Chaoyang Mountain 朝阳山

About Chaoyang Mountain

The temple is built directly against the rock so that its eaves project from the cliff face, which is why it is also called the Chaoyang Hanging Temple. Ming and Qing editions of the Qi County gazetteer record that it stands on the site of a Shang palace said to have been used in winter by King Zhou, and the Henan provincial culture and tourism authority repeats that tradition while listing Chaoyang Shan among Qi County's main visitor sites. Whether a palace stood here is a gazetteer tradition rather than an excavated fact, and the surviving fabric on the slope is Buddhist.

The carvings themselves are registered as the Chaoyang Temple Stone Carvings in the seventh batch of provincial protected cultural heritage units of Henan, with a date range running from the Eastern Wei to the Qing. They sit at Dawa Village in Lingshan Subdistrict and include a dated Sui inscription, a set of grottoes with carved figures, and later cliff inscriptions, among them the two running-script characters cut beside the Huatai terrace in the Jin dynasty.

What to look for

• Chaoyang Temple itself, built hard against the cliff so that its halls and eaves appear to hang from the rock
• The cliff inscription dated to the fourth year of the Sui Kaihuang era (584), directly above the grotto on the rock face north of the temple
• The six grottoes west of the stone arch bridge by the Qingliang'an, which hold carved figures and further cliff inscriptions
• The two large running-script characters reading 'Huatai', cut on the cliff beside the terrace in the second year of the Jin Xingding era
• The Eastern Wei grottoes and the large carved 'Buddha' character on the southern face of the hill, the latter a modern addition written by a monk from Taiwan

Location & getting there

Getting to Chaoyang Mountain

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

• Search for 朝阳山 with 鹤壁市 and 淇县.