Open Collections

Opera Stage (Xitai 戲台) and Family Shrine (Jia miao 家廟)

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 stage is located just outside and to the east of the old south gate of a fortified village, facing north towards a newly-reconstructed Dragon King temple. None of the structures are dated, but the murals are of 19th- or early 20th-century style. Like all opera houses in the region, the interior space was originally divided into front-stage and back-stage areas, but the wooden proscenium wall (geshan qiang 隔扇牆) dividing them has now been removed. The front-stage murals show Western-influenced architectural scenes of great palace walls and portico entrances. These buildings are captioned, although the cartouches appear to have been written over at some point, once in blue ink reading right to left, and again with different titles in black, reading right to left. On the west wall, the blue caption is illegible, while the black caption reads ‘Dharma-Gate Monastery’ (Famen si 法門寺), the name of a popular play still performed in the Peking Opera repertoire. On the east wall, the blue caption reads ‘Fictive ☐, true affairs’ (xu☐zhenshi 虛☐真事). The black caption reads ‘The Intentions Great Official’ (Yida guan/gong 意大官). Given the European form of the painted palaces and the existence relatively nearby of the Italian Jesuit-built imperial Summer Palaces (Yuanmingyuan 圓明園), it’s possible that this title should be read ‘The Italian (Yida) Palace.’ The back-stage murals display difficult-to-identify theater scenes, as well as performers’ graffiti from the early 20th century. Another unusual structure in the same village is a little shrine, tucked away in the northeast-corner of a now-abandoned courtyard house. Again, the structure is undated, but the palette of greens and oranges suggests a late 18th century date. The two east and west side-walls show folding screens with bird-and-flower paintings (huaniao hua 花鳥畫). The central (north) wall shows a trompe l’œil image of a hanging scroll with a painting of Daoist sages, flanked by two matching calligraphic couplets (duilian 對聯). The couplets read: “Passed down by children and continued by grandchildren, always flourishing without decay” 子承孫繼永荐不朽☐, and “With ancestors' virtue and forebears' strength, receiving never-ending sacrifice” 祖德宗力常享無窮祭. These paintings are unique, and no-one was at the site to explain their significance. Given the location in a private house and the contents of the couplets, the room was probably once a household ancestral shrine.

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

chi

North China Mural Survey

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0415723

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