Black Myth Wukong Locations: 27 Sites, One Room

Twenty-seven sites. No film crew.

On 20 August 2024 a Chinese studio released a game called Black Myth: Wukong. By the next morning a hashtag was trending on Weibo asking Shanxi province to “catch the sky-high wealth” that had just fallen on it. The game had been made in Hangzhou. Almost everything in it that looked real had been borrowed from Shanxi. This is a guide to the Black Myth Wukong locations that resulted, and to what every listicle about them gets wrong.

Within a week, every English-language listicle on the internet agreed on the numbers: the game used 36 locations across China, and 27 of them are in Shanxi. Within a month, the province had published three official touring routes. Within a year, one county of 90,000 people had received 1.5 million visitors.

Here is the part almost none of those pages tell you. You cannot visit these places the way you visit a film location, because nothing was filmed. There was no camera on location. There was no crew, no set, no take, no second unit. A video game does not photograph a building. It scans one — which puts it closer to a working studio than to a film set, a distinction we set out in China’s film studios compared.

That single word — scanned instead of filmed — reorganises the entire trip. It changes what you will recognise when you get there, how big the places are, how long you need, and which of the 27 are actually reachable. This page is about that, and about the 27 buildings themselves.

Everything below is sourced, dated, and where a number has no owner I say so. If you came here looking for a list of Black Myth Wukong locations, the list is real and it is in the middle of this page — but the four sections before it are the ones that decide whether the trip works.

The word is wrong, and the province’s own website uses it

Search for Black Myth Wukong locations and you will find the phrase filming locations. It is in the headlines, in the listicles, in the video titles. It is also in the English-language website of the Shanxi provincial government, in an article published three days after launch, which states that “among the 36 filming locations across various provinces and cities, 27 are located in Shanxi Province.”

The same article, a few paragraphs later, describes the Yungang Grottoes as “one of the inspirational sources of the game’s scene design.” Those are two different relationships. They have been put in the same sentence, and then in the same number.

What the relationship actually was	Is there a camera?	Can you stand where it happened?	Counted as a “filming location”?
Scanned and rebuilt — geometry and surface captured on site, then rebuilt as a game asset	No. A scanner.	Yes, roughly — but the asset is not a copy	Yes
Partly scanned — a statue group, a doorway, a bracket set, a roof ridge	No	Only that fragment	Yes
Reference / inspiration — looked at, sketched, used as a mood	No	Not meaningfully	Yes
Filmed — a camera recorded actors in a real place	Yes	Yes, exactly	This is what the word means — and it is not what happened

So when a page tells you there are 27 filming locations, it is using a word from film tourism to describe a practice from game development, and it is using one word to cover at least three different practices. That is not a translation slip. It is the reason the numbers do not add up later in this article.

What scanning actually produces

The mechanics matter, because they explain what you will and will not recognise.

To build environments faster, Game Science decided to scan buildings and statues on site, and then either copy those elements into the game or use them as the basis of the design. The scanning began before the first gameplay trailer was released; after the trailer, the work started receiving support from local governments. That is the sequence, and it explains why so many of the sites are in one province: once a provincial government is helping, the logistics collapse.

Then comes the step almost nobody mentions. After Game Science finished scanning, a second studio — Nanjing Graphics Science — handled what the Chinese sources call secondary design work on some of the Mount Wutai buildings. Scan, then redesign, then ship.

Which means the thing in the game is neither a photograph nor a reconstruction. It is a new building made from a real building’s surfaces. The bracket sets are the right bracket sets. The proportions, the scale, the neighbours, the light and the sequence of rooms are the game’s own invention, because a game has to be playable and a temple was not designed to be played in.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing that surprises people:

The number 27 has no owner

Before you plan anything around the Black Myth Wukong locations, it is worth knowing where the number 27 comes from. The answer is: a news cycle, not a company.

The earliest Chinese coverage, on 21 August 2024, introduced the figures with four characters — “据不完全统计”, according to incomplete statistics. That hedge has been dropped by almost everyone who repeated it. Game Science has never published a list of scanned sites. There is no official document to check the 27 against.

Four things then went wrong with the number, and all four are visible in public sources.

Claim	Who said it	What contradicts it
36 locations in China, 27 in Shanxi	Media aggregation, 21 Aug 2024, hedged as “incomplete statistics”	No primary source exists; the studio never published a list
“36 filming locations”	Shanxi provincial government English site, 23 Aug 2024	The same article also calls the sites “inspirational sources”
The 27 span 9 prefecture-level cities	Shanxi provincial transport department, 23 Aug 2024	The published list contains 8 cities. No ninth city is identifiable
36 total	Widely repeated	Published out-of-province lists already run to 15 sites; 15 + 27 = 42

This is not a scandal and it does not make the trip a bad idea. We keep our own counts in the dataset behind this site, with the same caveat printed on it. The 27 names are consistent across sources and the temples are real. But the number is a finding aid, not an accounting. It is good enough to tell you where to look. It is not good enough to tell you that you have seen everything, or that any given count of days will cover it.

