Shanxi, According to Lǎobǎixìng

The Cultural Revolution’s lasting impact on ancient Chinese religious and cultural relics

A friend invited me on a trip to Shanxi to photograph ancient outdoor theaters. In June, we trekked through Gaoping, Changzhi, Yuncheng, Fenyang, and Linfen. Once used for Shanxi Opera, many of these stages were later repurposed during the Mao era as community halls and revolutionary performance spaces. They’re scattered across the countryside. Almost every village, no matter how small, has at least one.

Shanxi is often called the “Museum of Ancient Chinese Architectural Art.” The province is home to more than 28,000 historic structures, most of them temples, monasteries, and pagodas. It drew renewed national attention after the video game Black Myth: Wukong featured four local temples. While there’s no single count of all temples, the scale is immense. Mount Wutai alone has more than fifty, and major sites like the Yungang Grottoes make Shanxi one of the most important centers of Buddhist heritage in China.

The province’s location at the crossroads of Silk Road trade routes shaped this richness. Centuries of cultural exchange left their mark on Shanxi’s architecture, while abundant stone, favorable geology, and varied terrain made it ideal for cave temples and monumental construction. Relative geological stability helped these structures survive. Many have stood for hundreds of years.

As locals proudly point out, around 70 percent of China’s surviving pre-Qing dynasty architecture is found in Shanxi. Only structures from the Yuan dynasty or earlier qualify as protected cultural heritage, which makes the concentration here even more striking.

That survival was far from guaranteed. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the Communist Party launched a campaign to eradicate religion as part of the “Four Olds.” Religious practice was banned. Temples, churches, mosques, and texts were destroyed. Clergy and believers were persecuted, and Mao worship was promoted in their place.

Theaters became propaganda stages, and temples were stripped of their religious functions. Many were turned into warehouses, schools, dormitories, or offices. Yet while I was in Shanxi, I heard countless stories of villagers quietly resisting. Some hid stone steles in muddy rivers and dug them up years later. Others plastered over frescoes or sealed painted alcoves behind walls to protect them from Red Guards.

In one temple we visited, we met an elderly preservation officer. As a teenager, he had taken part in the destruction of the site, following the political fervor of the time. Decades later, he returned to it with a deep appreciation and respect for the cultural heritage he once helped damage.

He showed us an old house in the village, believed to be the oldest surviving residential structure in China. Built during the Yuan dynasty, it is now being converted into a small museum. Until a few years ago, it was still occupied by an elderly woman whose family had lived there for generations. Next door lived another woman in her eighties, still farming and cooking for herself. The officer told us that farther from the highways, deep in the mountains, there are villages that remain disconnected from running water, electricity, and gas.

After 1978, as religious restrictions eased, temples were gradually returned to monastic communities. From the 1990s onward, tourism drove another transformation. Local governments built and rebuilt temples to stimulate the economy, eventually bringing the total number to today’s figure. Since then, Buddhist temples have gone through repeated cycles of commercialization and correction. Over time, these cycles have pushed temple management toward a more standardized and stable system.

Today, nearly five decades after the Cultural Revolution, spirituality has revived in China and temples have once again reinvented themselves. At the same time, a new government clampdown is underway, aimed at restoring a stereotypical image of the temple as secluded, solemn, and morally authoritative, and at shaping a version of religious practice that is socially useful and politically legible. In the end, the theaters and temples of Shanxi tell the same story as the villages around them: not one of purity restored, but of endurance through constant reinvention.