Winter Travel Experience – HanShan Temple Of SuZhou

On day 5 of our packaged travel to China, we got a morning call at 7:30am. My room was on the other block from where we were going to have our breakfast. We packed our luggage as we would leave SuZhou later today for another historic city of Nanjing. When I stepped out of our hotal block, I found 1 interesting scene on another building fascade next to our hotel (photo below). On top of their painting skill, these painters are cliff hanging experts as well! 🙂

This morning, we would wander around SuZhou town centre. Our destination in the morning was HanShan Temple (寒山寺) or Cold Mountain temple. Perhaps many of you who learn about chinese culture should have heard that HanShan temple is Chinese favourite spot of Lunar New Year celebration where its bell ringing at midnight marks the New lunar Year which could be heard from miles away.

Eh Hmm… we were being squeezed to the other corner of the frame as tourists are lining up to take photo in front of these 3 words, Han Shan Si. Yeah, yeah, yeah… I’ve been there, you see the photo? 🙁

It is located at the town of Fengqiao (枫桥, Maple Bridge), about 5 kilometres west of the old city of Suzhou. Next to the entrance of the temple is the site map of Hanshan temple. It is a huge compound. However, we have only got time to cover one third (30%) of the temple… 🙁

“Two bells are currently used at Hanshan Temple, both dating from the late Qing Dynasty when the temple was last renovated. One was forged in China in 1906, and the other was forged in Japan at around the same time.” This is the bell which rings to famous.

“A new 108 tonne bell commissioned by Hanshan Temple and built by a foundry in Wuhan was completed recently, and is on its way to Hanshan Temple to replace the hundred years old Japanese built bell. The new bell tall 8.5 meter, widest diameter 5.2 meter.” Beside the bell, there was a rockery referred as GuanYin Rock (观音石).

What locals would do in the temple is praying with joss sticks to GuanYin, Buddha and Lohan….

…hanging wishes written red papers on tress that believed could make wishes come true. We learned the culture and did the same things.

Though not much else we could do there, beautiful architecture and holy scenes made me snapped quite some photos to share. 🙂

Beyond the praying courtyard of 3 themed temples in front, there is the main temple located within the multi-storey Pungming pagoda (普明宝塔) at the backyard.

Buddhist should be able to explain more on the story scultured on this wall….

We spent only about an hour in the temple, which is definitely insufficient to cover the whole site. Well, it’s a typical packaged travel disadvantage. The only thing we could do were to snap as many photos as we could 🙁

At the exit of Hanshan temple, we saw the identical scene: shops selling local products, silk, tea pot, chestnut and souvenirs.

After that, we visited the local silk factory which was one of the ‘compulsory’ itineraries on this trip. Contrary to the travel destination of Hanshan temple, we were given more than sufficient time to shop at this factory before we had lunch within the same factory. It seemed to be a popular item for our fellow travel group members as they spent not less than RMB20k just for just silk products!

Funny to make note here is that we had complimentary beers for each and every meal in our China tour and different brand of beer was served in every different restaurant! 🙂 In this case in SuZhou, ShanSui Icy Beer was served… – Travel Feeder.

All above photos were captured by Panasonic Lumix Fz28

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.