Now we are on the way to the Linggu Temple Park. On our right there is a fishing terrace with beige glazed tiles built in 1937. It was a monument to Dr. Sun Yatsen from the National Military Academy, which was founded by Dr. Sun Yatsen in 1924.

 

      Linggu Temple lies about one and a half kilometers to the east of Dr. Sun Yatsen 's Mausoleum. It was called Jiangshan Temple in the ancient times and its original site was in Dulongfu at the foot of the Purple Mountain. However, in the early days of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang chose that place to build his tomb, thus the temple had to be moved and rebuilt at the present site and was renamed as the Linggu Temple with an inscription "The First Buddhist Forest " at the entrance to the mountain. Inside the entrance there is a secluded footpath with thousands of pine trees, verdant and luxuriant, so it is called the "Valley of Spirit Deep in Pines".  It is one of the 48 attractions in Nanjing.

 

      Inside the temple there is the Beamless Hall built in 1381 in the Ming dynasty. The hall, 53.8 meters long, 37.85 meters wide and 22 meters high, was built entirely of bricks and stones from top to bottom without a piece of wood. There are nine overlapping ridges and three dagobas decorating the top ridges. In size, the Beamless Hall stands first and foremost of its kind in China. It was built more than 200 years earlier than the other five of the same kind in the other areas: Xiangtong Temple at Wutai Mountain; Yongzuo Temple in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province; Wannian Temple on Ermei Mountain in Sichuan; Kaiyuan Temple in Shzhou and Longchang Temple in Jurong County. It far surpasses them all in solidity and magnificence. No wonder it is considered a masterpiece of Chinese stone-brick buildings. The difficulty involved in its construction and the complexity of techniques adopted testify the wisdom of the architectural technology of the time in China.

 

      Beyond the Beamless Hall are the Wind-through-pines Pavilion and a nine-storeyed, over sixty-meter-high octagonal pagoda, with a corridor encircled by stone rails on each storey. Inside the pagoda a spiral staircase winds to the top through the nine stories. When one gets to the top story and gaze into the distance, one can get a view of the entire mausoleum area.