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: Opera Stage 戲台.
Location: Yu County, Hebei Province 河北蔚縣. The stage sits to the south of the location of the old village fortress gate. Originally it was faced to the north by a Temple to Lord Guan 關公廟, but this is now demolished.
Period: Undated. Graffiti within the structure goes back to the ’20s of the Guangxu reign (1895-1905), suggesting that the structure was built in the second half of the 19th century.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: In the outer part of the stage, the two side-walls show trompe l’œil images of screens. In the backstage area, there’s a full-wall mural of a Qilin gazing at the moon 麒麟望月 and two lions 獅子 on either side. These seem to be standard backstage decoration in this area. Of interest are the many performers graffiti.
Panels above the proscenium wall 隔扇牆 show images of opera performances. There’s also these lovely black-and-white panels under the eaves; in retrospect I regret that I didn’t take better photos of all these.
One historical collectors’ item among these is a graffito marked “the first year of the reign of Constitutional Abundance (Hongxian)” 洪憲元年. the regnal title refers to Yuan Shikai’s 袁世凱 abortive attempt to restore the monarchy, which lasted exactly 83 days between December 12th, 1915 and March 22nd, 1916. While broadly unpopular across China, it seems that Yuan Shikai’s reign had some support in rural Yu County!
Another interesting little graffiti is a depiction of a performance by the Wenyu Troupe 文蔚班 (“Literary Yu-County”; they habitually mis-spell 蔚), dated to March 11th, 1894. The Wenyu Troupe seems to have been particularly active around the eastern part of the Yu County valley in the decade before 1900, as several of their little performance self-portraits survive on opera stage walls in this area.
Other Notes: One of the things that I still don’t understand about these stages is the practice of splashing ink on the backstage walls. Almost all of these stages have a small section in the rear where someone has Jackson-Pollocked long stripes of ink along the wall, often over-written with exorcistic formulae (i.e. “The Great Lord has arrived – all spirits return to your places” 太公在此，諸神退位). I’ve always assumed that this has to be some kind of consecration ritual for the stage or for individual performances, but nobody I spoke to locally has ever been able to explain it to me. If anybody who reads this knows what this is about, I’d be curious to learn.
Full Gallery
