I had gone along to the Jing’an Temple and the Park in front of it sometime ago, but because it was yet another temple and yet another park I haven’t quite got round to writing about them. But yesterday I walked a route in one of my tourist books that took me from West Nanjing Road metro station to Jing’an Metro so I thought I would start this with a look back at the cold days running up to the Spring Festival when I went to visit the Temple.
Old Image: Jing’an Temple
Almost The Same View in 2015
Everything about the Jing’an Temple is huge. It is a modern structure, completely unidentifiable from the original. The perimeter wall of the temple contains, on the inside, rooms for the monks; on the outside there are normal shop fronts. I wonder if the monks benefit from the rent? The front courtyard, the monk’s rooms at the back, the golden pagoda, the statue of Buddha, the buildings that surround it, the archways and the incense burner, the guardian lions, all are on the grand scale:
It was all in keeping with the size of the buildings around and about, but I can’t help thinking that they’ve lost something here; quite a lot in fact. The huge Buddha is made from 13.6 tonnes of silver, the size of which adds to the sense that this is Temple is all about bling, but the carving of the statue does have a serene quality at odds with much here. There were a couple of other interesting carvings I noticed:
and the saffron robes soaking by the fountain gave what would otherwise have been a rather disappointing experience a nice personal touch.
Across the road facing the temple were some cows in Nick Park style, but advertising some rather nondescript shops, like Dunelm I think one of them was:
and further along the street a temporary sculpture for the year of the sheep advertising pepsi and a permanent one of an Albrecht Dürer rhinoceros at the entrance to the Jing’an Gongyuan (Jing’an Park) :
The park has a lily pond with an Indonesian restaurant the Bali Laguna in a Swiss Chalet on the water’s edge and a mountain constructed out of rocks backed up against the top of the Jinag’an Metro station with a small pavilion on top, where someone was doing their stretches.
Bali Laguna Jingan Gongyuan
Mountain top Jingan Park
As in all parks in Shanghai there were people doing their thing, whether that be doing tai chi in front of the Teacher’s Statue, playing cards, watching people playing cards, or just watching or mucking about on climbing frames no matter how old you
Tai Chi and Teachers Statue
are, it’s just the size of the equipment that changes.
Watching cards being played, or not
Cai Yuanpei
There’s a statue of Cai Yuanpei, an educationalist, who was instrumental in sending Chinese students to Paris – many of whom later became leaders of the Chinese Communist Party – but was himself one of the four elders of the nationalist Guomindang (KMT) and anti-communist. He tried to change China’s education system to one along French lines (but failed) and advocated the equal importance of the five ways of life 德、智、體、群、美 (virtue, wisdom, health, collective and beauty) which are still taught in schools in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. He was a proponent of a woman’s right to divorce and strongly opposed foot binding and the whole system of concubines.
Cinars
Carp pond in the Eight Sights Garden
The park was built around the 100 year old chinars (from Çınar a turkic word meaning plane trees ) which were planted in 1898 when in colonial times this was the Bubbling Well Cemetery. Within the park is the Jing’an Eight Sights Garden commemorating (I think) the original features that were associated with the old Jing’an temple. Of these the Bubbling Well, which bubbled away all day and every day gave its name to the original cemetery and also to the main road The Bubbling Well Road outside the temple (now called the West Nanjing Road) which takes you east from here to the former racecourse – now People’s Park. The monks erected a stone pillar by the well, but both were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Another of the eight Jing’an sights was The Chiwu tablet which marked the spot
Copy of The Chiwu Stone Tablet
of the original Jing’an Temple, then known as the Chong Yuan Temple and marked the original spot some distance from here after the temple was moved to Bubbling Well during the Song Dynasty. It was later found submerged in the river.
Entrance to the Jingan Eight Sights Garden
I visited the Jing’an Eight Sights garden on my second visit, as I had not understood the significance of the place, and I am glad that I did, and I didn’t have to pay the reported RMB 3 (30p) to get into the garden either as there was no-one on the gate.
That evening, after work, Richard and I went to our local Japanese restaurant – we have been there before – and ordered some Tsukemono (pickled things) we couldn’t identify and some soba noodles (made from buckwheat) and beef for Richard and duck and ramen noodles (wheat) for me, washed down with some Japanese beer and green tea.
I’ve since watched a programme about Japanese pickle making (we get a very good english language Japanese channel on Sky) and I managed to identify all three pickles, but have since forgotten! One I think was pickled onion, another pickled ginger and the third pickled turnip. The beans were nattō – soybeans fermented with Bacillus subtilis and covered in egg yolk which added to their slimy texture – we won’t be ordering them again, even though they are reported to have probiotic benefits.
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