Who made this site? My name is Norbu Lhaga, I’m a PhD student at a university in America. You can email me at twosmallblocks@gmail.com.

What are all these images? These are pictures of murals from villages in northern China, mainly the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, plus a handful from Qinghai and Gansu. Most of the murals come from village temples, but some of them are from opera stages, houses, caves, or other structures.

Why did you take all these pictures? I took these pictures because these murals are beautiful and a lot of them are in danger. In 2013-4 I spent a year and a half in northern China and Tibet, wandering around villages trying to collect inscriptions and maps of old fortifications. What I ended up doing in practice was visiting a lot of temples. When I returned in the summer of 2017, I was horrified to discover that several mural sites I had seen three years prior had been vandalized or totally destroyed. In something of a rage, I threw up this gofundme page to finance a documentation trip and, due to the kindness of a whole bunch of both family, friends, colleagues and strangers, within a few months I had collected enough money to set out. My university not only gave me the year off but very kindly offered to provide me with healthcare for the duration. Through the kind assistance of prof. Vincent Durand-Dastès and others I was able to get a position as a visiting student at the Central Academy of Arts 中央美術院 in Beijing. Thus I was able to spend the calendar year of 2018 in the field, taking documentary photographs of all the murals I could find. Obviously, in that time I was only able to see a fraction of what’s out there, but I did manage to visit and take photos of nearly two hundred mural sites. Because this was a crowd-funded project aimed at documenting in-danger cultural relics, I’ve put all these documentary images online here.

From a scholarly perspective, I took these photos because I’m a historian interested in the society of China’s north and west. To understand Chinese society you have to understand the cities and villages where Chinese people lived. To understand Chinese cities and villages you have to understand the temples which were the main public buildings and the markers of built space, and which are the principle repositories and subjects of the extant genre of locally produced texts (i.e. steles). To understand temples, you have to understand the murals which gave form to the gods and structured sacred space and its relationship to the world beyond.

We don’t know anything about these murals. A few of them have been published in recent Chinese collections but the majority of them haven’t. The last person to write about them in English was Willem Grootaers in the 1940s, and it’s only recently that a small literature has appeared on them in Chinese. Standard histories of Chinese art state that mural painting ceased or was in terminal decline after about the 14th century, an idea contradicted by this mass of material. With the destruction visited on these places by 20th-century communism and then 21st century capitalism, this whole artistic tradition has been irrevocably shattered and is difficult to reconstruct. We don’t know how many iconographies survive, where the main examples are, what their historical development was, what rituals were associated with them, who painted them, or who saw them. At a basic level, we do not know what images do or do not exist, nor do we know what those images “meant.”

Beyond their importance to the history of Chinese art proper, these murals are important puzzle-pieces in the history of world visual culture. To the west, the “procession” compositions in these murals seem to have clear relatives in Tibetan mountain deity (zhidak གཞི་བདག) iconographies, or the images of the ride of Raudra Cakrin (Drakpo Khorlocen དྲག་པོ་འཁོར་ལོ་ཅན) from Śambhala. To the east, decorative themes in these paintings bear a close resemblance to the better-known Korean “books and things” (chaekgeori 책거리) screens. From the 18th century onward, these Chinese murals themselves show an increasing fascination with images of the Western world, with western-style perspective, cast-shadows, and images of European or Islamic city-scapes gaining increasing prominence, mirroring the chinoiserie images being produced at the same time in Europe. Clearly, this is a body of material worth adding to our map of early-modern Asian visual culture.

How did you find these places and take all these pictures? I find temples using google maps. Temples are seldom located at random within villages and their distinctive size and shape makes them easy to spot from satellite images. In 2013-4 I would travel by bus, hitch-hiking, and on foot. In 2018 I got a Chinese driver’s license and then with the help of some local friends bought an old Shanghai-built Volkswagon Santana 上海普桑 which broke down repeatedly over the course of the year. Occasionally I would sleep in the car or outside, but more normally I would locate myself in hotels in the county-towns and set out into the villages by day. Over the course of the year I slowly worked my way from Beijing to Repgong on the Tibetan border, visiting thousands of villages and hundreds of temples along the way.

Below: My car, now sadly sold, on a rainy day near Zhangjiakou.

Below: Research map for Zhangjiakou 張家口 and Datong 大同 cityships. Excuse the clutter, it’s a work-in-progress. I’ve been to most of the ones with color, I haven’t been to the ones marked white.

Below: Research map for northern Shaanxi 陝北 and parts of the Wutai Range 五台山. I’ve been to most of the ones with color, I haven’t been to the ones marked white.

Some temples are abandoned and have no doors. In other cases they are so active that the doors are habitually left open and you can just walk in. Most often, someone in the village has the key. Much of my time was spent in long searches for the key-holder and then negotiations for rights to photograph inside. Only very rarely was I outright refused permission to photograph within temples; more commonly I was asked to avoid firing the camera flash at the deity statues on the altar, and I always respected this.

