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Such a couplet would be stranger indeed at an urban temple or at a mountain monastery.
Jiang looked to Yao religious architecture as further evidence of Han influence. The important point for him is that the temples and everything inside them were made by Han craftsmen.37 Lemoine makes a similar point about the scriptures and paintings used by Yao in Laos and Thailand: “The Yao were probably taught the art of painting at the same time as they learned calligraphy…. But, as in the reproduction of liturgical books, the Yao must often have been obliged to rely on Chinese painters.”38 Lemoine then relates the following anecdote about an amateur Chinese painter that he met while in Laos:
When the artist was Chinese, he might well have been also a kind of ‘weekend amateur’ painter. When I was in Luang Prabang in Laos, some ten years ago, I knew a petty Chinese peddler who used to settle himself, for months at a time when business was slow, in a Yao village near Vang Vieng. In this area, predominantly populated by lowland Laotians and others, stood a group of three Yao villages which had been there for about forty years, and formed, as it were, a kind of demographic and cultural island. In spite of the villagers’ attachment to their traditions and culture, their isolation increased the difficulty of securing proper training in the Chinese script for their children, and proper rituals by qualified High Masters for themselves. The nearest qualified High Master for a tou sai ceremony had to be fetched from a neighboring province, at five days distance on foot and by boat. It was thus a great advantage for them to have an itinerant Chinese copyist and teacher on the spot. When this man announced that he could also reproduce their sacred paintings and books, a family commissioned him to copy a number of rituals and a series of paintings. A son of the family became his apprentice; and this young man learned so well that, when his teacher left, he could paint unaided from the originals already in the house.39