The official answer was three routes, not one

On 22 August 2024, at a digital tourism conference in Taiyuan, the Shanxi culture and tourism department launched a campaign called Follow Wukong through Shanxi. It did not publish one itinerary. It published three themed routes and one self-drive route.

The three themed routes are named for what is in them, not for geography:

Official route	English reading	What it is actually for
古建华章与彩塑满堂晋北线	Timber masterpieces and halls full of painted sculpture — northern line	Liao and Jin timber, Yungang, the Hanging Temple, the wooden pagoda
楼阁飞云与神仙洞天晋南线	Towers in the clouds and Taoist heavens — southern line	Yuan murals, the great Guandi temple, the Stork Tower
神奇上党与绝美造像晋东南线	Shangdang and its sculpture — south-eastern line	The painted-sculpture halls: Yuhuang, Tiefo, Chongqing, Guanyin

Three routes is not a marketing decision. It is a description of the province. Shanxi is a long north–south slab about 680 km from end to end, the high-speed rail spine runs down the middle through Taiyuan, and the south-eastern cities — Changzhi and Jincheng — sit on a different line that connects to Zhengzhou, not to the north–south spine. There is no loop. You go out and come back.

Which is why the campaign that the English internet reduced to “27 filming locations” was, in its original form, an argument that you should pick one region.

The official eight-day drive covers 12 of the 27

The self-drive route is the most concrete thing any official body has published about this game, and it is worth reading in full, because it is a confession. It is eight days. It is 1,410 km. And it stops at thirteen buildings, of which twelve are on the list of 27. The thirteenth, Qinglian Temple at Zezhou, is not on the list at all — the itinerary and the list were drawn up by different people, and nobody reconciled them.

Day	Route	Distance	Sites from the 27
1	Arrive Datong	—	—
2	Datong — Yungang Grottoes — Shanhua Temple — Datong	50 km	2
3	Datong — Hanging Temple — Yingxian Wooden Pagoda — Shuozhou	240 km	2
4	Shuozhou — Foguang Temple, Mount Wutai — Taiyuan	350 km	1
5	Taiyuan — Shanxi Museum — Pingyao	110 km	0
6	Pingyao — Zhenguo Temple — Shuanglin Temple — Xiaoxitian — Linfen	310 km	3
7	Linfen — Fusheng Temple — Erxian Temple — Jincheng	300 km	2
8	Jincheng — Qinglian Temple — Yuhuang Temple — Tiefo Temple — Jincheng	50 km	2
Total	8 days, 7 driving days	1,410 km	13 stops, 12 of 27

Two things fall out of that table. First, 15 of the 27 are not on the official route at all — including three of the six Datong sites, five of the six Xinzhou sites, and the whole Yuncheng group. Second, the biggest single day is not a temple day: it is 350 km of motorway from Shuozhou to Taiyuan with one temple in the middle of it.

If you have read that the game has 27 locations and assumed there is a 27-stop itinerary, this is the correction. There is not. The province itself could not build one in eight days.

Two halls, 241.6 square metres

Now the thing that decides whether you enjoy this trip, and the one number that no Black Myth Wukong locations list prints.

Ask people what they remember from the game and they describe scale: a snowfield, a cliff, a temple complex you fight your way up through for an hour. Ask what is actually at the two most photographed sites, and the numbers are these.

Hall	Where	Floor area	Figures inside	People allowed in at once
Xiaoxitian, Mahavira Hall 小西天大雄宝殿	Xi County, Linfen	169.6 m²	Nearly 2,000 painted clay figures, largest 3 m, smallest thumb-sized	About 40
Tiefo Temple, Buddha Hall 铁佛寺佛殿	Gaoping, Jincheng	72 m²	28 figures, including the Twenty-Four Protective Deities	10 or fewer
Both	—	241.6 m²	—	—

A doubles tennis court is 23.77 by 10.97 metres: 260.9 m². The two most famous interiors in Black Myth: Wukong, added together, are smaller than one tennis court.

And the game’s third chapter is named after the smaller half of that pair. It is called Xiaoxitian. In the game it is a region: a snow ridge, a frozen lake, a prison pagoda, a sea of suffering, a valley, a forest of steles. In Shanxi it is a nunnery on a hill outside a county town, and its famous room is 169.6 square metres.

