Tiangui Mountain 天桂山

Tiangui Mountain is located in Pingshan County, 90 kilometers northwest of Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province, with a total area of 60 square kilometers. Due to its numerous strange peaks and grotesque caves, its natural scenery highly resembles the charm of Guilin's landscapes, hence the name "Tiangui Mountain" (Heavenly Cinnamon Mountain). It is a famous tourist attraction featuring historical ancient buildings set against beautiful natural scenery. Tiangui Mountain is also one of the renowned Taoist mountains. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the Qinglong Temple was built on Tiangui Mountain, adding a group of buildings with the grandeur of imperial gardens and the elegance of Taoist temples to the purely natural landscape. Since Wudang Mountain in Hubei is a famous Taoist sacred site in China, Tiangui Mountain is also known as the "Northern Wudang".

Qinglong Temple on Tiangui Mountain was originally built as a temporary palace for Zhu Youjian, the last Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. According to legend, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the uprising led by Li Zicheng severely shook the imperial power of the Ming court. Fearing that his regime was unstable as the rebel army approached Beijing, Emperor Chongzhen secretly sent his trusted eunuch Lin Zhongbi out of the capital to select a hidden location for building a temporary palace to prepare for unexpected events.

Lin Zhongbi traveled through half of China and, with his discerning eye, chose Tiangui Mountain, which is endowed with beautiful scenery and easy to defend but difficult to attack. When the palace, built by Lin Zhongbi in the style of an imperial garden, was about to be completed, Li Zicheng's army closed in on Beijing. Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself on Meishan before he could escape. To remain loyal to his master, Lin Zhongbi became a Taoist monk with the religious name Qingde, renamed the palace "Qinglong Taoist Temple", and cast a bronze statue of Zhenwu (True Martial Lord) modeled after Emperor Chongzhen, which he enshrined with daily incense offerings.

Therefore, on the corridor pillars of the Zhenwu Hall, where the bronze statue of Zhenwu is worshipped, there is an inscribed couplet: "Leaving the three palaces and six courtyards, he cultivated into a jade body; Entering martial arts and returning to the right path, he refined into a golden body." It reveals a trace of comfort in the final destination amidst helplessness.

Qinglong Temple belongs to the Longmen (Dragon Gate) sect of Taoism, with a deep connection to the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, the ancestral court of the Longmen sect. Lin Qingde presided over Qinglong Temple for more than 30 years, with the number of Taoist disciples reaching up to forty or fifty at its peak. The middle characters in the disciples' names also adopted the characters used by the White Cloud Temple in Beijing to indicate generational ranks. From Lin Qingde until the July 7th Incident in 1937, Qinglong Temple had thirteen generations of successors.