According to the chronicle of St. Petersburg, appeared the first Buddhists in these northern regions is still in the construction of the first buildings of St. Petersburg - Peter and Paul Fortress. These were the subjects of the Kalmyk Khanate, was not yet a member of the Russia, the Volga Kalmyks, who worked on the construction of the stone fortress of trees. But later, in the records of XVIII - the middle XIX centuries, there is no indication that the city had any representatives of the Buddhist faith. Only at the end of the XIX century in St. Petersburg began to organize the Buddhist community. According to the 1897 census the city's population of 75 Buddhists, and in 1910 there were almost 200. In general, these were the Volga-Don Kalmyks and Trans-Baikal Buryats.

Permission to build a Buddhist temple was given by Emperor Nicholas II at the request of the messenger XIII Dalai Lama's Buryat scholar Lobsang Aghvan Dorzhieva. The temple was built in a quiet, secluded location on the banks of the Big Neva from 1909 to 1915. At the same time it was built here a hostel for monks and visitors Buddhists and service wing, which has not survived to the present day. The temple project is executed by the architect Baranovsky and students of the Institute of Civil Engineers Berezovsky, to draw on the examples of medieval Tibetan architecture, exposing some of its Europeanization and modernization. Finance the construction of XIII Dalai Lama, Dorzhievurginskim, Bogdogegen VIII and believers of Buryatia and Kalmykia.

The building is a parallelogram tapering upward. From the south on the main facade of the temple has a beautiful portico - four square pillars topped intricate pattern bronze capitals. It can be up on the wide granite stairs.

Red and purple granite was chosen for walls of the temple. The upper part of the building is made of red brick, trimmed with blue sashes combined with white circles. From the north a three-storey building of the temple in contact with the four-storey tower, which is topped with a gilded copper completion, "ganchzhirom." More Buddhist temple decorated with a symbol - a circle vosmigradusnym "harde" copper figures of gazelles on the sides. At the corners of the main facade are placed gilded cones, which are located in the printed prayer texts. Inside the temple is decorated with colorful stained glass ceiling and fences with Buddhist symbols only skylights this space, multi-colored tiles that paved floor.

This temple has been conceived not only as a Buddhist chapel of St. Petersburg, but also as a kind of museum and the center of the Indo-Tibetan spirituality and culture in the European part of Russia. And now it is also a center of Buddhist learning - "monastic school."