Xiaoxitian: 169.6 square metres, nearly 2,000 figures

The temple’s proper name is Qianfo An, the Thousand Buddha Nunnery. It sits on Fenghuang Hill outside Xixian, a county in Linfen at the southern end of the province. It was founded in the Ming, in 1629, by a monk called Dongming. It is a national protected site, which in China is not an honour so much as a set of restrictions.

The Mahavira Hall is 169.6 square metres. Inside it are nearly two thousand painted clay figures, arranged in tiers that climb the walls and hang from the ceiling — a technique called xuansu, suspended sculpture, in which the figures are anchored to the wall and cantilevered out into the air so that they appear to float. The largest is about three metres. The smallest is the size of your thumb. Chinese sources call the result the last word in suspended sculpture, and for once the phrase is not inflated: there is nothing else like it at this density.

Nearly two thousand figures in 169.6 square metres is roughly eleven figures per square metre. That is not a hall you walk around. It is a room you are admitted to, and the ceiling is where the argument is. The fire extinguishers bolted to the front columns are not decoration either — they are part of why the hall now admits about forty people at a time.

The practical consequence is the queue, which is the next section, and the reason the county had to invent a reservation system in a fortnight.

The day 17,626 people queued for two minutes

On 2 October 2024, during the National Day holiday, Xiaoxitian received 17,626 visitors in one day. Before the game, the daily average was around a hundred. That is a multiple of about 170.

It went badly, and then it went better, and the numbers tell you why.

Measure	Figure
Visitors on 2 October 2024	17,626
Pre-game daily average	About 100
Resident population of Xixian county	About 90,000
Visitors in the whole of 2023	134,400
Visitors in the whole of 2025	1,506,800
Hall capacity at any one moment	About 40 people
Typical experience that week	About 3 hours of queueing, about 2 minutes inside

The arithmetic is not subtle. 17,626 people through a room that holds 40 at a time is 441 batches. At two minutes a batch, that is nearly fifteen hours of admitting people, in a hall that closes at dusk and that the county’s own notices say is best seen before 5pm because the light goes. There is no schedule in the world that makes that pleasant. The queue was not a management failure; it was arithmetic.

Since then the site has moved to timed, batched entry with advance booking, and the county has built an entire visitor economy around a room the size of a large living room. In 2025 it received 1.5 million visitors — more than eleven times its 2023 total, in a county of 90,000. Whatever else is true, this is the most complete example in China of a video game rewriting a local economy.

Tiefo Temple: the temple that had never been open

Xiaoxitian was overwhelmed because it was famous and small. Tiefo Temple in Gaoping was overwhelmed for a different reason: it had never been open at all.

It sits at the end of an alley in Mixi village, Mishan town, in the county-level city of Gaoping — Jincheng’s industrial satellite, a place built on coal and, more recently, on the archaeology of its own small temples. The buildings you see are Ming and Qing. The name comes from a single event: in 1167, during the Jin, an iron Buddha was installed and the temple took its name from it. It became a nationally protected site only on 7 October 2019 — five years before the game arrived.

For most of that time it was shut. Not “closed to tourists” in the way a site closes for renovation, but closed in the way a store room is closed: researchers wrote about it, locals had never been inside, and the sculptures were known from a small number of published photographs. When the game launched and the province published its routes, Tiefo Temple was on them — and people who tried to visit discovered that the route listed a building that did not admit visitors.

They complained. And then this happened.

Date	Event
20 Aug 2024	Game released. Tiefo Temple is named in the media’s list of 27
22 Aug 2024	Province launches three routes; the self-drive route includes Tiefo Temple on day 8
Shortly after	Visitors point out that the temple is not open
24 Aug 2024	Gaoping’s cultural relics bureau issues a notice: limited opening. Online booking, free admission, timed entry, flow control, maximum 500 bookings per day
Later	The hall is run at ten people or fewer at a time

Four days from launch to a reservation system. That is the speed at which a video game can change the operating rules of a 500-year-old building.

What is inside is why the rules exist. The Buddha hall is 72 square metres. Around its walls stand the Twenty-Four Protective Deities — twenty-four figures, plus the four bodhisattvas and the central Buddha, twenty-eight in all — modelled in clay over a timber frame, with the drapery cut so sharply that the figures appear to be turning. It is one of the densest sculpture ensembles in China, and it is in a room the size of a small flat.

Yuhuang Temple: where the game’s most famous boss comes from

Fucheng Yuhuang Temple stands on a low ridge north of Fucheng village, in Zezhou county, about 13 km north-east of central Jincheng. It was founded in 1076, in the ninth year of the Xining era of the Northern Song.

