Qiu Chuji left China in 1220 at past seventy to meet Genghis Khan, who was campaigning in Central Asia, and returned in 1224 having secured the khan's protection for Taoist clergy and their temples across the growing Mongol empire. The residence given to him in Beijing became White Cloud Temple, and the Dragon Gate lineage he founded there turned a modest urban temple into the most consequential Taoist institution of the following seven centuries.
What Qiu Chuji institutionalized was a discipline, not just a lineage. Longmen clergy live celibate and cloistered, following a monastic rule that borrows its shape openly from Chan Buddhist practice, a debt Quanzhen Taoism has never hidden. That discipline set the school apart from the older, married, household based clergy of Zhengyi Taoism, who administer rites for lay communities without withdrawing from family life. The distinction still organizes Chinese Taoism today, and White Cloud Temple is where it was first given a fixed monastic home.
The temple's other legacy is textual. Its library held one of the very few complete printed sets of the Ming dynasty Taoist Canon to survive into the twentieth century. A 1926 photolithographic reprint of the Baiyun Guan copy is what returned the canon to general scholarly circulation, and modern academic study of Taoism as a textual tradition effectively begins with that reprint.
White Cloud Temple survived the twentieth century's disruptions better than most Chinese religious institutions and now serves as the seat of the China Taoist Association. Its courtyards still hold a resident clergy trained in the Dragon Gate line Qiu Chuji founded, carrying forward a discipline that began as one master's answer to a Mongol summons.