The three founding monks chose well. Ngong Ping Plateau sits roughly 500 metres above sea level on Lantau Island, cooler and quieter than the densely populated shores below. The plateau was isolated enough for serious practice, accessible enough that the community could sustain itself. The informal settlement they established in 1906 was renamed Po Lin — meaning "Precious Lotus" — in 1924, when the community had grown sufficiently to warrant a proper institutional name. Over the following decades, the monastery built its main structures: the Main Shrine Hall of Buddha, the Hall of Bodhisattva Skanda, residential quarters for the monastic community. The main temple came to house three bronze statues of the Buddha representing his past, present, and future lives, alongside a library of Buddhist scriptures. The monastery became a regional centre of Chan Buddhism, the Chinese tradition that informs what the West knows as Zen.

In 1993, Po Lin Monastery changed scale permanently. The Tian Tan Buddha — named for the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, whose design influenced the structure's base — was completed after three years of work and installed on a hill above the monastery. The bronze statue itself stands 26.4 metres, with the full structure reaching 34 metres including its lotus throne base, making it one of the largest outdoor seated Buddha statues in the world. The statue faces north, looking out over China. Pilgrims and tourists climb 268 steps to reach the base, where smaller statues of bodhisattvas and devas surround the main figure. The Tian Tan Buddha drew visitor numbers that transformed Ngong Ping, and the transformation accelerated when the Ngong Ping 360 gondola opened, connecting the plateau to the town of Tung Chung below via a cable car with views over Lantau's forested hills and the South China Sea.

In 1918, twelve years after Po Lin was founded, three nuns who had been ordained at the monastery made a different choice. Rather than remain on the main plateau, they descended to Lantau's Lower Keung Hill and established a private nunnery called Chi Chuk Lam — 紫竹林 — dedicated to Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. The name means "Purple Bamboo Grove," a reference to one of Guanyin's sacred dwelling places. The nunnery operated as a contemplative community for decades; in the 1950s it housed around twenty jushi (lay practitioners) and nuns. Now only an elderly abbess remains. The Chi Chuk Lam story runs quietly alongside Po Lin's larger narrative — a smaller, quieter community descended from the same founding impulse, holding to its purpose as the world around both places changed beyond recognition.

Po Lin today occupies an unusual position: a functioning monastic community at the centre of one of Hong Kong's most-visited tourist attractions. The monastery continues its religious life — monks chant, incense burns, the daily rhythms of Chan practice continue — while tens of thousands of visitors arrive each year to see the Tian Tan Buddha and walk the grounds. The monastery is noted for its vegetarian restaurant, which feeds the pilgrim traffic, and for wooden bracelets sold near the Buddha statue that have become a sought-after souvenir. The Ngong Ping village around the gondola terminal offers the full apparatus of tourism — cafés, shops, a cultural village. But the monastery's original structures remain, and if you arrive early enough, before the gondola line forms, the plateau has something of the quiet that three monks from Jiangsu chose it for in 1906.