Its Jade Emperor Hall holds a set of Song dynasty celestial figures. But the reason anyone goes is the hall beside it: twenty-eight figures, one for each of the lunar mansions — the xiu, the stations the moon passes through in a month — each rendered as a seated deity with an animal attribute, and each given a face and a posture that no other surviving set in China has. Art historians describe them as the only complete group of their kind, and as evidence of how Chinese sculpture absorbed central Asian astronomy and then made it local.

The source material is older than the game by four centuries, and the 1986 television Journey to the West sent a generation of viewers to real mountains — Wuyishan and Zhangjiajie both still trade on it. Two of the figures here are the reason the game exists in the form it does. Kang Jinlong, the golden dragon of the Kang mansion, and Lou Jingou, the golden dog of the Lou mansion, are the designs behind two of the game’s characters. If you have fought Kang Jinlong, you have fought a Song dynasty sculpture from a village outside Jincheng.

The chapter is named after one city and staffed by another

Here is the single most useful fact on this page for anyone trying to follow the game on the ground.

The game’s third chapter is called Xiaoxitian. In the game it is a region: a snow ridge, a frozen lake, a prison pagoda, a sea of suffering, a valley, a forest of steles, a temple at the top. The name comes from the nunnery in Xi County, Linfen — 169.6 square metres, in the far south-west of the province.

And the boss you fight in that chapter, at the frozen lake, is Kang Jinlong — whose design comes from Yuhuang Temple in Jincheng, about 300 km east, in a different prefecture.

What the game gives you	Where it points	Prefecture	Distance from the other thing
Chapter 3, “Xiaoxitian”	Xiaoxitian, Xi County	Linfen	About 300 km
The chapter’s signature boss, Kang Jinlong	Yuhuang Temple, Zezhou	Jincheng

So the name of the chapter and the origin of its most famous character are in two different cities, and following the chapter name will not take you to the boss. This is not a mistake in the game — it is what assembling a world from a library of scanned parts looks like. The parts come from wherever the parts were.

It is also the reason a “follow the game” itinerary is not really a route through the game. It is a route through a catalogue, and the catalogue was assembled by art-historical importance, not by narrative geography.

Three temples called Tiefo

This one will cost you a day if you get it wrong.

Shanxi has at least three nationally protected temples called Tiefo — Iron Buddha Temple. Two of them appear on the list of 27. They are about 300 km apart, in different prefectures, and in English they are all just Tiefo Temple.

Chinese	Where	What it is	On the list of 27?
高平铁佛寺	Gaoping, Jincheng	The famous one. Twenty-Four Protective Deities, 72 m², opened August 2024, 500 bookings a day	Yes
尧都铁佛寺 (also 大云寺, Dayun Temple)	Yaodu district, Linfen	A city temple on Gulou South Road, next to Shanxi Normal University, with a tall brick pagoda	Yes
灵石铁佛寺	Lingshi county, Jinzhong	Another protected site of the same name	No

Both of the first two are on the 27. So a list that says “Tiefo Temple” is ambiguous even when the list is correct. When you book, book by city.

Thirteen of the 27 have no English Wikipedia article

We checked all 27 Black Myth Wukong locations against English Wikipedia, including variant spellings, on 18 October 2026. The result is the clearest measure of how thin the English-language record is.

Status	Count	Which
Has a dedicated English article that resolves to the right building	14	Yungang Grottoes, Huayan Temple, Shanhua Temple, Hanging Temple, Yingxian Wooden Pagoda, Foguang Temple, Nanchan Temple, Jinge Temple, Huiji Temple (Yuanping), Zhenguo Temple, Shuanglin Temple, Guangsheng Temple, Stork Tower, Haizhou Emperor Guan Temple
No usable article	13	Yong’an Temple (Hunyuan), Jueshan Temple, Chongfu Temple, Nanshan Temple (Wutai), Youguo Temple, Xiaoxitian, Guanyin Hall (Changzhi), Chongqing Temple, Yuhuang Temple, Tiefo Temple (Yaodu), Tiefo Temple (Gaoping), Xixi Erxian Temple, Fusheng Temple

Two of the thirteen are worse than missing. Nanshan Temple resolves to a disambiguation page that lists Sanya and Zhangzhou and does not mention Mount Wutai at all. Youguo Temple resolves to a temple in Kaifeng, Henan — a different building, 700 km away. A reader following the English record is not simply under-informed; on two of these, they are actively misdirected.

And the three most important names on the whole list — Xiaoxitian, Yuhuang Temple, Tiefo Temple — are all in the thirteen. The places that made the game look the way it looks are the places English has not written down.

Three clusters, not one route

Map the Black Myth Wukong locations and a shape appears. They are not scattered across Shanxi. They sit in three groups, and the gaps between the groups are the reason the province published three routes.

