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 村廟.
Location: The temple is located at the north end of the axial road of the old fort. Unusually though, the temple is actually outside of the fort, on a large mound just outside of a north-facing gate; it looks in through the gate towards an opera stage in the middle of the village.
Period: On the right side of the still-standing wall is scrawled the following hard-to-read and not very encouraging message: “This place is very difficult. Mountain [illegible] mountain people. On the twenty eighth day of the seventh month of the tenth year of the Tongzhi reign [1871] it rained; this painter was working on repairs [?], on the thirtieth it rained, and on [illegible] of the eighth month in the evening the building collapsed and [illegible] fell in [illegible] and suffered disaster.” 此地好困 山[ ]山人同治十年七月卄八日下雨畫工攸[修?]卅日下雨八月[ ][ ]日晚止[此?]房倒[ ]塌[ ][ ]遭災 While one sympathizes with the long-suffering temple painter in the rainy summer of 1871, it does seem that the building was repaired and that he managed to complete the murals within.
Artist: Unknown, although see above.
Mural Contents: The surviving murals show scenes from the hagiography of the Perfected Warrior. This is actually the most elaborate such narrative I’ve seen, with many drawn-out episodes from the Perfected Warrior’s youth not found elsewhere.
Other Notes: At the time that I first visited this site in 2014, the two side walls were still standing, and a heavily-damaged part of the third wall stood as well. I took detailed although low-quality photographs of these with my little point-and-shoot. By the time I returned to the site in 2018, only one wall, the eastern one, still stood; this seems like it will very soon collapse. There are also some badly-damaged and badly-photographed opera stage murals; page-down through the galleries below to see these.
Full Gallery from 2014:
Full Gallery from 2018:
