Dazhong Temple, whose name means Great Bell Temple, sits in Haidian on the northern side of the city, a short distance from the ring road. It was founded in the Qing dynasty as a working monastery, and its halls are now the Ancient Bell Museum, a specialist collection devoted to Chinese bells and their casting. The reason the temple exists in its present form is a single object: a bronze bell cast in the early 1400s that is among the largest in the world by weight.
The Yongle Bell
The bell was cast during the reign of the Yongle Emperor, the same monarch who moved the capital to Beijing and built the Forbidden City, and it weighs in the region of forty-six tonnes. It hangs in a dedicated two-storey pavilion with a deep pit below it, so that the sound has somewhere to go. Its surface is covered with inscriptions - Buddhist sutras in Chinese and Sanskrit, said to run to more than two hundred thousand characters - cast into the bronze rather than engraved afterwards, which is what makes it technically remarkable. Chinese bells are struck from outside with a wooden beam rather than rung by an internal clapper, and the shape produces a long, low note with a pronounced strike tone.
The rest of the collection
The museum holds bells of many kinds from across China and from neighbouring countries: temple bells, court ritual bells arranged in tuned sets, small hand bells, wind bells from pagoda eaves, and bells of European manufacture that reached the Qing court. There are displays on the casting process, on clay moulds and piece-mould techniques, and on the acoustics of bell design. Because the collection is specialised, it is quiet even on weekends, and the courtyard buildings are themselves a good example of a medium-sized Qing temple layout with the bell pavilion at its centre.
Practical notes
The temple is in Haidian, a short walk from a metro station on line 13, and it is open daily except Mondays; admission is modest. Allow about an hour. It combines well with the Beijing Zoo or with the university quarter to the north, and it is a sensible stop if you are travelling between the city centre and the Summer Palace, which lies in the same direction. There is very little English signage inside the halls, so a guide or a translation app makes the visit considerably more rewarding.
