Master Jing Xiong. Photo: Liao Danlin/GT

Shifengyan Temple in Xiamen, Fujian Province, is not easily found. A small easily missed sign sitting on Maqing road in Xiamen's Haicang district is the only indicator pointing the way to Shifengyan Temple. Turning on the road, you may still feel a bit unsure if you're heading in the right direction because the street looks more like an abandoned path covered with dust and stones.

After a bumpy nearly three kilometer journey up a hill, a beautiful Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) temple suddenly came into view. For Master Jing Xiong, born in 1962, this place is not only going to be a place for him to exhibit the 5,000 cultural relics he has collected over the past 30 years but will also provide the foundation on which he plans to build a museum made up of buildings modeled on architecture from different dynasties to present the history of Chinese culture.

Teaching future generations

Master Jing Xiong converted to Buddhism when he was only a teenager shaving all his hair off in Xiamen's Nanputuo Temple. During the 1980s, he followed his master to Hong Kong where he was able to meet people from different professions, many of which were art and antique collectors. In Hong Kong he also learned a lot about how many national treasures had been lost during wars or political movements.

"Buddhism cares about culture, and relics are an important part of traditional culture. Each item represents a specific historical period," Master Jing Xiong told the Global Times.

During his travels to temples around China during the early 1980s, he noticed that there were not many religious artifacts to be found. After the decade-long Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and previous wars over the 19th and 20th centuries, a lot of relics were either destroyed or stolen and ended up in the hands of private collectors all over the world.

Living in Hong Kong for more than a decade, Master Jing Xiong also felt that Hong Kong had lost some of the flavor that came from traditional Chinese culture, becoming a city that was neither Eastern nor Western. 

"When it comes to preservation of traditional culture, South Korea and Japan are doing a much better job than we are," he said. As he realized how cultural relics could reveal the wisdom of past generations, he began to feel strongly that without protection or a movement to collect these items, future generations would not have the chance to get to know their forebears. 

Later Master Jing Xiong began encouraging his friends or the collectors he knew to bring relics back to China. "It's been almost 30 years," he said, adding that in recent years people from Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan have all sought him out to donate their collections to his plan to build a platform for cultural preservation.

A long road ahead

Master Jing Xiong sees his museum as something more than just a building containing exhibits. He told the Global Times that his ideal museum includes representative architecture, gardens as well as art and cultural relics. As such his ultimate goal is to create a museum that includes buildings from the Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), Ming and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, with each building containing relics from the appropriate time period.

Outside the Ming temple, a big board on the right side records all the names of the people who donated to the Shifengyan Temple. More than half the board is blank. Although gathering hundreds of millions of yuan for the project in Xiamen and constructing a new wide road from Maqing Street to the Temple has been a huge accomplishment, Master Jing Xiong does not like to talk much about his collection because he doesn't want people to think he is trying to show off.

"Compared with everything our ancestors made, our collection is like a drop in the sea," he said, adding that he doesn't expect everything that is donated to be some kind of national treasure. As long as an item possesses historical value, he is more than willing to display it in the museum.

Repatriating cultural relics that were lost overseas has always been a hot topic among scholars, culture experts and art market industry insiders. Later this year, the free trade zone in Beijing's Shunyi district will become the first market for the lost cultural relic trade in China. While buyers and collectors have been talking about taxes and pricing, museum directors are more concerned about preservation. However, when it comes to the general public, historic preservation is not a widely discussed issue. One of Master Jing Xiong's hopes is that his museum can remind people why it is so important to bring back these lost items.  

Known as China's "Southern Door," Xiamen is a beautiful tourist city where people can see mango laden trees lining the streets. Master Jing Xiong said he chose Xiamen as the place for his project due to the city's great location, which connects China to Southeast Asia. More tourists also indicate that his museum will have more opportunities to be seen and spread knowledge of traditional culture to people.

"This is not some vanity project that can be completed in a few years' time. It will require several generations working together,"Master Jing Xiong said.