Hidden in the hills behind the coast of Fujian is a small stone temple with a figure that should not exist. Cao'an is the last surviving Manichaean temple in the world, and its main statue shows Mani, the third-century Persian prophet who founded a religion that once stretched from Spain to China, in the form of a serene Buddha-like figure with long white hair and eyebrows. It was carved in the fourteenth century, during the Yuan dynasty, from a single piece of local stone, and its identity was recognised only in the twentieth century, when scholars matched it with texts.
Manichaeism taught that the world was a struggle between light and darkness, and it travelled along the Silk Road to China, where it was banned in the ninth century and survived in southern ports, such as Quanzhou, under the guise of other faiths. The temple, which sits on a hillside near Jinjiang, was built against a rock face, with a small roofed hall in front of the statue. The incense, the Chinese inscriptions and the surrounding woods give it a quiet, slightly secret feel, and the local people still treat it as a Buddhist shrine.
The temple is part of the Quanzhou heritage, listed by UNESCO in 2021 as an emporium of the world in Song and Yuan China, and nearby Shihu Dock was once a stop for ships in the sea trade. Quanzhou, known to Arab and Italian traders as Zaytun, was one of the world's biggest ports in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and people of many faiths lived there, leaving mosques, temples and tombs.
Riding in this part of the Fujian coast is a matter of crowded expressways and busy local roads, with scooters, vans and heavy trucks sharing the lanes, and the hills around the temple give a little relief, with narrow lanes through lychee and tea trees. The wet months are the summer and early autumn, when typhoons can reach the coast, and spring and late autumn are better. Jinjiang, a large industrial city, is around seven kilometres away and has fuel and food in abundance. Fujian cooking is lighter than Sichuan, and oyster omelettes and fish balls are a local speciality. Bring a rain layer, and be quiet at the temple.