Qualla: Nan Hua Temple

Nan Hua Temple: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ivan Fourie from South Africa, CC BY 2.0. Drive an hour east of Pretoria, past maize fields and the rusting headgear of old coal workings, and the last thing you expect to see is a Chinese monastery rising from the highveld grass. Yet there it is: the curved, tiled roofs of Fo Guang Shan Nan Hua Temple, golden against the African sky. Spread across more than 600 acres in the Cultura Park suburb of Bronkhorstspruit, this is the largest Buddhist temple and seminary on the entire continent of Africa - the unlikely African headquarters of a monastic order founded on a mountain in Taiwan.

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Image: Ivan Fourie from South Africa | CC BY 2.0

Nan Hua Temple: A Gift of Land

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elf-friend at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The story begins with a handshake and a patch of ground. On 8 March 1992, the Bronkhorstspruit City Council - led by Dr Hennie Senekal, its chief executive and a former church minister who had travelled to Taiwan to court investment - donated fourteen hectares of land to the Fo G...

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Image: Elf-friend at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Nan Hua Temple: A Monastery and a School

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elf-friend at English Wikipedia, Public domain. What rose from the veld was not a single building but a small religious city. Alongside the main temple stand a guesthouse, the African Buddhist Seminary, the Nan Hua Village, an assembly hall, and a Pure Land meditation retreat a kilometre and a half away. The seminary trains mo...

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Image: Elf-friend at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Nan Hua Temple: The Bomb in the Basement

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Moore from Johannesburg, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0. Not everyone welcomed a Chinese temple on Afrikaner soil. On 30 October 2002, members of the Boeremag, a militant right-wing organisation, planted a bomb in the temple's basement. Roughly 150 worshippers from South Africa, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia and the United States were ga...

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Image: Andrew Moore from Johannesburg, South Africa | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nan Hua Temple: Where Two Worlds Meet

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Moore from Johannesburg, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk the grounds and the dialogue between continents is everywhere. Statues of bodhisattvas look out over grassland that once knew only Boer farms and Bantu cattle herders. Inside the main shrine, thousands of small golden Buddha figures line the walls in glowing tiers, each one ...

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Image: Andrew Moore from Johannesburg, South Africa | CC BY-SA 2.0