Open Collections

Temples to Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin, Lord Guan, and the Dragon Kings at Leopard Valley Mouth Village (Baoyukou cun Guanyin, Guan gong, Long wang miao 豹峪口村觀音廟、關公廟、龍王廟)

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

Leopard Valley Mouth (Baoyukou 豹峪口) is a small village in located in a narrow valley in the hills, just on the Hebei side of the Hebei-Shanxi provincial border. If the village was ever walled, no trace of it now remains. A small shrine to Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin sits on the main street, facing north. The murals inside show, on the upper register, Guanyin rescuing devotees from the “eight terrors” (ba nan 八難). The lower registers show the arhats (luohan 羅漢). A courtyard also on the south side of the main street contains a large south-facing temple and an opera stage. The identity of the central deity of the temple is not clear, as only the two flanking shrines to the east and west survive with murals. The western shrine is devoted to the Dragon Kings, and the one surviving wall shows them returning to the Crystal Palace. The eastern shrine is devoted to Lord Guan, and shows scenes from the Three Kingdoms cycle. The captions read as follows: East wall, bottom row, left to right: 桃園結☐ “Pact of the Peach Garden”, 義士贈馬 “Donors grant them horses”, 劉關張大破黃巾 “Liu Bei, Lord Guan, and Zhang Fei win a great victory over the Yellow Turbans”, 安喜縣鞭打督郵 “Whipping the Inspector at Anxi County”; middle row, right to left: 酒未溫時斬華雄 “Slaying Hua Xiong before the wine has warmed” [sic], 虎牢關三戰呂布 “The three heroes fight Lü Bu at Hulao Pass”, 玄德公北海解圍 “Liu Bei lifts the siege of Beihai”, 轅門射㦸 “Shooting the halberd at the camp gate”; top row, left to right: 侯成盜馬 “Hou Cheng steals a horse”, 陶公祖徐州讓印 “Tao Gongzu grants the seals of Xuzhou [to Liu Bei]”, ☐門關☐斬呂布 “Slaying Lü Bu at [White] Gate Pass” [sic], ☐☐煮酒☐論英雄 “[illegible] heating wine and [illegible] discussing heroes”. The village also has another small shrine to Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin at its eastern outskirts and a fourth shrine to an unknown deity, but the wall paintings in these are too fragmentary to be reconstructed.

Hebei Sheng (China); Yu Xian (Hebei Sheng, China); 39.873564; 114.224444

chi

North China Mural Survey

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0421705

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Graduate

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