Location info and some photos withheld. As of my last visit, this mural site is vulnerable to theft or destruction. I have withheld the location beneath the county level and any photographs (of steles, signs, scenery, etc.) that might identify the place. If you are an accredited scholar and you have a good reason to want to see this information, email me and we’ll talk about it.
Structure Type: Village temple 村廟.
Location: Jia County, Shaanxi 陝西佳縣. The place is a tiny, unwalled hamlet on the loess-hilltops here; the village’s temples are scattered over the bluffs.
Period: Undated. 19th century due to similarity of style with other Water and Land images in this area. A stele records the creation of the temple in 1732 and its renovation in 1912. However, the extant murals don’t obviously seem to date from either of these periods. For an analysis, see 呼延勝, “陝北土地上水陸畫藝術,” 博士論文, 西安美術學院, 2012, pp.87-8.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: There are three temples in the village, one devoted to Guanyin 觀音廟, one to the Dragon Kings 龍王, and one to the Buddha 佛. The first two have late-20th-century murals in them; I photographed inside the Dragon King Temple. These images show the standard scene of the Mother of Waters 水母 enthroned on the central wall, with the Dragon Kings processing out and back on the side walls to dispense rain.
The old murals are located in the Buddha Temple 佛廟. The murals show the Buddhist Feast of Water and Land, in which all the gods and demons of the cosmos are called down to the altar to partake of offerings and be converted. Unfortunately, the statues of the protector-deities set against the wall make it almost impossible to get any kind of good composite image of each mural surface.
Other Notes: This area is extremely poor, and the village is now mostly abandoned.
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