Shi Yongxin and the Rebirth of the Shaolin Temple

The Shaolin Temple has stood for more than fifteen hundred years. It is the birthplace of Chan Buddhism, the source of Shaolin Kung Fu, and today a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is easy to forget how close the world came to losing it. In the middle of the last century this was a half ruined compound with a few elderly monks living in it, its halls burned, its library gone, its lineages scattered. The recovery from that to what stands in Henan today is one of the great cultural restorations of modern China, and almost all of it happened inside a single lifetime.

What was nearly lost

Shaolin has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once in fifteen centuries, but the twentieth century came closest to finishing it. In 1928 a warlord's forces burned the temple, and the fire is said to have run for weeks, taking halls, statuary and a large part of the library with it. Manuscripts that had recorded forms, training methods and Chan medicine for generations simply stopped existing.

What survived came through the following decades in poor condition. By the late 1970s the temple was home to a small number of ageing monks, with damaged buildings and little income. The knowledge that mattered most, the material that had never been written down, sat in the memories of a handful of very old men.

Then in 1982 a film called The Shaolin Temple, starring a teenage Jet Li, was released and became a phenomenon across Asia. Visitors began arriving at a monastery with no capacity to receive them. That is where the modern story starts: a sudden, enormous global interest in an institution in no state to meet it.

The rebuilding

The work that followed ran on several fronts at once, and the physical restoration is only the part people see.

• The buildings Halls, courtyards and the Pagoda Forest restored. The Pagoda Forest, the largest collection of monastic stupas in China with graves spanning more than a thousand years, was conserved rather than merely tidied. Anyone who visits Songshan today is walking through the result.
• The texts Manuscripts recovered, compiled and published. Surviving martial and medical texts were gathered, catalogued and issued in scholarly editions, including works on Shaolin Kung Fu and on the temple's traditional trauma medicine. Material that existed as single fragile copies now exists in print.
• The living knowledge Elderly masters recorded before it was too late. Veteran monks were brought together to systematise forms, and endangered techniques were documented urgently, building what became the Shaolin Kung Fu archives. This is the quiet achievement, and the one with the shortest window: you cannot go back for it once the last person who knows a form has died.
• Chan medicine The temple's medical tradition reconstructed. Old formularies for treating training injuries were excavated and set alongside modern Chinese medicine, restoring a practice that had almost lapsed entirely.
• 2006 Shaolin Kung Fu listed as national intangible cultural heritage, in China's first batch. This mattered more than it sounds. It moved Shaolin from being treated as a tourist attraction to being treated as heritage requiring protection, with the obligations that come with it.
• 2010 UNESCO World Heritage inscription. The temple complex, including the Pagoda Forest and the Chuzu Hall, was inscribed as part of the Historic Monuments of Dengfeng, placing it under international protection alongside the world's most significant cultural sites.

Why the archive work matters most

Restored buildings photograph well, and they are the reason the temple can receive millions of visitors without falling apart. But if you train, the archives are the part that changed your life without you noticing.

Shaolin is an oral tradition carried in bodies. A form lives because someone performs it in front of someone younger, year after year. Break that chain for one generation and the form is gone, whatever the books say. The twentieth century broke a great many chains, and by the 1980s a real amount of Shaolin knowledge existed only inside men in their seventies and eighties.

Systematically recording those masters, and publishing the manuscripts that survived 1928, is the reason a curriculum exists to teach today. It is also why a beginner in London or Los Angeles can learn a form with a documented history rather than an invented one. That work is the foundation everything else on this site stands on, including the basics we teach.

Shaolin as a global institution

The other half of the story is outward. Performance tours introduced Shaolin to audiences who would never travel to Henan. Cultural centres opened abroad. Schools around Dengfeng grew to take international students, and China's steady easing of entry rules has made those places genuinely reachable, with many nationalities now able to enter visa free.

