‘Gaze Upon Its Depth’: On the Uses of Perspectival Painting in the Early-Modern Chinese Village

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small group of villages in northern Hebei province began to adorn their opera stages and temples with Western-style perspective drawings.[1] These drawings, painted in vigorous blue shades on the walls flanking the temple and stage rooms, depict fantastic amalgamations of Chinese and Western-style buildings, receding into pictorial space: immense multilevel mansions (Fig. 1), pagodas and minaret-like spires (Fig. 2], long rows of buildings lining the streets (Fig. 3), tall domes, and opulent porticoes. Around the bases and atop the roofs, belvederes and porticoes of these structures, complex scenes take place: godly personages sit in state, complex processions set out and return (Fig. 4), more groups of characters gesture or strike operatic poses, while others just lean on the balustrades, taking in the view. This paper attempts to ask the basic questions about these images. What are these pictures? Who are the people and stories in them? Why were they drawn on these walls? What did they mean to the people who drew them?

Prosaically, this paper represents a case study of the early-modern mural-painting traditions of a single Chinese county in northern Hebei province, describing the state of rural artistic traditions on the eve of the introduction of Western-style perspective, and then examining how these traditions changed with Western contact. I contend throughout this paper that these murals represent structural elements of complex compositions of village space, and are not comprehensible without this context. To this end, I begin by giving a brief history of these villages from 1500, focussing on religion, opera, and spatial discourses. In the second section, I narrate the arrival of perspectival techniques and particularly the use of these techniques in opera stage murals, where they were probably first applied. I identify two crucial themes within the stage murals for the ‘Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions’ (Si wang ting 四望亭) and the ‘Mansions of the Western Seas’ (Xi yang lou 西洋樓). I argue that these ‘exotic’ architectural drawings establish the village stage as a crucial point of contact with the modernising world. In the final section, I re-examine the logic of both stage and temple murals, focussing on the idea of the temple and stage as ‘porticoes’ or entranceways that derived their power from access to holy, fictional, or otherwise ‘foreign’ spaces that extended away behind the altar or scaenae frons. I then show how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this logic was reworked with Western-inspired painting techniques including perspectivalism and the use of cast shadows, catalysing a renaissance in rural mural painting that produced some of the most beautiful and complex works in the history of this art.

Beyond their simple artistic worth, these images are significant for a number of reasons. Scholarly study of the reception of Western artistic techniques in China, for reasons of preservation, access, and documentation, has tended to focus on images produced either in the imperial court,[2] by members of the broader upper classes,[3] or in well-known artistic centres in the southern cities of Jiangnan.[4] To date, there has been little writing in any language on Chinese temple mural painting after about 1400, or on small-scale temple paintings not connected to elite sponsorship.[5] What painting traditions existed in the early-modern countryside, and what effect Western perspectival techniques might have had on the construction or experience of painted temple or theatre space, are unexplored questions. In a country that was overwhelmingly rural until the turn of the twenty-first century, these images represent a uniquely village creativity, allowing us to see villagers as themselves ‘actors’ in early-Modern Chinese cultural history. From another perspective, it has long been an established fact in theatre studies that Chinese opera did not generally use stage sets. While the rural stage murals examined here were not sets or scene backgrounds in the strict sense, they certainly were elaborately painted tableaus intended to establish the stage as a theatrical space, and thus represent an important expansion to our preconceived ideas of the Chinese theatre. For these reasons, an examination of the apparently recherché painting traditions of a small north-Chinese county takes on some importance, as a case study of how the rural majority of Chinese people in their villages produced art, religion, theatre, and, ultimately, modernity.

1) Fortress, Temple, and Stage

These images are located in Yu county, Zhangjiakou city, Hebei province (Hebei sheng, Zhangjiakou shi, Yu xian 河北省張家口市蔚縣), about 150 kilometres west across the mountains from Beijing. The area is one part of a larger historical and geographical region known as Xuan-Da 宣大, which encompasses the contiguous area between the cities of Xuanhua and Datong north of the Taihang 太行 and Yan 燕 mountains. Over the course of this paper, I will speak specifically about Yu county while making repeated references to the culture and history of broader Xuan-Da, which encompasses it. I came to know about the images over the course of a survey of rural antiquities undertaken in this and adjacent counties over the winter and spring of 2013–14, and shored up by multiple subsequent visits over the last few years, particularly 2018 spent in the field.[6] The stages and temples on which these murals are painted are scattered across around fifty small villages and perhaps a thousand square kilometres.[7] Few of these villages today have even nominal populations of over a few thousand people, and pre-Communist numbers would have been smaller. Almost none of these images have been reproduced, and, to my knowledge, only one brief analytical treatment of them exists — a chapter in a PhD thesis by Liu Wenjiong 劉文炯.[8] In the following pages, I will attempt to describe the rural cultural world in which these images appeared, with particular emphasis on the historical development of religious, theatrical, social, and artistic space.

These stage and temple drawings must be understood in the context of the history and culture of the Yu county village. Both the temples and the stages were religious structures and they formed one component in physically and symbolically complex arrangements of village space. The villages of Yu county were established in their present form in the first half of the sixteenth century, when they were reconstructed and fortified en masse in response to continual Mongol raiding from the steppe.[9] The religious system of these villages — that is, the temples that existed within, atop, and around the village walls — seems to have appeared at the same time and as part of the same process.[10] After the Longqing Peace from 1567, Yu county, in its isolated mountain basin, did not again see significant warfare essentially until the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. As evidenced by the stele record, from around 1700 the region entered a long period of relative prosperity, which saw the maintenance of old structures and forms of worship, with the much slower addition of new temples within the existing system. This prosperity peaked in the long Qianlong reign (1735–96) but continued through the nineteenth century (troubled elsewhere in China, but peaceful in Yu county) and even into the first decades of the twentieth.[11] This period of fading but still-evident prosperity and peace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the one that produced the perspectival drawings that are the topic of this paper.

Temples in Yu county are usually one to three bays (jian 間) in width, often built upon a low stone and earth plinth (Fig. 5). Other temples, particularly those built into the north wall of the fort, are tall, stepped structures of multiple levels. (Fig. 6) Some of the larger and more important temples have a walled yard (yuanzi 院子) extending in front of them, although the majority of small village shrines do not. The main gods are universally depicted on the rear wall opposite the door. These depictions were either statues set on an altar, paintings on the wall, or in some cases both; almost no pre-Revolution statues now survive in Yu county. For some iconographies, the altar extends around the room on three sides, so that subsidiary statues of the main god’s retinue flank the worshipper as he enters. Offerings and incense are set on the altar or a table in front of it; gongs, bells, incense-burners, votive dhvaja pillars, and steles are placed around the shrine or in the courtyard as appropriate.[12]

Rural Xuan-Da religion was, broadly speaking, a system in which compositional or spatial relationships carried defining symbolic meaning. This was true both of the arrangement of villages and the compositions of village art. The village itself marked the power of particular ritual buildings via their command over lines of sight. From the sixteenth century on, the new fortress villages were usually dominated by a tall tower at the centre of the northern wall that gazed over an axial road stretching down to the main gate (Fig. 7). A male, martial god — frequently the Perfected Warrior (Zhen wu 真武) or the Jade Emperor (Yu huang 玉皇), but sometimes other gods — would be enthroned in a shrine on this panoptical tower, while a temple to a female deity — usually Avalokiteśvara (Guan yin 觀音) or the Daoist ‘Goddesses’ (Niangniang 娘娘) — would sit at the southern end of the axis. Although the specific buildings and their placement could vary according to the situation of individual villages, on the whole this axial relationship between temples was the main structuring principle of the physical space of Yu county villages from the sixteenth century onward.[13]

