Note: Part or all of this painting has now been cut off the wall and stolen. If you see this or a fragment of this in a gallery or collection, you should inform the auction-house, local police or Interpol as appropriate.
Structure Type: Dragon King Temple 龍王廟. Across from it is an opera stage 戲台.
Location: Gou Family Hollow, Yu County, Hebei Province 河北省蔚縣苟家淺. The temple was located outside of the south gate of the old walled village.
Period: Undated. I’m judging 17th or 18th century based on style. The mural is certainly Qing-dynasty (1636-1911); one of the human figures in the bottom-most register bears a Qing-dynasty queue 辮子.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: The murals showed the standard Dragon-King scene. On the right-hand wall they rode out from the Crystal Palace 水晶宮 dispensing rain; on the left-hand wall they returned, become pacific. On the central wall were arrayed the Mother of Waters 水母, the Dragon Kings of the Five Seas 五海龍王, and the Master of Rain 雨師, plus all the deities of the rain procession. Of all of this, now only the figure of the Master of the Rain 雨師 along with a few of his attendants survives. There are also a few graffiti remaining on one wall of the old opera stage. These were some of the best, and stylistically earliest, Dragon King images I’ve seen.
Other Notes: The temple was in ruins when I first visited it in summer 2014, but the murals were still relatively intact. Later on in 2015-6, thieves stripped the room. The only photos I have of the two side-wall murals come from that one trip in 2014, during which I only had a small point-and-shoot camera and wasn’t intentionally documenting murals in any case. When I returned in early spring 2018, all that remained was a single section of the rear wall. Thus unless the mural surfaces again somewhere, all that remains of this temple are these rather low-quality photos. I stitched together length-wise panoramas of the two side walls from diagonal photos I took without flash in 2014, but the results are not great. This place is a tragedy.
Below: The temple in 2018, after being stripped by thieves:
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