In the late 1950s, China's state planners drew a reservoir on a map, and the water it would hold was set to cover Yongle Palace entirely. The complex had stood on its original site since construction began in 1247, growing over more than a century into one of the three major ancestral temples of Quanzhen Taoism, its halls carrying nearly a thousand square meters of Yuan dynasty mural painting judged by later art historians to be among the finest surviving work of its kind in China.
Demolishing it and starting over was never seriously considered as the answer. Between 1959 and 1965, workers dismantled the entire palace, wall paintings included, and reassembled it roughly two kilometers north of the Ruicheng county seat in Shanxi Province, outside the reservoir's flood line. Moving a mural is not like moving a painting on canvas; the images are fused to the plaster of the wall itself, so relocating the Chongyang Hall's forty nine panels meant finding a way to detach centuries old painted plaster from its original wall without destroying the paint layer, then remounting it intact on a new wall built to receive it.
That six year salvage effort succeeded well enough that the murals are studied today essentially as they stood in 1358, the relocation itself now a minor footnote rather than a visible scar on the work. It is a reminder that a devotional artwork's survival can depend as much on a mid twentieth century engineering decision as on the piety of the century that made it.