The Xuan-Da religious system was also one that paid attention to the placement and motion of gods through both three-dimensional and painted space. Particular gods are depicted in temple murals as being positioned in particular ways. The Perfected Warrior and the Jade Emperor are generally seen seated in state on the north wall of a temple, gazing down the axial line of the village, with rows of warriors lining either side of the room so as to emphasise the spatial metaphor of an imperial court. (Figs 8a & b) Other gods are depicted as moving through space to fulfill some important function of their cult. The Dragon Kings (Long wang 龍王), all-important as weather gods in semi-arid north China, are invariably painted processing in a circular rain-dispensing expedition around the space of the shrine room, wrathful and thunderous on the left-hand wall, pacific and shedding rainbows as they return after the storm on the right (Figs 9a & b). The God of the Five Ways (Wu dao shen 五道神) and the Horse King (Ma wang 馬王) are depicted in similar processions, in this case pursuing demons and, returning on the right-hand wall, dragging them back in chains.[14] As a broad set of principles relevant to these later perspectival paintings, Yu county temples were positioned with spatial intent, the artistic depictions in and around those temples expressed aspects of that intent, and the gods who inhabited those temples and those depictions were thought to be located in particular places and to move through space in particular and intentional ways.

Opera stages in Yu county are small, freestanding structures, constructed of timber and brick, usually three narrow bays in width. (Fig. 10) They are generally raised up on a stone plinth, typically higher than those of the temples, between one and two metres in height. With a few exceptions, the stages have three walls, with the fourth side open to the audience. Usually, there is no back door onto the stage and the only entrance is from the front, although some larger stages do have a small opening at the rear through which performers could slip in and out. The stages were usually divided into a proscenium and a backstage area by an elaborate scaenae frons ‘screen wall’ (geshan qiang 隔扇牆) of painted wooden panels. (Figs 11a & b) This scaenae frons, however, was not a solid boundary; it invariably had two doors leading in and out on either side, and elaborate lattice windows towards the centre. These openings could be used for dramatic purposes or closed off with curtains to create a true backstage area, as the occasion demanded (Figs 12a & b).[15]

Some of these villages had opera stages within or around the walls during the period of their creation in the Ming dynasty, but it doesn’t seem that all of them did.[16] From the eighteenth century on, there are a number of steles that record the refurbishment of old stages and the establishment of new ones in villages previously without them.[17] As we will see below, the apparent difficulty with which many of the stages are fitted into the packed space of these villages suggests that many of them were late additions into the system. In any case, by the start of the twentieth century, nearly every village in the county had at least one stage. Of these, perhaps two hundred now remain, in various states of repair and collapse.[18] The perspectival drawings that are the subject of this paper are almost never accompanied by clear dates. A few examples can be fixed to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However, from the style and the topics depicted therein it is clear that bulk of them cannot have been painted before the year 1800, and that the majority were produced in the late nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth.[19] The Guangxu reign (1875–1908) particularly may have represented something of a golden age for Yu county opera generally: dated graffiti on Yu county stages seems to have peaked in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Fig. 13).[20]

These stages were votive structures and all of them were located across from temples.[21] The ritual use of opera in rural China is well documented, and Yu county is not an exception.[22] Although the content of the plays was usually secular, in the sense that the operas were, for the most part, not ‘mystery plays’ specifically depicting acts of the gods,[23] the operas were performed ritually as offerings during rainmaking rituals,[24] temple fairs,[25] and autumn festivals to repay and entertain the gods after the harvest.[26] The ritual uses of opera are actually frequently depicted in temple murals themselves. The lower right-hand wall (according to the Chinese reckoning)[27] of the all-important Dragon King temples almost always contained depictions of rituals performed in autumn to thank the gods at the end of the successful harvest. Here, we find images depicting processions of Daoist priests accompanied by shawm bands (Fig. 14),[28] masked saishe 賽社 or shehuo 社火 processions (Fig. 15), and, not infrequently, images of opera being offered on stages facing the temple (Figs 16 & 17a & b). We will return to this type of mural later, but for now it is enough to note that for such ritual performance to be effective, a direct line of sight between the temple and the stage was necessary. The god had to physically see the opera.[29]

Of course, these walled villages were tightly packed spaces, and free space for an opera stage across from a suitable temple was not always easy to come by. Villagers went to great lengths and exercised considerable architectural creativity to ensure the lines of sight between temple and stage. One stele from 1750 records a village argument over the creation of such a stage, since the only proper spot for it — across from a temple to Lord Guan (Guan gong miao 關公廟) — was already occupied by a temple to Avalokiteśvara (Guan yin miao 觀音廟).[30] The assembled villagers (zhong 眾) were stymied until ‘an elderly man, racking his brains and with emotion’ (baisou dong nian kairan 白叟動念慨然) came up with the solution of shifting the Avalokiteśvara temple to the top of the gatehouse facing north and putting the stage in its previous place, thus satisfying the geomantic requirements of both structures. In another village a geomantic temple and a stage were folded into each other to form one awkwardly conjoined ‘franken’-building, in which the back wall of the stage is the front wall of the temple.[31] In at least three other villages the stage has been cleaved in half on either side of the axial road so that it doesn’t impede the central geomantic axis. When an opera was to be performed, the gap over the road could be boarded over and foot traffic diverted around or under it.[32] The point here is that creating and maintaining these lines of sight between votive structures was not necessarily easy, and villagers put a great deal of effort, resources, and ingenuity into doing so.

These processes, proceeding differently in each individual village, resulted often in the creation of complex architectural assemblages of many buildings and open spaces between them, linked by criss-crossing lines of sight. With a temple on one side, a stage on the other, enough open ground between them to fit the assembled villagers in, perhaps the fortress gate on the third side and a few other shrines and shops set adjacent, these lines between temple and stage often defined what are effectively village squares. The areas created in this way were and are the main centres of public life in the villages, comparable to the fora and agorae in the classical West. Today they are often busy and multipurpose spaces: farmers thresh grain, shopkeepers chat with their customers, itinerant peddlers lay out their wares on carts and blankets, children chase and play, old men sit sunning themselves on the temple steps or opera plinths, smoking, and exchanging gossip.[33] Between the stage and the temple, Chinese villagers sang their opera, worshipped their gods, conducted their buying and selling, and held their public meetings. We should not overlook these village squares as among the principle spaces in which Yu county villagers eventually met and took part in the modern world.

It is a truism of Chinese village opera that it instructs,[34] and that it forms one of the main ways in which illiterate villagers take part in larger historical and national narratives.[35] Although we know very little about it, we do know that these stages were sometimes used for news-sheet re-enactments of current events. Arthur Henderson Smith, writing in 1889 of China generally, remarked that anti-foreign plays — for instance, depicting the Tianjin Massacre of 1870 — were frequently performed in villages, and that local events such as disputes between counties would be rapidly written into dramas and performed to acclaim in those areas.[36] These stages and the squares in front of them could function as fora to relate and discuss local and national events. And of course opera troupes circulated, often very widely, moving frequently between the cities and the villages.[37] Temple fairs were commercial fairs, and commercial fairs also had opera, held on stages in front of temples.[38] It’s quite probable that for a villager in nineteenth or twentieth century China, even into the 1980s and ’90s, the gatherings held in these spaces and performances represented one of the main venues for contact with the wider world.

