Fuchuan Fuxi Village Ma Yin Temple

A forest of 120 massive wooden columns stands on a ship-shaped plot of land in Fuxi Village, holding up a temple built entirely without iron nails. In 1396 and 1413, Yao and Han villagers raised these structures to honor Ma Yin, the Southern Chu king who brought stability to this mountainous borderland. In 1499, local craftsmen replaced the original brick walls of the Dudu Temple with a massive timber frame. They carved the faces of the king's advisors into the roof ridges and painted Daoist immortals on the pillars, leaving their physical marks on the sacred space.

The engineering of the temple relies on a hybrid system, combining northern post-and-beam framing with southern column-and-tie joinery. The builders selected durable Phoebe nanmu, Chinese fir, and sandalwood, which still release a faint, sweet fragrance during the humid summer monsoons. The craftsmen left the natural topography intact, anchoring one of the seventy-six main pillars directly onto a jagged outcrop of bedrock. The remaining columns rest on cool stone bases carved as lotuses, orchids, and dragons. At the center of the altar, they carved a sun relief, reflecting traditional Yao sun-worship.

Across the rushing stream, the Zhongling Wind-and-Rain Bridge, built in 1904, connects this military governor's temple to the civilian king's temple 400 meters away. Today, villagers still gather on the bridge to talk, while children play around the exposed bedrock.

Every year, on the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, the temple courtyard fills with the sounds of the annual fair. The ancient timber frame, preserved through reconstructions in 1676 and expansions in 1867, remains a physical anchor of shared history, where the past continues to shelter the present.