20250907 Sunday, September 7, 2025: Quanzhou Temples, Mosque and Stone Bridge

20250907 Sunday, September 7, 2025: Quanzhou Temples, Mosque and Stone Bridge

The Breakfast at the Andaz Hotel is one of the nicest breakfasts we have seen this trip. The restaurant offers quite a dim sum selection as well as full Western breakfast options in a very modern and elegant setting. It was nice to not have to get up before the crack of dawn since our touring started at 8:30am. 

Our day began with a long bus ride from Xiamen through a very long underwater tunnel to the mainland, and then up to the city of Quanzhou. This is the next coastal city up the coast from Xiamen, about 60 miles to the northeast. Yesterday, we explored the living quarters of people in the mountains of Fujian. Today, it is the temples of the coastal people. 

Our first stop was the Kaiyuan Temple in Ancient Quanzhou. It is a Buddhist temple famous for the largest stone pagodas in the world, from the Song Dynasty (686 ca). This and several other sites in Quanzhou are on the UNESCO World Heritage sites list for its importance in the medieval global maritime trade. It is one of very few Chinese Buddhist temples to have Hindu monuments from Southern India, which were a byproduct of that early global maritime trade. 

The Pagodas are featured in a wildly popular online game “Black Myth: Wukong” based on a chapter from the Chinese classic epic Journey to the West. It has made Quanzhou one of the most popular tourist destinations in China among domestic tourists and video gamers alike. 

There is a 1000 year old mulberry tree on the site.  Legend has it that the local benefactor had balked at the cost of building the temple and told the monks that he would only pay up if this mulberry tree sprouted white lotus flowers within 3 days.  Somehow, on the third day, white lotus flowers appeared on the tree, and the Temple was built.  That is why this temple is often referred to as the Lotus Temple. 

There were many market stalls along the road along the front of the temple.  These included a stall selling jellied sand worms, featured on YouTube’s Blondie in China series.  These are a Xiamen specialty.  Our local guide Jenn says they are delicious, but we said we are too chicken to try eating sand worms.  She giggled in response to our reluctance to try this delicacy.  

Janet did find some hair clips to replace the one she left on the rickshaw in Beijing. We tried to haggle the price down from ¥9.9 ($1.39) each, but there was no getting blood out of that turnip.  

We also tried to haggle on some solar umbrellas, but the vendor was doing some shady bait and switch, so we walked away.  This is a common phenomenon where they have something on display, and after you agree on a price, they disappear behind a counter and pull out a similar but inferior item and quickly put it in the bag.  In this case, the umbrella on display had a nice reflective fabric on the outside and black inside, but the umbrellas they actually try to hand you are cheap vinyl umbrellas in a fabric cover sleeve.  But to be fair, ¥30 is only $4.21 for a folding umbrella.  

We had a lunch feast at the nearby Hillsborough Fankay House restaurant with a 10 course lunch featuring Ma Jiu’s Ginger Duck, which was a whole braised duck in a pot and a whole steamed grouper.  Viking’s local guides have been expert at locating restaurants with air conditioning and western private toilet facilities for us.  The food quality has been excellent.  

The next stop was the Tonghuai Guanyue Temple.  This is a very busy and popular Daoist  Temple dedicated to the worship of Guan Yu ( god of war and literature) and Yue Fei (hero and symbol of patriotism and loyalty).  Normal offerings involve offering 3 incense sticks, but people really wanting to fervently improve their fortunes will offer 9 or even 27 sticks of burning incense.  It attracts worshipers from Taiwan and throughout Southeast Asia.  

There is a lot of fortune telling using giant bamboo tubes and crescent shaped brightly red painted wooden carvings that are thrown like dice.  The temple was built during the Song Dynasty and is over 1000 years old. 

Architecturally, it has many swallowtail roof ridges and lots of dragons and other mythical beasts on the roofs.  It is the largest martial temple in Fujian Province and a hub for Daoist culture.  

Our last religious site for the day couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the buzzing hive of activity that was the Tonghuai Guanyue Temple and that was the Mosque of Quanzhou’s Ancient City.  Also known as the Qingling Ancient Temple, it is on the UNESCO World Hertitage list dating to the Song and Yuan dynasties for its importance in the medieval maritime trade of China.  Constructed in 1009, it is the oldest Arab style mosque in China.  The main worship hall unfortunately was destroyed in an earthquake.  A new mosque has been erected on adjacent property and the original prayer room is now a spooky shell .  

By this time of the day, it was in the mid 90’s and everyone was feeling the heat.  Our next stop was the Luoyang Bridge.  This is the oldest stone bay bridge in China and spans 1200meters.  It was started in 1053 during the Song Dynasty.  It has 46 piers. 

It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

We drove by it in the comfort of our air conditioned bridge, and when offered a choice between stopping and walking on the bridge, or returning to the hotel early and resting up for the afternoon, the vote was unanimous to head back to the hotel because it was simply too hot and humid to do any more walking in the sun.

The hotel has a complimentary afternoon tea and coffee service, and at 5:30pm, they bring out wine, soda and appetizers.  We sat and enjoyed a pick me up while Ben tried to communicate with our local guide with a combination of his rudimentary DuoLingo Mandarin and Google Translate to iron out some of the details about the places we visited today.  We also asked about places where we could get a solar reflective umbrella.  Google Maps showed a Walmart just 2.5 miles away, so we thought we’d check that out before the tour group headed off for dinner.  But after hitting the street with Google Maps in hand, it was evident that Google Maps was hallucinating, laying streets out where there were no streets and images that made no sense at all.  Ben switched to Apple Maps, which at least aligned the streets with the real world.  This showed the Walmart 4.6 miles away.  We would not have been able to get there and back in time for our dinner departure, but saw that it was just 15 minutes walk from the cruise ship terminal in Xiamen where the Viking Yi-Dun will dock tomorrow morning.  Since we will rejoin the ship at 3pm, we may have time to make a quick trip through that Walmart for cheap souvenir shopping.  

As we circled back to the hotel, we ran into a hole in the wall dime store with ton’s of stuff of all sorts.  At first, we could only find really cheap umbrellas on an end cap, but after showing the gal working there a photo of a UV umbrella from Amazon’s website, she dug out a laundry basket with umbrellas in it from under a pile of other merchandise.  There was one manual UV umbrella and one automatic one.  We ended up buying both for ¥93.  We probably should have bought the one at the Temple market for ¥35, but he only had the one demo.  The automatic umbrella was more expensive at ¥58 but much better made.  In the end we got two UV reflective umbrellas for $12, which is less than half Amazon’s price.  

Our tour gathered together and headed off to the waterfront in our bus for dinner.  This was in Heping Wharf on the waterfront next to where dinner cruises departed and had a nice view of Gulangyu Island, which we will tour tomorrow.  We had another 15 course Chinese dining extravaganza featuring a smoked Dongshan Squid, tempura giant prawn and beef ribs.  These were served with a French red wine and local rice wine and mineral water.  

After dinner, there was an option to walk through a night market featuring food carts, but we were too tired and full at that point to walk through a gauntlet of food vendors, and we had seen similar markets in Shenyang, so we opted instead to return to the hotel and retire.  We have to check out of the hotel tomorrow morning before we leave to tour Gulangyu Island.