Old photos of Qinghai Ta’er Temple in July 1947

In July 1947, Qinghai Ta’er Monastery was named Ta’er Monastery because there was a tower first and then a temple. Ta’er Temple is the Buddhist center in Qinghai Province and northwest China and the holy land of the Yellow Sect. Its main buildings are located on one side of the mountain and the other side of the plateau. There are more than 9300 buildings (including the Great Jinwa Temple, the Great Sutra Hall, Maitreya Hall, the Nine Room Hall, the Flower Temple, the Small Jinwa Temple, Jubazacang, Dingkezacang, Mambazacang, the Great Lalang, the Great Kitchen, and Ruyi Pagoda) on the slopes of the Lotus Mountain, forming a huge complex of Tibetan and Han architecture, It covers an area of 450000 square meters

In the 39th year of Jiajing (1560), Zen Master Renqin Zhejian praised the construction of a quiet room beside the pagoda. In the fifth year of Wanli (1577), 17 years later, Maitreya Hall was built on the south side of the tower. So far, Ta’er Temple has begun to take shape. In the first month of the fortieth year of Wanli (1612), the Xianzong College was officially established to teach scriptures and methods, marking that the Ta’er Temple became a formal monastery of the Gelug Sect

Since the Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty, the imperial court has given many gifts to the Ta’er Temple, including plaques, ritual instruments, Buddha statues, scriptures, and pagodas. The living Buddha systems of the temple, such as Ajia, Saichi, Lako, Sedo, Xiangsa, Sina and Quexi, were named as Hutuktu or Nomen Khan in the Qing Dynasty. Among them, Ajia, Saichi and Lako are Hutuktu stationed in Beijing, and some of them have also served as palmprint lamas in the Yonghe Temple in Beijing and Mount Wutai in Shanxi. Ta’er Monastery has developed rapidly and become one of the six famous monasteries of Gelug Sect of Tibetan Buddhism at home and abroad