miao minge (庙名额)

Simplified Chinese. ‘Temple name inscribed board’. General term used for the —often downward slanted— plaque or tablet attached over the entrance gate at Chinese or Chinese-style temples (fig.), ancestral shrines, city walls (fig.) and imperial palace halls, which at the main entrance of the complex would typically indicate the name of the entire temple or site in Chinese characters, or —once inside a larger complex— would specify the name of the particular hall or sanctuary (fig.). The name is either written vertically, i.e. from top to bottom, or inscribed horizontally, in which case the logograms should be read as they were traditionally written in ancient times, i.e. from right to left (fig.), unless perhaps with a few modern temples, shrines or palaces, built after 1954, when the writing system changed from left to right, along with the movement from Traditional to Simplified characters. These name signs can be of any design, from simple and straightforward, to decorative plaques with elaborate frames or even shaped in the form of a scroll (fig.), an auspicious animal (fig.), or some other propitious item. In traditional script the spelling is 廟名額. 回