Having not exactly been hibernating, I now find myself in what doesn’t merit the term of “sabbatical”. It’s partly that I’m beset by a lack of focus; while it’s good that I currently feel no need to inflict my ideas on others, it’d be nice if I had something to say. Still, this may come as a relief to some readers.
As to China, I remain intrigued by Zhang Zhentao’s review of my Gaoluo film. So far I haven’t found sources unpacking foreigners’ supposed proclivity for representing the “ugly” side of China, which is well worth refuting, seeming to imply that honest depiction of rural life is to be censored—but I welcome leads.
On my visits to Istanbul, while trips along the Bosphorus on the vapur ferry continue to delight, I’m ever more diffident about my random delvings into Turkish culture. One remarkable recent addition to the pleasures of the Kuzguncukmahalle is a little basement cafe where young Sufi singers and instrumentalists get together to practise the makam.
It is far from a literal translation of my English script—I was keen to adapt it to reflect the idiom and way of thinking of the Gaoluo villagers. So rather than the terminology of urban academia, we incorporated local vocabulary like lao guiju 老规矩 (“the old rules”: tradition), dangjia 当家 (“boss”), jiahuo 家伙 (percussion), wentan 文坛 (“civil altar”: vocal liturgy), and songjing 送经 (“escorting the scriptures”). In many ways I find it preferable to the English text—since the original English voiceovers are intact, it’s worth watching even for those not dependent on the translation.
The Chinese version is now available both (in China) on the CDTM website (follow this link) and on my YouTube channel (alongside the English version):
And do browse the posts under Gaoluo in the top Menu! Click here for thoughts arising from presenting the film at SOAS; here for an intriguing Chinese review; and here for a screening in Leiden along with my film on the Li family Daoists.
“Guying yu duju—Zhong Sidi jilupian ‘Zuotan: 1995 nian Nan Gaoluo cun yinyuehui zhengyue yishi’ yingping”, 孤映与独举——钟思第纪录片《坐坛：1995年南高洛村音乐会正月仪式》影评,Zhongguo yinyuexue 中国音乐学 2025.2.
No sooner had I surmised that Chinese audiences might not articulate the stark differences between my (inadvertently) ethnographic perspective and the sanitised, beautified portrayals from the Intangible Cultural Heritage (e.g. here; cf. Gaoluo film: a village screening), Zhang does precisely that.
The social context of Chinese folk musical cultures hardly appears on film. While I had blamed this on the ICH system since 2004, Zhang shows how deeply embedded is China’s history of romanticising and glamorising rural life. Despite Chinese scholars’ exposure to Western ethnography since the 1980s, his comments suggest that social realism has had little impact, and that the habit of self-censorship remains ingrained. I suppose the Party line is that while one may wish to film for one’s own research purposes, such scenes are not fit for public consumption: that we should draw a veil over poverty—over real life. In international visual anthropology the theoretical nuances of the film-maker’s “gaze” are much discussed, but this seems a particularly disturbing impasse.
Even Zhang Zhentao, who evokes village life in detail on the page, seems somewhat perplexed that we might want to display images of it. He finds the style of Seated at the altar consistent with that of my film on the Li family Daoists, and he might also have mentioned the DVDs with my two books on Ritual and music of north China. Playing devil’s advocate, he reiterates the simplistic notion that foreigners choose to depict China in ugly and shameful images, making the Chinese people “lose face”. He queries an apparent lack of “aesthetic” values (shenmei, where mei means “beauty”), adducing scenes from my films showing squalid streets and dwellings, shabby clothes, old women with bound feet, and the decaying architectural remnants of political campaigns. As he explains, such scenes are justified by the ethnographer’s search for “authenticity” and “realism”. *
To dispel China’s victim complex, it should suffice to watch documentaries filmed in India, Africa or Indonesia—and indeed on our own doorstep, such as De Martino’s films on taranta. But Zhang’s comments suggest that documentaries about other parts of the world have little influence in China.
As to fictionalised films, Zhang mentions the classic 1979 Abing biopic Erquan yingyue, as well as the movies of Zhang Yimou (and rather than the beautified images of Raise the red lantern, I much prefer the gritty realism of The story ofQiuju, or Jia Zhangke‘s depictions of small-town life). In between stand movies like Yellow earth or The old well (see here). While “underground” documentaries like those of Wang Bing, Ai Xiaoming, Hu Jie, and Jiang Nengjie, or the subaltern films of Xu Tong, boldly challenge the Party line, investigative Chinese TV documentaries show (or showed?) scenes of real village life, and brief unedited footage on Chinese websites and YouTube makes a useful resource. I wonder how Chinese audiences assess Sidney Gamble’s footage from 1920s’ Miaofengshan. Some non-Chinese scholars have issued documentaries on expressive and ritual culture in rural China, such as Chinese shadows, Bored in heaven, and the films of Jacques Pimpaneau (see this roundup). We might also adduce Ashiq: the last troubadour.
Politics: text and image It’s impressive that Zhang Zhentao broaches the issue of gaze, but he can hardly spell out another respect in which my perspective differs. My films complement my written texts—which though full of detail on the successive social and political upheavals of the 20th century (notably the Maoist era), attract little attention in China because few of them are accessible in Chinese (though see here and here). Politics is the elephant in the room, remaining taboo for music scholars within China; and among Chinese anthropologists too, few go so far as Guo Yuhua in documenting the ordeals of villagers under Maoism (see also here).
Text allows for more detail; film makes a more vivid impact. Whereas the film could only hint at the impact of political campaigns on ritual life in Gaoluo, in my book Plucking the winds I discussed this in some depth—such as the devastating national famine of 1959–61, of which very few images are available, by contrast with propaganda films on the supposed achievements of the Great Leap Forward.
Filming ritual and expressive culture In China, besides the official taboos on showing poverty and discussing politics, the study of religious ritual is largely confined to textual studies of pre-modern history.
Before the ICH (even during the Anthology era of the 1980s–90s), Chinese fieldworkers rarely had the wherewithal to film ritual activity; and even if they did so, such footage could hardly be published. I too filmed merely for my own research purposes, to enable me to document ritual activity in far greater detail than I could achieve through making notes, taking photos, and recording audio; my footage included all too few scenes of daily life, which significantly enhance a film.
Yangjiagou band, 1999
Shaanbei: scenes from Notes from the yellow earth.
My own films include scenes of lowly shawm bands at village funerals, a blind bard performing for a family blessing, beggars singing at a wedding, and a drunken folk-singing session in a poor peasant home. There is nothing sensationalist or demeaning about all this. If we seek to document rural Chinese communities and their expressive culture, how can we then ignore the conditions in which it takes place? Even if I could think how to sanitise, beautify, and idealise such scenes, it would never occur to me to do so. The social and historical setting matters, but is airbrushed in China. While I see the differences between my approach and that of the ICH, I have no intention of being controversial: I merely seek to document traditional ritual culture as best I can.
Gaoluo: ritual, “music”, and daily life In filming the New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo, my choices were limited, largely consisting not of any grand conceptual vision but of finding physical positions from which to frame the scene.
Knowing these villages so well, Zhang Zhentao seems both impressed and disturbed by my vignettes of daily life there—elderly people relaxing in the sunshine, Cai An at his general store, the family eating dumplings. Wearing their everyday clothes, villagers perform in simple peasant houses decorated only by pinups, or before the god paintings in their humble ritual buildings, with cigarette cartons and thermos flasks placed besides instruments on rickety wooden trestles—by contrast with the ICH format of presenting folk groups in fake-antique costumes performing on the concert stage or in tidy, arid government courtyards. Villagers smoke, they joke; they ride motor-bikes and use mobile phones. Social context is important; to censor the conditions of village life would be mendacious. It should go without saying that my films are made with the utmost respect for my village hosts, serving as a tribute to their resilience. **
“Music” Zhang Zhentao stresses the contributions that musicologists can make to ethnographic filming, but for me the challenge is the other way round. In reviewing Seated at the altar he focuses on the recitation of “precious scrolls” and the moving performance of the percussion suite—but I see these as inevitable components of documenting the entire ritual process. What I find significant is including scenes that may appeal more to ethnographers than to musicologists, such as (in Li Manshan) choosing the date and siting of the burial, the encoffinment, and informal scenes of the Daoists relaxing between rituals; or (in Seated at the altar) worshippers kowtowing and offering incense, or preparing the soul tablet for the deceased.
Zhang highlights the vocal liturgists’ renditions of the Houtu precious scroll before the gods in the lantern tent. Here he does well to observe that they had only been striving to recreate it in performance since 1993, at our behest; their efforts were less than ideal, and the future of the vocal liturgy still remains precarious. The recitation of the precious scrolls is most distinctive, but to me, just as crucial are the scenes that show their singing of the hymns that punctuate funerals and the New Year rituals, including The Incantation of Pu’an.
Similarly, while Zhang pays tribute to the visceral affective power of the percussion suite, I would also draw attention to the shorter percussion pieces that punctuate rituals. Still, the suite intoxicated me so much that over the years I missed no opportunity to film it during rituals, which taught me to find a suitable position and to zoom and pan at meaningful places. In China it would be unlikely to show the percussion suite within its actual function of ritual performance, but surely even Chinese audiences will find the result beautiful. True, in the Appendix that follows the final credits, our experiment with Cai An and Cai Yurun demonstrating the sections was one that might occur only to musicologists. ***
As to those final credits, Zhang notes the poignancy of the long list of performers, with their dates—many of them having died since the footage was filmed.
* * *
In sum, I simply fail to see how to evoke village ritual life, in either text or images, without providing social and historical context. Yet basic anthropological principles, that to us are self-evident, appear to struggle to gain acceptance in China—all the more under the current ICH regime. Because I’m so impressed by the work of my Chinese colleagues, I sometimes fail to register the constraints under which they operate.
Meanwhile at the Shanghai Centre for Ritual Music, Xiao Mei offers an impressive training in international approaches to ethnographic film-making, making me keen to see how they bridge the gulf—see my further reflections after my film won awards at the 4th Chinese Music Ethnographic Film Festival in Shanghai this July.
* And what if villagers actively prefer to be displayed in glamorous costumes on the concert stage?! So far I have no evidence that they are so allergic to displaying the conditions of their lives as are apparatchiks.
** Partly because I was reminded of the sad decline of revolutionary hero and vocal liturgist Cai Fuxiang, in the film’s funeral scene I included one tiny shot of the village’s only beggar at the time. I regret not chatting with him, because he would have added to our picture of village life, and our visit might have enhanced his self-esteem.
Cf. my sketch of the affable disabled ritual helper Yanjun in Yanggao, whose story I only gleaned at second hand (see under Yanggao: personalities).
In the film I allude to the Catholic minority in Gaoluo since the late 19th century, the 1900 massacre, and their re-evangelisation by Italian priests from the 1920s. Their continuing activity is a sensitive subject, but the scene of their brass band parading at New Year 1995 was so striking that it seemed acceptable to include it.
*** Cf. the complete shawm suite (with useful musical signposts in the voiceovers) at a 1992 funeral that forms the Appendix of my 2007 DVD Doing things.
Presenting my film on Gaoluo at SOAS the other day, and the following discussion, thoughtfully led by Rachel Harris and Feng Jun, prompted me to try and rework some of my thoughts.
My book on Gaoluo was published in 2004, the result of frequent fieldtrips ever since 1989, and it’s full of detail on the lives of villagers through all the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. But I then moved onto other projects, and I only returned to the topic recently, to compile this film from my footage of the 1995 New Year’s rituals, which makes a nice succinct subject—and already a historical one, as I say in the film.
I see ethnography and film as essential complements to library work on imperial history (see here). This kind of subject, though vital to folk society, can’t be addressed only by reading old books in libraries. Actually, the topic hardly appears at all in old books—it’s only revealed by fieldwork. Until the 1950s almost every village in the region had an organisation like this; and many of them still do. While I eventually focused on this one village, we also did a survey of over a hundred village associations nearby (see e.g. under “Hebei” in the main menu, including this survey).
