Nanchan Temple, Buddhist temple in Shanxi, China

Nanchan Temple's Great Buddha Hall is a three-bay square timber hall, 11.62 m wide and 9.9 m deep, raised on a low platform reached by stone steps. Twelve pillars carry the load, leaving the walls non-structural. Its broad grey-tiled hip-and-gable roof has the shallowest pitch of any surviving Chinese timber building, with curved finials at the ridge ends and bracket sets beneath the eaves.

Rebuilt in 782 during the Tang Dynasty, this temple stands as the oldest surviving wooden structure from that era in China. The building has endured for over a thousand years and represents a key example of ancient Chinese construction methods.

The hall's seventeen Tang clay sculptures stand on an inverted U-shaped brick dais 8.4 metres long and 0.7 metres high, with Shakyamuni at the centre. Three figures were stolen in a 1999 armed robbery and never recovered; the remaining fourteen include Manjushri on a lion and Samantabhadra on an elephant.

The temple sits about 22 kilometers southwest of Wutai County and is relatively straightforward to reach. Bring sturdy shoes, as the pathways around the building can be uneven in places.

The hall's bracket sets hide a detail found in no other surviving timber building: each bracket arm ends in five lobes, each tilted inward by three millimetres. The technique is known from Sui and Qi stonework, and the 1974 restoration also removed later dwarf pillars to expose the original Tang load-bearing frame.