Yongle Palace and the Murals of the Pure Yang Hall

Lu Dongbin is a Tang-era figure whom Daoist tradition treats as the founder of the jindan, or golden elixir, meditation line, and who became the most prominent of the Eight Immortals in Ming plays and popular storytelling. The palace was built to honour him, and it belongs to the Quanzhen, or Complete Perfection, school, founded in Shandong in the twelfth century by Wang Chongyang, who lived from 1113 to 1170. With the Chongyang Palace in Shaanxi and the White Cloud Temple in Beijing it counts as one of that school's three ancestral temples, and its construction ran from 1247 to 1358. At the original site the precinct covered about 200 mu, with the Zhongtiao mountains behind and the Yellow River in front.

The palace keeps 1,005.68 square metres of wall painting, spread through four halls: the Longhu Hall, the Hall of the Three Pure Ones, the Chunyang Hall and the Chongyang Hall. The largest single work is in the Hall of the Three Pure Ones. The Assembly of the Immortals was finished in 1325, the second year of the Yuan Taiding era, covers 429.56 square metres, and shows 290 Daoist deities ranged around the Three Pure Ones, the high gods whom Daoism drew from several traditions into one trinity. It is the largest surviving mural of the Yuan dynasty, and the whole ensemble has long been called the gallery of Oriental art.

Everything here has been moved once. In 1956 the Sanmenxia reservoir project put Yongle town, the palace's original site, inside the area to be flooded, and between 1958 and 1966 the halls and their paintings were taken down and rebuilt on the site of the capital of the Western Zhou state of Wei. The operation was authorised by Premier Zhou Enlai and funded with more than 2.2 million yuan from the Ministry of Water Resources. The palace had been a national key cultural relics protection unit since 4 March 1961, in the middle of the work, and on 28 October 1998 it was placed on the World Cultural Heritage tentative list.