Cluster	Cities	Sites	What it is about	Railhead
North	Datong, Shuozhou	8	Liao and Jin timber, Northern Wei cave temples, one cliff monastery, one wooden pagoda	Datong South (high-speed from Beijing, under 2 h)
Centre	Xinzhou, Jinzhong	8	China’s two oldest timber halls, Mount Wutai, and the two temples that share Pingyao’s World Heritage listing	Taiyuan South, then Pingyao
South	Linfen, Changzhi, Jincheng, Yuncheng	11	The painted-sculpture halls, the Yuan murals, the great Guandi temple	Linfen West / Jincheng East / Yuncheng North

The three clusters do not form a loop. North and centre connect through Taiyuan. South connects to the centre by a long motorway run and to the outside world through Zhengzhou, on a different high-speed line. If you try to do all three in one trip you will spend a third of it travelling, which is exactly what the official eight-day route does. For the rest of the province, see Shanxi on our China by region hub.

North: Datong and Shuozhou

Eight of the 27, and the easiest group to do well, because Datong is two hours from Beijing by high-speed rail and the sites are close together. Our Datong filming locations guide covers the film side of the same city, and its six scanned sites section covers the game.

Yungang Grottoes are the reason to come. Carved between 453 and 495 under the Northern Wei, with 51 main caves and more than 51,000 figures, they are one of the three great Buddhist cave complexes in China. The largest Buddha is 17 metres; the smallest is two centimetres. This is the one site in the 27 where the scale in the game is not an exaggeration, because the real thing is already enormous.

Huayan Temple holds a Liao library hall and a Jin main hall, and is one of only three surviving Liao temple complexes in China. Shanhua Temple has one Liao hall and three Jin ones, and was in the first batch of national protected sites in 1961.

The Hanging Temple at Mount Heng is the photograph everyone knows: forty rooms on a cliff, held by 27 timber beams driven into the rock. One honest note that most pages skip — the monastery was founded in the Northern Wei, but every building you see is a Ming or Qing rebuild. “1,500 years old” describes the site, not the carpentry.

Taiyuan, on the same rail line, is the other Shanxi stop most itineraries cut; its Song dynasty hall and the 2023 film that made it famous are covered in the Taiyuan guide. In Shuozhou, the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda is the oldest and tallest surviving timber pagoda in the world: 67.31 metres, built in 1056, with 54 distinct types of bracket set, and it has absorbed earthquakes, artillery in 1926 and a direct hit in 1948 without falling. Chongfu Temple in Shuozhou city has a Jin Amitabha Hall with a 1184 plaque still over the door.

Centre: Xinzhou and Jinzhong

Eight more, and this is where the architecture matters most.

Nanchan Temple, on Mount Wutai, has the Great Buddha Hall of 782 — the oldest surviving timber building in China, and it holds seventeen original Tang sculptures. Foguang Temple, a few kilometres away, has the East Hall of 857, the third oldest, and it is the building Liang Sicheng called China’s first national treasure when he identified it in 1937: Tang timber, Tang sculpture, Tang murals and Tang inscriptions in one hall.

Mount Wutai contributes four more — Jinge Temple, Nanshan Temple, Youguo Temple and, at Yuanping, Huiji Temple. This is the group with the weakest English record: two of the four have no usable article, and one of those resolves to a temple in a different province.

In Jinzhong, Zhenguo Temple’s Wanfo Hall dates to 963, in the Northern Han, and holds some of the only surviving tenth-century sculpture in China. Shuanglin Temple holds about 2,052 painted clay figures across ten halls and is called the gallery of oriental painted sculpture; with the walled city and Zhenguo, it forms the World Heritage listing inscribed in 1997 as “one city, two temples.” Most visitors to Pingyao see the wall and skip both temples — and most of them came for the wall because of a film, which is a different trip: see the Qiao Family Compound. They are 6 and 15 km out of town, in opposite directions, and they are the best sculpture in the group.

South: Linfen, Changzhi, Jincheng, Yuncheng

Eleven sites, four cities, and the densest concentration of the thing the game actually borrowed: painted clay.

Linfen has Xiaoxitian (169.6 m², nearly 2,000 figures) and Guangsheng Temple at Hongtong, whose lower temple holds Yuan dynasty drama murals — the earliest surviving large paintings of Chinese theatre, and the reason theatre historians go to Shanxi. Its Feihong Pagoda is a thirteen-storey octagonal tower clad in yellow, green and blue glaze.

Changzhi has the Guanyin Hall, a Ming hall packed with suspended sculpture, and Chongqing Temple at Zhangzi, whose Song dynasty eighteen arhats are among the finest of their period.