Of course, to restate the obvious, these opera stages were also used for performing operas. In a largely illiterate society, these stages allowed Chinese villagers to interact both with local artistic forms and with the broad stream of Chinese national literature. Wang Zhijun and Tian Yongxiang in Difang juzhong gaishuo enumerate a broad typology of performances on Yu county stages as follows: Zither Tunes (Xianzi qiang 弦子腔), Lolo Tunes (Luoluo qiang 羅羅腔), Sai Operas (Sai xi 賽戲), Great Operas (Da xi 大戲), Seedling Songs (Yang ge 秧歌),[39] Operas of the Way and Emotion (Dao qing 道情), Playing with Children (Shua hai’er 耍孩兒), Lantern-Shadow Plays (Deng ying xi 燈影戲), Plays on Stilts (Gaoqiao xi 高蹺戲), Shanxi Operas (Jin xi 晉戲), and Assorted Tales of the Pear Garden (Liyuan zashuo 梨園雜說).[40] Although the differences between each of these genres go far beyond the limits of this paper, the reader will appreciate the immense variety and sophistication of the rural performing culture in these regions. From the opera titles found throughout Wang and Tian’s book, it is clear that the rural Yu county repertoire included material in both national and local circulation: plots were drawn from pan-Chinese story cycles like that of the Three Kingdoms (San guo 三國), plus a great variety of plays popular in Peking or Shanxi opera, all freely merging with locally produced performance and song. These rural plays cover the full range of human experience, including love songs, political dramas, histories, comedies both secular and mythological, performances with votive or exorcistic content, and from the twentieth century onward, ‘new’ plays both Republican and Communist.

If this was the religious, spatial, and performing culture that produced these structures and the images on them, then what of the culture of fiction and theatricality within these villages, surely relevant to what seem to be essentially fantasy landscapes on opera stages? We must be wary of projecting onto rural Chinese life a Protestant dividing line between fiction and religion. Similar, perhaps, to classical Greece and Rome, Chinese society generally was one in which religion could be freely used as the raw material for fictional invention, as in Journey to the West (Xi you ji 西遊記) or even Dream of the Red Mansions (Hong lou meng 紅樓夢),[41] and in which fictional invention could, without any apparent cognitive friction, again form the basis for religious worship, as in Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San guo yanyi 三國演義) and Romance of the Investiture of the Gods (Feng shen yanyi 封神演義).[42] In Yu county villages, such fiction was consumed on the opera stage as part of elaborate, and often elaborately theatrical, religious rituals.[43] The gods themselves might populate the stage at times,[44] while the gods’ temples themselves often held elaborate panelled hagiographies apparently drawn from popular literature.[45] Religion, opera, and fiction were interpenetrating realms in these villages, and we divide them at our own intellectual peril.

Nor can we assume that villagers were naïve about these relationships, or that the theatricality of the village stage was in any way less sophisticated than that of the urban or literati-produced opera. One fascinating window into rural ideas of religion, gaze, fiction, and theatricality are the ‘opposing couplets’ (duilian 對聯) that were written or inscribed on the two central pillars of the stage.[46] Theatricality is front and centre here. We read: ‘We make real an empty meal — and discuss all the examples of history / we make True (zhen) a False (jia) image — and act out all the strange affairs of Now and Then’ 虛飲作實談論歷代典故 / 假像變真扮演古今奇事. A repeated theme in many of these couplets, and one which will become very important later in this paper, is the way in which the physically small and bounded space of the stage can form an entrance into much larger historical and social realms. ‘People call it a house (fang), but I call it a mansion (lou) / lords, dukes, kings, and ancestors — they’re all inside of it’人家叫房我叫樓 / 公侯王爺在裏頭. ‘The surface-area isn’t big, but it has families, it has nations, it has all beneath heaven / there’s not many people, but they are sons, they are fathers, they are gentlemen ministers’ 地面不大有家有國有天下 / 人數無多為子為父為君臣. Another longer poem refers to mirage-visions, ‘the cities of the sea, towers upon giant oysters’, 海市蜃樓 and ‘all the realms of illusion, from first to last’ 乾坤幻境. Thus the epigraphic culture of these stages describes them as a place of spatial recession into fictional space — a place at the boundary of true and false, between our reality and fantastic other worlds.[47]

To summarise here for the purposes of the remainder of the paper, the temples and spatial system of Yu county villages appeared in recognisable form in the early sixteenth century. The opera culture that we see there today achieved maturity later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including a high-point at least of stage graffiti around the Guangxu reign (1875–1908). This culture was sophisticated and intentional about the creation of physical and symbolic space. Villages were planned settlements, and temples were constructed within and around this space with clear symbolic intent. Stages were located across from these temples so that the gods could watch the opera. The physical opposition between these two structures formed village squares that were the centre of most types of village events, including religious, operatic, commercial, and political. Important for understanding the perspectival murals, these spaces and the events held in them were the main gateways via which Chinese villagers interacted with the broader world. The epigraphic culture found around these structures emphasised the spatial liminality of both the stage and the temple as trespasses between religion, fiction, and worldly society. The operas, songs, and rituals performed on these stages belonged to a rich and sophisticated circulation of local and trans-local traditions, all of which freely mixed religion and fiction.

2) The Mansion and the Pagoda: Western Exotica in Yu County Village

The history of Yu county village art prior to the turn of the eighteenth century is difficult to trace. The Yu County Museum possesses many medieval-period objects of common types that have been the subject of studies in English. These include Northern Wei-period carved Buddhas set within arched niches, nested śarīra (sheli 舍利) reliquaries from the base of Liao-period stūpas, and Liao-period tomb murals depicting gateways flanked by musicians. From this, we should conclude that Yu county was well within the mainstream of medieval-period north-Chinese visual culture, and that later mural traditions should represent an outgrowth of these earlier genres. Importantly, recent studies on these types of medieval objects have emphasised the connection between their holiness as religious objects and various types of spatial recession, as well as the connection between theatrical space and entrances to other worlds, notably that of the afterlife.[48] Given that the fortified villages and temples of rural Yu county were created in the sixteenth century, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that the main elements of village mural traditions took their present form in that period as well. This, however, must remain speculative until more dated examples come to light.[49] The outstanding exceptions to this lack of clearly Ming-period murals are the immense Water-and-Land (Shui lu 水陸) images of Previous-Fort Monastery (Gu cheng si 故城寺), dated from ceiling plaques to 1507.[50]

From around 1700, however, clearly dated and well-preserved murals become comparatively numerous. The situation at this earliest extant level in Yu county seems to have been one of relative conformity in composition and subject combined with great stylistic heterogeneity. All of these village temples have, on the central wall, images of the enthroned deities seated in state (Fig. 18). While three Dragon King side-wall procession murals from 1698 (Fig. 19), 1709 (See Figs 9a & b), and 1730 (Fig. 20) seem almost unrelated in style, the roster of different figures and their relative positions in the procession are all the same. Importantly, for later developments, the inner (northern) side of two out of three compositions depicts a portico-fronted building extending back behind the frame. This is the Crystal Palace (Shui jing gong 水晶宫) from which the expedition of the Dragon Kings departs on the left-hand wall and to which it returns on the right. A similar procession of the Goddesses from 1724 departs farther afield stylistically from anything else in Yu county, to the extent that we may suspect some Tibeto-Mongol influence (Figs 21a & b). Although the portico-fronted building at the interior of the image and the small figures beneath are here missing, the main composition of the procession of the gods is similar to that of the Dragon King images and to other undated Goddess processions from around Xuan-Da.[51] Clearly dated eighteenth-century examples of panelled story narratives and martial images of divine generals indicate that these genres and topics were well established in Yu county by this point as well. Thus we may describe Yu county village mural art before the clear appearance of Western perspective as capable of great beauty and stylistic variety, but possessing a limited range of subjects and compositions.

