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Endangered temple wall-paintings in Shanxi, China
The remote villages of China's Shanxi province are home to numerous Buddhist and Daoist temples containing undocumented wall-paintings and temple art. Many of these earthen and timber buildings are falling into ruin and others have been targeted by thieves.
There is an urgent need to undertake a more comprehensive survey of Shanxi's temples, both to record material before it is lost and to use as a platform in future research and conservation. We are therefore delighted to have received generous funding from Arcadia - a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, for a four-year programme of survey work that started in 2018.
We have started publishing 3D models of the temples on Sketchfab.
Our Study Tour before the project's start informed our work programme for coming years and initial pilot study that took place in China in May, 2018, created an agreed set of workflows with our partners. As we move to the main activities of the project, the data from more sites will be made live. The work will eventually result in the open-source publication of a digital archive of wall-paintings and building plans.
The images presented here, prepared in the 2017 scoping survey, give an idea of what we will be working on.
One of the Ming Dynasty (Wanli period) wall paintings in the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas
The scene, showing a ritual libation, has been badly defaced by recent graffiti.
View of the interior of one of the rooms of the Guanyin temple
It shows wall paintings as well as the temporary works that are preventing wall-collapse