Yongle Palace (Ruicheng)

Major National Historical And Cultural Site; Yuan Dynasty Quanzhen Daoist Temple With Some 1,000 Square Metres Of Wall Painting, Relocated 20 Kilometres In The 1950s And 60s · Ruicheng, Shanxi

Yongle Palace holds the finest Yuan dynasty wall painting in China - roughly a thousand square metres of it, spread across four halls, painted between 1247 and 1358 by workshops of professional muralists for a Quanzhen Daoist temple raised on the supposed birthplace of the immortal Lu Dongbin. In the Hall of the Three Pure Ones an assembly of two hundred and eighty-six deities more than four metres tall processes towards the centre in a single unbroken composition, robed, crowned, attended, each face individual; in the next hall the life of Lu Dongbin unfolds in fifty-two scenes of Yuan daily life - inns, markets, boats, arguments - that are as valuable to historians as they are to art. And then there is what happened in the 1950s. The Sanmenxia dam was going to flood the site, so the whole temple was taken apart and carried twenty kilometres to higher ground: halls dismantled beam by beam, and the murals themselves cut into sections, crated, moved and reassembled on new walls.

Longquan Village, Ruicheng County, Yuncheng, Ruicheng, Shanxi, China

Open daily, generally around 8:00-18:00 in summer and roughly 8:30-17:00 in winter, with last entry before closing. THE MURAL HALLS ARE KEPT DELIBERATELY DIM for conservation and there is no bright lighting, so arrive in daylight hours rather than late in the afternoon. PHOTOGRAPHY INSIDE THE MURAL HALLS IS PROHIBITED AND ENFORCED. Individual halls close for conservation at short notice - ring ahead if one hall in particular is the reason for the trip.

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