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: Lineage Temple 家廟.
Location: Yu County, Hebei Province 河北省蔚縣. The temple is located within the old fort, in a small yard off the main north-south road.
Period: Undated. 18th or 19th century. For a close stylistic comparison, see the 1818 family temple at Song Family Village 宋家莊.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: The main purpose of the murals is to show the votive tablets 牌位 of the ancestors, so that they can be written out in genealogical order and receive worship. Great attention is paid to the geomancy of this imaginary scene; a hill sits at the top (north), with rivers flowing around it. The apical ancestor’s tablet sits at the commanding spot beneath this hill. Beneath this, there is a “spirit-way” 神道 of tables of offerings and ceremonial arches 牌樓. At the base of the image, prosperous-looking members of the Liu family, both male and female, approach in carts and on mules.
The small black-and-white panels under the eaves show filial scenes: a man worships images of his ancestors as a woman looks on; in another scene, a young woman offers an elderly woman her breast, presumably a daughter-in-law sacrificing her body to nurture her husband’s parents.
Outside of the lineage temple, there’s also a small shrine-room which seems to be devoted to the Gods of the Five Ways 五道廟; this is heavily damaged.
Other Notes: The lineage temple is now used as someone’s store-room. I visited it twice, once in 2014 and once in 2018; both times it was packed full of crates and bags of grain, etc., and thus it was difficult to move around the space and photograph effectively, or to see all of the scenes at the base of the image. The photographs are correspondingly mediocre.
Lineage temples were once reasonably common in rural Yu County; I’m aware of at least seven standing pre-Revolution family shrine buildings scattered around the villages and the county town, and there were no-doubt once more than this. Nevertheless, it’s clear that such temples were never a ubiquitous in the way they were in southern China, and were probably a relatively late (18th or 19th century) phenomenon in the area. Of the shrines that survive, only three have intact murals.
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