Chinese Stone Lions, Temple Relics, and Fertility Belief in Rural China: A Dragon King Temple Object Record from Jiepai, Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about Chinese stone lions, temple relics, fertility belief, sacred-object memory, and the domestic afterlife of religious material culture in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in material religion, vernacular religion, Chinese folklore, object biography, sacred objects studies, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, temple memory, and local history. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “The Stone Lion of the Dragon King Temple,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents the remembered afterlife of a surviving stone lion from the former Dragon King Temple near the Hongdeng ginkgo tree in Jiepai, Danyang, Jiangsu, China. It follows a temple object from religious space into family space, domestic storage, childhood play and strength practice, near-forgetting, rediscovery, and later reclassification as a final remnant of the former Dragon King Temple. The record’s value lies in Chinese stone lions, temple relics, sacred objects, fertility belief, material religion, vernacular religion, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, temple memory, object biography, and local history. It preserves how a religious object can move through ritual, domestic, bodily, mnemonic, and archival meanings across a changing rural-industrial township world. Methodologically, this item combines the Archive Author’s childhood memory, family oral transmission, direct object memory, recent rediscovery, later questioning of the author’s father, author annotations, and private photographic documentation. The annotations distinguish childhood fact, family recollection, object history, uncertain earlier transmission, authorial wording, and provenance boundaries. A key feature of the record is the object’s changing status. The stone lion appears first as a temple object, then as a fertility-related household object said to help produce sons, then as an ordinary stone figure in the author’s childhood environment, then as a makeshift weight for exercise, and finally as a surviving relic of the former Dragon King Temple. The item is therefore useful for studying the domestic afterlife of sacred objects and the movement of religious material culture through rural social transformation. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20847659. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include current-site photographs, object photographs, precise location maps, raw spatial materials, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.