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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I42 



some of the temples were so completely changed that they could not 

 be recognized. Very often the only hope of finding any trace of a 

 former temple was to search for and find former residents, generally 

 old people, who were willing to talk. Many people were afraid to 

 talk, fearing that we might be agents of organizations looking for 

 temples or former temples to confiscate or even to recover old tem- 

 ples and restore them to their former uses. It is likely that there were 

 some temples in Chengtu that had disappeared within the last 50 years 

 of which we failed to get information, and this is undoubtedly true in 

 every other town and city that we studied, with the possible excep- 



FiG. g. — Numbers and kinds of temples in Chengtu. 



tion of Suifu. People had forgotten about them or were unwilling 

 to talk. The destruction of the temples was even worse than our re- 

 searches showed it to be. 



In Chengtu and in the near suburbs we found traces of 210 tem- 

 ples. This did not include the Mohammedan mosques. There were 

 120 inside the city, and 90 outside. In Chengtu-hsien there were 109, 

 68 inside the city and 41 outside. There were loi in Hua-yang-hsien, 

 52 inside the city and 49 outside. Of these 98 were Buddhist, 44 

 were Taoist, 16 were Ru-t'an, 3 were Confucian, and 49 were no 

 longer temples, so that they could not be classified according to 

 their religion. Of the total, no were large, 69 medium, and 31 small ; 

 47 were in good repair, 73 medium, and 90 in very bad repair. 