Religion The whole topic of the Hebei ritual associations was only “discovered” by Chinese musicologists in 1986, and it has become a major theme within that discipline—but alas, not in religious studies. I think there are two main reasons for this.
First, terminology. These groups are now commonly known by the umbrella term yinyuehui, which seems to translate simply as “Music Associations”. But it’s confusing: in these villages the term yinyue refers very specifically to the melodic instrumental ensemble that accompanies the rituals of Buddhist and Daoist temples. That indeed was our initial interest, but it’s only one aspect of the associations’ ritual activities, their “instrumental department”, if you like. The term does have an authentic historical pedigree, but tous (both in the West and for urban-educated Chinese) it suggests an unfortunately secular image, like some kind of folk club for entertainment, which encourages Chinese attempts (both in the media and in academia) to downplay the pervasive role of religion (or “superstition”!) in folk society. So I obstinately insist on calling them ritual associations. Despite the gradual decline of vocal liturgy in the region, associations preserve many ritual manuals. And while the melodic instrumental repertoire now dominates, many groups regard these pieces as “scriptures”.
Apart from terminology, folk religion is a sensitive subject. There are some fine scholars in China, but they mainly write about earlier history and written texts, and are cautious about documenting events since 1949, or current activity; whereas we who study expressive culture incline more towards fieldwork. At least, scholars of religion could choose a few villages to clarify the transmission (whether “Buddhist” or “Daoist”) from early temple priests, and study early artefacts such as ritual manuals (not least the “precious scrolls”) and god paintings. While it may now be hard to establish a different image to that of the ICH (see below), the system has legitimised such associations, and they are not subject to the taint of “superstition”—even if scholars of religion may choose to exercise a certain discretion about the early sectarian connections that we documented.
These associations on the Hebei plain are devotional, priding themselves on providing ritual services for their home village without payment. Their ritual sequences are not very dense, but their purpose is to appease the gods. I again put them in the context of other manifestations of religious behaviour in China (such as sects, occupational groups of household Daoists, and spirit mediums). Like my film on the Li family Daoists (which I also encourage you to watch!), this film is set in the north; the soundscapes of the two films are similar, but their social contexts are rather different.
After the end of the main film, the Appendix gives some clues to the workings of the majestic percussion suite, ending with the most moving complete rendition. This is the most convincing illustration of the inadequacy of text, audio recordings, and photos, and it shows the villagers’ deep commitment to the tradition.
All this is a good illustration of how ethnomusicology is based on society and soundscape. Ritual in performance is always animated by sound, so soundscape should always be a major element in our study of ritual. Indeed, most local traditions of “Chinese music” depend on ritual—folk-song, opera, narrative-singing, and dance. One might compare the ritual groups in southwest China studied by Helen Rees, or “song festivals” in the northwest. In Uyghur culture, the pervasive role of Islam is masked by Party propaganda on muqam. The world music industry also remoulds “Sufi music” misleadingly to highlight instrumental music.
Conflict, and the 1949 barrier Politics and social change are major themes of my book and this website. It’s always important to break through the 1949 barrier. We must take modern history seriously. The story always continues, from imperial and Republican times to the Maoist and reform eras, adapting to the changing times. People’s life stories and personalities make a revealing human window onto history and social change. Stories like those that I document—amidst campaigns, conflicts, famine, massacres, thefts—are airbrushed under the current Chinese regime.
Unlike small occupational household groups such as Daoists and shawm bands, these associations are public bodies, which the villages cadres have always played a major role in supporting.
I’m always struck by this amazing image of a former monk training disciples in a nearby village in 1959 (see here, under North Xinzhuang), just as the devastating great famine was occurring—the famine is among crucial topics that can hardly be addressed in China.
Shadows in the field I could only offer superficial responses to Feng Jun’s salient query about how I positioned myself in relation to the people and events I was documenting. It’s a major theme of the book (and of a thesis in Chinese). I was most fortunate to have two excellent fieldwork companions from Beijing, who were totally on board with studying social and religious change. It’s most important to stay in the village, and to take part in their ritual life (neither of which is common for Chinese scholars). The villagers were open in replying to my questions, which Chinese scholars hardly asked.
I never thought of making films for the public domain; I filmed strictly for my own research purposes, and only realised later that some footage could be edited into watchable films. Our visits energised the Gaoluo association, while others were declining, but transmission was a constant anxiety of theirs, and a theme of our discussions. We can now see this as a precursor of the Intangible Cultural Heritage system.
The ICH Since my last visit in 2003, a lot has happened in these villages. They’re no longer so poor. Crucial issues, everywhere, are migration, social media, state education, and the whole emptying of the countryside. And there’s no escaping the ICH system, which has influenced many such village groups. Many authors have described how the system commodifies, secularises, and reifies local traditions (see e.g. here). It’s state propaganda; most “research” under its auspices is superficial. While my film, and the book, inadvertently make a contrast with the celebratory approach enshrined by the ICH, I’m perturbed that Chinese viewers don’t seem to articulate this; they can’t read my book in Chinese, and anyway I’m not sure they would care to dwell on my different approach. With recent Chinese fieldwork dominated by the ICH, it is hard to gain a more in-depth picture.
Although the system uses “music” and “culture” as a smokescreen to downplay religious life, it works both ways; for the communities themselves, it helps protect them, legitimise them. With the tenuous survival of these groups under question ever since the 1980s’ reforms, joining the ICH made a tempting expedient for the association leaders. And faith endures, with villagers using the system to their own ends; the Gaoluo association still does funerals, and villagers still offer incense.
The village’s Catholic minority (whose brass band took part in a “demonstration” on 1st moon 15th in 1995, shown in the film) makes an intriguing sub-plot in the story. In this whole area the relationship between “Patriotic” and underground churches has long been opaque, and without a prolonged stay it would be hard to further our understanding of the shifting scene.
As with my work on the Li family Daoists, the combination of book, film, and website is most instructive.
Towards a dynamic approach to material artefacts in diachronic social context
Further to my previous post giving background on material support for amateur ritual associations on the Hebei plain, I now focus on Gaoluo village, whose four ritual associations all preserve a wealth of ritual artefacts. Here our prolonged fieldwork allows us to “break through the 1949 barrier” by incorporating the easily-neglected Maoist era into the wider picture both before the Communist victory and since the 1980s’ liberalisations.
To remind you, both South and North villages have their own ritual association, now commonly known as Music Association (yinyuehui, yinyue referring to the “classical” style of paraliturgical melodic instrumental ensemble); and both villages have their own Guanyin Hall Association (or Eastern Lantern Association, dongdenghui), now known as Southern Music Association (nanyuehui, having adopted the more popular style of “Southern music”). But whereas the misleading term “music association” has since become standard in the region, note that neither the 1930 nor the 1990 lists of South Gaoluo use the term: both texts (like their 1983 gongche score) refer to “Southern Lantern Association” (nandenghui), the 1990 list glossing it as“sacred society” (shenshe). So to stress yet again, this whole topic belongs firmly within the study of folk religion and society, far beyond “musicology”. Do watch my film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo!
These two donors’ lists from 1930 and 1990 make striking exhibits, but the village’s other associations also suggest clues; having written about them separately, here I rework them into a diachronic account.
A common stimulus for creating new donors’ lists is the expenditure of replacing ritual artefacts (ritual manuals, god paintings, instruments, and so on); besides recording the contributions of named villagers, many lists provide detailed public accounts.
The 1930s For our main ritual association in South village, one such list, which we saw adorning the lantern tent for the 1995 New Year’s rituals, was said to date from the late 19th century, but alas it was so faded as to be totally illegible. Instead, most handsome of the ritual artefacts on display was the 1930 donors’ list—apparently the only surviving list from before Liberation that we have found in the region:
Now if we saw this list on the wall of a museum, it would have limited potential. But since the tradition endures, not only can we witness rituals, hearing the wind and percussion music and vocal liturgy before the gods; but further, the descendants of the people featured in the list were able to provide considerable detail, putting the initiative in the context of the Republican era in the region. To summarise my discussion in Plucking the winds and in Ritual images: Gaoluo, during 1930 both associations in South village undertook a refurbishment of their ritual apparatus—apparently prompted both by the brief restoration of peace in the area after many years of fierce fighting between warlords, and by competition with the renewed energy of the village Catholics.
The 1930 list, entitled Wanshan tonggui (“The myriad charities return to the same source”), commemorates the commissioning of a major series of diaogua hangings from Painter Sun of Doujiazhuang village in Zhuozhou county just north. It records 92 heads of households, surely consisting of most of those then living in the southern half of South village which the association served, though some were doubtless too poverty-stricken to be able to afford even a minimal contribution. For all the beauty of the list, many (including all the womenfolk) were unable to read it.
The donations, ranging from 6 yuan to 5 jiao, totalled 109.83 yuan; the cloth cost 24 yuan, the paintings 61.5 yuan, and other expenses amounted to 33.83 yuan, leaving debts of 9.5 yuan. Five “managers” of the association are named at the head of the list: Cai Lin, Cai Ze, Shan Xue, Shan Chang, and Shan Futian (sketches in Plucking the winds, p.54). As their descendants recalled in the 1990s, all were prominent figures in the village, some of whom were also active as ritual performers.
Later in 1930, in preparation for the following New Year’s rituals, the South village Guanyin Hall Association also made a donors’ list for the commissioning of twelve new ritual paintings, listing four “managers”, two “organisers”, and three “incense heads”. The paintings were again made by Master Sun; the 1990s’ members also say he made new diaogua hangings for their association. In the years before the 1937 Japanese invasion, one Wang Laoguo from South Gaoluo painted more diaogua for them.
Further suggesting the ritual revival of the time, the early Dizang precious scroll of the Guanyin Hall Association in North Gaoluo contains a section recopied in 1932 (the precious scrolls are introduced here, and for Hebei, here and here).
Under Maoism In the decades after the 1949 Communist revolution, many village ritual associations gradually became less active or ceased entirely. However, a close look belies the common notion that ritual life was in abeyance right until the 1980s’ reforms. For this crucial and ever more elusive period, material artefacts serve only as an adjunct to the memories of villagers.
With the new regime in its infancy, peace gave rise to hope for local communities long traumatised by warfare. Even as the collective system escalated, Gaoluo’s new village administration managed to embrace its traditional associations. The production teams used to give a little grain or other goods to support whichever association lay within their patch. The political climate didn’t dampen faith in village ritual associations: they continued to perform funerals and observe the New Year’s rituals in their respective lantern tents. Between 1950 and 1964 several groups of young men were recruited to learn both the vocal liturgy and the instrumental music; new gongche scores of the latter were compiled.
However, I doubt if the associations often dared hang out their ritual artefacts, and the atmosphere must have discouraged the making of donors’ lists. Our association didn’t make one between 1930 and 1990, but in 1952 the South village Guanyin Hall Association converted from their chaozi shawm-and-percussion music to the more popular style of “Southern music”. They invited the locally-renowned musician Hu Jinzhong from nearby West Yi’an village to teach them, giving him food and accommodation through the winter, but no fee, as ever. There was some official opposition to them learning the music, so the association sought no public donations; it still owned some land in the early 1950s, so it could buy instruments independently. Supporters merely “took care of a banquet” for the association, and no donors’ list was made.
The early 1960s From 1961 to 1964, in the brief lull between the famine and the Four Cleanups campaign, ritual associations revived strongly throughout the Hebei plain, training youngsters in both the instrumental ensemble and the vocal liturgy. The latter tradition was in general decline on the plain, with the elders of the “civil altar” dying off. In Gaoluo, the vocal liturgy of South and North village Guanyin Hall Associations effectively came to an end with the deaths of Zhang Yi in 1950 and Shan Yongcun around 1956. Only our South village ritual association had a group of keen teenagers who came forward in 1961 to study the vocal liturgy with senior masters. But elsewhere the shengguan instrumental ensemble increasingly came to represent the scriptures before the gods.
One might imagine the early 1960s’ revival prompting our association to compile a new donors’ list, but perhaps the leaders were wary of creating such a public pronouncement. However, in 1962 the South village Guanyin Hall Association used its 1930 list to add a new list of donors.
