By the Tang dynasty Famensi was a major relic centre, its stupa believed to hold a finger-bone of the Buddha, and the relic became the focus of periodic imperial veneration. Every few decades the emperor had it escorted from Famen to Chang'an, received in the palace, and displayed for the devotion of the court and populace before its return; these were among the great religious spectacles of the age. The most celebrated episode is the memorial of 819, in which the Confucian official Han Yu attacked the veneration of the relic and was banished for his pains, a document that incidentally attests the relic's prominence.
The last of these ceremonies preceded the sealing of the relic, with a vast array of imperial offerings, into the crypt beneath the pagoda in 874. The deposit lay untouched as the Tang fell and the centuries passed. The Ming-era pagoda that stood above it collapsed after heavy rain in 1981, and the 1987 excavation of the foundations exposed the intact underground palace, with its nested reliquaries of gold, silver, jade and sandalwood, its inscribed catalogue, the four finger relics, and the treasure hoard. The finds transformed the study of Tang material culture and confirmed the documentary history of the relic; the true bone is now enshrined in a modern stupa at the temple, and the treasures are held in the Famen Temple Museum.