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: Village temple.
Location: The temple is located in a little cluster of Ming-dynasty buildings located outside of the old fort, on a slight rise to the south-east. The complex was once a Daoist temple of some wealth, holding shrines to the Old Gentleman 老君 (Laozi), the Three Purities 三清, the God of Wealth 財神, the God of Fire 火神, the Yama Kings 閻王, and Lord Guan 關公. This collection of buildings was faced to the south by an opera stage 樂僂. All of these buildings are now in ruins, with only the Dragon King Temple containing intact murals.
Period: The 1595 date is a pure guess. I am getting this from the fact that the building adjacent, which was once a “passing hall” 過殿 that held images of the Three Purities 三清, has a plaque on the ceiling indicating that it was built 建 at this date. There is, of course, no reason to believe therefore that the Dragon King temple next-door was built in the same year, but the style looks roughly late-Ming or early Qing to me and so I have listed it under this date. If this date is correct, this is the earliest extant Dragon King murals known to me.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: The murals depict the procession of the Dragon Kings out and back to dispense rain on the world below. Besides the speculative early date, the most interesting aspect of the mural is the upper register containing rows of hundreds of figures in Ming dress, all marching together. This seems to be a local variation of the Dragon King iconographies, attested here and at two other sites known to me, all within a fifty-kilometer radius of each other. Unfortunately both this site and one of the others are in ruins; a third site (which I dated on style to the late 19th or early 20th century) is intact, but local officials did not allow me to photograph within the temple. I have not seen an explanation for this theme, which is local in distribution but apparently quite old.
Other Notes: This was the first site I photographed when I returned to China to do this in 2018. It was extremely cold and I was still figuring out how to use my camera, hence these photos are really bad. The structure is ruinous and the murals are being destroyed by rain and vandalism.
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