Shanxi Province is at the heart of China, and home to some of its richest architectural heritage. Covering an area of 156,000 square kilometres the Province is larger than England and Wales combined. Many earthen and timber buildings and temples contain wall paintings, witnessing Chinese folk religion, Buddhist and Daoist beliefs. Scattered over a large geographic area these remote village temples present a fairyland of Chinese traditional folklore. Many of these sites are endangered, and most are unrecorded.
Funded by Arcadia, a charitable trust fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the Shanxi Digital Documentation of Endangered Temple Wall Painting Project (SDDP) is a four-year programme (2018–2021) aimed at recording these historic temples and wall paintings using high-resolution photographic and three-dimensional photogrammetric techniques, and also including selective capture of multi-spectral imagery. These records will form an open-access digital archive of temple paintings and associated architecture, structured by a Chinese-English bilingual database.
The SDDP is a partnership between Zhejiang University, Shanxi Institute of Architecture Conservation and University College London (represented by two research centres within the Institute of Archaeology: the International Centre for Chinese Heritage and Archaeology and the Centre for Applied Archaeology). The programme of survey and research is guided by the Shanxi Provincial Bureau of Cultural Heritage (SBCH) and an international advisory board
