Jing’an Temple

Jing’an Temple is a functioning Buddhist site in Shanghai whose crowded courtyards, smoke-filled passageways, and silent prayer rooms form the setting for a crucial encounter in the investigation into Wu Liyao’s disappearance. Sun Jie has taken refuge there after his wife went missing; when Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling find him, the temple’s public rituals and enclosed quiet frame a private question he has been carrying: whether she is dead.

Setting and Sacred Space

The temple is presented as an ancient enclave hemmed in by the modern city. Brick walls and high gates enclose courtyards where people burn incense and paper offerings in large metal boats. Yellow and red flags hang from covered balconies; beneath crumbling black-tiled roofs, rust-red pillars support passageways and gold-leaf altars presided over by large Buddhas. Towers of glass, concrete, and steel surround this older precinct, making the temple seem like a surviving pocket of another time rather than an ordinary urban interior.

Its activity is communal as well as devotional. Young women kneel on crimson cushions with incense held between their palms, while people of different ages and backgrounds sit around courtyard tables folding gold and silver paper into small shapes. They gather the folded offerings in red paper bags and old shoe boxes before burning them. Li Yan has never been inside a temple and cannot understand the purpose of the practices; he watches with wonder, curiosity, and some apprehension. His uncertainty gives the setting a distinct point of view: rituals familiar to their participants remain opaque to the investigator, even as he moves through their space.

The sensory details persist as the pair go deeper inside. In one chamber, visitors paste gold-colored strips onto walls, some bearing small photographs that Li Yan takes to be pictures of dead relatives. In another courtyard, monks in saffron robes chant around a jade Buddha. Smoke stings the investigators’ eyes; from prayer rooms come murmured chants, and from elsewhere the regular clapping and deep, measured beat of a drum. The temple’s religious life is not a single tableau but a sequence of rooms and sounds that gradually carries the search away from the public courtyard.

History and the City’s Past

Nien Mei-Ling overlays the visible temple with a story of its earlier reputation. She describes it as a center of corruption in the 1920s and 1930s and recounts a legend about a six-foot-four abbot who was married to a wealthy woman, kept seven concubines, dealt with the gangsters of his day, and traveled with White Russian bodyguards. The account is presented as legend, not as verified institutional history. Its striking details unsettle any simple opposition between a sacred site and worldly power: the temple’s remembered past includes wealth, criminal connections, and conspicuous status alongside its present rituals.

That historical aside belongs to Nien Mei-Ling’s account of Jing’an Temple. She also mentions a grander temple farther up the road, said to have survived the Cultural Revolution after monks covered its gates with posters of Mao Zedong, deterring Red Guards from defacing his image. That preservation story concerns the other temple, not Jing’an Temple; the distinction makes the passage a comparison between religious sites and their different histories rather than a claim about Jing’an Temple’s survival.

Sun Jie and the Investigation

The investigators are directed to Sun Jie by the manageress of an acrobatic circus. She says he used to be beside himself when Wu Liyao disappeared, eventually rejoined the tour when she could not be found, and has not been the same since. She reports that he has become a Buddhist and spends his afternoons at Jing’an Temple, where they may find him. The temple is therefore not merely a scenic stop: it is the place Sun Jie has made part of his changed life after the disappearance.

Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling follow the directions through a circular opening in a yellow wall and into a narrow passage lined with prayer rooms. At its end, several monks sit reading around a long table. Sun Jie sits apart in a shabby blue suit, leaning forward with clasped hands and bowed head beneath hanging strips of red cloth embroidered with black characters. A red velvet covering lies across the prayer table, with candles burning near a small Buddha. The room’s silence is actively guarded: when Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling enter, the monks turn and glare at them for interrupting it.

Li Yan identifies himself with his Ministry ID and says they want to speak about Sun Jie’s wife. A brief hope appears in Sun Jie’s eyes, then gives way to fear as he glances toward the monks. He refuses to discuss the matter there and hurries out, with the investigators following. He leads them through two more circular openings to a deserted square beneath the monks’ living quarters. Washing hangs from plastic lines on the balconies above; the chanting, incense, and drum now seem distant. In that secluded space, away from the prayer room’s audience, Sun Jie asks whether his wife is dead. Li Yan explains that the police have recovered a woman’s body that may be hers, but decomposition has damaged her features, and they need Sun Jie to identify her. Sun Jie’s expression does not perceptibly change. After a long silence, he asks what makes them think the body is Wu Liyao.

Narrative Significance

The temple’s sequence of thresholds shapes the encounter. The investigators pass from a busy courtyard into inner chambers, then into a room where even speaking is an intrusion, and finally into an empty square where Sun Jie can ask his question. This movement from public ritual to guarded silence and then relative privacy gives the conversation its form without making the temple itself disclose what happened to Wu Liyao. The body still requires identification; Sun Jie’s presence and grief do not settle its identity.

Jing’an Temple also brings together two kinds of response to uncertainty. Li Yan encounters religious practice as something he cannot readily comprehend, while Sun Jie is described as having turned toward Buddhism after the loss of his wife. The narrative does not explain his beliefs or present them as a solution to the investigation. Instead, it sets his withdrawn posture, the monks’ reading, the offerings, and the repeated sounds of prayer against the practical demands of police work. The temple becomes a place where historical stories and ongoing rites surround an unanswered, intensely personal question.