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Some more photos from my visit...
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As the Northern Shaolin Temple complex is quite large, traveling to different halls can take a while, and the path goes up as you go deeper into the complex, and down as you move back towards the main gate…
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We went to see the Damo Stone, this is the hall it is kept in, I forget the name…
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Here you can see the Damo stone. Interestingly, Zhou Yang, the disciple of Shi De Cheng who I was visiting, told me that he does not believe that this is the real Damo Stone (you can read about the legend of the Damo Stone and of Damo (the great Bodhidharma, our first patriarch) in Sifus books on Zen and Shaolin). He told me that the original was taken by the Japanese when they invaded China, and the original is now in a musem in Osaka.
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Here you can see the marked difference in the construction of the new halls. The Northern Shaolin Temple has been burnt down quite a few times, the last being in 1928 I believe, and so many off the halls have been rebuilt from scratch.