This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Stand at the center of the Sanqing Hall and the walls do not present a single scene so much as an event still in progress. Nearly three hundred figures move along the four walls and the screen wall in one continuous hierarchical procession, converging toward Yuanshi Tianzun, the Primordial Celestial Venerable, one of the Three Pure Ones at the summit of the Taoist pantheon. Eight principal deities, each painted close to three meters tall, anchor the composition; around them flow celestial officials, planetary and stellar spirits, immortals, guardians and attendants, ranked by size, position and the elaborateness of their dress in a visual grammar that a viewer is meant to read as clearly as a written hierarchy.
A recent iconological study of the mural argues that even the deities' headwear is doing structural work rather than decorative work: four distinct categories of crown, from the elaborate mian crown down through phoenix crowns, jinxian crowns and floral crowns, map directly onto rank within the assembly, so that a worshipper who could not read could still tell at a glance who outranked whom by looking at what sat on each figure's head. The same study places the mural's brushwork and color palette, dominated by blues and greens with flowing, continuous drapery lines, as a direct continuation of a painting tradition running back through the Song and Tang dynasties, adapted here to Yuan dynasty circumstances rather than invented from nothing.
The mural was completed within a single documented year, 1325, an extraordinary pace for a work of this scale that all but requires a coordinated workshop rather than one or two painters working alone. The temple's own inscription names two of them, a father and son from Luoyang. It does not name the rest.