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 collection is 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 printing plant of the Lewiston Tribune, having stood for nearly ninety years. ‘Beuk Aie / Buck Eye / Bok Kai’ are Cantonese and Taishanese transliterations of Beidi (the Northern Emperor); the Idaho Historical Society's ‘Chinese File’ photograph archive consistently records it as the ‘Bok Kai Mui Joss House’ (i.e. Beidi Temple), independently corroborating CINARC's account. Surviving ritual implements likewise invoke the imperial title — a couplet of 1888 reads ‘The Emperor's virtue extends afar, its grace flowing to distant lands; the deity's power ever manifest, its radiance illuminating barbarian realms,’ and a horizontal plaque of 1889 reads ‘The Emperor's virtue spreads wide.’ However, the deity's name must be distinguished from the temple's formal designation: according to CINARC's research, the formal temple name inscribed on its lintel and ritual texts was in fact ‘Liesheng Gong (Temple of Many Saints),’ making it a multi-deity temple; the five deity tablets behind the central shrine were Beidi, Guandi, Guanyin, the God of Wealth, and Hua Tuo, and the arrangement did not treat Beidi as the sole central deity — a pattern identical to that of the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, California. It should be noted that the doubts raised by Chace and Eberhard about ‘the principal deity having originally been a local river-named water god’ concern the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, and online summaries often misattribute this to the present temple; the two should not be confused. The temple's surviving furnishings were first moved to a stone house at 522 C Street in 1959, and were accessioned into the Lewis-Clark Center for Arts and History in Lewiston in 1991; they went on display in October 1994, were reinstalled in 2012–2013 alongside the shrine of the Hip Sing Tong in the same room, and were described by the National Endowment for the Humanities as among the best-preserved surviving Chinese temple collections in the United States; under a 2021 memorandum, they were transferred to the Nez Perce County Historical Society in 2025. The coordinates given for this entry mark the current location of the surviving collection (the Center for Arts and History, 415 Main St), not the temple's original site — C Street, where the original site stood, no longer exists and cannot be reliably located. Notably, of the seven surviving dated artifacts, 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 1887 massacre of thirty-four Chinese miners at Hells Canyon.

Highlights

• Built before 1875; demolished in 1959
• Popularly called the ‘Bok Kai Temple,’ though its formal name was in fact ‘Liesheng Gong’
• Its surviving collection is among the best-preserved Chinese temple collections in the United States
• Concentrated donations between 1888 and 1890 are thought to be linked to the Hells Canyon massacre