Note: Part or all of this painting has now been cut off the wall and stolen. If you see this or a fragment of this in a gallery or collection, you should inform the auction-house, local police or Interpol as appropriate.

Structure Type: Village Temple 村廟.

Location: Cao Tuan Village, Yu County, Hebei Province 河北省蔚縣曹疃村. The village has two forts, which were joined at one wall to make a single conurbation. The temple is located at the northern end of the axial road of the western fort, facing down the road through the gate (now vanished) to an opera stage.

Period: The fort was built at this location in Ming, and presumably the main parts of the temple date from that period. According to a stele now deposited in a trash-heap on the main street of the village, the temple was repaired once in 1774, and then again in 1846, at which point the murals were repainted. There are other steles in the village, not all of which are legible, but I would tend to accept 1846 as the likely date, both because (unusually) the stele explicitly says that the temple interior was repainted at this time, and because the style seems roughly right for this period.

Artist: Wei Guang 魏廣.

Mural Contents: The main or northern wall shows the Perfected Warrior 真武 seated beneath a black flag with the sign of the dipper, holding his sword, his hair unbound and his feet bare, a turtle and a snake before him. To the left and right are the Peach Blossom Girl 桃花女 and the Duke of Zhou 周公. On either wall are the Twelve Primordial Generals of the Thunder Bureau 雷部十二元帥, here helpfully labeled.

Other Notes: I visited this site in 2013 and took bad photographs with my little point-and-shoot camera; afterwards when I returned in 2017, the temple had been stripped by thieves. Thus these photos are terrible, but unless this mural resurfaces somewhere, they’re all that remains.

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