Jincheng is the cluster’s centre of gravity and has zero English Wikipedia coverage for all three of its sites: Yuhuang Temple (the twenty-eight mansions), Tiefo Temple at Gaoping (the twenty-four deities), and Xixi Erxian Temple at Lingchuan. Qinglian Temple, on the same day of the official route, holds Tang sculpture and Song timber.

Yuncheng is the outlier: three sites, roughly 300 km west of everything else, and not one Tang, Liao or Jin timber hall among them. It is also the cluster most people cut, and the one where the list and the province disagree most obviously.

The Guandi Temple at Xiezhou is the largest of the thousands of temples to Guan Yu — an imperial-scale complex, and the one site in this cluster that a Chinese tour group will also be visiting.

The Stork Tower at Yongji is the only one of China’s four great towers north of the Yellow River. The building is a 2002 reconstruction — the original was destroyed in the Yuan — so climb it for the river at dusk rather than for the carpentry.

And then there is Yongle Palace at Ruicheng, which is not on the list of 27 at all and is the best building in the province for a certain kind of visitor: 128 years of construction, finished in 1358, the largest surviving Yuan Taoist palace and one of the three great Quanzhen temples, with murals that were cut out, transported and reassembled when the reservoir came. Every English listicle puts it in the 27. The list does not.

All 27 Black Myth Wukong locations, with what you actually get

All Black Myth Wukong locations in Shanxi, grouped by cluster. “Hall size” is the floor area of the principal interior where it is documented, because that is the number that decides your visit.

Site	City / county	Date of the main structure	Why it is on the list	Booking
Yungang Grottoes 云冈石窟	Datong	453–495	51 caves, 51,000+ figures	Ticket, advance
Huayan Temple 华严寺	Datong	Liao / Jin	One of three surviving Liao complexes	Ticket
Shanhua Temple 善化寺	Datong	Liao / Jin	Largest Liao main hall	Ticket
Hanging Temple 悬空寺	Hunyuan, Datong	Ming–Qing rebuild	40 rooms on a cliff, 27 beams	Ticket, timed, often capped
Yong’an Temple 永安寺	Hunyuan, Datong	Yuan	Yuan water-land murals	Limited
Jueshan Temple 觉山寺	Lingqiu, Datong	Liao	Liao brick pagoda	Limited
Chongfu Temple 崇福寺	Shuocheng, Shuozhou	665 / Jin halls	Jin Amitabha Hall, 1184 plaque	Ticket
Yingxian Wooden Pagoda 应县木塔	Yingxian, Shuozhou	1056	Oldest, tallest timber pagoda, 67.31 m	Ticket; interior restricted
Nanchan Temple 南禅寺	Wutai, Xinzhou	782	Oldest timber building in China	Ticket
Foguang Temple 佛光寺	Wutai, Xinzhou	857	Third oldest; Liang Sicheng’s “first treasure”	Ticket
Jinge Temple 金阁寺	Wutai, Xinzhou	Tang foundation	Highest temple off the five peaks	Ticket
Nanshan Temple 南山寺	Wutai, Xinzhou	Yuan	Seven tiers, largest on Mount Wutai	Ticket
Youguo Temple 佑国寺	Wutai, Xinzhou	—	Upper tiers of Nanshan; stone carving	Ticket
Huiji Temple 惠济寺	Yuanping, Xinzhou	Song–Jin	Five dynasties of building in one compound	Limited
Zhenguo Temple 镇国寺	Pingyao, Jinzhong	963	Tenth-century hall and sculpture	Ticket
Shuanglin Temple 双林寺	Pingyao, Jinzhong	Ming–Qing rebuild	About 2,052 painted figures	Ticket
Xiaoxitian 小西天	Xi County, Linfen	1629	Nearly 2,000 figures in 169.6 m²	Booking, timed, batched
Guangsheng Temple 广胜寺	Hongtong, Linfen	147 / Yuan	Yuan theatre murals; Feihong Pagoda	Ticket
Tiefo Temple 尧都铁佛寺	Yaodu, Linfen	—	City temple with tall brick pagoda	Check locally
Guanyin Hall 观音堂	Luzhou, Changzhi	Ming	Suspended sculpture in a small hall	Ticket
Chongqing Temple 崇庆寺	Zhangzi, Changzhi	Song	Song eighteen arhats	Limited
Yuhuang Temple 玉皇庙	Zezhou, Jincheng	1076	The twenty-eight lunar mansions	Ticket
Tiefo Temple 高平铁佛寺	Gaoping, Jincheng	Ming–Qing	Twenty-Four Protective Deities in 72 m²	Free, booking, 500/day
Xixi Erxian Temple 西溪二仙庙	Lingchuan, Jincheng	Jin	Jin timber and sculpture	Limited
Guandi Temple 解州关帝庙	Yanhu, Yuncheng	Sui foundation	Largest Guandi temple in China	Ticket
Fusheng Temple 福胜寺	Xinjiang, Yuncheng	Northern Qi foundation	Yuan hall and painted sculpture; almost no English coverage	Check locally
Stork Tower 鹳雀楼	Yongji, Yuncheng	Rebuilt 2002	Four great towers; the only one north of the Yellow River	Ticket

