Taiqing Palace 太清宫

About Taiqing Palace

The temple was founded in 165 AD, in the Eastern Han, under the name Laozi Temple. After the Tang founder Li Yuan claimed Laozi as the ancestor of the imperial Li clan in 620, the shrine was rebuilt as an imperial ancestral temple with halls on a palace scale; Laozi was given the title Supreme Mysterious Primordial Emperor in 666, Wu Zetian honoured his mother as the Xiantian Empress and built the Dongxiao Palace for her in 684, and Emperor Xuanzong ordered the renaming to Taiqing Palace. In its Tang form the site had a front palace and a rear palace about half a kilometre apart, linked across the Qingjing River by the Huixian Bridge, together covering some 872 mu with more than 600 halls and pavilions.

War destroyed the complex at the end of the Tang. Emperor Zhenzong of Song came in person in 1014, held state rites, ordered an enlargement and set up a stele in his own hand; the buildings burned again in the Jingkang upheaval at the end of the Northern Song, were added to under the Jin and Yuan, and were repaired in 1579 and 1671. The State Council listed the site as a national key cultural heritage site in 2001. Excavation by the Henan cultural heritage bureau in 1997 recovered more than a thousand objects, among them 68 bronzes, and the dig was nominated for the national top-ten archaeological discoveries of 1998; work at the Dongxiao Palace site found a Song brick-paved processional way with Tang and Han layers beneath it. Since 2005 the county has carried out staged reconstruction, a second phase completed in April 2008 adding the Laozi Culture Square, a replica of Laozi's house, the Hanxuan Garden, the Daoyuan stele forest and the Sanqing Hall.

What to look for

• The Xiantian Empress eulogy stele of 1014, composed, written and titled by Emperor Zhenzong of Song, about 8 metres high and 2 metres wide and weighing over 50 tonnes; the tomb of Laozi's mother lies behind it
• The Tang Daodejing commentary stele, the oldest imperial stele on the site, carrying Emperor Xuanzong's commentary on the Daodejing
• The Taiji Hall, rebuilt in 1913 from building components of the Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing periods
• The iron pillar standing before the Taiji Hall, a reference to Laozi's post as 'historian under the pillar' at the Zhou court, and the Nine-Dragon Well beside the hall
• The west exhibition gallery, which displays finds from the 1997 excavation of the Western Zhou Changzikou tomb together with material on the history of the temple

Location & getting there

Getting to Taiqing Palace

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 太清宫 with 周口市 and 鹿邑县.