Po Lin Monastery

What it is

Po Lin Monastery is a working Chan (Zen) monastery on the Ngong Ping plateau, in the middle of Lantau Island, at an altitude of about 400 metres and set between Lantau Peak and Lei Nak Peak. It began in 1906, when three monks from the Jiangtian Monastery in Jiangsu province, Da Yue, Dun Xiu and Yue Ming, cleared a patch of thorn scrub and built a small stone house, then a thatched hut that gave the place its early name, the Big Thatched Hut. It was renamed Po Lin Monastery in 1924 under its first abbot, Ji Xiu, and is now led by its eighth. What turned a hill monastery into one of Hong Kong's most visited places was the Tian Tan Big Buddha, inaugurated on the ridge opposite on 29 December 1993 and reached from the monastery courtyard by a long flight of stone steps. Two things follow from that for a visitor. First, the site is really two sites, the monastery halls on the plateau and the bronze statue on Mount Muk Yue, and they keep different hours. Second, the monastery is not a museum: ordination ceremonies, retreats and repentance services run through the year, and the halls are in use while visitors walk through them.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The monastery's halls stand on a north-east to south-west axis, facing the Big Buddha and looking out over the South China Sea. Past the mountain gate come the Hall of Bodhisattva Skanda, then the Main Shrine Hall of Buddha, a seven-span building of 1970 with a double-eaves gablet roof, and behind it the Grand Hall of Ten Thousand Buddhas, drawn up from 2000 and finished in 2014 to Song-dynasty proportions, holding a shrine hall, an exhibition hall, a meditation hall, a scripture library and the abbot's chamber. Flanking them are the bell and drum towers, the Hall of Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha, the dining hall and the sangha hall, and the grounds also hold the Hall of Arhats, Po Lin Pond, the Orchid Garden, Bauhinia Park and the two sutra pagodas. Across the steps, the statue's three-level base platform covers 2,239 square metres and is open to the public: the Hall of Merits, with a Ksitigarbha figure carved from nanmu timber over five hundred years old and four frescoes by the Sri Lankan monk Mapalagama Wipulasara Maha Thera; the Hall of the Realm of Reality, hung with donated paintings and publications; and the Memorial Hall, which keeps two rice-grain relics of the Buddha presented by Muthiyangana Vihara in Sri Lanka in 1992.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Allow two and a half hours on the plateau. The monastery publishes no suggested visit length of its own, so that figure is this guide's judgement rather than a number read off its site, and it is built from the hours the monastery does publish: the grounds open 9am to 6pm, the Big Buddha 10am to 5:30pm, and the exhibition on the statue's construction and restoration 10am to 5pm. Two and a half hours covers the main axis of halls at a reading pace, the climb up and down the stone steps, the three halls inside the base platform, and a sit-down in the vegetarian kitchen. Ninety minutes is enough for the steps and the statue only, and it means skipping the monastery itself, which is the older and much quieter half of the site. Budget the journey separately and generously: the operator's own figures are about 45 minutes by bus from Tung Chung, or about 25 minutes by cable car plus a ten-minute walk, each way, before any queue. A visitor who reaches Ngong Ping after about four in the afternoon should go to the Buddha first, because it shuts half an hour before the monastery does.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The monastery is open every day of the week, public holidays included, so there is no closed day to plan around. The binding constraint is the shorter window on the statue rather than on the monastery: the Big Buddha opens at 10am and closes at 5:30pm, and the exhibition about it closes at 5pm, both well before the monastery's own 6pm. An early start is therefore the useful move. The grounds open at 9am, a full hour before the statue admits anyone, and that hour is the one stretch of the day when the halls can be walked ahead of the arrivals coming up on the first cable cars. The monastery publishes its ritual calendar in advance and the dated services are worth checking either way. For 2026 they include a seven-day meditation retreat from 10 to 17 March, a water repentance service over Ching Ming from 31 March to 6 April, great compassion repentance services from 18 to 24 May, 26 July to 1 August, 14 to 20 August and 22 to 28 October, and the water and land ritual marking the Big Buddha's anniversary from 20 to 27 December. Those weeks bring devotees in numbers and fill the halls with ceremony rather than emptying them.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

