Temple Fair
01 · Historical Records
The Baoding Jiaxiang Temple Fair began in the Southern Song dynasty and gradually flourished during the Yuan and Ming periods. The Baoding incense festival takes Guanyin Bodhisattva as its main object of worship. The duration of the fair once extended to forty or fifty days around the nineteenth day of the second lunar month, the birthday of Guanyin; today it generally lasts three to seven days. For example, in 1946 a jiaxiang (incense-carrying) procession of more than four thousand people came from Changsha, Hunan. The people organize incense-carrying teams for pilgrimage on their own initiative, while the temples are responsible for organizing the various Buddhist worship activities. The Baoding incense festival integrates mountain pilgrimage and incense offering, trade, and entertainment into one. It continuously gathers and spreads culture with distinctive ethnic characteristics, and plays an active role in transmitting regional culture, enriching the spiritual life of the masses, promoting social harmony, and fostering local cultural exchange.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
In the northeast of Dazu District, Chongqing, stands the world-renowned Baoding Mountain Grottoes of Dazu. The Baoding incense festival derived from them is likewise extraordinary and has enjoyed a high reputation from ancient times to the present. The Baoding Jiaxiang Temple Fair is the crystallization of a high degree of integration between religious culture and folk culture, and an indispensable component of Dazu culture. At each session of the incense festival, the number of pilgrims ranges from more than one hundred thousand to as many as four or five hundred thousand. Believers come from Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Hunan, Hubei, Fujian and Guangdong provinces. About one third of them are individual pilgrims, while two thirds belong to incense-carrying teams. Each year three or four hundred incense-carrying groups take part in the incense festival. A single incense-carrying group numbers from more than one hundred to several thousand people. The incense-carrying activity proceeds under the lead of an incense-guiding master. At the front of the procession, meteor hammers clear the way, accompanied by flags, gongs, umbrellas and canopies; next, dragon lanterns and lions lead the way ahead; these are followed in order by lanterns, the sacred palanquin, nine-grade candles and incense, ten-offering carrying boxes, the eighteen scholars, the eighteen arhats, the eight immortals, and the twenty-eight lunar mansions. The whole ceremony is solemn and reverent, and a spirit tablet is set up at the sacred palanquin. Whenever the incense-carrying procession encounters monasteries, market towns and bridges along the way, and when it enters Baoding Mountain to visit the Great Buddha Bay, the Shengshou Temple and the Guangda Temple, it pays homage site by site and temple by temple, niche by niche and cave by cave, hall by hall and statue by statue, finally presenting its incense and fulfilling its vows at the Thousand-Armed Guanyin. The Buddhist religious activities of the Baoding Jiaxiang Temple Fair consist mainly of two parts: the popular and the temple.
The lead incense-master
A lead incense-master commands the column, which opens with whirling fire-streaks and flies banners, gongs, umbrellas and canopies.
Fire-streaks and dragon-and-lion escort
Fire-streaks lead, then dragons and lions, and only behind them the lanterns, the holy seat and the offering boxes.
The holy seat and its tablets
Tablets stand at the holy seat, and here the column turns solemn in sharp contrast to the noise that preceded it.
Worship at every niche
Every temple, town, bridge, niche and hall on the route is visited in turn, a patience that makes the pilgrimage arduous and complete.
Offering incense before the thousand-armed Guanyin
The journey ends at the thousand-armed Guanyin, where pilgrims deliver their incense and discharge their vows.
Rites by laity and by monastery
Laymen form the pilgrim teams while the monastery conducts the rites, the two tracks running side by side.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Its trade activities are quite active and have given a certain impetus to the development of the local economy.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair · Temple Fair.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The Baoding Jiaxiang Temple Fair is founded on the Baoding Mountain Grottoes of Dazu, and the destination of the pilgrims' worship is the carved images themselves. The incense-carrying procession pays homage site by site and temple by temple, niche by niche and cave by cave, hall by hall and statue by statue, finally presenting its incense and fulfilling its vows at the Thousand-Armed Guanyin — this route corresponds one to one with the distribution of the grottoes, making the religious rite at the same time a pilgrimage through the art of stone carving. The interdependence of the grotto images and the incense festival is a striking sample of Chinese cave temples in the mountainous south. The organizational scale of the incense festival is also rare: each session draws from more than one hundred thousand to four or five hundred thousand pilgrims, of whom about one third are individual pilgrims and two thirds belong to incense-carrying teams; a single team numbers from over a hundred to several thousand people, and over the whole year there are three to four hundred teams. Believers come from Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Hunan, Hubei, Fujian and Guangdong provinces, and the processions tie incense bonds at every place they pass, their momentum joining into a single sweep. The Buddhist rites are composed of two parts, the popular and the temple: the people spontaneously organize the incense-carrying teams, while the temples are responsible for organizing the various worship rites. This division of labor allows the incense festival to keep its flexibility without losing its solemnity. Historically the fair once lasted forty or fifty days around the nineteenth day of the second lunar month, the birthday of Guanyin; today it generally runs three to seven days. Although the scale and tempo have changed, the mutual stimulus between pilgrims and local trade remains evident.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Hu Wenxiang 04-1974
- Guan Zhangxun 04-1975
- Cheng Zhongxin 05-3018
- Wang Defeng
- Luo Binggen
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。