Guangyou Temple, adjacent to the White Pagoda, claims origins in the Eastern Han Dynasty — making it potentially one of the oldest Buddhist sites in northeast China. The current buildings are later Qing Dynasty reconstructions, but the location has been a Buddhist complex for at least fifteen hundred years, and the accumulated atmosphere of that continuity is apparent even in the rebuilt structures.
The temple is small and functioning rather than museum-ised: monks are present, incense burns, and the courtyard has the worn-stone quality of a place that has been used continuously rather than preserved for display. The combination of the working temple and the thousand-year-old pagoda immediately adjacent gives this corner of Liaoyang a density of historical layering that most Chinese provincial cities cannot match.