Structure Type: Village temple 村廟 and opera stage 戲台.
Location: The temple and stage are located in the south part of the village. This is outside what was presumably the old walled center of the town, although this is now hard to reconstruct.
Period: Late 19th century. The temple building itself was built in 1586, as evidenced both by the architecture and by a stele sitting outside which narrates this. Some of the old Ming-dynasty paintwork still survives around the eaves. However, both the stage and the temple seem to have been repainted around 1900; the style suggests this period, and the earliest graffiti on the opera stage is from the mid Guangxu reign (1875-1908).
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: According to the stele outside and the old man who keeps the keys, the temple is devoted to the historical King Wuling of Zhao 趙武靈王, an ancient ruler of this area (r.325-299 BC). The side-wall murals were stripped recently during the repair of the temple. However, a few photographs taken by Chinese bloggers before this happen can be found online. These murals did actually seem to have been panel-narratives, presumably depicting the life of this king. That said, the deities worshipped here are now the Dragon Kings, and the front-wall iconographies seem basically indistinguishable from the Dragon Kings and Dragon Mothers as well.
More interesting is actually the opera stage, which has a fantastic collection of 20th-century opera graffiti, including elaborate “advertisements” of different Shanxi Opera 晉戲 troupes. These graffiti are dense and fairly continuous from about 1900 to the mid-1950s, with another small uptick in the ’90s.
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