And in 1964 the Gaoluo village opera troupe, not inhibited by the taint of “superstition”, commemorated its revival in a donors’ list (composed by Shan Fuyi), with the 280 donors representing the great majority of households in North and South villages at the time. The list records the donation of c450 yuan in total.
For both the ritual associations and the opera troupe, the early 1960s were a cultural heyday such as they had not been able to enjoy since the early 1950s, reflecting the social recuperation after the famine afforded by a central withdrawal from extreme leftist policies. Little did they know that political extremism was once again to disrupt their lives still more severely; the optimism of their declarations was soon to look naive and hollow.
Since the 1980s’ reforms In the Hebei villages, as throughout the whole of China, the last two decades of the 20th century were particular in that their associations were reviving after at least fifteen years of stagnation—and even those that had been active until the eve of the Cultural Revolution had practised somewhat furtively. Thus they needed to replace a considerable amount of their ritual equipment.
In Gaoluo after the liberalisations following the collapse of the commune system in the late 1970s, the village “brigade” (dadui) gave 100 yuan a year to all the village’s main associations, which our South village ritual association spent on getting its sheng mouth-organs tuned. In the early 1980s they commissioned a new ritual pantheon of Dizang and the underworld, and compiled a new gongche score, but they didn’t yet create a new donors’ list.
However, the North village Guanyin Hall Association had a donors’ list made as early as 1981, to commemorate their own revival, written in elegant classical Chinese (text copied in Zhang, Yinyuehui, pp.128–9). This association had a reputation for observing the ritual proprieties, and preserved splendid “precious scrolls” from the 18th century, but their fine tradition of reciting them was going into decline even before Liberation. The first historical material on the list consists of four names (“transmitters of the ritual business”) from the 1920s. Unusually, having originally been a temple-based ritual association based on reciting the scriptures, they had diversified by adopting secular genres, acquiring opera in the 1930s, reformed pingju opera in 1951, “Southern music” in the 1960s (learned from their sister association in South village), and lion dancing in 1981.
The 1990s As the economic liberalisations gathered pace and communal consciousness was attenuated, many village associations that had revived found it hard to maintain activity. In Gaoluo the 1990s were distinctive for the renewed energy provided by our fieldwork (Plucking the winds, pp.189–205).
After our first visit over the New Year’s rituals in 1989, our association now resolved to refurbish their “public building”, which they had reclaimed from the village brigade after the collapse of the commune system. This initiative was led by the then village chief Cai Ran, himself a keen member of the “civil altar”. After writing enterprisingly but unsuccessfully to the Music Research Institute in Beijing to request funding for the project, they managed to be self-sufficient in realising the project, with villagers donating money and labour.
So in 1990 the leaders of our association invited Shan Fuyi to make a new donors’ list. His substantial text outlining the association’s history (see Ritual images: Gaoluo) makes clear that my visit was a stimulus for the project; still, it was written with no guarantee that outsiders would return.
The 1990 list names 270 heads of households. Still, villagers were becoming less conscientious about donating (see Women of Gaoluo, under “Rural sexism”).
From the 1930 and 1990 lists alone, we can hardly perceive change. The association still served the ritual needs of the villagers, and was still supported by most households in its catchment area. Without thick description from fieldwork and interviews, we might never know how ritual and social life were changing.
In the early 1990s there were several thefts of ritual artefacts in Gaoluo—but this served as a stimulus for the association to reclaim those that had been taken off by cultural authorities under Maoism.
The lantern tent of the South village ritual association, 1998, with new and newly-copied donors’ lists.
Our attention to the South village ritual association stimulated another competitive ritual flurry among the two villages’ other three ritual associations. For New Year 1990 the North village ritual association also had new ritual paintings made, of their own pantheon and the Ten Kings of the Underworld (for the donors’ list commemorating this initiative, see under Ritual images: Gaoluo). We also saw a more transient paper list of expenses from New Year 1992, pasted at the entrance to their ritual building, and already decrepit and hard to read by the following summer. They had received 690.47 yuan; they had incurred expenses such as buying coal, meat, vegetables, doufu, oil, salt, tea, firecrackers, tuning sheng, buying cloth bags for sheng, copying scores, and mounting ritual manuals and paintings—all conscientiously recorded. At New Year 1998 we saw their paper lists of income and expenses for the past year. Most of the association’s income had come from the hiring of crockery; donations had also been made when the association performed funerals (the rate being around 100 yuan). Some individuals had donated cash (one as much as 750 yuan), and the village committee had given 200 yuan. They had received 3,638.2 yuan (including 939.8 yuan brought forward from the previous year) and spent 2,992.2 yuan.
After the demise of the commune system, the South village Guanyin Hall must have revived along with the other associations by about 1980. Following our 1989 visit and the revamping of the ritual associations of North and South villages, they too had a surge of energy. For New Year 1992 they made a new donors’ list (image here) for the rebuilding of their humble ritual building, with this inscription:
The Eastern Lantern Association of South Gaoluo rebuilt its public building in 1992 AD under the People’s Republic of China, with the aid of the donors listed above. Total expenditure 2,984 yuan 4 jiao; 15 yuan surplus.
The list shows 215 household heads giving sums from 20 yuan to 2 yuan.
Conclusion In all, community support for ritual life had not waned despite successive social upheavals. But new challenges were taking their toll: migration to the towns in search of work, state education, and popular media culture. Since my last visit in 2003, Gaoluo has continued to be transformed—notably by the arrival of the Intangible Cultural Heritage system, which I will address soon.
Static, silent material artefacts are most instructive when we can use them in conjunction with fieldwork and interview, helping us connect them to changing social life, filling in the gaps, learning more about practice and personalities over time. This is where the ethnographer has an advantage over the historian. I wish we had been able to find yet more detail—for instance on the 1950s: how funerals were changing, how calendrical rituals became less frequent, the decline of the vocal liturgy, and so on. We were lucky to be able to consult people who had taken part in the events commemorated in donors’ lists; but as time goes by, fewer villagers remain who can recall the early years of Maoism, let alone the “old society” before 1949.
[1] See the index of Plucking the winds, under “donations and donors’ lists”; Zhang Zhentao, Yinyuehui, pp.116–35, copies and discusses all the Gaoluo donors’ lists. On this site, note also the series of articles under the Gaoluo rubric of the main Menu.
Stone, cloth, paper: economic support for village ritual associations
My new film on Gaoluo prompts me to revisit our fieldwork the ritual associations of the Hebei plain—a task further stimulated by the recent reification of these groups under the Intangible Cultural Heritage system. I now wish to outline economic support for such ritual organisations under the successive political regimes of modern times—”breaking through the 1949 barrier”.
First, in this post I expand on some themes from my survey of ritual associations on the Hebei plain; and in a sequel I focus on Gaoluo, where we found a wealth of ritual artefacts to accompany our prolonged fieldwork and discussions with villagers. Both essays are mere samples of the material we collected through the 1990s—please excuse the considerable overlap with many of my previous writings, both on the ritual associations and on Gaoluo. [1]
Introduction Living traditions of Chinese folk ritual provide a rich source of material artefacts dating back several centuries (cf. China’s hidden century). Still, they are mere snapshots of particular moments: one hopes to be able to augment them by fieldwork on observed ritual practice and the oral accounts of villagers throughout living memory.
In rural China, as everywhere, ritual and cultural life depends on moral and economic support from local communities. Patronage, in cash and in kind, depends on the nature and scale of the enterprise.Occupational family-based groups such as household Daoists and shawm bands (as well as individual intermediaries like spirit mediums) are paid for a particular event such as a funeral, and have successfully adapted to changing patterns of social support in the post-reform era.
In the religious sphere, alongside local temples, the composite term huidaomen (used pejoratively by the Communist state—hui Association, dao “Way”, and men “Gate”) subsumes both ascriptiveamateurvillage-widedevotionalassociations and voluntarysectariangroups. On the Hebei plain, the two broad categories overlapped (see e.g. our notes on Xiongxian and Xushui counties).
Priding themselves on not accepting payment, ascriptive ritual associations have long relied on recouping their expenses through donations from the village communities whose ritual needs they serve. But whereas support for voluntary sectarian (as well as Catholic) groups remains grounded in enduring faith, the ascriptive associations have faced a particular crisis in the new economic climate since the 1980s.
Temples and temple fairs, ritual associations and the “public building” Temples have always been an important focus of community life, and in many regions they remain so, such as in south China (Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, and so on) and the northwest—although much research there has focused on the imperial legacy rather than modern change.
On the Hebei plain, temples were ubiquitous until the 1950s. Village ritual associations learned from Buddhist or Daoist temple clerics, or from other nearby associations that had done so, at various times since the Ming dynasty; they existed mainly to serve the village temples. But in a long process over the 20th century, temples were destroyed or abandoned; rather few have been rebuilt since the 1980s’ liberalisations, and still fewer have any regular staff apart from a temple-keeper. So the main venue for the reduced calendrical rituals of such villages became the “public building” (guanfangzi: Zhang Zhentao,Yinyuehui, pp.181–204), an inconspicuous building only adorned with god paintings and other ritual artefacts, easily stored away, during calendrical rituals on behalf of the community. Besides the long-term decline of active temples in the region, this may suggest insecurity among village communities through political upheavals.
Villages that have restored their former temples are in a minority, but in such cases the refurbished temples seem to provide a greater focus, visited and tended more often, as in Gaozhuang (Xushui county) and two villages in Xiongxian county, Hanzhuang and Kaikou. Still, their annual ritual calendar remains quite sparse (see my survey, under “Ritual duties”).
Even once we recognise the importance of the “public building”, a major part of the duties of these associations is to supply funeral rituals at the homes of deceased villagers.
Donors’ lists Alongside the wealth of material artefacts that we found among the Hebei village ritual associations (ritual paintings, ritual manuals, scores, and so on) are donors’ lists (beiwen碑文), documenting support over the previous year, or for a major initiative. Displayed alongside the god paintings in the ritual building, they proclaim the associations’ support among their community for providing calendrical observances and funerals, symbolising the village’s sacred core. As Zhang Zhentao notes, local terms like beiwen and bushi布施 (“donating”) remind us of the living connection of these groups with the tradition of supporting Buddhist and Daoist temples.
More ephemerally than the stone steles of temples, the donors’ lists of Hebei village ritual associations are commonly inscribed on cloth; but many are even more perishable, written on paper, pasted on the wall of the ritual building over the New Year’s rituals—when new donations (often in cigarettes and tea) are recorded daily. Thus they might never be documented unless some ethnographer happened to be there to take photos at the time.
Throughout China, paper documents are commonly pasted up announcing temple fairs, temple inaugurations, and particular rituals; some of these may record donors and amounts contributed. Even for weddings and funerals, scribes record gifts. The donors’ lists of the Hebei associations are rather different, recording the names of household heads—thereby establishing them as members of the association not just for particular rituals but throughout the year—and amounts contributed. Since these associations were responsible for performing rituals on behalf of the whole village, their leaders sought donations from virtually every household. Besides a few more affluent patrons, most families could only afford a token contribution.
While village ritual associations were inextricably linked to their local temples, there is no direct transition from the stone steles of the latter to the cloth and paper memorials of the former. Most associations must have made donors’ lists ever since their founding, generally in the Qing dynasty or even the Ming, but alas they don’t survive. Even if they did, we couldn’t make a simple comparison.
For those Hebei temples that have been rebuilt since the 1980s’ liberalisations, we found a rare instance of a stone inscription listing donations on the back of the 1993 stele for the inauguration of the Ancestral Hall to Venerable Mother (Laomu citang) in Gaozhuang, Xushui county—led by the village’s ritual association.
Whatever the material on which such lists are written, the Hebei associations are mostly village-wide public bodies, perhaps encouraging them to openly display both their expenditure and the names of their patrons. Still, many of these groups have sectarian ancestry, so I wonder if such lists have been documented among sectarian groups elsewhere in China—leads welcome.
