Open Collections

Temple to the Dragon Kings 01 (Longwang miao 龍王廟)

From the Ground Up: Buddhism & East Asian Religions (FROGBEAR Project)

Village name and precise coordinates concealed to protect potentially vulnerable sites from looters. The village is located in Yu County of Hebei Province (Hebei sheng Yu xian 河北省蔚縣). The Dragon King temple is located outside of the old village walls and a little ways to the south-east, facing south across an area of marshes and paddy-fields along the banks of the Huliu River (壺流河). The two side-walls of the temple were mostly intact in 2014, but by 2018 had been cut up by looters. For whatever reason, the cut-off squares of painted plaster had not actually been removed from the temple, and remained stacked in a corner. The iconography shows a standard Dragon King procession, with the dragons proceeding out from the Crystal Palace (shuijing gong 水晶宮) on the east wall to dispense rain, and returning on the west. One of the figures holds a scroll with an invocation for rain. The characters appear to have been written over something else and are quite garbled, but the words follow a question-and-response formula which is known from many such Dragon King temples in the area: ‘The Dragon Gods ask the Judge (panguan), how widely should it rain? [The Judge replies]: Let it rain for a thousand-thousand li, a bumper harvest for ten thousand-thousand years [?], ten thousand thousand years. Repaired on the sixth day of the fifth month of the twenty-fourth year of the Guangxu reign (June 24th, 1898).” (龍神問判官，雨下多來寬，下雨千千里，豐收萬萬[歲?]，收萬萬年。光緒二十四年五月六日修.) Two vertical panels which flank a small antechamber, as well as several of the small ink-painted panels in the rafters, are painted in a quite different style to the murals in the main hall, and may be older. The two panels in the antechamber show fierce guardians, one bearing a fan and a candle, the other with a wu-board 笏 and a votive stalk of grain.

Hebei Sheng (China); Yu Xian (Hebei Sheng, China); 39.841503; 114.56477

chi

North China Mural Survey

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0413622

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