The largest and best-known temples are state protected cultural relic sites and no photography is allowed inside. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise – rather than focusing on large, central, and famous sites, I was forced out into the villages to discover new things for myself. The only two state-protected sites that I genuinely regret not being able to photograph in are the Princess Monastery of Fanzhi County 繁峙縣公主寺 and the Temple of the Holy Mother outside of Fenyang 汾陽縣聖母廟. I regret the first because it represents the finest-quality of Ming-dynasty Water and Land 水陸 painting out in the countryside. I regret the second because it is the earliest and the most beautiful Procession 巡行 mural known to me, with a host of important compositional and iconographic details. Other than these two sites, I’m reasonably satisfied that my photos are able to sketch in broad strokes at least the story of the last 500 years of north-Chinese rural mural painting.

What kind of copyright are these pictures under? Can I use them for my project / research / whatever? I license these images under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. which means that you can use them, edit them, even sell them as long as you credit me. Since I took all these photos using other people’s money, they should be free for everyone to use.

From the perspective of academic ethics, yes, I am happy for you to use these pictures in your research project. My work is intended to be an archive for scholars, and this website is just a gallery for the best-preserved and most interesting pieces. If you’re a researcher working on something related to this, please let me know, and I’m happy to send you links to more galleries not uploaded here, more information about the sites, high-quality RAW images, etc.

Important caveat: Some of the photos reproduce works of art produced in the last 80 years. I do not possess copyright over these works and thus the legal validity of the Creative Commons Attribution is nil. I reproduce them here because (a) they’re of ethnographic interest, (b) I’d hope that these artists would want more attention to their work, not less, and (c) frankly, these people seem unlikely to sue me. If you’re interested in commissioning art, I’d be happy to put you in touch with some of the contemporary mural and scroll painters I met in China. That said, you should be careful about using these images.

Is this all the pictures you took? No. I have nearly two hundred thousand photos of various things in villages in China. Most of these pictures are not actually that interesting, and uploading these galleries takes a lot of time. Moreover, many of the murals are damaged, ugly, or otherwise not-that-great. For this reason I’ve focused on putting up what I think are the most representative or interesting sites. I’ll continue adding more such galleries slowly as I have time. If you’re a scholar particularly interested in some topic, email me and I’ll send you a fuller list of what I have.

What do you do about the destruction of these murals? I have no power to alter things in China, nor should I have any power to alter things in China. That said, I’m concerned. These temples are vandalized, altered, or cut off the walls by thieves all the time. In many case I visited a place in 2014 and returned in 2018 only to find the place stripped – hence the impetus for this project to begin with. Beyond just taking documentary photographs, I did a couple things to make sure I was helping and not harming.

1. I always put money in active temple collection boxes. North China has a living ritual tradition, but it needs money to function.
2. When I saw a site that I thought was important, I would send the location either to my advisor at the Central University for Nationalities or to the local cultural relics bureau people if I knew them, with an explanation for why I thought that location was worth protecting.
3. I never state the location of vulnerable sites online. Many of these galleries give no more location information than the county, and this is intentional – I don’t want my work to be used as a map for thieves.
4. Mural painting is a living tradition, albeit one facing difficult times. I buy things from contemporary village painters, to the extent that I have spare money to do so. I hope that my work will underline the importance of the people today who are the inheritors of this tradition. To that last end, scrolls and paintings can be commissioned from village artists for very little money – the problem is more communicating these people and arranging for images to be transported from rural China to somewhere more sensible. If you’re interested in this, contact me and I’ll see what I can do.

Are you still collecting murals? No. I have to be a PhD student, which is a full-time job that means researching and teaching things that are not Chinese murals. I’m also not planning to go back to China any time soon. The place has been part of my life for most of the past decade, but I don’t like what’s going on there under Xi Jinping (at time of writing: Uyghurs, Hong Kong, massive 1984-style surveillance-state technology rollout, Tibet worsening as usual) and I’m not eager to go back. That said, if you have photos of murals, get in touch with me and I’d be happy to add them into the collection under your name. If you’re interested in going out and collecting photos of murals, I can give you lots of suggestions for good places to look.

Is there any kind of academic publication connected to this? Yes, there is one. The paper is titled “Gaze Upon Its Depth: On the Uses of Perspectival Painting in the Early-Modern Chinese Village.” You can download it for free here http://www.eastasianhistory.org/43 – remember to get the high-quality version for better pictures. This may or may not be the place for academic confessions, but: I should have cited James Flath, The Cult of Happiness and Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange. Alas, by the time I realized this, the paper had gone into print.

I am also preparing a second work which will be a sort of “history of north-Chinese murals, 1500-2018” -type thing; this will not be published for some time. Meanwhile, if you have questions about this material or anything associated with it, just write to me (twosmallblocks@gmail.com).