The Hanging Temple, known also as Xuankong Temple, near Datong, was one of the definite stops we’d planned for our initial route. After a few hiccups in mine (Ruth’s) super ambitious plan, this was one of the places we managed to visit.

More like a train trip to Datong, an adventure…

Leaving Beijing for Datong was an unplanned adventure. As our train left at 12:20am we decided to take the metro to Beijing Railway Station (Line 2). What we didn’t realize was that this required us to change on to a different train, which we missed, and this led to us needing to leave the station and hail a cab. Many passed us by and didn’t want to stop for us until eventually Fábio decided to stand in front of one. The cab then stopped and took us to the station without much of an issue.

Once we were at the station we went to collect our tickets that we’d bought on the internet (but having done it too late we were only able to get seated tickets… We were very excited to travel for 5 and a half hours on a night train with a tired child – meant sarcastically, of course! 🙂 ). We then headed to the platform, boarded our carriage and half of the people on the carriage stared at us, especially at Noah. We were finally lucky enough to find that, even though we weren’t sitting together, our seats were opposite each other which meant that we could lay Noah across our legs and he could sleep peacefully.

When we got to Datong, our hotel let us check in to our room early and before 8am all three of us were sleeping again, but this time comfortably 🙂

Our visit to the Hanging Temple

The next day, we went on a little trip with the small group of the 2 Italians and the French girl (Giuseppe, Maura and Anne) that we met in the Yungang Grottoes and by about 1pm we were visiting the Hanging Temple.

The Hanging Temple was built by a monk in the year 491. In the last 1500 years it’s undergone various modifications and extensions, but even so it’s still surprising to see this amazing small construction suspended on the cliff face of Cuiping Peak. I say it’s small, because it literally is… From a distance it’s funny to see the size of people who are walking on the Temple’s balconies.

There are more than 40 rooms in as little as 125m² of space inside the mountain. None of the rooms is bigger than 36m².

It was fun to walk on the small and narrow balconies; to watch as Noah (the little madman that he is… 🙂 ) didn’t even mind that he was several meters up from the ground and also watch him as he paid his respects to the religious deities that were in the Temple’s small rooms.

So many little details in such a small space… Stairs going up… other down… Quite an experience… 🙂

Our driver took us back to Datong and we decided to stay with our Italian travel companions (Maura and Giuseppe, whose birthday it definitely was and we celebrated in a very funny and particular way 🙂 ) until the train arrived that would take us to our next destination.

Next stop, Pingyao!