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 and Opera Stage 戲台.
Location: Zuoyun County, Shanxi Province 山西省左雲縣. I’m not sure whether the village was ever fortified, or how it was shaped in the 19th century. At present, the temple and stage sit by the road, next to a large old signaling tower 烽火台.
Period: 1882. This date is found on a painted almanac 曆書 on one of the panels over the door; this is in fact a relatively common way for painters to date their murals. It strikes me that at least some of the murals and painted panels in the opera stage adjacent are also in the same hand, and thus should be from the same date, but I’m not certain; different parts of the building may have been painted at different times. The temple building also contains some extremely crude drawings from the a late 20th- or early 21st-century “repair”.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: The temple murals show the standard procession of the Dragon Kings out and back from the Crystal Palace 水晶宮 to dispense rain on the world below. These are heavily damaged, and now painted over with a reflective glaze that makes them difficult to photograph.
Much more interesting are the rectangular panels set over the door, which have crude but interesting Korean-style chaekgeori “bookshelf picture” panels showing decorative objects in receding space. These are conspicuously “exotic” – a foreign-built clock, a sheaf of popular novels, some apples and grapes done up in chiaroscuro still-life, etc. Other panels show historical and mythological figures, although I’m not sure of the identities of most of these. The whole ensemble (including the opera depictions on the stage, for which see below) emphasizes the cultural concatenation between village religion, western modes of viewing, popular entertainment narratives, and the opera stage in these 19th century villages.
Also notable in the same structure are some truly atrocious attempts at “repair” from the late 20th or early 21st centuries. These include crude door gods and votive images of the Perfected Warrior 真武, the Goddess 娘娘, and (slightly less incompetent) the Dragon King 龍王. These are worth seeing as an example of the truly awful amateur art that sometimes shows up in these newly-repaired temples.
The opera stage across from the temple has heavily-damaged trompe-l’œil images of hanging scrolls, with some interesting graffiti around them. More interesting are the square panels over the scaenae frons and the triangular ones beneath the rafters, which show scenes from operas.
Full Gallery
