What is unique about the activity pine of Jietai Temple in Beijing?

The "activity pine" in front of the Thousand Buddha Pavilion is a 25-meter-high Pinus tabulaeformis, which is said to have been planted by Yue Quan, the abbot of the Yuan Dynasty. This pine tree is umbrella-shaped and its branches are intertwined. Its characteristic is that if you touch any of its branches with your hand, its branches will shake all over, "attracting one will make the whole body hair".

Every time Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty went to Jietai Temple, he shook his pine for fun. Qianlong named this strange pine "living pine" and wrote three poems for it, including the poem "Shake the branches to keep up with the old", all of which were engraved on a dome-shaped stone tablet on the southwest side of this big tree. However, the later activity pine was not the one that Emperor Qianlong saw, but was replanted during Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty.

Why can "activity loose" move? It turns out that its trunk and branches are tilted to the east, and the whole tree is unstable, so a branch moves and the whole body is shaking.

There is a tall bronze statue of Peluzena Buddha in the center of the pavilion. Brick walls on both sides are inlaid with glass murals, which are all over the pavilion. Each niche provides a small carved Buddha statue with a height of 10 cm, totaling 1680.

"Sitting on a thousand Buddha pavilions, you can get all the blessings in the world. "As the only open-air Buddha statue in Jietai Temple, the Maitreya Buddha carved with a thousand-year-old camphor wood is beautifully carved, sitting cross-legged, shirtless and lifelike in natural form.

Accompanied by the morning bell and dusk drum of the ancient temple, Maitreya watched the spring and autumn of this world with a lasting smile, often gaining the light of the sun and the moon, absorbing the aura of heaven and earth, standing on the pavilion of thousands of buddhas, cultivating the heart of thousands of buddhas, smiling with eternal joy, and accepting the world with a big belly, which also contains the hopes of all people in the world. It also infects people with smiles to be happy, to do things and to live a happy life.

Turn north from the ruins of the Thousand Buddha Pavilion, and you will first see a quadrangle with two entrances, where Prince Ia of the Qing Palace lived in seclusion 10. The courtyard is elegant and quiet. Since the Qing Dynasty, it has been famous for planting cloves and peonies, especially rare species such as black peony, which is the icing on the cake, so it is called peony garden. The peony garden has a unique architectural style, which skillfully combines the traditional quadrangle form in Beijing with the garden art in the south of the Yangtze River.

Climb the stone steps at the left rear of the Thousand Buddhas Pavilion, and you can reach another high platform, namely the Guanyin Hall, the tallest building in Jietai Temple. It is three rooms wide, with one in the middle for the statue of Guanyin Bodhisattva and two in the left and right for the study room of Prince Gong Ajia.

On the edge of the front seat of Kannonji in Jietai Temple, there is a bluestone fence. From north to south, there are 17 big lions and 8 cubs, including various shapes such as hydrangea play, feeding the cubs and holding them in the palm.

This group of stone lions are exquisitely carved, with clear lines and smooth and soothing knife techniques. They are even more delicate than those of Lugou Bridge, and similar to those of the 17-hole bridge in the Summer Palace. They are high-quality works of Jietai Temple.