Structure Type: Various shrines within a large Daoist abbey 道觀.
Location: White-Cloud Mountain Temple, Jia County, Shaanxi Province 陝西省佳縣白雲山道觀.
Period: Undated. I genuinely have no idea when these were painted and I’ve placed them in this chronological list basically at random. Shaanbei mural styles have a very different progression than those familiar to me in Shanxi and Hebei, and I haven’t spent long enough there or amassed enough dated examples to be able to say from style. Shaanbei does seem to be a place where older styles lingered much later and a number of very divergent painting styles coexisted in the same areas, often the same temple complexes. Particularly the shrines to Zhao Gongming and Spiritual Official Wang beneath could be anywhere from 1500 to 1948 as far as I’m concerned.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: White-Cloud Mountain is full of beautifully preserved murals, but most of these are off-limits to photography and in any case have been published . I was particularly interested in three iconographies which I haven’t seen elsewhere, and thus hid myself among the statues and got off a few basic documentary photographs. All of these shrines were cramped and full of statues, thus I had to make composite photographs to get the whole composition. These necessarily came out quite blurry and distorted in places.
On the steps up towards the main Hall of the Perfected Warrior 真武廟 are two shrines on either side of the way, one devoted to the Spirit Official Zhao 趙靈官 (i.e., Zhao Gongming 趙公明) and the other to the Spirit Official Wang 王靈官. These appear elsewhere in northern Shaanxi as the Perfected Warrior’s left and right attendants. The modern explanatory plaque calls these the Black Tiger 黑虎 and the Orthodox Unity 正一 gods. It adds that they are, respectively, ethnically Han and Mongol, and therefore this paired hall represents a monument to the friendship of the Han and Mongol peoples. This I really can’t speak for, but these murals are indeed quite rare and interesting. Both halls show the respective deity riding out to defeat demons, engaging in magical combat, and returning to pay homage to the Perfected Warrior 真武.
Another mural I hadn’t seen elsewhere was to the King of Ghosts 鬼王, also called the Great Master of Flaming Mien 面然大師 or the God of Orphaned Souls 孤魂爺. Little shrines to this deity are ubiquitous across north China, but usually he is represented by a statue and not a mural. Again due to the narrow space, I had to create a composite image to get this photo, which came out somewhat distorted:
Other Notes: Because Mao Zedong once stopped to watch a temple play here, White-Cloud Monastery was allowed to survive the Cultural Revolution unscathed. For this reason it’s a massive museum of murals, all of which I was afraid to photograph due to ubiquitous security cameras, threats of fines for damaging cultural property, etc. Thus I confined myself to a few surreptitious snapshots of things I hadn’t seen elsewhere. If you’re interested in this, though, most of the murals have been published in a quite good book, see 本書編委會. 中國佳縣白雲山白雲觀壁畫. 北京: 文物出版社, 2007.
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