Bok Kai Temple (former site on Front Street), Marysville马里斯维尔北溪旧庙遗址

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

United States · California · Marysville · Originally on Front Street (a street that no longer exists), about half a mile from today's Bok Kai Temple, in the floodplain outside the Feather River levee; no above-ground remains of the site survive.

Coordinates

39.1394, -121.5936 Map ↗

First built

Early 1850s (one account gives 1852) / rebuilt in 1854 · Destroyed by flood, generally dated to 1866; in March 1880 the community built a new temple at the present site (the corner of D and First Streets).

Overview

This entry concerns the predecessor of the Bok Kai Temple. Marysville lies at the confluence of the Yuba and Feather Rivers; in the 1850s it was California's third-largest Chinatown, its residents drawn mainly from the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong, numbering five to six thousand at its height, with organizations including the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, the Chee Kung Tong, and the Hip Sing Tong. Chinese residents built a temple on Front Street in the early 1850s, rebuilt in 1854 — one of the earliest Chinese temples in California; because the temple site lay in a floodplain outside the levee, it was destroyed in a great flood, generally dated to 1866. This temple, like the surviving Bok Kai Temple today, belonged to the 'Liesheng Gong' type of multi-deity temple, its principal deity Beidi (the Emperor of the Dark Heaven), who governs water conservancy and controls flood and fire — a belief with an intensely practical basis for a community living in a floodplain. A pair of plaques dated to the fifth year of the Tongzhi era (1866) preserved in today's Bok Kai Temple are among the earliest dated Chinese temple artifacts known in North America, though whether they originate from the old temple remains unsettled. The name 'Bok Ky/Bok Kai' first appears in the press in the Marysville Daily Appeal of March 23, 1880; scholars presume the community's actual usage of the name predates this. It should be noted: Paul Chace and the sinologist Wolfram Eberhard once speculated that 'Bok Kai Temple' originally referred to a local river deity, not necessarily Xuanwu; the editors of CINARC, by contrast, hold that the old temple was inherently a multi-deity temple, with Beidi as one of its principal deities among others — both views coexist in the scholarship. No above-ground remains of the old temple site survive today, and Front Street itself has likewise disappeared.

Highlights

• First built on Front Street in the early 1850s, rebuilt in 1854
• One of California's earliest Chinese temples, destroyed by flood (generally dated to 1866)
• Its principal deity, Beidi, governs water conservancy and flood and fire control, directly tied to the community's floodplain circumstances
• The new temple was completed in 1880 at the corner of D and First Streets — today's Bok Kai Temple
• No above-ground remains of the site survive; Front Street itself has disappeared