By the year 1700, however, European perspectival techniques and pictorial themes had already begun to have an influence on the broader sphere of Chinese art. Merchants and missionaries first brought European images to the coastal port cities towards the end of the Ming dynasty. By the mid-seventeenth century, the southern cities of Yangzhou and Suzhou were centres of large-scale production of woodblock ‘foreign images’ (yang hua 洋畫) depicting exotic Western scenes, as well as painted images of all types that adopted various aspects of Western perspective, shading, or composition.[52] The eighteenth century saw the integration of European artists into Qing imperial court production in northern China, especially after the arrival of the celebrated Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang Shining 郎世寧, 1688–1766) in Beijing in 1715. By the twentieth century, images of Western cities and scenes both real and imagined could be viewed all across rural and urban China via woodblock ‘yearly pictures’ (nian hua 年畫) and travelling zograscope displays. Woodblock perspectival drawings also made frequent appearances in reformist and modernising literature and illustrated newsprint.[53] Although there is very little literature describing this process, Western pictorial techniques certainly had an influence on religious mural painting as well. Perspectival murals depicting imperial processions were commissioned at Mount Tai in Shandong as early as 1677,[54] and by the end of the nineteenth century, perspectival techniques were being used in murals even on the Tibetan border in modern Qinghai province.[55]

It is difficult to date precisely when perspectival painting first appeared in Yu county villages. The vast majority of the extant perspectival murals in Yu county clearly date from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, judging by both style and the adjacent grafitti. The majority of these are located on the walls flanking opera stages. We have seen that these stages were a centre of the public life of the village, and that opera troupes were one of the main agents of cultural circulation within these villages. Opera stages were a site naturally associated with spectacle, gaze, modernity, and encounters with the outside world; it is not surprising then that Western themes and pictorial techniques of receding space were painted there. We have also seen that the period of the appearance of opera stages in rural Yu county (beginning in the sixteenth century, but gradually achieving ubiquity only over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) roughly matches the period of Western art’s transfusion into China. Thus it may not be necessary to search for developed opera stage mural traditions prior to Western influence.[56] It seems likely to me, although unproven, that perspectival murals first appeared on stages, which were, at the time, a relatively new site for mural painting and one not necessarily limited by religious prescription. Only afterwards did these paintings begin to spread into the temples.[57]

Liu Wenjiong has calculated that perspectival architectural paintings represent somewhat over 40 per cent of extant opera stage murals in Yu county, with the rest being images of folding screens, with or without figures peeking around the edges (Fig. 22).[58] These paintings appear on the two flanking walls of the stage, exterior to the scaenae frons and perpendicular to the gaze of the spectators and the deity in the opposing temple. It is important to emphasise that these images were not backdrops in a strict sense; although they were visible to spectators sitting at angles to the stage, the only people who would have seen them head-on during the performance were the actors themselves. The use of perspectival technique is loose. It is apparent that this technique was new to the artists, and they used it with varying success. Some of the drawings succeed at simple point perspective, with long lines of buildings receding down an axial street. In other compositions, attempts at Western perspective are applied more unevenly to the slant of the railings of the structures, which become a crazy zig-zag of impossibly layered stories, with recession in height indicated by the reduced size of the upper figures. In still more compositions, the artists do not even attempt formal point perspective, instead achieving the effect of receding space by foregrounding some buildings and placing others on a distant horizon line behind it (Figs 23a & b). Although many permutations are possible, in the main these images contain two main structures or compositional elements, which I refer to here as the pagoda (ting 亭) and the mansion (lou 樓).[59] Each of these seems to derive from a different source, and I will treat them separately below.

The ‘pagoda’ that usually occupies the centre or outer side of these compositions appears to derive, at least in some cases, from an anonymous mid-Qing novel called The Full Tale of the Green Peony (Lü mudan quan zhuan 綠牡丹全傳).[60] The story is also known as The Full Tale of the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions (Si wang ting quan zhuan 四望亭全傳). The novel was published in 1800. From that year until the end of the dynasty (1911–12), it was reprinted 26 times, and, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of operas and later films were based on it.[61] The story concerns two heroes, — young circus-performer named Jade-Lotus (Hua Bilian 華碧蓮) and her love interest, a somewhat bumbling scholar-aspirant named Luo Hongxun 駱宏勛. Luo Hongxun, Jade-Lotus, her father, her spry old grandmother, and a band of swashbuckling friends all take up arms against the evil Empress Wu Zetian. At the end of the story, aided by the famous Judge Dee (Di Renjie 狄仁杰), the band of heroes defeats Wu Zetian and restores the rightful heir to the throne of China.

The relevant scene for our purposes occurs roughly a third of the way through the novel, over the nineteenth and twentieth chapters. By this point, the two heroes have professed their love to each other but have since become separated. Jade-Lotus and her father, Hua Zhenfang 花振芳, are driving a herd of horses in through the gate of Yangzhou city (Yangzhou fu 扬州府), where they arrive at a tower called the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions (Si wang ting 四望亭). Here they find an old friend of Hua Zhenfang’s named Yu Qian 余謙, who has vowed in front of a crowd to catch an escaped monkey, which is clambering about on the roof. The monkey, by this point, has ascended the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions, and Yu Qian is labouring around after it, steadily losing face. Hua Zhenfang calls Yu Qian down, and instead sends Jade-Lotus up to nab the monkey. In a series of acrobatic leaps she makes it up onto the roof of the pagoda. Granny Hua (Hua Nainai 花奶奶) leaps up after her. Jade-Lotus pursues the monkey up to the highest gable. Thereupon comes the moment of high drama:

Jade-Lotus slides herself stealthily towards the monkey. She reaches out an arm to grab him. The monkey sees that Jade-Lotus is blocking the escape route to the right: he’s got no empty space to escape through. The animal panics, and uses all his might to leap, hoping that he can jump right over Jade-Lotus’s head. For many years, though, nobody has maintained the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions. The wood is rotten, the mortar and bricks split asunder — Jade-Lotus together with the monkey go plummeting down. On the ground the people exclaim: ‘How terrible! Someone’s fallen down!’

As Jade-Lotus falls, Hua Zhenfang, Yu Qian, and the Ba brothers are all dismayed and without any recourse. Jade-Lotus has no way of saving her own life. The only hope comes from one young man beyond the fourth or fifth ring of spectators, who shouts: ‘You still haven’t moved to save her — what are you waiting for!’