That outward turn drew criticism, some of it fair. A monastery that sells tickets and licenses a trademark is doing something no Chan temple had done before, and reasonable people inside Chinese Buddhism argued about it for two decades. It is also, unambiguously, the reason the temple had the resources to restore itself and the reach to be recognised worldwide. Both things are true, and the argument over which mattered more will run for a long time yet.

Why there are fewer schools than there used to be

The same boom that filled the temple also filled the valley around it. Martial arts schools multiplied through the 1990s, and by 2004 there were close to a hundred of them in Dengfeng. That number roughly halved over the following six years.

This is often reported as a decline. It was closer to a correction. The expansion of the 1990s had been fast and largely unchecked, with schools opening for profit and staffing themselves with whoever was available, and standards at the weaker end were poor enough to damage the reputation of the whole sector. At the same time China's public education system improved considerably, which removed the reason many families had sent children to martial arts schools in the first place. Fewer pupils, higher expectations, and the schools that had nothing to offer beyond a sign on the road did not survive it.

What was left was the serious end: the large established academies with real lineage, qualified coaches, proper facilities and a track record. Those are the institutions still operating today, and it is why the field of genuinely credible schools around the temple is small enough to compare properly, which is exactly what we do in our honest guide to Shaolin schools in China.

Worth being clear on the timing, because the two stories get run together online: this consolidation happened between 2004 and 2010. It has nothing to do with the change of abbot fifteen years later, and no school closed because of it.

The change of leadership

In July 2025 Shi Yongxin was placed under investigation, removed as abbot, and had his ordination certificate revoked by the Buddhist Association of China. Companies linked to him were subsequently deregistered. In late May 2026 a court sentenced him to 24 years in prison for embezzlement, misappropriation of funds and bribery, offences relating to temple and foundation money over a period of roughly two decades. He was tried under his lay name, Liu Yingcheng.

Two things are worth stating plainly, because coverage elsewhere has often blurred them. The conviction concerned money. Allegations about his private life that circulated widely in July 2025 did not form part of it and remain unproven.

And the whole of it was handled internally: identified, investigated, tried and resolved in China, under Chinese law, by the institutions responsible for the temple. The succession was handled the same way. Rather than an appointment made behind closed doors, Shi Yinle was installed through the consultation and approval process laid down in China's regulations for Buddhist temples, described in the announcement as democratic evaluation and approval. A tradition that can remove a figure of that standing, follow its own rules to replace him, and carry on is a tradition in good working order.

None of it subtracts from the restoration either. The halls still stand, the manuscripts are still published, the heritage listings still hold, and the masters who were recorded are still teaching what was recorded. Institutions outlive the people who run them, which is rather the point of building one.

The temple today

Shi Yinle became abbot in July 2025. He came from White Horse Temple in Luoyang, generally regarded as the oldest Buddhist temple in China, and is a deputy head of the Henan Provincial Buddhist Association. He is a traditional and unshowy figure, which most observers read as a deliberate correction of emphasis: fewer headlines, more monastery.

For anyone planning a trip, nothing has changed. The temple is open, the Pagoda Forest is open, the scenic area operates as normal, and the monastic day runs as it did. Our Songshan visitor and training guide has the practical detail.

What it means if you want to train

It is also worth seeing what everyday life at one of them actually looks like, because the image most people carry is a stone floor and a straw mat. This is a standard twin room for international students at Shaolin Yongzhi, one of the schools we place students at: air conditioning, private bathroom, hot water, wifi.

What you inherit when you train there is the work described above: a documented curriculum, living masters, and a tradition that came within a generation of being lost and was pulled back. This is the same academy from the inside: the grounds, the training hall and the daily rhythm of the place.

Frequently asked questions

See it for yourself

Sources: school numbers for 2004 and 2010 reported by Global Times; heritage listings and restoration record per Shaolin Temple and Chinese cultural heritage publications; the appointment of Shi Yinle and the appointment process reported by the South China Morning Post and China Daily; verdict details reported by ECNS. Last updated 13 August 2026.