Lists of expenses Also often detailed on such lists is the expenditure of the association, justifying the leaders’ probity on behalf of their patrons. Expenses documented include replacing instruments or maintaining them (notably tuning and repairing sheng mouth-organs), commissioning new ritual paintings; buying other equipment (tables, pennants, incense, candles, lanterns, paper, food for banquets); “utility bills” for the ritual building or rehearsal venue (coal for rehearsals, oil for lanterns, electricity); and New Year’s expenses such as firecrackers. For example, again from Gaozhuang is a paper list of expenses from 1995:
Here’s a 1994 list of expenses from Kaikou village (Xiongxian county) for the revival of the temple and its association (Zhang, Yinyuehui, pp.140–43):
Beiwen with written histories Rather as temple steles from imperial times might also document successive renovations, some donors’ lists include brief histories. Some associations even composed separate histories, such as a 1990 banner from Xin’anzhuang, Renqiu county:
Was this prompted by some interest from county cultural workers, I wonder? It clearly constituted some kind of public declaration; but the preludes of some gongche solfeggio scores of the paraliturgical melodic ensemble, whose readership was limited to the performers themselves, also contain brief histories of the association, like those of Longhua from 1963 and 1980 (for both Longhua and Xin’anzhuang, see under Ritual groups around the Baiyangdian lake).
Intriguingly, the instances that we documented were written since the 1949 revolution. Under state socialism, did political anxieties now prompt ritual associations to proclaim or justify their history, portraying the tradition as “culture”, downplaying religion? Re-reading the brief texts that head some donors’ lists, I find them diplomatic, distancing the associations from sectarian connections, claiming a place within the official discourse long before the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This seems to complement the innocuous appearance of the “public building”, the easily-concealed ritual artefacts, and indeed the growing prevalence of the shengguan instrumental ensemble over the vocal liturgy.
Still, such histories can make a useful starting point as we compile more detailed accounts from villagers’ oral recollections.
Some further examples Apart from the Gaoluo associations (to be discussed in a separate post), Zhang Zhentao (Yinyuehui, pp.130–50) details donors’ lists from other village groups we visited on the Hebei plain. These include two 1992 paper lists from North Qiaotou in Yixian county (Zhang, Yinyuehui, pp.136–40; see my discussion here)—a donors’ list introduced by a text in praise of the association’s benevolent virtue:
and their list of expenses:
In Xushui county, on our visit to North Liyuan in 1995 we found donors listed on a blackboard:
Also under my page on Ritual groups of Xushui is material on the rebuilding of village temples in East Zhangfeng (§8) and Xiefangying (§9). Zhang Zhentao further documents lists from Zhaobeikou on the Baiyangdian lake, and Fuxin in Wen’an county.
Many of these groups were of sectarian ancestry—the North Qiaotou association derived from a Hunyuan sect, for instance. As I suggested above, perhaps this made their public proclamation of charitable virtue still more apposite, counteracting state suspicion of “superstition”.
Summary Static, silent material artefacts only provide snapshots in the life of these groups. They are most instructive when we can use them in conjunction with fieldwork, helping us connect them to changing social life, filling in the gaps for the intervening periods, learning more about practice and personalities over time, using the frozen material evidence to prompt recollections from villagers, building up a picture of the longer term. This requires prolonged familiarity—as we gained in Gaoluo, subject of the following post.
And to repeat my point yet again, whereas the topic was discovered by musicologists, it belongs firmly within the study of folk religion and society.
[1] For the Hebei ritual associations, see this survey, and many pages under the Gaoluo and Hebei rubrics of the main Menu. Besides my 2004 book Plucking the winds, as well as “Ritual music under Mao and Deng” and “Revival in crisis”, note in particular Zhang Zhentao’s 2002 book Yinyuehui: Jizhong xiangcun lisuzhongde guchuiyueshe 音乐会: 冀中乡村礼俗中的鼓吹乐社. Like his discussions of the “public building” and gongche scores (pp.181–204, 365–407), his chapter on donors’ lists (pp.115–80) is excellent; following perceptive discussions of particular lists, he analyses the material on pp.150–79, including the role of the local gentry in supporting ritual associations, and comparison with the opaque economics of the mercenary shawm bands.
My new filmon the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo has recently been screened at a grand event (billed as a conference) in the village itself, thanks to the enterprise of Wei Xiaoshi (CDTM) in collaboration with Cai Yurun, who has long served both as leader of the ritual association and the village. A detailed review of the occasion has just appeared on the CDTM WeChat site (click here).
I’m delighted that my old fieldwork companion Xue Yibing could take part—we witnessed the New Year’s rituals in the village together for the first time in 1989, and his careful fieldnotes on Gaoluo and other villages over the next decade were invaluable (see mainly under Hebei in main Menu).
Gaoluo: our first visit to the Lantern Tent, New Year 1989.
One of my sessions with village litterateur Shan Fuyi, displayed on his daughter-in-law’s mobile.
I trust the film was well received, giving younger villagers an opportunity to glimpse their parents and grandparents in the days before the reified commodification inculcated by the Intangible Cultural Heritage began to influence their practices. With sonorous speeches inevitably the order of the day, the constraints of the occasion made me nostalgic for the informality of our fieldwork. The very setting, in a revamped Party Committee office, suggested how material conditions in the village have improved since my visits.
South Gaoluo New Year’s rituals, 2025. Images: Wei Xiaoshi.
Still, the religious context has not been lost: the New Year’s rituals still attract the village faithful, and the association still performs funerals for them. But the authoritative Cai Yurun voiced concerns that ICH support still can’t guarantee the future prospects of the association—in particular the vocal liturgy (which has been in a wider decline on the Hebei plain for many decades). It would take a further period of lengthy immersion in the villagers’ lives to learn their true perceptions (perhaps prompted by the film) on social and ritual change over these last thirty years. My film didn’t seem to prompt comments on how significantly the ethnographic perspective differs from the sanitised media approach typified by the ICH, but Zhang Zhentao has now published an intriguing review on this topic. Inevitably, whereas my book Plucking the winds stresses the constant tribulations of such villages under successive regimes, the prevailing congratulatory mood within China discourages such an approach.
Enbedded in the review of the event, the performance of the percussion suite in the courtyard, while still technically accomplished, inevitably lacks the spirit of the 1995 rendition before the gods. I doubt that this derives merely from the official secular context of the event; the total commitment of masters of yore like Cai An and Shan Rongqing seems to have been diluted.
Above: the association with helpers, 1995 Below: members of the association with connference delegates, 2025.
The Chinese version of the film will soon be available both on my YouTube channel (alongside the English version) and (in China) on the CDTM website. And do browse the posts under Gaoluo in the top Menu!
Click here for recent screenings in Leiden of my films on the Li family Daoists and Gaoluo.
As I often stress (e.g. here), the study of both topics belongs firmly within the realm of religious studies, even if it has been dominated by Chinese musicologists. Sure enough, the distinguished sinologist Barend ter Haar graced us with lively comments, and I was delighted to see Tao Jin, formidable authority on Daoist ritual, on a visit from Beijing via Paris (see under Ritual life around Suzhou, and here).
With Tao Jin.
With both films concerning ritual life in north China, their subjects and soundscapes may appear somewhat similar, but the differences are significant (click here for differences in approach that emerge from studying with the two types of group). The Li family Daoists are
occupational, in a small group of five or six
active in a small radius around their home village; constantly busy, mainly for funerals,
with dense ritual sequences,
whereas Gaoluo is
among many amateur devotional associations, village-wide (cf. Xi’an, Yunnan, Jiangsu, and so on)
mostly serving the village itself, and not busy except at New Year,
its ritual sequences less dense.
My most focused fieldwork with the Li family Daoists was from 2011–18, with previous trips in 1991–2 and 2001–3; the film mainly shows footage from 2011 to 2015. My fieldwork in Gaoluo took place from 1989 to 2003, the film footage showing three weeks in 1995.
While the impact of the Intangible Cultural Heritage on the Li family Daoists has been negligible (cf. here), in village ritual associations like Gaoluo it has been major—which makes the 1995 footage even more significant.
I look forward to introducing both films further to live audiences in the coming months. Meanwhile, do watch them online!
Under the current political regime in China, we may have doubts about the scope for in-depth field research; but in the sphere of musicology, grand compilations of previous work continue to proliferate impressively, such as a valuable recent publication from the Music Research Institute (MRI) of the Chinese Academy of Arts:
Zhongguo chuantong yinyue kaocha baogao中国传统音乐考察报告 [Field reports on traditional Chinese music] (ed. Zhongguo yishu yanjiuyan Yinyue yanjiusuo, 10 vols, 2022),
reproducing the MRI’s original fieldwork reports (mostly mimeographs) dating from the 1949 “Liberation” through to the eve of the 1966 Cultural Revolution. For each subject, lists of recordings made at the time are appended. For introductions to the compilation, see e.g. here and here.
Volume 1 is prefaced by an authoritative survey from the redoubtable Zhang Zhentao 张振涛. Scholars now delineate three periods in the modern history of Chinese music fieldwork: the Maoist decades, the Anthology (1980s–90s), and the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) era since around 2004. As Zhang reflects, after the fieldwork for the Anthology and its publication, we didn’t know if we still needed to read these pre-Cultural Revolution “field reports” and what value they might have. The majority of these traditions were, and are, embedded in ritual life—which maintained activity, at least until the Great Leap Forward, and again in the brief interlude between the easing of the ensuing famine and the 1964 Four Cleanups. However, the bulk of these studies focuses on narrowly musical aspects, so clues to social ethnography are in short supply—over a period of great change. Interviews were often conducted during visits by folk groups to urban festivals. Nonetheless, I am as full of admiration as Zhang Zhentao for the achievements of these early scholars.
If the political climate under Maoism had dictated a cautious approach towards ritual, the Anthology era began to hint at a more mature approach to social ethnography; but under the ICH such study is again being hampered by a sanitised patriotic agenda.
In my early years from 1986 visiting the MRI archives in Zuojiazhuang—then still permeated with the atmosphere of Maoism (see under Qiao Jianzhong)—I was immensely fortunate to have access to such studies, photocopying flimsy mimeographs, and I have introduced some of them in earlier posts. They formed a basis for the Anthology fieldwork after the liberalisations of the 1980s. These volumes have long been somewhat hard to find, so I hope they will now be more accessible—as long as libraries outside China can afford to stock the compilation.
Contents, vol.1.
Yang Yinliu 1950.
Zhang again stresses the crucial leading role of Yang Yinliu. Vol.1 opens inevitably with his iconic A Bing quji (1979, based on their long acquaintance before Yang’s 1950 recordings), and his equally numinous studies of northern instrumental traditions: Ziwei village in Dingxian, Hebei (1952), the Zhihua temple (1953), and Xi’an guyue (1953). Vol.5 also includes a report, new to me, on “musical life” in the rural suburbs of Beijing (cf. here). Several studies address Shanxi, such as two reports from 1953—on folk-songs in Hequ, north Shanxi (vol.4), and yangge and huagu (vol. 5).
Hequ 1953Shiban, west Fujian 1962
Vol.1 ends with the 1956 national survey of the qin zither scene led by Zha Fuxi. Vol.3 is devoted entirely to the extensive 1956 Hunan survey led by Yang Yinliu, and vol. 6 includes his insider’s study of the paraliturgical instrumental ensemble music of Daoists in Wuxi, south Jiangsu. Li Quanmin’s report on his 1961–62 survey around Fujian (vol.7) laid a basis for later work there. Vol.4 features an essay on issues in collecting folk-song and instrumental music; vol.10 ends with the 1963 handbook Minjian yinyue caifang shouce 民间音乐采访手册.
Vol.2 is devoted to narrative-singing: danxian paiziqu, narrative-singing in Tianjin, bajiaogu in Liaocheng (Shandong), the liqu of Pu Songling (a rare historical departure), the qingqu of Yangzhou, and Henanquzi.
Studies of the ethnic minorites also punctuate the compilation—such as folk-songs of the Dong and Miao people in Guizhou, and Baisha xiyue in Yunnan (vol.4); the lusheng mouth-organ of the Miao (vol.6), and Mao Jizeng’s 1959 pamphlets on nangma and toshe in Tibet (vol.5). Vol.7 includes further reports from Yunnan, as well as Hainan, and from national events showcasing folk dance and amateur musical life among ethnic minorities. Vols 8 and 9 contain 1958 reports on minority arts festivals, and vol.10 reports on opera festivals—including interviews with performers that give clues to social change before and since “Liberation”.
