Cangjie Temple 仓颉庙

About Cangjie Temple

The temple faces south on a north-south axis. A People's Daily Online item carried on the Study the Great Nation platform describes the enclosure as a rectangle whose buildings run from south to north along the central axis – a screen wall, a gate, a front hall, a reporting hall, a middle hall, a sleeping hall and the burial mound – and says historical sources record a temple being built here as early as the Yanxi era of the Eastern Han, giving a documented temple history of more than 1,800 years. The China.org.cn page places the temple in Shiguan township, 35 kilometres north-east of Baishui county town, with the Huanglong mountains to the north and the Luo river to the south, and gives it an area of 17 mu.

The steles and the cypresses are the temple's other distinction. The People's Daily Online item records that the temple holds many stone steles, spanning the Eastern Han and the Wei, Sixteen Kingdoms, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing and Republican periods, and that the most prized among them is the Cangsheng bird-tracks stele, set up in the tenth month of the nineteenth year of the Qianlong reign, which the page dates to 1754; its 28 characters are held to reproduce the original forms of the pictographs Cangjie is said to have made. The same item describes a cypress in the south-west corner that is hollow and has a locust tree growing inside it, which is why the feature is called 'cypress embracing locust'. The China.org.cn page counts 48 old cypresses at the temple, all more than a thousand years old, and records that the temple's cypress group is named with those at the Confucian temple in Qufu and at the Yellow Emperor's mausoleum as the three great groups of old temple cypresses in China.

The China.org.cn page records that the temple was approved by the State Council as a national key cultural relic protection unit in June 2001, and describes it as the only surviving temple in China commemorating the invention of writing; the site of the Northwest Field Army headquarters was inside it during the civil war. The two pages differ on the temple's age: the China.org.cn page gives it more than 2,000 years of history, while the People's Daily Online item gives a documented temple history of more than 1,800 years.

What to look for

• The Cangsheng bird-tracks stele, set up in the tenth month of the nineteenth year of the Qianlong reign, which the page dates to 1754, whose 28 characters are held to reproduce Cangjie's original pictographs.
• The 'cypress embracing locust' in the south-west corner, a hollow cypress with a locust tree growing inside it.
• The 48 old cypresses the China.org.cn page counts, all more than a thousand years old, including the one the page says is put at more than five thousand years.
• The temple's axial sequence of buildings, from the screen wall and gate through the front, reporting, middle and sleeping halls to the burial mound.
• The steles spanning the Eastern Han to the Republican period that the People's Daily Online item records.

Location & getting there

Getting to Cangjie Temple

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

• Search for 仓颉庙 with 渭南市 and 白水县.