China Guide
Beijing
Yonghe Gong
Opening time: Daily 9am–5pm
Price: ¥25
Address: Next to Yonghe Gong metro stop
Though it is a little touristy, the colourful Yonghe Gong, Tibetan Lama Temple, is well worth a visit. It was built towards the end of the seventeenth century as the residence of Prince Yin Zhen. In 1723, when the prince became the Emperor Yong Zheng and moved into the Forbidden City, the temple was retiled in imperial yellow and restricted thereafter to religious use. It became a lamasery in 1744, housing monks from Tibet and also from Inner Mongolia, over which it had a presiding role, supervising the election of the Mongolian Living Buddha, who was chosen by lot from a gold urn. After the civil war in 1949, the Yonghe Gong was declared a national monument and for thirty years was closed; remarkably, it escaped the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.
Visitors are free to wander through the prayer halls and ornamental gardens, though the experience is largely aesthetic rather than spiritual. As well as the amazing mandalas hanging in side halls, there is some notable statuary. In the Third Hall, the Pavilion of Eternal Happiness, are nandikesvras, representations of Buddha having sex. Once used to educate the emperors' sons, the statues are now completely covered by drapes. The Hall of the Wheel of Law, behind it, has a gilded bronze statue of the founder of the Yellow Hat Sect and paintings that depict his life, while the thrones next to it are for the Dalai Lamas when they used to come here to teach. In the last, grandest hall – the Wanfu Pavilion – an eighteen-metre-high statue of the Maitreya Buddha, is made from a single trunk of sandalwood, a gift for Emperor Qianlong from the seventh Dalai Lama. The wood is Tibetan and it took three years to ship it to Beijing.
The lamasery also functions as an active Tibetan Buddhist centre, though it's used basically for propaganda purposes, to show China guaranteeing and respecting the religious freedom of minorities. It's questionable how genuine the monks you see wandering around are – at best, they're state-approved.