With a single leap he’s there, and catches Jade-Lotus with both hands, and holds her in his embrace, sitting down into the dust. Everyone shouts: ‘What an extraordinary hero! Without him, she’d have been crushed to meat-mush!’ Hua Zhenfang and a whole crowd all run over and with one glance they see — the person who’d saved Jade-Lotus was none other than Luo Hongxun!62

Jade-Lotus lays unconscious, pressed against Luo Hongxun’s chest. For a brief moment, the narrative shifts into the first person as she regains consciousness: finding herself laying sweat-covered in the arms of her long-separated beloved, she decides to keep her eyes closed for a while longer. Only when her father has tactfully removed her onto a charpai does she admit to being awake.[63] The various characters then turn to acrimony over the prize money.

This, then, is identifiably the scene represented on the opera walls in Yu county. At least five of these murals have buildings labelled ‘Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions’ and have visible pictures of Jade-Lotus and the monkey perched dramatically on the gables (Figs 24a & b). In two more compositions, the building is not labelled but nonetheless the telltale figures of a girl and a monkey are visible. In two of them you can also see an older woman balanced on a lower roof, and this must be Granny Hua. In some cases, the whole cast of characters is visible standing around the base of the tower, looking up and gesticulating at Jade-Lotus and the monkey, although it’s difficult to tell who is who (Fig. 25). Given how heavily damaged most of the murals are, it seems certain that there were once many more figures visible in all of the scenes. Many more villages just have depictions of tall towers or pagodas without any visible or extant labels or figures.

What did this image represent to Yu county villagers? The scene itself is engaging, kinetic, and affecting. It features acrobatic stunts, a rooftop chase, a fall from a high place, and a last-minute rescue. It also contains the unexpected reunion of lovers, a moment of deeply felt romantic emotion (qing 情), and the first-person expression of female erotic desire.[64] It’s fair to suppose that the image of a sensuous woman knight-errant (nü xia 女俠) leaping about on an exotic southern pagoda would represent an engaging interruption into the social and architectural world of the average nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Yu county peasant. One can also imagine a whole variety of positive explanations for this scene’s prevalence, although all of them are very speculative. It could have represented a rebus,[65] or it had a relationship with village ritual.[66] Liu Wenjiong has suggested a link to the village stage as a site of sexual and gender exploration, and this may be so.[67] In early twentieth century Shanghai, the scene was performed with elaborate rope-work special effects (jiguan bujing 機關佈景); perhaps Yu county people somehow witnessed this impressive modern spectacle and attempted to depict it.[68] The name Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions references the theme of architecturally established lines of sight, which we have seen is an important part of these stages’ function, and to which we will return again.

But none of these arguments quite satisfies. Among other things, the operas based on Green Peony do not seem to have been particularly popular in Yu county, at least within living memory. Wang Zhijun and Tian Yongxiang’s volume on Yu county opera mentions hundreds of titles performed within the county in the pre-Communist era.[69] As far as I can find, none of the various opera titles derived from Green Peony appear there.[70] So these plays may have once been performed on Yu county stages, but there’s no written record of it, and nobody around now seems to remember it. Perhaps no explanation is needed. One stage-painter enjoyed the novel and painted the scene; from there it became popular and emulated within the community of painters and audiences around Yu county. It seems safe, however, to say that Yu county villagers painted the world they wanted to see. And in village after village, that world was a realm of swashbuckling women warriors, free-booting and foul-mouthed proletarian heroes, chases, humour, excitement, architectural exotica, and an easy-going eroticism, love, and adventure.

The second building in the opera stage murals, the ‘Mansions’, always appears on the inner side of the composition, where it abuts the edge of the scaenae frons and the doors that pass through it. The images depict oblong, multistorey buildings with rows of windows facing the street, galleries along the upper stories, Italianate flourishes over the doors, long colonnades, tall minaret-like towers, and even domes — something truly exotic in eastern China. These structures are identified in several of the cartouches. One image-caption has them as The Mansions of the Western Seas (Xi yang lou 西洋樓), (see Fig 25). Another cartouche reads Yi da gong 意大宮 — ostensibly, The Intentions-Great Palace. This name is as awkward in Chinese as it is in English. Given the foreign form of the buildings, it seems more likely that the full name should be The Italian Palace (Yidali gong 意大利宮). The Chinese painter, finding Yidali ‘Italy’ a mouthful, simply lopped off the last syllable and gave the palace a more acceptably Chinese two-character name (Fig. 26). Another such mansion, in this case labelled The Mansion [sic] of Gazing in the Four Directions (Si wang lou 四望樓) has a row of nonsensical ‘Western’ alphabetic characters written along the top, although it is unclear to me even whether they are drawn from the Roman or Cyrillic scripts (Figs 27a & b).[71]

The mansions of the Western Seas (Xi yang lou 西洋樓) was not only a generic name for Western-style buildings; it originally referred to a specific set of structures located in the imperial Garden of Perfect Radiance (Yuan ming yuan 圓明園) outside of Beijing. The buildings and the gardens, maze, and fountains around them were constructed by Jesuit artisans, headed by Guiseppe Castiglione, for the Qianlong Emperor over the course of the late eighteenth century. The mansions were then destroyed by foreign troops during the second Opium War in 1860. At the time these buildings were constructed, they were strongly associated with theatricality and perspectival modes of viewing.[72] Yu county people would certainly have been aware of these structures, since they sat along the well-travelled road to the capital. The multistorey Western buildings were adjacent to the northern wall of the Garden and would have been visible over that wall from the outside. After the violent destruction of the Garden, travellers had free access to the ruins, which still existed in substantially complete form well into the twentieth century. Yu county people could hardly have failed to notice, and taken imaginative interest in, the immense ivory-white ruins of the foreign palaces that rose out the fields along the carriage road to the capital.[73] One such depiction, in the Halls of the God of Wealth (Cai shen dian 財神殿) and of the God of Literature (Wenchang 文昌) in the Six Gods’ Temple of Li [Family] Fort (Li buzi liu shen miao cai shen dian 李堡子六神廟) may actually be copied directly from the mansions or from one of the various sets of lithographs that were produced depicting them (Figs 28a & b).[74] The moniker ‘The Italian Palace’ on another of these depictions strengthens the general connection to Castiglione’s buildings in Beijing.

However, the majority of these images are not literal depictions of the Jesuit-built mansions. A more proximate source for all of these Yu county depictions may be found in perspectival ‘yearly pictures’ and peep-box show or zograscope images that circulated widely through eighteenth- to twentieth-century Chinese society. The 23-volume Collected Chinese Woodblock Yearly Pictures (Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng 中國木板年畫集成)[75] contains hundreds of perspectival prints from the late Qing and Republican periods. Dozens if not hundreds of these showcase exotic Western-style buildings of exactly the type found in the Yu county images, including long multi-storey façades, domes, and high, almost futuristic towers. We may point to specific depictions that may have been the source of particular depictions of the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions at Yangzhou, which display the same scene from Green Peony.[76] (It is relevant to point out here that the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions is a real structure that still stands in Yangzhou city, and that Yangzhou was a major source of such prints.) Any of these images could have served as the model or inspiration for the Yu county opera-stage drawings. Many fantastical architectural scenes of this sort circulated as peep-box views, known in Chinese as ‘scenes of the Western seas’ (xi yang jing 西洋景) or the closely homophonous ‘lenses of the Western seas’ (xi yang jing 西洋鏡).[77] The name and format of these devices underscores the link between perspectival drawings, Western architecture, technological innovations in the creation of spectacle, and the emphasis on the linear, modern gaze.

