Wuxiang Temple

What the sources say

In its district profile the Lishui District government website writes that the district contains "Wuxiang Temple, one of the 480 temples of the Southern Dynasties", and lists it with the Wuxiang Temple cliff inscriptions, Tiansheng Bridge, the Yanzhi River, Changle Bridge, Putang Bridge, the Yongshou pagoda and the Ming consort's tomb as the district's heritage sites. "The 480 temples of the Southern Dynasties" is a line from Tang poetry, cited by the website to indicate the early date of the temple; this entry reproduces the phrase and marks it as a quotation, and does not infer a precise founding year from it.

The district website's "Places of Note" page lists Wuxiang Temple with the Huifeng Mountain hominid fossil site and the Southern Tang reading terrace of Han Xizai as cultural landmarks.

Date and protection status

In the sources available the date of Wuxiang Temple is given only by the general term "Southern Dynasties"; its founding and its later fortunes are not recorded. The temple appears in no list of protected sites at national, provincial, municipal or district level, so no protection_level is given. Wuxiang Mountain also holds the municipally protected Wuxiang Temple cliff inscriptions, a separate protected site and not the same thing as this entry.

To be added

Still to be added: the date of founding and the temple's rise and decline through the dynasties, the buildings and remains that survive, the relation between the temple and the cliff inscriptions on Wuxiang Mountain, and the documentary basis for the phrase "one of the 480 temples of the Southern Dynasties".