Note: This is a painting produced in the last fifty years by an artist who is presumably still alive. I do not have copyright in any way over this artist’s work. I’m reproducing it 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 these scrolls very easily in the villages around Wutai County. If you’re interested, email me and I’d be happy to give you the contact information of several painters we met.
Structure Type: Urban Temple. This is only urban by the technical definition that it has a Temple to the God of Walls and Moats; in fact it’s a quite small village.
Location: Holds-the-Gate Fort, Yanggao County, Shanxi Province 山西省陽高縣鎮門堡村. The temple is located within the walls of the old forts, up a side-street.
Period: The temple was presumably founded sometime during the Ming; by the time of the first repair stele in 1824, it was already so old that nobody knew when it had been founded. The temple seems to have been gutted during the Cultural Revolution, and then rebuilt almost entirely in 2016, at which time the present murals were painted.
Artist: Unknown. I should have asked after the artists at the time that I visited, but I did not, and their don’t seem to be written anywhere that I can find in the photos. In any case it seems to me that the two halls with murals were painted by different hands.
Mural Contents: The main hall was described to me by the care-takers as the “central hall” 中堂, or “where the god does works” 辦公的地方. This hall shows relatively standard procession images on either wall, with panels to either side of the main altar showing scenes of bureaucratic judgement.
The rear hall, accessed by a small gate to the left of the main building, was described to me as the “living quarters” 住房 of the god. In more formal language, this would be called the “Palace of Repose” 寢宮. Here the statue of the god is enthroned together with his wife, identified to me simply as a “goddess” 娘娘. The side-wall murals show the accoutrement of their domestic chambers, including a rack of books, a television showing scenes from the Journey to the West 西遊記, a thermos for tea, a fan, a feather-duster, etc. Little clay figurines of children are set into niches in the wall, left by women whose prayers for fertility have been answered.
I’ve included these murals here both because of their slightly goofy literalism, and also because in a strange way, they provide a key to understanding many of the images in this collection. It seems to me that we should understand a broad variety of north-Chinese murals, from the earliest extant examples in the 13th century to the present, as referring to this sort of hidden interior space, located behind the altar wall of the temple or scaenae frons of the stage. This holy backstage, usually specifically coded feminine, is occulted from our view but is always the font of the divine fecundity. Although this specific “Palace of Repose” is perhaps crudely painted, such buildings and such tropes in paintings in fact stretch back to the Song dynasty Water God’s Temple 水神廟 in Hongdong 洪洞縣, or the Yuan-dynasty Temple of the Northern Marchmount 北岳廟 in Quyang 曲陽縣.
Full Gallery