Thus it seems closer to the truth to say that these stage drawings referenced a broader representation, popular across China from the eighteenth century until the Communist takeover, of a sort of architectural and visual ‘occidenterie’:[78] an exotic new type of building, and an exotic new way of seeing those buildings. Although drawn from the broader stream of Chinese visual culture, this representation had specific connotations within Yu county. Perspectival architectural drawings were in no way unnatural to a society that used architecturally established lines of sight as one of its main physical structuring principles. We have also seen how the open communal squares thus established between stage and temple were among the main spaces in which villagers interacted with the broader world, and how the epigraphic culture associated with these structures stressed the ability of the physically bounded stage to include ‘all beneath heaven’ (tianxia 天下).[79] A geographic and architectural imagination that extended to Beijing, Yangzhou, and even Europe was appropriate to these spaces. It was via these squares, stages, murals, opera performances, and commercial fairs that Yu county people first met the oncoming modern world, represented it to each other, and ultimately integrated it into their own cosmology and sense of self. These images of the Pagoda of Gazing in the Four Directions and the Mansions of the Western Seas are one artifact of that process.

4) The Portico of the Gods’ Realms

James Cahill has commented on the introduction of Western art to China that, ‘In China as in France, [artistic] appropriations were liberating rather than confining, giving artists the courage to break out of old habits that had become stultifying’.[80] This was certainly true in Yu county. The last 150 years of Yu county mural art, from ~1800 to 1950, were a period of extraordinary innovation. As these Westernising themes and perspectival techniques moved from the stage into the temples, traditional compositions were promiscuously remixed and reinvented. Rather than representing the breakdown of traditional mural-painting culture, I argue that this period represents its lost renaissance. Yu county artists combined Western techniques of depicting receding depth with the traditional spatial logic of the stage and temple to create what are undoubtedly the most complex and innovative compositions in the history of this art. To this end, I will first return to the earliest stratum of extant murals in the early eighteenth century. I argue that their efficacy as religious images derived from a combination of the recursion of the temple room with the realm of the gods depicted, and the evocation of a hidden space behind the altar from which the gods’ power emanated. I will then show how this logic was reworked with the new perspectival techniques, allowing for unique compositions that stretch across multiple buildings and surfaces and establish complex and efficacious connections between our world and the holy, fictive, or otherwise ‘exotic’ realms beyond.

Perhaps the most consistent single element of all of these depictions on temples and stages, both early and late, is a large portico (menlang 門廊) opening on the inner side of the composition (Fig. 29). In fact, we could reasonably refer to the entire genre of images examined in this paper as ‘portico-pictures’, since the great roofed portico on the inner side of each composition is their most consistent and distinctive feature. This structure is a flat, raised plinth, sometimes with railings but always bounded by pillars supporting the roof. Especially in the later images, the ‘sky-flower panels’ (tianhua ban 天華板) on the portico ceiling became an object of obsession for painters, who distorted space to bizarre degrees to display the perspectival recession of this grid (see Figs 1, 2, 26, 28b, et cetera). In the later opera stage images, this portico fronts the structure that I have earlier referred to as the Mansion and provides an entrance to its interior. In the temple images both early and late, this structure represents the façade and gateway into the gods’ palace.[81]

It is worth pointing out here that the physical porticoes of real Xuan-Da temples remain symbolically important places today. During a visit in the summer of 2017, the Daoist cleric resident in the Goddesses Temple of the Cock’s-Crow Postal Station (Ji ming yi 雞鳴驛) remarked to me, unprompted, that the gods would sit on the small portico space jutting out of the front of the temple in order to watch the opera being performed on the stage opposite. This raised and roofed entranceway, apparently empty, was thus one of the most important symbolic spaces of the temple complex, strongly associated with divine, spectactorial gaze from the temple to the stage, and with the actual historical performance of opera at temple fairs (Fig. 30). It is probable that in many temples the statue of the god would be physically carried out and set on this space during rituals and performances; I have seen this done in other parts of north China, although not in Xuan-Da proper. These porticoes are also, of course, the gateway or anteroom through which the devotee must pass in order to reach the inner sanctum.

The above examples point to two important interpretive aspects of these depictions, apparently unrelated but in fact intertwined. The first is that these porticoes do, after all, represent gateways, or epi-structures around gateways, that lead into sacred or otherwise alteric space. The second is that there is, from the earliest examples until the latest, a persistent conflation and even recursion between the space of the depiction on the wall and the three-dimensional space in which it was set, either temple, stage, or fortress. We will examine these propositions in tandem so that their relationship becomes clear.

To begin with, the earthly temple to the god was frequently conflated with the god’s celestial (or submarine) palace. The name of the palace in which the god is thought to reside is often used as a metonym for the physical temple building, both in the stele texts and on signs over the gateways of the actual temple buildings. Thus a Dragon King temple might have a gate inscribed with the words The Crystal Palace,[82] a Temple to the Perfected Warrior might be called The Palace of the Northern Dipper (Bei dou gong 北斗宮),[83] or a temple to the Goddesses referred to as The Travelling Palace of Mount Tai (Tai shan xing gong 泰山行宮),[84] etc. We have already noted that the interior of the temple is often creatively furnished to indicate the grotto or palace in which the god is thought to hold court. In this way, the temple space mimics the divine space of the gods. In the case of the portico images, however, a slightly more complex logic is at work. The flanking-wall porticoes are invariably painted on the interior side of the wall, with the building extending back outside the frame of the image. Thus in these earliest extant images, the position of the portico suggests the exterior façade and gateway of a mysterious interior or ‘backstage’ through these painted gates. This holy interior, the realm of the gods, is located at or extends away behind the altar where the statues sit.

As Dragon King temples were the most common type of large temple in Yu county, the spatial logic of these depictions is most developed in those compositions, and many intact examples exist. In these temples, the inner side of both lateral walls almost always holds an image of both the Crystal Palace and, beneath it, a smaller recursive image of the temple building itself in which the image and the shrine is held (Fig. 31). The rain-giving procession of the dragons around the space of the shrine room (that is out and back from their palace, and around the human world) is almost always echoed by miniature, sympathetic images of mortals on the ground beneath, fleeing from dragon-sparked lightning, then plowing, planting, harvesting, and, finally, forming themselves into a votive procession with a shawm band or shehuo mummers’ parade that arrives to give thanks at the gates of the recursive temple. As we have seen above, several extant images even show opera performances performed on stages facing the temple gate (see Figs 14, 15, 16 and 17). The visual recursion between the small temple below and the great palace above, and between the painted image and the physical temple space, is clear — by facing north towards the altar in the temple, the devotee is able to access the Crystal Palace of the Dragon Kings. The space of the workaday human world is coterminous with the circuit of the Dragon Kings’ dominion, and the physical temple is the anteroom to their divine realm.

