Mufu’s Gateway and the Hall of Books

At Mufu in Lijiang, four characters above an entrance carry two readings. The phrase Tianyu Liufang evokes nourishing rain in Chinese; the site’s interpretation also links its sound to a Naxi encouragement to study. The gateway brings language and learning into the approach to a former governing compound.

The Mu family’s hereditary rulers served in Lijiang from the Yuan period into the early Qing. A 2026 exhibition at Prince Kung’s Palace Museum described a span of roughly 470 years. The long chronology gives the buildings a political setting, while the words on the gateway open another history: books, poetry and cultural patronage.

The compound includes gateways, an assembly hall, Wanjuanlou and a protector hall. A 2025 account identifies Wanjuanlou as the second major hall and the Mu family’s place for reading and storing books. Its description brings Chinese works, Buddhist scriptures and Dongba texts into the same library history.

The buildings encountered today also have a recent history. The same account records reconstruction after the 1996 Lijiang earthquake. The hall sequence carries older names and associations through a fabric shaped by repair and rebuilding.

In March 2026, the Beijing exhibition gathered more than seventy objects and document sets from ten museums and libraries. Books and objects moved the Mufu story into a different kind of room. Between the gateway’s words, a library hall and a modern exhibition, the compound emerges as more than a monumental outline: it is a place where governing, reading and remembering have met.