A guardian of our culture
It is the 31st year that Zhang Yufei has worked and lived in Faxing Temple, nestled in Cuiyun Mountain in Zhangzi county, Changzhi, North China's Shanxi province.
The 52-year-old cultural relics guardian and docent knows every sculpture and inscription in the temple, which was listed as a national key cultural relics protection site in 1988.
With a deep history, the temple has rich cultural offerings, including stone pagodas, wooden buildings, colored sculptures, inscriptions and wood carvings. A stone relic pagoda, built in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), is located on the central axis of the temple.
"These cultural relics have become a part of my life and I want to introduce the culture, art and stories behind them to a wider public, letting more people appreciate their beauty," Zhang says. He has published several monographs on the temple's relics and shared Shanxi's cultural heritage stories on social media.