The era came to an end by 1964 with the tense political climate that led to the Cultural Revolution, silencing both traditional culture and its study until after the reforms of the late 1970s.
Complementing updates by Frank Kouwenhoven in the new CHIME newsletter (subscribe here, under Newsletter) on silk-and-bamboo music, I also appreciate two further field reports from him, again written in his communicative style. First he writes on huar 花儿 song festivals in Gansu and Qinghai provinces of northwest China. [1]
Part of the wider phenomenon of shan’ge “mountain songs”, huar has long been a hot topic in Chinese folk-song studies. With his late lamented partner Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Frank made fieldwork trips there from 1997 to 2009. Do read his substantial chapter
“Love songs and temple festivals in northwest China” in Music, dance, and the art of seduction (2013, soon also to appear on his website), which he co-edited with James Kippen—altogether a fine volume, with a particular focus on India.
In a rapidly changing society, Frank has recently embarked on a restudy, which he outlines with engaging vignettes in the newsletter.
Though huar (an umbrella term) has long been commodified, with leading singers recruited to regional song-and-dance troupes to perform on stage, [2] Frank characterises its local folk basis as part of “the universal triangle of music, sex, and religion”. As often, the study of such festivals should be carried out not only by musicologists but by ethnographers and scholars of ritual. They should also be incorporated into the thriving field of Amdo studies, [3] addressing a complex ethnic mix—Han Chinese, Tibetans, Hui and other Muslim groups, Dongxiang, Bao’an, Salar, as well as various Monguor-speaking groups. Under the current censorship regime within China, and for a region long troubled by ethnic tensions and poverty, one can hardly expect frank coverage of religion or sex—or indeed politics.
In 1993 Xi Huimin listed nearly one hundred festivals for Gansu and Qinghai (reproduced in Qiao Jianzhong, vol.1, pp.125–8); by 2013 Frank provided a map of 213 festivals in south Gansu alone (Music, dance, and the art of seduction, p.158). The largest and best-known festival is that of Lianhuashan. As he observes, the content of every festival is shaped by local needs and circumstances. Motives for attending include entertainment, contact with the gods, political affairs, and solving social problems, all closely intertwined.
Festivals are not merely places for pilgrimage, prayers, and chance encounters with strangers. They are major social events, combining markets, opera plays, disco dancing, kung fu movies, sooth-saying ceremonies, acrobatic shows, horse races, ritual processions of local gods, prayer sessions and a great deal more.
But the Chinese media
usually present these songs as a harmless form of musical entertainment, and often refer to the temple festivals in which they are sung as ‘hua’er festivals’, as if the songs are unrelated to the ritual settings, and void of religious connotations.
Still,
Some scholars who ignore or deny connections between hua’er and temple worship may do so not out of real conviction, but mainly in order to protect hua’er culture: religion is a politically sensitive topic in China, and in the past several local ritual traditions are known to have been forbidden by the authorities after details about them had been published in academic studies.
Frank also notes the Buddhist and folk-religious songs performed inside the temples, as at the Upper Bingling temple festival (pp.127–34).
As ever, it would be good to glean material on the maintenance of such local events through the Maoist decades (cf. Sparks). Even
during the Cultural Revolution, people went on singing at the risk of being arrested or attacked by Red Guards. Complete battles took place between hua’er singers and Red Army soldiers at Lianhuashan after the government had forbidden the festival there.
Frank’s chapter goes on to discuss courtship and sex, sacred singers in mythology, and fertility cults; power, authority and competition at temple festivals; and ethnicity.
Hornblowers at the head of the annual procession of the eighteen gods in Xincheng, 1997.
His recent fieldwork focuses on the festivals at Erlangshan (Minxian) and Xincheng. As in his earlier chapter, he notes how processions of the gods often result in violence. In Xincheng,
We recorded violence between three such groups at one spot near the south gate, resulting in bloodshed, chaos, people squeezing one another, and furious quarrels flaring up between individual men. A big police force had been kept on standby. It soon arrived on the scene, some twenty, thirty men including national guards, but they were unable to calm down the mob.
A bunch of daredevils had used their sedan chair as a weapon, pushing and chasing another sedan chair down the road. It was as if the gods themselves were taking up a fight. The dense crowd began to move, shouting, gesturing, and the assembled policemen were involuntarily pushed along.
Among recent changes on Erlangshan, Frank notes that some singers themselves now favour amplification:
It made their singing much louder, but obviously undermined the option for most people to join in spontaneously with a phrase or a couplet, precisely the thing that had made the whole tradition so endearing: the free-flowing exchange of lyrics, an ever ongoing battle of wits… Now, the person in a crowd holding the microphone would decide whom to give it to for a reply, with all others essentially being excluded from the sung conversation.
Frank also documented devotional songs in nearby villages. While musicological analysis is always desirable, I’m keen to see more research on the ritual aspects of these cultures in changing society.
In Minxian he also attended a grand stage show, illustrating the secularisation and commodification of local culture—leading nicely to his next topic, which I introduce here.
[1] Frank’s 2013 chapter includes a useful bibliography of works on hua’er in Chinese and English. Among publications are several surveys by Qiao Jianzhong (in vol.1 of his works), as well as studies by Du Yaxiong and regional scholars such as the folklorist Ke Yang. One should also consult the Anthology folk-song volumes for Gansu and Qinghai. Rather than the conventional rendering hua’er, I favour the form huar. Links to further posts on Gansu here.
[2] Among such “stars” of huar was Zhu Zhonglu 朱仲禄 (1922–2007), subject of several CDs (and tracks on the archive set Tudi yu ge); this documentary, though straight-laced, is representative of the official image.
I’m not exactly hibernating, but while I have various projects on the go, new posts are few and far between at the mo—so meanwhile do keep working through my previous ouevre:
The recent film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo leads to a whole series on the village, rounded up in the Gaoluo Menu at the top, starting here.
And for context, the Hebei Menu contains many more fieldnotes, starting here.
Apart from my own films, my You Tube channel includes playlists leading you to particular themes on this blog outlined on the homepage—a selection including
The qin zither is exceptionally well represented online, but I rather like my succinct playlist
And much more—do spread the word!
Meanwhile, to follow this update on Nicolas Magriel’s voluminous sarangi site, he continues to add precious material… (see also under A garland of ragas).
I’m trying to abandon the iniquity of Twitter by moving to BlueSky, so do follow me there.
“Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible”
At this time of year I like to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic by organising some of my more notable posts from the past year under particular themes. As ever, many belong under multiple tags, so below I make some whimsical choices.
Keeping company with my film on the Li family Daoists, most important is my *new film* on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo (Chinese review here). It also prompted me to devise a new Menu, and even a YouTube channel (with playlists reflecting my diverse tastes as well as my own films). For now I still resign myself to Twitter, but I’m posting on BlueSky too, so let’s all migrate there!
Homages to the genius of three friends who greatly inspired me:
You can find any posts I’ve neglected in the monthly Archive as you scroll waaay down in the sidebar. All this suggests that it would be a sensible New Year’s resolution for me to burden you with fewer of these ramblings—but first I plan a major series inspired by the Gaoluo film…
A substantial Chinese review of my new film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo has appeared on the WeChat public account of the CDTM 中国音网, headed by the enterprising Wei Xiaoshi—
Following CDTM’s earlier review of my book on Gaoluo and its audio CD, access to the film within China should clarify my emphasis on the ritual function of such groups on the Hebei plain, over a decade before the Gaoluo ritual association came to fame as their image was remoulded by the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Naturally, I hope the villagers themselves will be gratified to see vignettes of life in Gaoluo thirty years ago—many of them will hardly remember that era, and youngsters should be intrigued to see their grandfathers taking part in these rituals. As to scholars, it would also be good if the film finds an audience not only among musicologists but also in the fields of religion and folklore.
You can now watch the Chinese-subtitled version on my YouTube channel and here, and (in China) on CDTM (follow this link).
The amazing Hua family shawm band 滑家鼓乐班 playing the suite Da Yanluo 大雁落 for a funeral, Zhuanlou village, Yanggao county, north Shanxi, August 1992 (here).
From the DVD Doing Things with my book Ritual and music of China: shawm bands in Shanxi (2007).
The Hua band’s repertoire (“Ming dynasty bebop”) is heard on the ear-scouring CD Walking Shrill (Pan Records, 2004). Note also this detailed comparison of shawm bands with the qin zither, and this piece in particular! For more on shawm bands in China, see Walking Shrill, and for shawm bands around the world, here.
People like Li Wenbin and He Qing perceived no conflict between worshipping the gods and supporting Mao’s broad social goals.
My new film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo prompted a recent post on the tenacity of rural tradition. Still reflecting on my fieldwork, it’s worth revisiting my remarks in Plucking the winds (pp.277–85, with minor edits) on “belief”—referring to devotional village-wide groups like those of Gaoluo
By 1995, as throughout its history, the association had a patchwork of ritual artefacts made at various times over the last century. The previously bare and unprepossessing “public building”, once fully adorned, becomes a place of great beauty, a fitting backdrop for the association’s ritual performance. But since the 1980s’ liberalisations, unlike many villages in north and south China, and indeed nearby such as Niecun just across the river, Gaoluo has not sought to build new permanent temples.
What beliefs do such artefacts symbolise? Aside from popular belief in Houtu and the God of Prosperity, formidable He Qing, always a fine source for old traditions, said the association worships Dizang, god of the underworld, as the association is said to go back to “the Tang king’s tour of hell”. Members have often said this was a Daoist association, even that Gaoluo was a Daoist village. We must understand this in the context of a dilution of the term Dao, meaning simply ritual. The senior He Yi recalls a tradition that their [melodic instrumental] music was learned long ago from Daoists (laodao), for what it is worth; perhaps a priest attached to the temple of North Gaoluo or the temple of South village. In fact, where one can distinguish, their ritual manuals have a substantial Buddhist component, and they also claim to believe in the Buddhas (fo). Fo and Dao are often interchangeable in these villages.
Screenshot
Association members themselves do not generally worship, regarding participation in ritual activities itself as a form of worship. In fact, women are altogether more prominent as worshippers, despite being excluded from active participation in the association. Incidentally, the name “music association” (yinyuehui, see here and here) seems to be used less than terms like huitong 会统 “association” and zaijiaode 在教的 “those in the teachings”. Ritual function is paramount: in discussing the activities of the association, villagers also often talk of the scriptures, with terms like “taking out”, “escorting”, or “offering up” the scriptures (chujing 出经, songjing 送经, fengjing 奉经).
Masters of the vocal liturgy: left, Cai Yongchun; right, Li Wenbin.
As to the ritual specialists, while they practise the rituals with considerable intensity, few of them claim to “believe” deeply in the gods. This is a difficult area—my efforts to elicit insights often recall Nigel Barley’s bemusement in Cameroon. Genial Shan Yude, himself a member of the “civil altar” reciting the scriptures, recalled the previous generation frankly: “Cai Fuxiang didn’t really believe, he just learned the liturgy when he was young and got attached to it, like me; he was a Party member. Cai Yongchun believed—he didn’t join the Party.” In these cases there seemed to be a certain negative correlation between Party membership and religious faith.
But it was complex, for few sought or gained admission to the Party, but many more, including Cai Yongchun, were leading participants in the revolution. Anyway, after Cai Fuxiang’s decline, his belief in the gods, or the habit of ritual, endured, but that was not the cause of his later expulsion from the Party. And there were some people, whether Party members or not, who had no time for religious traditions at all, like Shan Yude’s own father: “He didn’t believe in any gods—he was always doing things for the Party, but he didn’t join.” But throughout the area we have found leading local Communist cadres preserving the tradition of reciting their villages’ ritual manuals. People like Li Wenbin and He Qing perceived no conflict between worshipping the gods and supporting Mao’s broad social goals. Whether or not they joined the Party, people’s commitment to the new society was just one element in their psychological make-up: there was no simple correlation between religious belief and identification with the ideals of the new society.
