the Mountain Summer Resort in City of Chengde.

It was built in 1755 and imitated the form of the Sanmoye Temple in Tibet. The construction lasted for four years and was completed in 1759. It covers an area of 33,000 square meters and it is one of the eight most famous temples outside the Mountain Summer Resort.

In 1961, it was listed into Chinese emphatic preservation unit of cultural relics.

In 1755, the chief of Mongolia tribe in north of Xinjiang rebelled. Emperor Qianlong sent armed forces to put down the rebellion immediately. Soon the rebellion was calmed.

When the news came back to Beijing, Qianlong was so happy that he decided to build a temple named "Temple of General Peace" at the riverside of the Mountain Summer Resort in Chengde City to represent that the atmosphere of peace is full of the whole China and all over the world.

Qianlong invited four chieftains of the four tribes to the Mountain Summer Resort in winter of that year and declared to build a monument with text saying Mongolia tribes belonging to Qing Dynasty.

The Temple of General Peace is huge and there are Heaven Palace, Great Hero Precious Palace and Bell, Drum Towers and so on. The central construction of the temple is Hinayana Palace with 6-layer eaves cumulation and the standing statue of God Mother Bodhisattva with thousands of eyes and hands covered with gold enshrined in it. The statue is 22.23 meters high and its waistline is 15 meters and carved with 5 kinds of wood such as cypress. Its weight is 20 tons and spent more than 120 cubic meters wood.

The Wuliangshou Buddha with 1.53 meters high is enshrined in the Heaven Palace and it is one of the largest wood-carved statues in China. In the west of the Hinayana Palace, there are Sun Palace and Moon Palace indicating the sun and the moon.

Round the Sun and Moon Palace, their were Tibetan constructions such as towers indicating "Four Largest Continents" and "Eight Smallest Continents" in Buddhism. There are Miaoyan Temple and Scripture Halls on both sides of the palace. The whole construction melts the Buddhist artistic styles of Han, Tibet and India. The scene is very unsophisticated and graceful.

Temples with multi-layer layout were built along the slope. The temples in front have Han style and those in the rear have the characteristic of the Sanmoye Temple of Tibet, and they are the representatives of Chinese temple art.

No matter whether you are Buddhist, the Temple of General Peace is worth visiting. You are better off visit it after the Mountain of Summer Resort in Chengde, which can save a lot of time for you.

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