An eighth-century idea, built in 1998
Diamond Hill is a stop on the Kwun Tong line, surrounded by housing estates and behind them the quarries that gave the district its name. In the middle of it stands a Buddhist nunnery built almost entirely of timber, in an architectural language that had not been used in Hong Kong before - and next to it, a garden laid out to the description of a Tang dynasty garden that no longer exists. Both are free.
The nunnery
Chi Lin Nunnery was founded in 1934 by Venerable Wai Um and others, and it is the only ten-direction nunnery for women in Hong Kong - from the start it took in nuns from anywhere who had nowhere else to go, and paid for it by running a school, an orphanage and a home for the elderly. In the 1980s the Tate's Cairn tunnel project and a redevelopment of the district took the site apart. The rebuilding, planned from 1989 by Abbot Hong Xun - the monk who had earlier directed the construction of the Tian Tan Buddha on Lantau - was consecrated in January 1998 and opened to the public in May 2000.
What was built is a Tang timber complex, held together by mortise and tenon joints, with no iron nails and no concrete frame visible anywhere. The overall plan came from the representation of a monastery in a Dunhuang cave mural; the layout runs north to south in three courts, and sixteen separate halls are tied into one building by covered galleries. The sequence is worth following in order: the mountain gate and the lotus pond, the Hall of the Heavenly Kings with its bell and drum towers, then the Great Hall, the halls of the Medicine Buddha, Guanyin and the reclining Buddha, and finally the teaching hall, the sutra library and the five-storey pagoda of ten thousand Buddhas. Experts from the mainland's State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage advised on it, with Hong Kong and Japanese specialists.
Cultural Insight
The choice of the Tang was not only aesthetic. In a colony where Chinese tradition had been pushed to the margins, the designers went back to the dynasty before it and rebuilt from there - from Dunhuang rather than from the local vernacular. It reads today as one of the most deliberate statements about identity in the territory.
The garden
Nan Lian Garden occupies 35,000 square metres immediately south of the nunnery and is run by the nunnery under a symbolic lease of one Hong Kong dollar a year from the government. It opened on 15 November 2006, and unlike most Chinese gardens in the region it is not an imitation of the Ming and Qing: it reconstructs the garden of the Jiangshou Juyuanchi in Shanxi, known from an eighth-century essay and from later scholarly reconstruction, and it follows three rules - do not strain the visitor, work with the ground you have, keep it natural. The entrance is a Tang black-headed gate copied from a Dunhuang mural; inside are the lotus pond, the round harmony pavilion, a covered bridge and the pine tea house. The Chinese Timber Architecture Gallery holds scale models of nationally protected timber buildings.
Plan on ninety minutes to two hours. The site was nominated with the nunnery in November 2012 for China's UNESCO World Heritage tentative list, and the garden is open from seven in the morning until nine at night.
Lunch
We eat in the garden's vegetarian restaurant, which the nunnery runs and which is one of the best-known vegetarian kitchens in Hong Kong - the dishes are made without meat, onion or garlic, in the Buddhist manner, and the room looks out over the lotus pond.
Meals
Lunch (vegetarian, at the Nan Lian Garden restaurant)
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