Shan Yude also claimed “Most people in this area aren’t so superstitious, but my grandparents’ generation was more devout.” This may be broadly true: on the Hebei plain, so near the modern ideas of Beijing, faith may have declined more over the 20th century—gradually, note, not abruptly upon Liberation—than in some more remote mountainous regions of inland central China. But again the point needs qualifying. As we saw, belief was already variable among the previous generation of ritual specialists, and continues to be so today. Cai Haizeng’s father Cai Fulü practised the rituals, but with no great commitment; but now, villagers say, Haizeng is a believer, certainly more than his father. Yude himself observed, “Cai Ran and Haizeng are more devout than me. He Qing also believed, but he had a lively mind.”
Yude even admits to not believing at all, like his father. Still, if so, then he practises the ritual with utter commitment: we should distinguish belief in gods and belief in tradition, in the morality of convention. Cai Yurun made a comment that reveals the new social tolerance: “whether villagers believe or not, it’s harmless”. Though it was only officially considered harmless after about 1980, under the Maoist climate of the previous decades private worship might have become rarer, but belief was hard to assess; after all, public rituals had persisted. Very limited scientific advances and an increasingly secular climate had only partially obviated the need for the gods, and people continued to feel vulnerable.
A facile comparison with Europe springs to mind. Regional variations in industrialisation and literacy may partly explain different levels of religious belief, but within particular societies, and between generations, the situation is uneven; north Italy may generally be less “superstitious” than south Italy, but young and old people in both regions may or may not believe. Our problem for China is to recognise variation and put the supposedly dominant control of ideology in perspective. […]
Cai Yurun pointed out: “The saying goes that when they’re folded away the god paintings are just cloth, but when they’re hung out they’re gods. Don’t pay too much attention to our bullshitting normally—as soon as we Open the Altar we’re pretty serious.”
The lantern tent, New Year 1998, with new and newly-copied donors’ lists.
On pp.304–5 I observed:
As to ordinary villagers, though there are more women than men offering incense, quite few of the people are elderly: young and middle-aged women and young men seem to be more active in this. Many pray silently to the goddess Houtu for a healthy son, or for the health of their aged parents; more generally, people pray for good luck and prosperity. One couple were offering incense for the safety of the husband, who is a driver—even for the most diehard atheist, recourse to divine help is particularly tempting on Chinese roads. The atmosphere is highly jocular as people enter the courtyard. As they go to offer incense and kowtow they look embarrassed, but then when they are actually doing it they become extremely serious. Then as they get up and dust down their trousers, they look all embarrassed again, and, avoiding meeting the gaze of all the onlookers, they leave the area, often going into the “temple”.
So in many such villages over previous decades, the driving force behind the maintenance of ritual practice seems to have become not so much “religious belief” (itself an alien term) as the “old rules” (lao guiju 老规矩) of tradition. Devotional associations provide ritual as a service for the needs of the community. Under “Note on sources” in my introduction to these groups, see also my articles “Chinese ritual music under Mao and Deng” (1999) and “Revival in crisis” (2010).
Besides groups like these, this may even apply to occupational groups of household Daoists such as the Li family in north Shanxi. With the Maoist decades followed by the assaults of popular media and migration, ritual groups in some regions (including Hebei) are now further vulnerable to the secularised commodifications of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. But it would be interesting if one could somehow compare communities further south like Fujian (see under “Elsewhere” in main Menu), where religious faith appears to be a still more pervasive catalyst for popular culture. And of course faith in the gods is still evident in the popularity of spirit mediums, pilgrimages, and so on.
I’ve just made some small but important updates to my early article Ritual life around Xi’an. Besides introducing the devotional societies there, urban and rural Buddhist and Daoist temples, former rain pilgrimages, the great Daoist priest An Laixu, the lifelong research of Li Shigen, and my own visits, I’ve at last added some rare film footage unearthed by David Badagnani—all the more precious for predating the flummery of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.
To help negotiate the new Menu, the page is now under “Elsewhere”—here’s a screenshot!
Note also the series on Shaanbei in the same Menu!
I wonder how the new Menu is going down… Under “Roundups” there you’ll also see Playlists. I’ve never even noticed that I have a YouTube channel, but now—with the stimulus of publishing my new film on Gaoluo there—I’ve begun the long process of creating new content.
In due course I’ll upload my other documentaries on Chinese ritual cultures. Meanwhile I’m gradually adding playlists to reflect some main topics of this site, so far including
This exercise might seem a tad nerdy, but I naively imagine the selection in the playlists may lead the listener [singular—Ed.] to the numerous posts in which I expand on them—hmm, I spend all my time going on about how silent immobile text isn’t enough, and I now find myself pointing out that film isn’t enough—No Pleasing Some People…
Now that I’ve supplemented my portrait film of Li Manshan with precious footage from the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo, I feel it’s time to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic by revamping the Menu.
Here’s an instance of the submenus:
With a personal selection of some main topics, I hope it’s now more user-friendly. It’s work in progress, and doubtless I will continue refining it in the coming months, so please Bear With while I edit links throughout the site. It may take us all a while to get used to it—do keep using the search box too.
YAYY, I’ve finally got round to publishing my new documentary on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in the village of Gaoluo just south of Beijing!!! Click *here* for the film and commentary—a page under the new Gaoluo rubric that now forms part of a totally revamped Menu. The film link is to my (currently small but perfectly formed) YouTube channel.
Along with the Silk Roads, that reliably popular buzzword, the Mogao Buddhist cave complex outside the oasis town of Dunhuang occupies a unique position in studies of medieval Central Asia. Having thrived for a millenium from the 4th century CE as a staging post along the trade and pilgrimage route, by the 14th century Dunhuang was a backwater—until its long-hidden treasures were discovered by European explorers in the early 1900s.
Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who entrusted many manuscripts to Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot from 1907. Source.
The manuscripts are written in a variety of languages, with Chinese predominating.
The soundscapes of society are important. Early caves like those of Dunhuang contain a wealth of music and dance iconography, much studied in China. Instruments * depicted there—mainly as part of ensembles—have been reproduced by Chinese scholars. Echoes of the medieval oasis-towns were heard at the court of the Tang capital Chang’an (modern Xi’an), venue for the first world-music boom (see here, and here). Yet early iconography and texts are silent and immobile (alas, the Dunhuang caves haven’t yielded any caches of A/V recordings!). ** And whereas Western performers in the modern tradition of HIP have paid attention to the sound and performance practice of medieval European music, within China attempts at recreation have yielded less palatable results (cf. Tang music), leaving too much at the mercy of the modern imagination—a bandwagon onto which composers and performers climb all too readily without undue concern for authenticity.
The unspoken issue of context deserves pondering. Early murals show idealised representations of the distinct social milieu of celestial musicians (apsara, Chinese feitian 飛天) before the gods; as in Europe, their function in a pious medieval society was far different from that in galleries and museums today. Similarly, modern sonic recreations are performed on the concert stage (cf. Bach)—a venue far removed both from those of the murals and from the diverse human contexts of traditional social musicking in ancient and modern China, whether sacred or secular.
Musical ensemble from Cave 112 (detail), mid-Tang, including zheng zither (front left). Source.
Doubtless thanks to a limited budget, it was a relief that Wei Xiaoshi adopted the modest rubric “Contemporary echoes of an ancient legacy”, making no pretence of recreating the medieval soundscape, thus avoiding the kitsch spectaculars that are rife in China.
Three accomplished solo performers performed in turn: the Uyghur Shohret Nur on rawap and dutar lutes with busy, percussive pieces from his hometown of Kashgar; the Amdo-Tibetan Ngawang Lodup accompanying his florid singing on mandolin (an instrument widely adopted in modern times by folk musicians around the world) and dramyin lutes—also featuring, to my distress, the notorious “singing bowls” (which “there is no credible historical evidence, whatsoever, of Tibetans ever having used”, in the words of Tenzin Dheden); and the innovative Chinese Wu Fei on zheng zither (whose modern version, FWIW, is remote from that seen in the Dunhuang murals) and vocals. They ended with an improvised trio that I can only describe as strange.
The audience didn’t seem to mind the tenuity of any relation with Dunhuang, ancient or modern. Rather, the concert made a pretext simply to admire the artistry of these fine musicians—from roughly the same part of the world, a millenium after the murals were depicted. Still, were one to present a concert complementing exhibits from the court of Charlemagne (e.g. here), it would hardly seem relevant to present traditional musicians from various parts of France. A millenium is a long time.
It was never going to seem suitable to air the topic of politics, but it was an elephant in the room. As Wu Fei replaced the Uyghur and TIbetan performers on stage with her polished conservatoire-stylezheng playing and vocal items, it might just have crossed one’s mind how Han-Chinese rule since 1950 has engulfed Uyghur and Tibetan societies.
Anyway, while research on medieval Dunhuang occupies its own niche, it’s always good to be reminded, however impressionistically, of the variety of living musical traditions throughout the ethnic bazaar of Central Asia, as they have evolved over time (cf. the 2002 Smithsonian festival, or this tasteful concert). For another Silk Roads concert at the BM, click here, and for a symposium, here.
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Photo from German Central Asian Expedition, undated (early 20th century): shawm and percussion accompanying pilgrims (cf. the Uyghur mazar). Source.
Putting medieval iconography and modern concerts to one side, I muse idly on the potential for documenting folk expressive cultures around Dunhuang since their heyday—from the 14th century down to today. So I look forward to reading the recent compilation Dunhuang minjian yinyue wenhua jicheng 敦煌民间音乐文化集成 [Anthology of folk musical cultures of Dunhuang], comprising three volumes on folk-song, “precious scrolls“, and regional opera.
The Dunhuang region today. Source: Google Maps.
Nearby along the Hexi corridor, household Daoist groups perform rituals—for these and other living Han-Chinese traditions in Gansu, click here, and for the cultures of other ethnic groups in the Amdo region, here. For the troubled history of the Dunhuang Academy in the 1960s, note volume 2 of the memoirs of Gao Ertai. For museums and soundscape, see China’s hidden century. Posts on the Tang are rounded up here.
* A personal favourite of mine is the konghou harp, whose rise and fall were similar to that of Dunhuang itself: following the early research of Yuan Quanyou, see e.g. here, here, and even wiki.
Konghou, Cave 285, 6th century (detail).
** By a considerable margin, this beats my fantasies of discovering ciné footage of the Li family Daoists presiding over the 1942 Zhouguantun temple fair, or of the first performance of the Matthew Passion.
Despite all its flaws, the vast Anthologyof folk music of the Chinese peoples remains an essential starting point to survey the ritual life and soundscapes of regional folk cultures. For the province of Henan, I’ve written posts on bards and spirit mediums; now, while bearing in mind the volumes on folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance, I’ve been skimming the Anthology volumes on instrumental music, where much of the material on ceremonial and ritual life appears (cf. my surveys for Fujian, Liaoning, and Tianjin, as well as Two local cultural workers):
Though the great bulk of the volumes consists of musical transcriptions (never very helpful in the absence of available recordings), and the quality of the textual essays is even less satisfactory than in many of the other volumes, clues may be found in the terminology for regional genres and names of bands and musicians.
While the early history of musical cultures in Henan is reflected in a wealth of iconography and excavations (for which, see further Zhongguo yinyue wenwu daxi, Henan juan中国音乐文物大系, 河南卷, 1996), the main material is based on fieldwork on living traditions. Major themes in the modern transmission of local cultures, always suppressed in PRC historiography, are poverty and the memory of trauma (cf. Memory, music, society, and Sparks). But the Anthology rarely offers glimpses of this submerged history; in the narrative-singing volumes for Hunan province I found some passages bearing on the famine around 1960 (here, and here), but Henan suffered even more grievously, and looms large in studies of the national catastrophe. *
Shawm bands By now we are used to finding the Anthology‘s most substantial coverage devoted to “drumming and blowing” (guchui), referring to shawm bands serving life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies. After the general survey (pp.9–11), the introduction to these bands (pp.29–35) preceding the many transcriptions is brief and formulaic.
