Yongle Palace

Yongle Palace, also known as the Palace of Eternal Joy, is a Yuan-dynasty Taoist temple complex on the east side of Longquan Village, about 3 km north of Ruicheng County town in Yuncheng, southern Shanxi, China. Its buildings were dismantled and moved to the present site in the 1950s to escape flooding from the Sanmenxia reservoir, and the relocation preserved the murals intact. The complex is celebrated for its wall paintings, which cover the interiors of several halls and rank among the finest surviving examples of Yuan-era mural art in China. The most famous is the Chaoyuan Tu (Homage to the Origin) in the Sanqing Hall, a vast procession of deities with flowing robes and fine line work that wraps around the walls. Other halls, including the Chunyang Hall and the Chongyang Hall, hold narrative scenes from the lives of Taoist immortals. Visitors move along a straight axis through a gate and four main halls set in a quiet courtyard garden, with time best spent looking closely at the murals and the architectural details of the halls. A visit takes about one and a half to two hours. Lighting inside is dim and photography is typically restricted to protect the pigments, so a small torch is not permitted but patience helps. Weekday mornings are quiet, whereas holidays bring tour groups. Ruicheng lies about one and a half hours by car south of Yuncheng over the Zhongtiao Mountains, so most visitors arrive by chartered car or Didi from Yuncheng.