Note: These are paintings produced in the last fifty years by a artists who is presumably still alive. I do not have copyright in any way over these artists’ work. I’m reproducing them here because (a) these images are of ethnographic interest, (b) I’d hope that shining more light on contemporary mural and scroll painters will ultimately be good for their trade, and (c) frankly, these people seem unlikely to sue me. To that last point: It’s possible to commission scroll or mural paintings. If you’re interested, email me and I’d be happy to give you the contact information of several painters we met.
Structure Type: Village temples 村廟.
Location: Building-Peace Fort, Yuyang District, Shaanxi Province 陝西省榆陽區建安堡村. I’ve put this up as an example of how many murals once existed within a complete village-fort system. Building-Peace Fort is a Ming-dynasty Great Wall garrison, one of over a dozen which stretched along the northern edge of Shaanxi Province, following the line of the Ördös desert. Although all of the shrines were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, the village rebuilt its temples almost entirely in the 1990s. With ten large ritual structures located in and around the walls, these large military forts now mostly function as religious centers for the surrounding hamlets in the loess hills. The temples are as follows, running north to south. Satellite image © Google Maps:
- Temple to the Goddesses 娘娘廟, facing south.
- Temple to the God of Walls and Moats 城隍廟, facing south.
- Temple to the Horse King 馬王, facing south.
- Temple to the Buddhas 佛廟, facing south.
- Bell Tower 鐘樓, with a shrine to the Perfected Warrior 真武廟 on the lower level and a shrine to the Jade Emperor 玉皇 on the upper. These two shrines face south; on the northern wall of Shrine of the Perfected Warrior there is a small box which represents a Shrine to the Dark Altar 玄壇廟.
- Another shrine room on an arch which I now realize I never went into and don’t have an ID for in my notes; my guess is that this is probably devoted to Wenchang 文昌.
- An opera stage 戲台, facing north through several gates ultimately probably to the Temple of the God of Walls and Moats and the Goddesses Temple.
- Temple to the Three Officials 三官廟, on a high tower on the western wall.
- Dragon King Temple 龍王廟, on a rise outside the walls, facing south
- Temple to Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin 觀音廟, located up on the corner-tower of the wall, facing north.
- Temple to Lord Guan 關公廟, on a hillside 500 meters to the south of the fort, facing north-west.
Note that the shrines are not located randomly. The entire town is structured around the line of sight between the opera stage and the temples to the Goddesses and the God of Walls and Moats. Over this line of sight are built two “panoptical” shrines to male deities (the Perfected Warrior and Jade Emperor); a third shrine to a male deity (the Three Officials) looks down a subsidiary east-west axial road. The Dragon Kings, a group of potentially dangerous deities, are as always located outside of the fortress walls.
Period: As stated, all of these temples were rebuilt in the 1990s in their previous positions. See the individual sections for more information.
Mural Contents: I’ll deal with the shrines in the order given above.
1) The Temple to the Goddesses 娘娘廟 consists of two shrines, one to the Goddess of Eyesight 眼光娘娘, here seemingly imagined as a form of Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin 觀音, and another shrine to the three Goddesses who Bring Children 送子娘娘. These two shrines were painted in 1992-3 by artists Liu Jihuan 劉雞換 and Li Shengming 李生明. The former has lovely Dunhuang-inspired apsaras 飛天, and is generally speaking a rather unusual iconography that I haven’t encountered elsewhere.
2) The Temple to the God of Walls and Moats 城隍廟 contains a front hall 過殿 and then a main hall 正殿. The murals show the procession of the god out and back into the world. As elsewhere, his cult is connected to that of the underworld, and his main attendants are the terrible psychopomps Oxhead and Horseface 牛頭馬面.
3) The Temple of the Horse King 馬王 shows a similar procession of this deity, with images of him granting health and fertility to horse and oxen.
4) Didn’t take pictures in the Buddha Temple 佛廟, as it was mostly just a very new and gaudy shrine to Śākyamuni 釋迦牟尼.
5) According to a stele on the second floor, the Bell and Drum Tower 鐘鼓樓 was rebuilt from rubble in 2003. The painter was named Zhang Yanzhen 張彥珍. The lower floor contains an image of the Perfected Warrior 真武祖師, the Duke of Zhou 周公, the Peach-Blossom Girl 桃花女, and the Ten Primordial Generals 十元帥. Around the back there is a small north-facing shrine to the Dark Altar 玄壇, another name for Zhao Gongming 趙公明. These little Dark Altar shrines were once common on fortress walls across northern China, but this is the only one I’ve ever seen still in place (although rebuilt). The upper floor has images of the Jade Emperor 玉皇, attended by the Golden Lad 金童 and the Jade Girl 玉女.
6-8) These sites do not have murals, or in the case of (7), I just forgot to go into it.
9) The Dragon King Temple has the standard Dragon King murals, showing them processing out and back from the Crystal Palace 水晶宮 dispensing rain. Did not notice any steles or cartouches here giving the date or painter, but these should be from around the same time period as the rest.
10) The Shrine to Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin 觀音廟 does not have murals.
11) The Temple to Lord Guan 關公廟 is a large complex located outside the walls. This contains a number of rooms, with story-board scenes depicting stories from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國演義 and, in the inner chambers, images of Lord Guan progressing out and back. This temple was rebuilt in 1993, with murals by Cai Shengbao 蔡生寶 and Gao Shengrong 高生榮.
Nor were shrines limited to actual temple structures. Almost all Chinese houses would have some sort of shrine within them as well, either ancestral altars 祖龕, shrines to the God of the Earth 土地神 or the God of the Hearth 灶神, or “Grandfathers’ House” 爺爺家-style pantheon charts. Many of these little shrine-boxes still survive on the outer walls of old Shaanbei houses.
I’ve put all this up here to try to give a sense of the complex assemblages in which all of these murals were once constituent parts. Most murals exist now in isolation, scattered survivors of a campaign of destruction the scale and completeness of which is difficult now to image. Nevertheless, all of these paintings once existed in spatial and visual relationship to other paintings. The temples themselves marked some aspect of built or natural space. The murals functioned to define the location or motion of the deities within this space; whether they sat enthroned over their axial domains, patrolled the streets and alleys of the fort, or rode in great wild-hunts through the cloudy wilds. The whole of this formed a complex and encompassing grammar of space, image, motion, and sight. Until we can imagine this system in its totality, we do not understand what these murals were “doing”.
Full Gallery
