Yongle Palace

The Yongle Palace is a Daoist temple complex built during the Yuan dynasty between the 13th and 14th centuries, originally at the birthplace of the Daoist immortal Lü Dongbin in the small town of Yongle. When the town was slated for flooding by a reservoir in the 1950s, the entire complex — including the irreplaceable murals — was dismantled and rebuilt at its current site near Ruicheng, about 40 km from Yuncheng city.

The three main halls contain some of the most extensive and best-preserved Yuan-dynasty murals in existence: thousands of square metres of painted Daoist deities, celestial processions, and narrative scenes. The main hall, the Sanqing Hall, has a continuous wrap-around mural of over 400 square metres showing the Daoist heaven with more than 280 individual figures. The painting quality is exceptional — confident, fluid, and detailed in the tradition of the great Northern Chinese mural workshops. Photography is technically restricted but happens constantly.

things to do sight
A story
When the Chinese government decided to build a reservoir that would flood the original Yongle Palace site in the 1950s, engineers and art workers painstakingly cut the Yuan-dynasty murals from the walls in sections and transported them to the current site, where they were reassembled on reconstructed walls. The relocation of some of the most valuable medieval paintings in Asia, executed before the world had developed standard techniques for such work, was an extraordinary feat. The murals were moved between 1959 and 1964, and examination since has found the joins and patches, but the paintings themselves are intact.