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Temple to Lord Guan at Lone Mound Village (Danhou cun Guan gong miao 單堠村關公廟)

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

The temple to Lord Guan at Lone-Mound Village (Danhou cun Guan gong miao 單堠村關公廟) is located outside of the east gate of the walled village. The space forms a small square, with the gate on the west, the temple at the north, a stage on the south, and a small shrine to the Horse King (Ma wang 馬王, Skt. Hayagrīva) on the east. The stele record at this temple is dense enough to reconstruct a fairly detailed and interesting history of this structure. (The steles are transcribed Deng Qingping 鄧慶平 ed., Yuxian beiming jilu 蔚縣碑銘輯錄 [Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2009], 330-49.) The temple was first built in the Zhengde reign (1505-1521) atop a tower on the northern wall of a separate fortified village (zhai 寨) located to the north of Lone-Mound. According to the southern gate plaque, Lone-Mound village itself was founded in its present walled form in 1534. It seems that at some point prior to 1545 the unnamed neighboring fortress to the north had become abandoned, but the inhabitants of Lone-Mound village still felt a familial obligation to maintain its temples. In that year, “because the sacrifices were inconvenient” (yin si bu bian 因祀不便), the villagers of Lone-Mound deconstructed the temple’s timber and rebuilt the structure at its present location outside of the east gate of their own fortress. Speculatively, it may be that this abandoned northern fortress had fallen to Mongol raiders. Yu County was invaded multiple times during this period, and the 1585 repair stele that records the early history of this temple tells us that “the bandits came knocking at our frontiers” (lu qiu kou guan 虜酋叩關), and praises the 1571 treaty between the Longqing Emperor and Altan Khan that ended over a century of warfare. The opera stage across from the temple was built in 1740. The temple itself was repaired in 1760, and the murals inside may date from this repair; the style is clearly 18th century, and the 1760 stele lists a painter named Che Guanglu 車廣祿. In 1770 flanking halls (cifang 祠房) were added on the east and west side of the courtyard for the convenience of the worshippers. In 1807, the village put together money to repair all of the village’s shrines, including the Lord Guan temple. In 1904, the village altar association (she 社) made the rather extraordinary decision to commission two massive stone flagpoles (shibiao 石表) from Guo County in Shanxi (modern Guoyang Town in Yuanping Cityship [Yuanping shi Guoyang zhen 原平市崞陽鎮].) This was a herculean journey of over two hundred kilometers, by cart on dirt roads across high mountain passes, dragging sections of two stone pillars each thirty centimeters around and nearly four meters in length when assembled. As the stele puts it: “The road was long and the stones heavy, such that the carts could not withstand the load. Axles snapped, shafts bent, spokes cracked and wheels were destroyed. Everyone despaired, sighing, and wished to abandon the stones along the road” 路遠石重車不勝載有斷軸者折轅者摧輻而敗輪者皆怨望咨嗟欲棄於道路. Nevertheless, after a journey of several months, the flagpoles arrived at Lone-Mound Village, and remain there today. These are a very rare survival: originally many temples, shops, and government buildings in north China had wooden flagpoles, but almost none have survived the Maoist period, and few have been reconstructed since. The pillars have matching couplets (duilian 對聯) with mottos that pertain to Lord Guan: “The spirit of the threefold division [of the empire] overcomes - the Yangzi river in Wu is cold / The glow of a single candle wavers - the moon is bright over Han” 三分氣壓吳江冷 / 一燭光搖漢月明. The little four-sided capitals at the end of each pillar segments have, on each side, the following statements: “His intent is to uphold the house of Han / A loyal heart through all his days” 志存漢室 / 忠心貫日, and “His virtue is equal to Mount Ni / His righteous commands rise to heaven” 德配尼山 / 義令參天. At the time of the researcher’s first visit in November 2013, the temple steles had been broken up by vandals, but the east and west wall murals were relatively intact. Unfortunately, photos taken at this time were of very low quality. By 2016 the murals had been entirely stripped by looters. At last visit in 2018, the temple had been boarded up and was awaiting repair by the county Cultural Bureau. The murals were painted in very fine style, and showed scenes from the Three Kingdoms cycle in a continuous landscape. Unusually among such temples, the scenes were not labeled.

39.88913; Hebei Sheng (China); Yu Xian (Hebei Sheng, China); 39.88913; 114.487639

chi

North China Mural Survey

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0421808

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