The Magnificent Little Potala Palace— Putuo Zongcheng Temple

While traveling to Chengde, standing on the top in Chengde Mountain Resort and looking westward, you will have an panoramic view of the magnificent little Potala Palace in Chengde— Putuo Zongcheng Temple. It looks like a pearl in the mountains.

Putuo Zongcheng Temple is just situated on the north part of Chengde Mountain Resort and was built in 1771 during Emperor Qianglong in Qing Dynasty. Putuo Zongcheng refers to Potala in Tibetan. The temple faces south, is built into hillside and higher layer by layer, which seems very splendid. The temple covers an area of 220,000 square meters. It is a typical building in Tibetan architectural style. The main buildings of the temple are on the top, with about 60 flat-top houses in total.

It was built to celebrate Emperor Qianlong ‘s 60 years old birthday and his mother's 80 years old birthday. Putuo Zongcheng Temple is the largest temple in the Eight Outer Temples in Chengde. Since the layout of this temple is just like the Potala Palace in Lhasa, it is called little Potala Palace.

This is the first gate of the temple, which looks very plain and simple. When you arrive at this place, it is hard for you to imagine that something charming and brilliant is waiting for you.

Get through the gate, there is a stele pavilion, in which tourists could find 3 square stone tablets, on which the history and story relevant to the temple are carved. All the words on the tablets are written by Emperor Qianlong.

Then passing by the pavilion, people could see a Tibetan style gate, which insists of a white stand and five pagodas. The gates is around 10 meters high with three arches. The five pagodas are red, yellow, black, which and green, which represents different sects of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet. There a stone-carved elephant in front of the gate. Elephant is the symbol of Mahayana Buddhism.

Keep walking, people will see a glazed gateway. Finally, people reach to the main building of the temple, which covers an area of more than 10,000 square meters. The lower part of this building is a white stand and the upper part is red. There are 6 glazed shrines embedded in the front wall of the red part from top to the bottom, to worship the 6 Amitayus Buddhas Besides, there are 80 yellow glazed shrines embedded in the upper part of 4 walls.