Cult architecture of Buryatia, Mongolia and Manchuria in the photo album of military orientalist M.A. Polumordvinov (early XX century)

This article presents study results of the M.A. Polumordvinov's photo collection. Mikhail Arkadyevich Polumordvinov (1867-1917) is a military orientalist, a member of the Russian Orientalist Society in Harbin. He served in Zabaikal'e since 1898, in Manchuria in 1903-1915, and now the Tomsk Regional Museum keeps its cult and pictorial collections. Polumordvinov's photo collection includes photographs of temples, military maneuvers, ethnographic portraits, and this article examines 11 photographs of various 9 temples. These pictures refer to the beginning of the XX century and record following religious buildings: the Buryat datsan, which includes Tibetan, Chinese and Russian elements of architecture, the Islamic temple in Chinese style, the Mongolian temple in Chinese-Tibetan style, the Mongolian mountain temple in Chinese style with one Tibetan-style building; the Taoist temples in Chinese style (Manchuria): the state temple of the god Guandi, the temple of the ancestors, the village's joss-house, the state chapel, the temple complex. In this article maximum attention is paid specifically to temple buildings, details of the descriptions of people and animals are omitted. The aim of article is to examine stylistic features of religious architecture, and its novelty is due to the introduction into scientific circulation of previously unpublished photographs and data on them. Photographs were digitized and investigated as part of a research grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research in the humanities and social sciences for the project “Forerunners of Eurasian Integration in the Mirror of Museum Funds” (No 17-11-70007). The article describes design and decoration of temples, taking into account belonging to a particular architectural style (Chinese, Tibetan, Buryat, mixed); contains texts of Russian inscriptions on pictures back side of photos and translations of Chinese inscriptions on front side of photos, qualitatively complementing information of images. Also here is a fragment from Polumordvinov's article “Monasteries of Chjerim Seim of Northeastern Mongolia” devoted to differences of Tibetan and Chinese architectural styles in relation to Lamaist temples (the article was published in 1912 in a publication of the Harbin Society of Russian Orientalists). The article data allow us to consider similarities and differences in the cult architecture of different peoples and denominations, the dominant Chinese and Tibetan styles, and also determine closeness of the Asian peoples of Russia and abroad not only a sign of confession, but also a sign of architectural aesthetics.

Keywords

Authors

References