A vast conurbation that has sprung up from nowhere in the space of a couple of decades, Shenzhen is hardly the place you would expect to find any temples. But it does have a couple that are worth taking a look at.
Hongfa Temple is Shenzhen’s only sizable Buddhist temple, and a busy place of worship by mainland standards. The story goes that the temple, which was built in the early nineties, sits on the site of a monastery founded by a monk many centuries ago after he had a vision of a celestial nymph at Xianhu, or Fairy Lake. Next door to the temple is a pleasant and reasonably atmospheric vegetarian restaurant – a staple of most Chinese Buddhist temples.
Shenzhen’s other worthwhile temple attraction is its Tianhou Temple (or Matzu Temple), out at the Nanshan district. Matzu is the patron saint of seafarers and much revered throughout southern China’s coastal regions, where she seems also to be worshiped as a form of Guanyin, the Goddess of Compassion. The original temple is said to date back to 1410, and was built as an offering to Matzu for sparing the fleet of the famous world-navigating eunuch, Zheng He, or as he is often known, Cheng Ho. Unfortunately, the temple today is the latest of a series of reconstructions of the original, this latest one dating from the early nineties.