Bands are commonly known as xiangqiban响器班, and the shawm as dadi⼤笛, often supported by the related wind instruments xidi锡笛 and menzi闷⼦. Many bands have added the sheng mouth-organ since the 1930s.
The introduction confirms the lowly outcast status of the musicians in the “old society”. Locals distinguish those who only play shawm (qingshui清水) and those who also work as barbers (hunshui混水). In Zhoukou municipality alone, 300 bands were documented at the time of compilation.
In sections near the end of vol.2, following introductions to the Song family shawm band of Kaifeng (a kind of folk academy for the state troupes) and the shawm band of Shibukou in Lankao county (pp.1422–23), brief biographies (pp.1425–35) contain further clues. Many of these musicians came to the attention of collectors through being absorbed into the state troupes, but any of their lives would make an illuminating in-depth social study—incorporating the history of Maoism, the famine, and the 1980s’ reforms.
Guanzi player, Tianshan village, Longmen, Luoyang Xun ocarina player, Puyang Shang Yuanqing on shawm, Neixiang Shengguan players, Xinzheng.
Chuida in Neixiang county, and Bayin louzi of Zhoukou Sixian luogu, Shangcheng county Shipan, Yima municipality.
Also subsumed under the rubric of “drumming and blowing” are groups in central and northwestern Henan led by guanzi oboe or dizi flute: the shipan⼗盘 of the Luoyang–Sanmenxia region (named after its ten-gong yunluo, and akin to ritual shengguan ensembles just north); the amateur bayin hui⼋⾳会around Jiaozuo (with a more diverse instrumentation)and bayin louzi⼋⾳楼⼦ of Zhoukou municipality (named for their processional sedan), once patronised by Shanxi merchants.
Clues to the Shanxi origins of the Bayin louzi in Zhoukou.
String ensembles By comparison with wind bands, string ensembles (“xiansuo”) are rather under-represented in modern Chinese folk cultures (see e.g. Amateur musicking in urban Shaanbei; Musicking at the Qing court 1: suite plucking). In Henan the main genre isbantou pieces 板头曲 (pp.724–894), along with their zheng zither repertoire, largely collected around Zhengzhou (cf. The zheng zither in Shandong)—the instrumental component of the dadiao vocal tradition, based on 68-beat variants of the folk melody Baban.
Cao Dongfu.
Despite biographies of the celebrated zheng masters Wang Shengwu (1904–68), Ren Qingzhi (b.1924), Cao Dongfu (1898–1970) and his daughter Cao Guifen (b.1938), one gains little impression of the recent maintenance of this tradition.
Blowing and beating Without acquaintance of “blowing and beating” (chuida) pieces around the Funiushan and Dabieshan mountains, I’m unclear how they differ in style from the shawm bands discussed above. In Shangcheng county on the northern slopes of Dabieshan, mixed ensembles with strings and percussion (sixian luogu) are found. The famine around 1960 was particularly devastating in the Xinyang region; bands there, derived from shadow puppetry, are said to have “developed” greatly in the 1950s.
Festive percussion ensembles are introduced in a rather good article (pp.1061–66), including tongqi she铜器社 societies (cf. Xi’an) originally serving temple fairs (with 87 groups active in Xuchang municipality alone at the time of compilation), and the funerary jiagu架鼓 of Taiqian county, northeast Henan.
More solo pieces are identified than for most other provinces (pp.1197–1334), although most perhaps belong under ensemble and vocal categories: for dizi flute, regional types of bowed fiddles (zhuihu, zhuiqin, sihu, “soft-bow” jinghu), the rare bowed zitheryazheng, zheng plucked zither (related to the bantou tradition), and sanxian plucked lute.
“Religious music” Noting that the very concept of “religious music” is misleading, I often wish that local music collectors would engage with folk ritual practice—and scholars of religion with its soundscape. For regions such as Fujian, on whose local Daoist “altars” scholars have published detailed monographs, little can be learned from the sections on “religious music” in the Anthology; but for regions where serious scholarship is deficient, these sections at least promise some preliminary leads. Despite the long-term social impoverishment of communities in Henan, folk ritual practice there appears to maintain its vigour, yet the minimal Anthology fieldwork yielded disappointing results, and the topic still doesn’t seem to have attracted scholarly attention.
Transcriptions of Buddhist pieces, mostly instrumental, come from Yuanyang, Qixian, Minquan, Zhengyang, and Wuzhi counties, with only two vocal items (from Xinxiang municipality). This section strangely neglects the prominent Xiangguo si temple in Kaifeng, whose “music” was commodified even before the Intangible Cultural Heritage era, although the temple’s Republican-era gongche solfeggio score is reproduced in an Appendix (pp.1441–85). Daoist pieces are transcribed from Yanling, Xunxian, Pingyu, and Huaibin counties; the introduction (p.1378) also mentions a household Daoist group in Gegang district of Qixian county.
[Household?] Buddhist ritual specialists, Xinxiang municipality Buddhist monks, Lingshan si temple, Luoshan county Household Daoist presides over funeral, Tongbai county.
Hints of ritual life come in the guise of two brief biographies of wind players who were recognised at regional and provincial festivals in the 1950s:
Zhang Fusheng 张福生 (Daoist name Yongjing 永净, b.1918) came from a hereditary family of Daoists; he fled the 1942 famine along with his father and seven Daoist priests to make his home at the Guangfu si temple in Yanling county (p.1428).
Sun Hongde 孙洪德 (Buddhist name Longjiang 隆江, b.1927) came from a poor village in Minquan county; when he was young his mother gave him to the village’s Baiyun si temple, and later he moved with his master Canghai to the Tianxing si temple in Jiangang district of Shangqiu municipality (p.1430).
So far I have found few clues online to augment this paltry material, though a brief 2004 article on “Daoist music” in south Henan (where the officiants are commonly known as daoxian 道仙) is based on fieldwork with six “altars” (tan 坛) there. Further leads welcome!
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A/V recordings of such folk traditions are hard to find online; some brief clips appear on douyin, e.g. “folk ritual from Xinyang” here. Perhaps still more than with local traditions of instrumental music further north and northwest, most of these genres are inseparable from folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera—as a reminder of the importance of vocal music, here’s a clip of “wailing for the soul” (kuling) for the third anniversary of the death:
In the Shaanbei revolutionary base area in the 1930s, cultural cadres struggled to valorise folk performing traditions that were so inextricable from the “feudal superstition” which the CCP was seeking to overthrow (see here). The long process of sanitising such traditions has now reached its nadir in the dumbing-down of the ICH. So, however unsatisfactory, the Anthology remains an essential starting point for fieldwork on local traditions of expressive culture in China, allowing us to adjust our perspective from the “national music” of the conservatoire style, through facile epithets (coined in the 1950s) standing for the music of a large region (Hebei chuige, Jiangnan sizhu, and so on), right down to grassroots fieldwork—town by town, village by village.
While the Henan volumes contain useful material on late imperial and Republican history, what we now need are detailed ethnographies for the whole period since the 1949 “Liberation”, as the social fabric of local communities served by such traditions struggled to survive political and economic assaults.
* For Henan, see e.g. Ralph Thaxton, Catastrophe and contention in rural China (2008), and Peter Seybolt, Throwing the emperor from his horse (1996). For more sources on the famine, see under Cultural revolutions.
The wondrous truth of the Buddhas is not concerned with writings
諸佛妙理，非關文字
—Huineng
The Western vogue for Zen was already well established when I sought to learn about it in my teens (see here). Alongside the surveys of Christmas Humphreys, Alan Watts, and classics by Eugen Herrigel and R.H. Blyth, I read the works of D.T. Suzuki with an enthusiasm that I now learn was misguided. [1] But as scholarship expanded vastly, I was discovering other fields to plough, drawn towards the ethnography of folk religion in China. Lately I’ve been wondering why the two most popular Western images of Zen are so elusive in China—the koan encounter dialogues and zazen seated meditation. So I’ve resorted to the useful wiki series on Chan and Zen (see also Zen narratives, Koan, and Zazen; cf. the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).
Research on religion (both its early textual history and its current state) is clearly quite different from “doing religion”. For historians and ethnographers, participant observation is optional; and practitioners of religion need not be versed in scholarly literature. Indeed, writing about anything is different from doing it—music, for example. I’m not exactly arguing with the concept of academia—even I am not quite so fatuous. But Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen make particularly stimulating examples of the contrast.
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Early Chan patriarchs stressed a “separate transmission outside the scriptures, not relying on words and letters” (cf. early Daoist writings such as Laozi, “The way you can follow is not the eternal way; The name you can name is not the eternal name”). However, quite remote from our modern iconoclastic image of Zen, the doctrinal history of Chan is remarkably verbose and discursive. [2] This contradiction is itself the subject of much verbal analysis!
The modern Western fantasy of Zen is based on the numinous reputation of the Tang dynasty. Much of the evidence for the early history of Chan is based on the transmission texts, sermons, and doctrinal writings of leading patriarchs such as Bodhidharma, Shenxiu, and Huineng—received images of whom are based on their portrayal by Song-dynasty writers. As Mario Poceski observes (Ordinary Mind as the Way: The Hongzhou school and the growth of Chan Buddhism, 2007),
The connection with the glories of the bygone Tang era bestowed a sense of sanctity and was a potent tool for legitimising the Chan school in the religious world of Song China.
From such sources, gong’an/koan “encounter dialogues” and commentaries emerged. The early masters were prolific writers, even if some recognised the dangers: in the 12th century, Dahui Zonggao “is even said to have burned the woodblocks of the Blue cliff record, for the hindrance it had become to study of Chan by his students”. One revealing theme is the many cogent criticisms of the koan system, both within Chan and by modern scholars. Poceski again:
Although Zen is often portrayed as promoting spontaneity and freedom, encounter-dialogue exegesis actually points in the opposite direction, namely towards a tradition bound by established parameters of orthodoxy
—the masters’ exegeses reinforcing their status and authority, and impressing their literati patrons.
Popular image notwithstanding, I deduce that beyond those monks and patrons, penetrating the gnomic aphorisms of the Tang and Song masters has played only a minor role in temple routine. Conversely, Chan Buddhists have always esteemed the Mahāyāna scriptures: even in the Tang, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra and Diamond Sūtra were considered important texts.
Among Western scholars, Bernard Faure has an informed view of the broader picture (see e.g. Chan insights and oversights: an epistemological critique of the Chan tradition, 1993). In his Introduction to Chan Buddhism in ritual context (2003) he gives a useful survey of the field.
Chan/Zen studies are, on the whole, divided between textual/ philological and historical approaches on the one hand, and hermeneutical and philosophical approaches on the other. […] We are still lacking works considering Chan and Zen as complex cultural systems and trying to place them in situ
—this more anthropological approach “in reaction against the spiritualist tendency of traditional historiography and against historicist reductionism”. In the same volume, Wendi Adamek notes:
In the eighth century, Chan masters were no longer simply meditation masters and they had not yet become Zen masters, those enigmatic eccentrics who have made their mark in contemporary popular culture.
The modern visitor to Chinese temples may be perplexed by the apparent absence of the “Zen spirit” there. [3] But, far from some recent dilution, ever since the early history of Buddhism in China, Buddhists have put varying emphases on three types of training inherited from India: vinaya, the rules of discipline; dhyāna, meditation; and dharma, mastery of the Buddhist texts. Wiki cites McRae:
Chan was not nearly as separate from these other types of Buddhist activities as one might think […] The monasteries of which Chan monks became abbots were comprehensive institutions, “public monasteries” that supported various types of Buddhist activities other than Chan-style meditation. […] There was never any such thing as an institutionally separate Chan “school” at any time in Chinese Buddhist history.
Thus as Chan was integrated with other schools (notably Pure Land, Huayan, and Tiantai), while leading masters continued to write abstruse treatises, temple life revolved around the discipline of institutionalised religion. Once we grasp all this, the apparent conflict between early and later history becomes less incongruous.
