Famen Temple

Famen Temple is about 120 km from Xi'an. Originally called Ayuwang Temple, it was renamed Famen Temple in the early Tang dynasty. It is a historic Buddhist temple and houses a finger bone relic of Shakyamuni Buddha in its pagoda, earning it the reputation of “the ancestor of pagodas and temples in Guanzhong”. In 1981, half of the pagoda collapsed. During its reconstruction in 1986, a Tang-dynasty underground palace was discovered. It measures about 21 metres long and covers 31.84 square metres, and is the largest underground structure found to date that houses Buddhist relics. Four relics and a large number of precious Tang-dynasty cultural relics were unearthed from it.

Inscriptions in the underground palace record that the Buddha finger bone relic had been kept in the foundation of the Famen Temple pagoda. Emperor Gaozong of the Tang dynasty once welcomed the relic to Luoyang, and Empress Wu Zetian also invited it to be enshrined in the Hall of Light she had built. The Famen Temple Museum, located on the west side of the temple, displays more than 300 exhibits, including Buddhist scriptures, stone steles, porcelain, glassware, tea sets, ritual objects, gold and silver ware, the eight-layer treasure boxes, and the Hu-gate-throne jade coffin, among other rare treasures.