Open Collections

Mosque at Mengda Township (Mengda xiang qingzhen si 孟達象清真寺)

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

Mengda 孟達 is a township (xiang 鄉) located on the south bank of the Yellow River (huang he 黃河), just on the western side of the Gorge of Piled Rocks (jishi xia 積石峽) that marked the traditional border between the Chinese-speaking loess farmlands and the Tibetan Plateau. The township is inhabited mainly by ethnic Salars (Ch. Sala zu 撒拉族), a small Turkic-speaking ethnicity that practices Islam. Explanatory plaques at the site claim that the mosque was originally built in the mid-Ming 明dynasty (1368-1644), and expanded in later centuries; while no Chinese-language inscriptions date the building, the styles of the murals inside seem to support this idea. As is common with many mosques in the region, the structure consists of an inner (western) chamber around the mihrab niche, and a larger outer (eastern) prayer hall. The inner hall is painted in tones of deep red, with Sini-script Arabic calligraphy in gold; the color-scheme suggests a probable Ming date. It appears that the outer hall was painted much later, probably in the nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries, with some individual panels added or recoloured in the 1990s or 2000s. Individual panels consist of landscape paintings (shanshui 山水), images of flower-vases or other auspicious objects, or trompe-l’œil images of hanging scrolls with Arabic calligraphy. Other images show calligraphic medallions placed on pedestals like Buddhist thrones, surrounded by halos of rainbow light (wuse guang 五色光). All of this suggests the vitality of Islamic mural-painting traditions in pre-Revolution China, and the close connections between this visual culture and the Han Chinese and Tibetan visual cultures surrounding it; these traditions are now largely lost elsewhere.

Qinghai sheng (China); Xunhua xian (China); 35.832843; 102.639351

chi

North China Mural Survey

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0438802

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