Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Talmage, CA

Talmage is an unincorporated census-designated place in Mendocino County, located 2.5 miles east-southeast of Ukiah in the southeastern Ukiah Valley, at an elevation of 627 feet.

The 2020 Census counted 986 people in Talmage, down from 1,130 in 2010 and 1,141 in 2000 — in 2000, those residents lived in just 327 households.

Talmage covers only about 1.6 square miles of the Ukiah Valley floor.

The community is famous as the home of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, one of the largest Chan Buddhist monasteries and temples in the United States.

The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas occupies the former Mendocino State Hospital, a state asylum that opened in 1893 and closed in the 1970s, before the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association bought the property in 1974.

The monastery grounds span 488 acres, with more than 70 buildings and over 2,000 rooms.

Its Jeweled Hall of 10,000 Buddhas, completed in 1982, holds a 20-foot statue of Avalokitesvara and walls lined with 10,000 small Buddha images, each one molded by the monastery's founder, Master Hsuan Hua.

The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas also runs its own schools — including the Developing Virtue Secondary School — and a Buddhist university on the grounds.

Visitors to the monastery are often greeted by the cries of free-roaming peacocks wandering the grounds.