You are in for a treat! I just spent three hours exploring temple murals from Northern China.

For the essay I wrote in the Journal of Daoist Studies (2019) on Zhang Sanfeng and his relationship to Tai Chi, the Golden Elixir and theater, I included a citation from Hannibal Taubes’ website. The citation was about the ubiquity of Zhen Wu (Perfected Warrior) City Wall Temples across Northern China. My editor at the JDS suggested I use a specific published work instead. I lost most of the fights with my editor, but that one I won because Taubes website is simply the best source in existence on the subject. Readers may recall that Zhen Wu is the god that taught the Immortal Zhang Sanfeng how to do Tai Chi in a dream.

The awesome Stephen Jones, expert on Daoist Music, who brought an incredible Daoist Processional Band to a conference in Paris eighteen months ago, has a write up of Hannibal Taubes’ latest work on his blog.

One of the things that makes this project wonderful is that it was crowd-funded outside of any institutional support. Once he was on his way, he got help from Vincent Durand-Dastès whose work also crosses mine (he studies theater/ritual/comedy and its historical relationships to authentic Daoist practice, most of his work is in French).
I could write about this project more, and perhaps I will, but you might as well get over there yourself and check it out. This is a good place to start, it organizes everything into categories.

There is some interesting stuff in his notes, like that some temples had dueling stages! Two stages that faced each other. Theater troupes would put on shows at the same time or perhaps alternating, in which they would compete for audience attention.

In my new book, I present six examples of different types of rituals which likely had some form of highly skilled martial Nezha performer as a possible source for Baguazhang. Several of those rituals are mentioned in the Temple Trash notes. Dragon King temples are one of the most common temple types he encountered and also the site of one of the rituals I describe in the book. Seems it would have been great to get some of these pictures in my book! Oh well, next time… enjoy.