That the rear walls of Chinese temples were understood to recess into holy space is spectacularly confirmed by two temples in areas immediately adjacent to Yu county that have, on the central/rear wall, chiaroscuro trompe-l’œil images of hanging prayer beads that cast painted shadows on the wall — something genuinely unprecedented in traditional Chinese art. One of these images was painted in 1783, while the other is undated but appears to be in early nineteenth-century style, indicating the early spread of Western painting techniques into rural Xuan-Da, and their use from the very start to compose sacred space. In both cases, the realistic illusion of these shadow-casting beads serves to emphasise the spatial recession of the wall into a specifically feminine interior space located through the gates of a portico structure. In the 1783 temple, this is apparently the interior quarters of the palace of a draconic water god and his wife (Figs 32a, b & c), and in the other case, it is a wall fronting the inner sanctum of the Goddesses (Figs 33a & b).[85] The former temple also makes it clear that this harem interior is the fount or source of the divine fecundity — from under the table in the interior quarters and over the rooftops of the portico on the side wall pour great waves of life-giving water. The optical illusion of the beads in particular breaks the boundaries between painted surface and physical space, allowing the gods’ realm, and their blessings, to inhabit our mundane world.

Similar to the case of the porticoes in front of the temple, this idea of a secret, often specifically feminine interior behind the altar corresponds to the actual construction and ritual use of physical temple space. I have visited several temples across Xuan-Da where a male god was worshipped in two separate buildings — a front hall where he ‘did work’ (ban gong 辦公), and a rear hall, which was his living quarters (zhufang 住房, qin gong 寢宮). In one of these rear halls, the statue of the God of Walls and Moats (Cheng huang ye 城隍爺) could be found enthroned together with that of his wife, referred to simply as ‘the Goddess’ (Niangniang). The room had been painted in the 1990s with murals of the god’s household furnishings including a television, radio, fan, tea thermos, bookshelf, et cetera. Today, villagers consider this rear hall a location possessing a particular power of miraculous response (lingying 靈應) within the temple complex, especially efficacious to prayers for human fertility.[86]

This unseen rear space and the portico that is its entrance are important from the earliest extant images to the last, Western-influenced ones. However, the size and centrality of the side-wall portico structure grew over time, as well as the range of contexts where it might appear. In a God of Wealth mural dated to the Daoguang reign (1820–50) at the Cock’s-Crow Postal Station (Ji ming yi cai shen miao 雞鳴驛財神廟), the portico is still rendered in traditional isometric Chinese style, but it has expanded to cover nearly half of the wall. Here, the structure seems to represent the gateway of a wealthy devotee’s house. Towards this house, approach the God of Wealth from a celestial cloud and bearded Central Asians on the ground level, all bearing gifts (Fig. 34). By the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century, the portico was depicted in ostentatiously Western style, with the receding grid of tiles on the ceiling now expanded to fill the entire composition; gods, who, in earlier murals would have processed across the mortal world, now sit upon this stage in state. While the earliest images already employ trompe-l’œil, European techniques allowed the effect to be perfected. The Yu county heavens had been Westernised, both in their architecture and in their mode of depiction, and the evocation of this hidden interior receding behind the altar wall had become the central theme of the murals.

This spatial recession is even more the case on opera stages, where the painted portico fronts the Mansion of the Western Seas and appears to represent both the entranceway to the Mansion and a stage in itself. In this case, the mysterious interior to which the gates lead is the backstage, actual and imagined, hidden beyond the two perforating gates of the scaenae frons (Fig. 35). Marvin Carlson has called this space ‘the hidden “other” world of the actor, the place of appearance and disappearance, the realm of events not seen but whose effects conditioned the visible world of the stage’.[87] Stage performers would traditionally enter the stage through the right-hand door and depart from the left.[88] Thus the circular, clockwise motion of the temple gods through the mortal world is mirrored by the circular motion of stage performers across the theatrical ‘world’ of the stage, while the painted portico-stages in the murals mirror the actual stage space. A portico is particularly useful as a sign in this context because it can represent a stage just as well as it can represent the pavilion at the gate of a palace; both structures are, after all, just a flat plinth with pillars supporting a roof. And this equivocation points to the shared function of these two types of physical structures. Both temples and stages, as we have seen, are, in some sense, anterooms built around the access points to other worlds, be they exotic-to-fictional (the Mansions of the Western Seas) or holy (the various divine palaces) or both. Moreover, the symbolic ability of these physical structures and spaces to access phantasmagorical and efficacious realms derives precisely from their equivocation or mirroring with the painted images of gateways on their walls.[89]

This understanding gives us the key to understanding many of the more unusual perspectival paintings around Yu county, and allows us to make sense of the innovation that these perspectival techniques unleashed. The undated Goddesses Temple of Stone-Waste Fort (Shi huang bu niangniang miao 石荒堡娘娘廟), while ostensibly traditional in its layout, is a fascinating example of this creativity.[90] The two side walls of this room depict the procession of the three goddesses out and back from their mansion, here rendered in skillful perspectival style. Although the lower part of the composition is destroyed so we cannot see if there are small mortal figures at the base as there would be in a Dragon King temple, it is clear that the circuit of the room represents the goddesses’ dominion, which is to say, our world. And from interior of the mansion, the goddesses’ blessings come welling into our space: children, healthy sons, thronging the balustrades, peaking out from the windows, and gambolling among the pillars and on the portico steps. The rear wall of the temple room, behind where the votive statues would once have stood, depicts painted screens from behind which lovely musician-attendants peer. These are the same screens that also appear on the walls of the opera stage, south across a plaza, suggesting the homology of the goddesses’ powerful, feminine interior to the fictive space extending laterally out and back from the theatre walls (Figs 36a & b, see also Fig 4).[91]

But beyond this now-standard layout, perspective technique and the gendered space have encouraged the artist to play with surface and depth, illusion and meta-image. The painted Mansions are perforated by windows and gates, revealing glimpses of more hidden spaces from which children bound or beautiful women peer. The screens that block our view back from the altar are themselves painted with interior and exterior scenes, views through moon gates, misted landscapes stretching back. As if to intentionally toy with the trompe-l’œil effect, the artist’s style playfully shifts across each panel of the room and the painted screens. Our gaze moves from the regal musician-attendants to the still, voyeuristic scenes on the screen, reminiscent of ‘beautiful-woman pictures’ erotica (meiren hua 美人畫),[92] then out through the portico gates to the riotous, demonic calvacade of the Goddesses’ procession across the exterior world, and finally up to triangular panels in the rafters, where cartoonish images depict two women seated in a mountain grotto (Fig. 37), and the moon-goddess Chang’e with her rabbit, pounding the elixir of immortality. The artist here has used Western perspective as one among many stylistic tools to break the boundaries between flat and three-dimensional space, producing a work that fascinates with its glimpses into illusory feminine realms as much as it functions as an efficacious religious and theatrical tableau.

Other works are still more innovative in their composition. Song Family Village (Song jia zhuang 宋家莊) has a ‘split-centre opera stage’ (chuan xin xilou 穿心戲樓), built as a square archway over the main village street (Fig. 38). Carved stone panels on either side of the stage depict actors peaking out from half-opened doors, emphasising the function of the stage as a gateway. The two flanking walls of this stage have murals depicting a receding perspectival view through the centre of a portico structure, which is signalled by the pillar-couplets and the sky-flower panelled roof. At the end of the perspectival corridor, the climactic scene of the opera Officials All Around the Bed (Man chuang hu 滿床笏) is taking place. The scene describes the joyous pageant of the sixtieth birthday of the main character, Guo Ziyi 郭子儀, who has, over the course of the play, defeated the famous rebel An Lushan 安禄山, and brought peace to China. His seven sons have all attained high office and his grandson has just achieved the first place in the examinations (zhuangyuan 狀元). Together with all the daughters and servants, they gather around to congratulate him.[93] The receding view through the portico in the stage-painting mirrors the physical view of the spectators and the god, through the split-centre opera stage and down the axial road of the fort (Fig. 39). To drive home the parallelism, a wooden plaque (bian 匾) originally hung over the stage with the epigrammatic words ‘Gaze Upon Its Depth’ (Guan qi shen 觀其深).[94] This pointed double-entendre points both to the play itself, to the visual recession of the perspectival drawings, and to the physical and fictive space of a stage that was also an actual gateway. In this way, the equivocation of the painted space, the actual space, and the fictive space of the play allows the desideratum of the painting — worldly success — to share the space of the fort.

