Structure Type: Urban Temple 城鎮廟宇.

Location: Shanxi Province, Tianzhen County, Xinpingbu Town 山西省天鎮縣新平堡鎮. The tower is located on a four-way arch over the central crossroads of the town; it commands panoramic views down the axial roads in all directions.

Period: Undated, 18th century based on style. The tower itself should have existed here since the foundation of this fort in the Ming Dynasty, but the murals don’t seem that old to me.

Artist: Unknown.

Mural Contents: The murals are highly faded and it’s difficult to identify any of the figures. The two rear walls on either side of the altar show life-sized female attendants holding up offerings to the deity. The side walls show a “Heavenly Court” image 朝元圖, in which ranked deities face north towards the sovereign god. At the northernmost part of the assembly are the gods the Perfected Warrior (Zhenwu 真武) and Tianpeng 天篷, recognizable by their unbound hair, black robes, and swords. Next to them, now highly faded, should be Tianyou 天猷 and Yisheng 翊聖. The other deities, dressed as civil officials in the Daoist pantheon, are less easy to make out. It strikes me that these must be the Thirty Three Heavens 三十三天, astral deities that attend the Jade Emperor in iconographies in northern Shaanxi 陝北; I’m not sure if this is or is not the case.

Other Notes: These murals are faded and hard to appreciate. Nevertheless, I’ve stuck them up here because these massive, axial towers used to be the defining visual feature of Chinese urban landscapes. Today, only a tiny fraction of these buildings survive, and the ones that do almost never have their interiors intact. To understand pre-modern Chinese urbanism, we have to understand the visual function of these once-ubiquitous structures, both in that they commanded axial views over the surrounding towns and countryside, and in that they were themselves efficacious interior spaces, their halls painted with complex and efficacious arrays of holy beings. In some sense, the entire town of New Peace Fort is constructed around this single now-vanished image of the Jade Emperor, and the painted deities which attend him at his court. This kind of visual construction – our view towards the tower, and the view of the arrayed gods down through the axial streets and out across the mountains of the Mongol border – is a defining feature of imperial north-Chinese urbanism.

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