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: Buddhist Monastery 佛寺.
Location: The monastery is located on the bluffs about half a kilometer north of the village. Just next to it on the north-west is a small mud fortress, which shows little evidence of ever having been inhabited; this may once have been a refuge fort for the village. Note that no one was at the site, and hence I have no idea what the name of the monastery was.
Period: The words “Republic of China” 中華民國 (1912-49) are written on a scroll in one of the triangular panels in the rafters.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: The monastery has three halls. The southernmost hall should originally have been a “passing hall” 過殿 or a “Hall of the Heavenly Kings“ 天王殿; any murals here were long gone when I first visited in 2014.
The middle hall was presumably some kind of “Arhat Hall” 羅漢殿. When I first visited in 2014, this had beautiful full-wall murals of the “Arhats Crossing the Sea” 羅漢渡海, a theme that shows all of the Buddha’s disciples walking across the waters to reach a paradisiacal further-shore. This theme is relatively common in late-imperial art generally, but I’ve never seen it elsewhere in mural-form. The triangular panels under the rafters contain images from the Universal Gate Sutra 普門品經, in which Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin rescues devotees from a series of dangers.
The rear hall should originally have been called a “Main Hall” 正殿 or, in the more grandiloquent style, a “Mahāvīra Hall” 大雄寶殿. This contained panel-images of the life of Śākyamuni Buddha.
When I returned with a real camera in 2018, all of these halls had been stripped by thieves; only a few fragments of the ceiling-panels and the rafters still remained. Thus these photos are terrible, but they’re all I have. The wreckage:
Full Gallery
