Dongyue Temple, Beijing
First published in 2019
Do you know where these Science Fiction authors found their inspiration when creating new species? Well, I'm not sure, but I might have a suggestion. Go to the Dongyue Temple in Beijing.
You can find this temple in the northeastern part of the city. It's not really far from the city center where you can find all the tourist highlights like the forbidden city. Still, it's quite off the beaten tracks.
If you like to explore cities you can walk (what I did), but you can take a taxi as well. Taking a taxi in Beijing is cheap and easy, but you better ask someone at your hotel to write down the name of your destination in Chinese letters.
The design of the temple is not really special. Quite some halls with Buddha statues, some squares in between with different things to explore. So far so good. The really interesting stuff is in a huge number of small chambers lining up at the outer walls. Every chamber is telling a different story. Some of them are quite ordinary, but some have characters that seem to come from outer space.
