The Painted Figures of Shuanglin Temple

Stand at the entrance of Shuanglin Temple, six or seven kilometres southwest of the ancient city of Pingyao, and the first hall is a wall of guardians. The Hall of the Devas holds Vajrapani and the Four Heavenly Kings, modelled in painted clay at the scale of a standing person, their faces set in the fixed concentration that temple sculpture gives to protectors. The colour is the point: this is a temple of painted clay rather than carved stone, and the figures were finished in mineral pigments. The temple was founded in 571, in the second year of the Wuping period of the Northern Qi dynasty, and took the name Shuanglin in the Northern Song; the buildings that stand today are of the Ming and Qing.

The Arhat Hall is the quietest room in the complex. Eighteen arhats sit with the plain, amicable faces that the Song, Jin and Yuan sculptors gave to those who have finished their study, their garments cut as tight shirts over loose robes with broad sleeves. Nearby, the Hall of a Thousand Buddhas keeps a Ming figure of Weituo, the dharmapala, posed with his legs over a coiled dragon, and the Bodhisattva Hall holds a Guanyin with a great many arms, each finished with the same care and each set against a painted background. The subjects are drawn from ordinary life as much as from scripture: towers, buildings, mountains, rivers, clouds, rocks, grasses, flowers and stands of trees fill the ground behind the figures, and the halls seem less like rooms than like caves.

The clay figures were made in such numbers that the temple is called a museum of coloured sculpture: 2,052 are reported, and 1,650 are said to survive. Between the figure counted and the figure still standing there is more than the passing of time, because many of the statues were stolen or damaged during the Cultural Revolution. The site has since undergone several renovations, and much of the sculpture remains in poor condition, its surfaces dulled and the exterior of the temple grey with coal dust. The temple is one of the five places identified in the city's conservation area of cultural relics. Its ten halls stand within three courtyards, and with Zhenguo Temple and the walled city it is one of the three parts of the 1997 World Heritage inscription.