“Limited” means what it says: small protected sites with irregular opening, sometimes by appointment through the local relics bureau, sometimes closed without notice. Do not build a day around one without confirming the day before.

Tickets, bookings and the 500-a-day rule

Three different regimes are in operation across the Black Myth Wukong locations, and confusing them is the most common planning error.

Regime	What it looks like	Where	What to do
Normal ticketed site	Gate, ticket office, opening hours	Yungang, Huayan, Shanhua, Hanging Temple, Yingxian Pagoda, Nanchan, Foguang, Zhenguo, Shuanglin, Guangsheng, Guandi Temple, Stork Tower, Fusheng Temple	Buy in advance in peak season; the Hanging Temple caps daily numbers
Free, but booked and batched	Online reservation, ID, timed slot, group size capped	Xiaoxitian, Tiefo Temple Gaoping	Book as early as the system allows. Tiefo is free and capped at 500 a day. Xiaoxitian admits about 40 at a time
Limited or appointment-only	No ticket window; sometimes a phone number	Yong’an, Jueshan, Huiji, Chongqing, Xixi Erxian, Youguo, Nanshan, Yaodu Tiefo	Confirm by phone or through the county relics bureau the day before. Assume nothing

We have deliberately not printed prices. Rates for these sites change with season and with policy, several are free, and a stale number is worse than no number. The structural facts — who needs a booking, who caps numbers, who is free — are stable, and those are what you plan around.

Getting there: the rail reality

Getting between the Black Myth Wukong locations is the part that decides your itinerary. Shanxi looks compact on a map and is not, because the high-speed network runs north–south and the sites do not. For ticketing mechanics, see our China rail planning guide.

Leg	How	Time	Note
Beijing → Datong	High-speed rail	Under 2 h	The easiest entry point for the northern cluster
Taiyuan → Pingyao	High-speed rail	About 30 min	Pingyao Gucheng station
Taiyuan → Datong	High-speed rail	About 2 h	—
Taiyuan → Linfen	High-speed rail	About 1 h	Linfen West
Linfen → Jincheng	Road	3–4 h	No useful direct rail; this is the official route’s day 7
Jincheng / Changzhi → elsewhere	High-speed rail via Zhengzhou	Varies	The south-east is on a different line from the north–south spine
Yuncheng	High-speed rail	—	On the Xi’an line; often paired with Shaanxi rather than with Shanxi

The practical consequence: pick a cluster and fly into its railhead. Taiyuan Wusu (TYN) is the province’s hub; Datong (DAT), Changzhi (CIU), Yuncheng (YCU) and Linfen (LFQ) have smaller airports. Trying to enter from one end and leave from the other sounds efficient and is not, because the south-east does not connect to the north without going back through the middle or out through Henan.

How long you actually need

Three honest answers for the Black Myth Wukong locations, depending on which cluster you pick. If you are still deciding how long to give China overall, start with how many days you need.

If you have	Do this	You will see	You will miss
2 days	Datong, based in the city	Yungang, Huayan, Shanhua, and the Hanging Temple if you start early	Everything south of Shuozhou
5 days	Datong → Taiyuan → Pingyao → Linfen	The northern cluster, the two Tang halls, both Pingyao temples, Xiaoxitian	Jincheng, Changzhi, Yuncheng — that is, the twenty-eight mansions and the twenty-four deities
8 days	The official self-drive route	12 of the 27, in the order the province chose	15 of the 27, including five of Xinzhou’s six

If the reason you are coming is the painted sculpture — and for most people who played the game, it is — then the answer is not the eight-day drive. It is Linfen plus Jincheng: Xiaoxitian, Guangsheng Temple, Yuhuang Temple and Tiefo Temple — four of the 27 — plus Qinglian Temple, which is not on the list and is worth the detour. Five sites, two cities, one long road between them, and four days if you take your time.

How to tell what a game actually borrowed

Most Black Myth Wukong locations guides are lists. There is no published map. Game Science has never released a list of what came from where, which is why the 27 has no owner. But four tests will get you most of the way, and they work for any game or animated film that claims real architecture.

