For more than a thousand years, monks in a small house on the mountain have copied and repaired old books. The collection began with a single Bible and now holds nine thousand volumes, some of them written in languages that nobody speaks today.
The work is slow and quiet. One damaged page may take a week to mend. Younger monks learn the skill by sitting beside older ones for years, never from a manual.
Scholars from many countries now visit, and a few pages are shown to the public every spring. The monks refuse to sell anything. Books, they say, belong to the future, not to the market.
Welcome. This temple is a place of worship as well as a monument, so please read the following.
Guided tours in English begin at 10 a.m. every Saturday. No booking is needed, but groups of more than ten should telephone one week ahead.
Dear Ms. Wallace,
Thank you for arranging our visit to the old city walls last Friday. I had expected a boring morning and found the opposite.
What surprised me most was the guide. She studies history for a living, yet she spoke about those stones as if they were her neighbors. She told us that three different civilizations had worked on the wall, each one building on what the last had left.
I would now like to write my final report on the wall rather than on the museum. May I borrow the two books you showed us? I will return them before the holiday.
Yours,
Ellie Chang
A regional office counted the visitors to four heritage sites last year.
| Site | Visitors | Change from the year before |
|---|---|---|
| Hillside Temple | 82,000 | +12% |
| Old City Walls | 64,000 | -3% |
| Stone Monument Park | 41,000 | +25% |
| Mountain Library | 9,000 | +4% |
Entry is free at every site except the Mountain Library.