Beuk Aie Temple, Lewiston刘易斯顿北帝庙（列圣宫）

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

United States · Idaho · Lewiston · The original site was in Lewiston’s Chinatown; the surviving objects are now held at the Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts and History

Coordinates

46.42164, -117.0282 Map ↗

First built

1870 · First built in 1870 at the corner of First Street and B Street; moved to 513 C Street in 1890; demolished in 1959

Overview

The Beuk Aie Temple was one of the largest Chinese temples in the interior Northwest. First built in 1870 at the corner of First Street and B Street, it moved to 513 C Street in 1890 and was demolished in 1959 for the plant of the Lewiston Tribune, having stood for nearly ninety years. “Beuk Aie / Buck Eye / Bok Kai” are Cantonese and Taishanese transcriptions of Beidi, the Northern Emperor; the Idaho State Historical Society’s “Chinese File” photograph archive consistently records it as the “Bok Kai Mui Joss House” (that is, the Beidi Temple), independently corroborating CINARC’s account. Surviving ritual objects likewise use the imperial title — a couplet of 1888 reads “The Emperor’s virtue reaches afar, its grace flowing to foreign lands; the deity’s numen is ever manifest, its radiance illuminating barbarian realms,” and a horizontal plaque of 1889 reads “The Emperor’s virtue is broadly bestowed.” The name of the deity must, however, be distinguished from the formal designation of the temple: according to CINARC’s research, the formal temple name inscribed on its lintel and in its ritual texts was in fact “Liesheng Gong (Temple of Many Saints),” a multi-deity temple; the five deity tablets behind the central altar were Beidi, Guandi, Guanyin, the God of Wealth and Hua Tuo, and the arrangement did not treat Beidi as the sole centre — exactly the same relation of name to reality as at the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, California. It should be noted that the doubts raised by Chace and Eberhard as to whether “the principal deity was originally a local water god named after the river” concern the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville; online summaries often misattribute them to the present temple, and the two must not be confused. The temple’s surviving objects were first moved in 1959 to a stone house at 522 C Street, were accessioned in 1991 into the Lewis-Clark Center for Arts and History in Lewiston, went on display in October 1994, and were reinstalled in 2012–2013 in the same room as the altar of the Hip Sing Tong; the National Endowment for the Humanities has called them one of the best-preserved surviving Chinese temple collections in the United States. Under a memorandum of 2021 they were transferred in 2025 to the Nez Perce County Historical Society. The coordinates given for this entry mark the present location of the surviving objects (the Center for Arts and History, 415 Main St), not the original site of the temple — the C Street on which the temple stood no longer exists and cannot be reliably located. It is worth noting that of the seven surviving dated objects, five were donated in a concentrated period between 1888 and 1890, with more than 550 donors contributing a total of $925.75 — at a time when the entire Chinese population of Idaho was only about two thousand. Researchers infer that this was a collective religious response to the massacre of thirty-four Chinese miners at Hells Canyon in 1887.

Highlights

• First built in 1870; demolished in 1959
• Popularly called the Beuk Aie Temple, though its formal name was in fact the “Liesheng Gong”
• Its surviving objects are among the best-preserved Chinese temple collections in the United States
• The concentrated donations of 1888–1890 are thought to be linked to the Hells Canyon massacre