Test	What you are looking for	How strong it is	Example here
1. The studio says so	A developer interview, an art book, a credits line naming an institution	Strongest, and rarest	The studio has described scanning buildings and statues on site and using them as assets or as design bases
2. A second studio is credited	Another company doing “secondary design” on specific regions	Strong — it tells you where the scan stopped and the invention started	Nanjing Graphics Science handled secondary design on some Mount Wutai buildings
3. The local government claims it	A provincial or county tourism page, a museum label, a site notice board	Medium — the incentive is to claim, but the specifics are usually right	The Shanxi government’s own English article lists 27 and names Yungang as an “inspirational source”
4. The site displays it	A poster at the gate, a QR code, a “as seen in” panel	Medium — recent, and often the most concrete	Xiaoxitian, Tiefo Temple and Yuhuang Temple all now lean on the association

What you will not find, for this game or for most, is a one-to-one mapping. A scanned bracket set can end up on three different buildings. A statue group can become a character and a doorframe. The unit of borrowing is the asset, not the site — which is precisely why the list of 27 is a list of sources and not a list of sets.

This is the difference between a game and a film, and it is worth being blunt about it. When a film shoots in a temple, the temple appears in the film as a place — that is what happens at Hengdian, where the buildings were built to be filmed. When a game scans a temple, the temple appears in the game as material. Both are real relationships. Only one of them can be walked.

If you only have one day

Two options, and they are genuinely different trips. Both assume you have already picked a cluster, because the Black Myth Wukong locations cannot be done from one base.

Datong, for the scale of the thing. Yungang in the morning — three hours minimum, and the caves at the western end are where the crowds thin out. Huayan and Shanhua in the afternoon, both inside the old city wall and ten minutes apart. This is the day for someone who wants to be impressed rather than moved, and it is the only day in the 27 where the game’s sense of scale is not a fiction.

Jincheng, for the thing the game actually borrowed. Yuhuang Temple in the morning — the twenty-eight mansions, and the two figures that became characters. Tiefo Temple at Gaoping in the afternoon, if your booking comes through. This is the day for someone who wants to see the sculpture that made the game look Chinese, and it requires a car and a reservation and a certain tolerance for county-town hotels.

If you are choosing between them and you played the game for its art rather than its landscapes, choose Jincheng. It is harder, less comfortable, less photographed, and it is where the design came from.

What to skip, honestly

If you are building a temple-and-timber trip rather than a single-province one, Chengde is the same argument in a different dynasty. Three of the 27 are, for a visitor, close to unrewarding — not because they are unimportant, but because what makes them important is not visible.

Site	Why it is on the list	Why you might skip it	Go instead if
Stork Tower 鹳雀楼	One of China’s four great towers, and the only one north of the Yellow River	The building you climb is a 2002 reconstruction; the original was destroyed in the Yuan. The poem is the point, and the poem is not there	You want the Yellow River view, which is genuinely good at dusk
Jueshan Temple 觉山寺	A Liao brick pagoda in a valley in Lingqiu	Remote, irregularly open, and the pagoda is the whole visit	You are driving the Datong–Wutai corridor anyway
Yaodu Tiefo Temple 尧都铁佛寺	A protected city temple with a tall brick pagoda	Easy to confuse with the Gaoping one, which is the one the game is actually associated with	You are in Linfen city and have an hour

And one thing to skip that is not on the list at all: the temptation to treat the 27 as a scoreboard. The province built an eight-day route and covered twelve. You are not going to beat that by trying harder.

The honest part: the error is one of scale

Every article in this series ends with the thing that is most often got wrong. For this one it is not a name, a number, a date, an address or a jurisdiction. All of those check out. It is size.

The game gives you a chapter called Xiaoxitian that contains a snow ridge, a frozen lake, a prison pagoda and a mountain. Shanxi gives you a hall of 169.6 square metres. Both are called the same thing, both are real, and the relationship between them is not a lie — it is a unit conversion, performed by a medium that needed a level and was given a room.

What you think you are going to	What is there	The ratio
A region	One hall, 169.6 m²	The chapter is a landscape; the place is a room
A temple you walk through	A queue, then a doorway, then a ceiling	About 40 people at a time, about 2 minutes each
Somewhere you will recognise	Surfaces you will recognise	The building was reassembled by a second studio

This is the twenty-first distinct failure mode we have catalogued on this site, and it is the first one that is not about a word. The previous twenty were errors of naming, counting, jurisdiction, layering and access. This one is an error of magnitude: the noun is right, the place is right, the number is right, and the size is off by two orders of magnitude, because a game expands what it borrows in order to have somewhere to put a fight.

The Black Myth Wukong locations are worth the trip. Take it for the room, not for the landscape.