Probably the most exceptional creation of this period, however, was the Temple to the Perfected Warrior of Wang and Liang [families] Fort (Wang Liang zhuang zhen wu miao 王良莊真武廟). This spectacular shrine, now half plundered and half collapsed, was unique within Yu county in its determination to show on each wall the interior of this mysterious divine space, of which in all other cases we see only the gateway and façade. Located at ground level in a curious northern barbican space of the fort, the temple was accessed only via a tiny gate through the inner fortress wall labelled The Palace of the Dark Emperor (Xuan di gong 玄帝宮) (Fig. 40). A line of sight stretched through this diminutive gate and down the axial street of the fort to an opera stage in the southern barbican. Within the temple, on the two side walls flanking the shrine room, were two immense full-wall images of the palace of the Perfected Warrior, composed in traditional isometric style. This painted palace was part temple, and part fortress, accessed by a fortified gate facing south, with corner towers in the style of the Forbidden City. Inside the palace, the Perfected Warrior was seated within a raised and roofed portico, flanked by his retinue of richly adorned generals, beautiful palace ladies, and fairy girls with slim swords. On the floor of the fortress-palace, beneath the portico, a mortal supplicant knelt (Figs 41a, b & c).[95] The mirroring argument was clear: the temple is an entrance to the palace of the god, which is the fortress, which is the god’s axial domain. Therefore, the worshipper may identify himself with the painted supplicant on the wall, who has entered now into the god’s realm and is communicating directly with the deity.

The rear (northern) wall of the room, which survived only partially when I first saw it in 2013, has now totally collapsed. One of three original panels survived: on the right side of the altar and facing south, so that the right (eastern) side of the image led into what was presumably once the centre of the depiction. Originally, statues would have stood on the altar-top, implying that the images on the wall represented the imagined space behind the physical and spiritual position of the god. Thus the image represents a glimpse beyond the scaenae frons of the Perfected Warrior’s heaven and into the mysterious interior beyond. In the mural, the palace had become a Western-style mansion, painted in clumsy but effective perspectival style in shades of deep blue and black, with a gallery of fantastic multistorey buildings receding towards the right, sharp spires and upper stories, walkways and pavilions. This was, evidently, the ‘rear palace’ (hou gong 後宮), the antaḥpuram or seraglio, for it was populated by strolling women in beautiful robes. At the far right or inner side of the receding line of structures, was a giant portico that led off-frame towards the vanished central panel of the main wall. Through the pillars of the portico we saw, distantly, even deeper apartments, an inner room, two servant girls in conversation, and a languid lady in red robes, drowsing upon her boudoir bed (Fig. 42).

All the elements we have identified above were present in this assemblage: the opposition between temple and stage; the physical construction of village space in a way symbolic of the spiritual positions of the gods; the spatial, textual, and visual recursion between the palace of the god and both the temple and the fortress; the use of this almost metafictive mirroring as a gateway or means of access into fantastic alternate realms, most commonly a holy interior located behind the altar wall; the function of the portico as one particularly powerful symbolic structure via which one could do this; the still-incomplete architectonic and pictorial ‘Westernisation’ of the village heavens; and, at a basic level, the extraordinary willingness of nineteenth and early-twentieth century village artists to experiment with the composition of space. This, then, was the effect of contact with the West and with perspectival painting in the Yu county village: a renaissance of artistic creativity and a reinvention of religious and theatrical space, which bloomed unexpectedly in these remote villages and was then cruelly and utterly cut off when the axe of Communism fell.

4) Conclusion

Jeehee Hong, speaking of Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasty depictions of stages in north-Chinese tomb art, argues that the side passages of stages or ‘ghost-gates’ (gui men 鬼門) were used symbolically to represent the boundary of ‘fictive “elsewhere” ’ — a gate between worlds, in this case, between the world of the living and the world of the dead.[96] Only actors could move between these ‘ontologically heterogeneous spheres’.[97] In the context of the Yu county opera paintings, these observations can be usefully combined with those of scholars working on Western-influenced perspectival drawing. Columbia scholar Shang Wei 商偉 has recently attempted to show how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, newly introduced Western perspectival techniques fused in the popular literature with pre-existing Chinese associations of mirrors, lenses, and magic, and techniques of gazing. He tells us:

What arrived with perspectival techniques and Western viewing lenses was not concepts of reproduction or representation, nor was it the fixed forms of realism. Instead it was an exploration of the subjectivity and uncertainty of vision, the discovery of receding space, and an interest in true and false, emptiness and reality, existence and nonexistence. In this way the indigenous language of phantasmagoria and illusion (meiying mohuan 魅影魔幻) was reinvigorated and endowed with new meaning.[98]

These perspectival drawings in some ways represent the imaginative synthesis of all these discourses, and discourses local to Yu county as well. The Yu county stage and temple drawings do seem very much to belong to the world of which Shang Wei speaks: the world of Supplement to the Journey to the West (Xi you bu 西遊補), A Tower for the Summer Heat (Xia yi lou 夏宜樓), and Dream of the Red Mansions — all stories in which architectural spaces, devices of viewing, and the magical realms and beings of Chinese folk religion provide portals into new and bewitching fictional universes. These drawings also suggest, as Jeehee Hong does, gateways into other fictional or ontological spaces, receding off laterally from the divine or spectatorial line of gaze. And the stages and temples do belong, as well, to the very specific world of the Yu county fortress — a world in which the symbolic power of particular buildings was defined according to their imperial command over architecturally defined lines of sight. These images, axial views into fantastic and otherworldly architectural landscapes, serve to underscore the spatial symbolism from which Yu county temples derived their efficacy, and to establish the village opera stage as a powerful and separate space in its own right. They became structures through which we gaze into other possible universes, branching off from ours, at once here and elsewhere, and new, and old, and other.

Finally, and at the risk of stating the obvious, these scenes are the products of a formidable creativity and intellectual engagement. If we go looking for a Chinese intellectual and artistic response to the Western world, we should not neglect to seek it on the temples, stages and public squares of the Chinese village. When these illiterate farmers discovered the West, their response was one of admirable curiosity and imagination. They took these foreign techniques and adapted them to their own sophisticated indigenous language of space, gaze, architecture, fantasy, and religiosity. They painted perspectival pictures on their temple and opera stage walls and then they filled those newly created spaces with the things they wanted to see: light, colour, action, and excitement; exotic cities, skyscraping spires, and fantastic palaces; new technologies of spectacle; holy sanctums of the ancient gods; tough, smart, working-class heroines who took up arms against the powerful and unjust; and dizzying, axial views down the main streets of the new world.