The monastery's own site publishes its opening hours, its transport directions and its contact details, and no admission price at all: none for the grounds, none for the Big Buddha, and none for the three halls inside the statue's base platform, which it describes simply as open for public visits. This guide therefore records no ticket price for Po Lin Monastery. No figure was found on the operator's site on 26 August 2026, and a price copied from a listing or booking site would be a guess dressed up as a fact. A charge quoted anywhere else should be treated as unverified until the monastery or the desk at the statue confirms it. What is certainly paid for is separate from entry. The vegetarian kitchen, on the left of the Main Shrine Hall facing it, serves 11:30am to 4:30pm and takes group bookings by telephone; the snack shop beside it sells home-made bean curd dessert and glutinous rice dumplings; and the souvenir shop occupies the Hall of Merits on the first level of the statue's base. The cable car and the buses up to Ngong Ping are commercial services with their own fares, and between them they are usually the largest sum a visitor spends on the day.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

No car is needed, and the monastery's own directions do not mention driving at all. Four public routes reach Ngong Ping. Lantau bus 23 leaves the bus station outside Tung Chung MTR station and takes about 45 minutes to the Ngong Ping bus terminus. The Ngong Ping cable car starts from its own station outside the same MTR station, takes about 25 minutes, and leaves a ten-minute walk at the top. From Hong Kong Island, a First Ferry from Central Pier to Mui Wo connects with Lantau bus 2, about 35 minutes from Mui Wo up to Ngong Ping. From the stilt-house village of Tai O on the west coast, Lantau bus 21 takes about 15 minutes. Lantau Island taxis also serve the plateau. The bus is the dependable option and the cable car is the scenic one, and the cable car is also the one that stops for weather and for scheduled maintenance, so an itinerary that has only the cable car in it has no fallback. Every route ends at the terminus a short walk from the monastery, and the last stretch is on foot in all four cases.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The two closing times are the trap. The grounds run 9am to 6pm, but the Big Buddha closes at 5:30pm and the exhibition at 5pm, so a plan built on the 6pm figure quietly loses the statue. Work backwards from the return journey as well, because the way home is a bus or a cable car with its own last departure, and Ngong Ping is 400 metres up on an island rather than a district of the city. The steps to the statue are a long, exposed flight with no lift. The plateau is cooler, wetter and windier than Central, cloud settles on it for days at a stretch and can reduce the Buddha to a silhouette at fifty metres, and wet granite is slippery, so a layer and shoes with grip are worth the space in the bag. This is also a working monastery: services fill the halls, photographing monastics or people at prayer is a question of courtesy rather than of technique, and covered shoulders and knees are the sensible default. The site lists no cloakroom or luggage store, so a visitor coming straight from the airport should not count on anywhere to leave a suitcase.

Checked 2026-08-26

Photography

The monastery publishes no photography policy, so the rules worth following are the ones common to any temple in use: no flash into a hall during a service, no lens pushed towards someone at prayer, and a glance for signs at the door of the Memorial Hall, where the Buddha relics are kept. The picture everyone takes is the statue from the foot of the steps, and it is the weakest of the options, because the flight foreshortens the figure and fills the bottom of the frame with other visitors' backs. Two better positions exist. Partway up, turning back, the monastery roofs sit below with the ridges behind them, and that is the composition that explains where the place actually is. From the terrace around the base platform the statue is close enough that only the head and shoulders fit, which is the frame that shows the casting seams and the mudras of the hands. Light is the real variable here. The plateau makes its own cloud and a flat white sky is the ordinary condition rather than the exception, kind to the bronze and unkind to the landscape behind it. The emptiest steps of the day are before the statue opens at 10am.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links

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