Xuan Hua meditating, Hong Kong 1953. Source: wiki.
Modern reformist Buddhist movements are the subject of much research. Chan is at the core of the teachings of renowned masters in the PRC, Taiwan, and the USA—who are no less generous with words than their medieval antecedents, like Western pundits such as Gary Snyder and Alan Watts (cf. Krishnamurti, and Paths for the reluctant guru).
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Besides the wealth of hermeneutical studies of Buddhism, one finds scant ethnographic material for normative practice—the daily lives of ordinary temple monks (whether today, in the Ming, or in the Tang). For the late imperial era, fiction may provide a useful source (cf. Ritual in the Dream of the Red Chamber).
A basic acquaintance with temple life in modern Chinese society provides the important perspective of physical diversity—from the grand, prestigious temples of cities and mountains, to medium temples with a modest staff, to small village temples with only a caretaker. Children were often given to small local temples as a means of survival; piety on the part of the parents might play a role, but spiritual concerns were often remote.
I’ll end with some impressionistic instances of usage where the term chan may mislead.
Just as chansi禪寺 refers generally to a Buddhist temple, other uses of the term chan often stand broadly for Buddhism—as in the interdenominational liturgical compilation Chanmen risong 禪門日誦. As Faure observes, ritual has long played a major part in Chan, although he doesn’t seem to address the particulars of liturgical practice (for folk Buddhist ritual, see here).
In Japan, zazen seems to be an intrinsic part of temple life; at outward-looking temples in China and abroad there has been something of a recent boom for meditation classes for laypeople (e.g. here), in response to demand. Chan meditation wasn’t limited to Chan temples, but I wonder how widely it is (and was) practised in local temples.
In temples the term chan is common in chanfang 禪房 or chantang 禪堂, which rather than “meditation room” is now just a common room or assembly room (for basic depictions, see e.g. here, and here). The term chanfang may even stand for the temple itself; found in sources from Li Bai to The Dream of the red chamber, it’s still in common parlance.
At the back of my mind in composing this post was the rough diagram that Li Manshan drew for me of the former Temple of the God Palace (Fodian miao 佛殿廟) in his home village (see Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.47–8, and our film, from 8.35), including a chanfang. Though the temple was quite imposing by the standards of a poor village, its 1876 stele lists only two monks. In many smaller temples, neither formal meditation nor scripture study are necessarily part of the schedule; the daily routine may consist largely of tasks such as sweeping the courtyard, preparing food, and maintenance. Whether or not monks regard such mundane chores as part of their Chan/Zen cultivation, in our times the idea of Zen as pervading worldly activities, from tennis to conducting, has become popular.
Meanwhile for academics, the study of Chan and Zen becomes a career, full of lectures, conferences, bibliographies; practitioners may find such erudite academic discourse alien from their own quest. And I’m just as guilty, adding yet more words on one of the most verbose sites ever. Having grown up with the romantic early image of Chan and Zen, I’m now impressed by all the scholarship unpacking its later doctrinal history. But just to reiterate my glib point, it goes without saying (sic) that historical research is very different from the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and daily temple routine is something else again—illustrating again how our image of the Wisdom of the Mystic East diverges from practice on the ground.
These are some of the issues that I haven’t yet found addressed in the extensive literature. Last word to Alan Watts:
If you are hung on Zen, there’s no need to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn’t. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it’s a free country.
[1] The cogent early criticisms of Suzuki by Hu Shih have been reinforced by David McMahan and John McRae; Bernard Faure describes Suzuki’s writings as “pious verbiage” (for more, see Chapter 2, “The rise of Zen Orientalism” of his Chan insights andoversights). While Alan Watts goes easy on Suzuki, I’m always impressed by his 1959 pamphlet Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen.
[2] I was drawn to this theme by a recent article in Sino-Platonic Papers (no.353!), Ming Sun, “Speaking what cannot be spoken: poetry as a solution to the ineffability in Chan rhetoric”. More generally, Adam Yuet Chau critiques the dominance of the “discursive mode” in “doing religion”.
Sun’s article also led me to “beating and shouting” (banghe 棒喝), practiced from the Tang by Mazu’s Hongzhou school, which
developed “shock techniques such as shouting, beating, and using irrational retorts to startle their students into realisation”. Some of these are common today, while others are found mostly in anecdotes. It is common in many Chan traditions today for Chan teachers to have a stick with them during formal ceremonies which is a symbol of authority and which can be also used to strike on the table during a talk. These shock techniques became part of the traditional and still popular image of Chan masters displaying irrational and strange behaviour to aid their students.
“Beating and shouting” was revived from the late Ming by Miyun Yuanwu (see e.g. Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in dispute: the reinvention of Chan Buddhism in seventeenth-century China (2008, reviewed here). I’m not familiar with the practice in modern Chinese temples (though it is introduced e.g. on Xing Yun’s site, along with copious commentaries), but it sounds somewhat akin to the enduring practice of ritualised debate in Tibetan monasteries (see under Daoism and standup).
[3] For the practice of Buddhism in modern China, note the trilogy of Holmes Welch. At a tangent is Bill Porter’s quest for the spiritual life of modern clerics and hermits.
Here I won’t extend my remit to Daoist meditation techniques, the wealth of scholarship on which is again introduced on wiki. Of course, the regulated life of Daoist temple priests also stands in contrast to the writings of early Daoist sages popular in the West.
There I was, hoping to publish some thoughts today on our (or at least my) misapprehensions about images of Chan/Zen, I find it’s gonna have to wait a while before I add to the already vast mountain of writings on the topic. So meanwhile, for anyone desperate to be entertained (yeah right), I’ll just remind you of some diverse posts that I’ve been retweeting recently:
For the anniversary of German reunification, Red love
Grimaud graces London again!, highlighting the magical Gesangvoll finale of Beethoven’s piano sonata Op.109, in recordings by Neuhaus, Richter, Backhaus, Gould, and Brendel.
The Li family Daoists perform the Pardon ritual at village funeral, Yanggao 1991.
My first visit to Yanggao in 1991 began an enduring relationship with the Li family Daoists and other ritual specialists of the otherwise unprepossessing county in north Shanxi. The great Li Qing (1926–99) was the seventh generation of household Daoists in the lineage, his son Li Manshan the eighth (besides my film and book, posts are rounded up here, including More Daoists of Yanggao, and Yanggao personalities).
Earlier this year I wrote about the venerable Buddhist monk Miao Jiang, also born in Yanggao. Now, thanks to Yves Menheere, I’m intrigued to learn of another native of the county: Li Wencheng 李文成 (no relation to our Daoist lineage!), an “old revolutionary” who miraculously became General Secretary of the Chinese Daoist Association in his 60s. He has just died at the age of 97, prompting nationwide memorial ceremonies (clearly secular services!).
Focused on the PRC, the Bitter Winter website’s coverage of (abuses of) religious liberty and human rights is important, even if I sometimes quibble with its stance (such as here). To augment its obituary of Li Wencheng I’ve gone back to the (selectively) detailed interview by the Chinese Daoist Association in 2021 (and this shorter eulogy, even more conformist). Bitter Winter is indeed frosty:
The former General Secretary of the Chinese Daoist Association knew nothing about religion but was made by the CCP first into a Catholic and then a Daoist leader. […] Li was a crucial figure in the history of government-controlled Daoism. His life and career shed a light on how the CCP selects the personnel it calls to lead the country’s religious organisations.
There can be no doubt about the subservience of state religious departments to the Party. Normally I would give short shrift to such high-ranking apparatchiks; while CCP religious policy is a perfectly valid research topic, it may obscure grassroots practice. Since Li Wencheng’s life makes an intriguing contrast with those of my Daoist masters in the county, here I will intersperse his story with that of the Li family Daoists on the eve of Liberation, under Maoism, and since the 1980s’ reforms (again, covered in my book and film); as well as with that of the eminent Miao Jiang. Despite my own aversion to officialdom, my interpretation will be rather less polemical than that of Bitter Winter.
* * *
With my field experience in Gaoluo, I was keen to document the early years of revolution on the plain just south of Yanggao county-town (for the disparity between my fieldwork methods in the two sites, see here). But I never found any “old revolutionaries” there who could describe the period in detail.
One could hardly expect upright cadres like Li Wencheng to volunteer frank reminiscences of the events surrounding the trauma of land reform. But his account makes a rather more personal supplement to that of the 1993 Yanggao county gazetteer. [1]
Some sites in the partial overlap between Li Wencheng’s war years and (in red) household Daoist bases. Cf. map here.
Li Wencheng in 2021. Cool trousers, eh. Source: Weibo.
Li Wencheng was born in Gucheng village in 1927, the year after the great Li Qing. From July 1945, just before the surrender of the Japanese invaders, he “engaged in revolutionary activities” further south in Yanggao, joining the motley armed militia of 2nd district, a mere couple of dozen men. The militia was soon disbanded, whereupon he was transferred to the county lianshe 联社association (forerunner of the gongxiaoshe Supply and Marketing Cooperatives). He gained admission to the CCP in March 1946.
Ritual life in Yanggao had persisted even under Japanese occupation. A 1942 stele commemorating the Zhouguantun temple fair lists the names of five Daoists from the Li family, who dutifully “offered the scriptures”—including Li Qing, then 17 sui. Li Qing recalled, “Our ritual business didn’t suffer during the occupation—the troops, themselves devout, even made donations when they came across us doing Thanking the Earth rituals! The local bandits didn’t interfere either”. He married in early 1945; his son Li Manshan was born in 1946. Li Qing’s Daoist father Li Peixing was shot dead accidentally by Nationalist troops in 1947.
After the Japanese surrender the Communists briefly took over Yanggao town, but by autumn 1946 Li Wencheng joined them in retreating south to the hills to engage in guerilla activity when Fu Zuoyi’s forces occupied the area. Fording the Sanggan river, they traversed the mountains of Guangling and Lingqiu counties to reach safety in Fanshi. Though travelling in only two trucks, they had to take cover from bombings by KMT planes. In Fanshi Li Wencheng took part in the initial stages of land reform, training for three months in Hunyuan county-town, base of the North Shanxi district committee.
All these counties also had active groups of household Daoists, intermittently serving the ritual needs of their local communities (Guangling, Hunyuan, as well as the household Buddhists of Fanshi).
Li Wencheng’s first mission to implement land reform was doomed to failure, sent all alone to a mountain village on the very southern border of Yanggao county. In December 1947, while still involved in guerilla warfare, he was deployed to Yanggao 1st district, serving as financial assistant (cailiang zhuli财粮助理) for the imposition of land reform in Upper village (Shangbu 上堡) just north of Dongjingji.
The CCP county administration had moved south of the Sanggan river, but the district base was just south of Gucheng at Dongxiaocun, a large village of over a thousand households, its Upper Fort (where they set up) towering over the Lower Fort. But it was sandwiched nervously in between the KMT strongholds of East Jingji township, just 20 Chinese li (10 km) east, and Xubu to the west. The guerillas often had to flee from KMT cavalry raids.
Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei frontier zone, Wutai county 1st district “small team” militia. Source. Note the headscarves, archetypal emblem of the revolution.
By 1948 the Communists could look forward to victory, and the Party government was able to move back to Yanggao town. In the autumn, with Yanggao already “liberated”, Li Wencheng was sent to “support the front line” (zhiqian支前), providing supplies for the troops around the Sanggan river, Fengzhen and Jining further north, and Zhangjiakou.
Li Peisen and his wife Yang Qinghua, late 1940s?
In 1947 in Upper Liangyuan, household Daoist Li Peisen, former village chief, perhaps realising that land reform was imminent, quietly moved his family to his wife’s natal village of Yang Pagoda in the hills just south, taking his sets of ritual instruments and costumes, as well as two trunks full of scriptures handed down in his branch of the lineage. People from “black” families tended to encounter less scrutiny outside their home village. The family of Li Peisen’s wife were well-off and well connected; both he and his wife are remembered as highly intelligent. Their move was clearly an astute way of sidestepping any investigations into his background—his economic standing, and his connections with the vilified Japanese and Nationalists. Yang Pagoda might make a safer base from which to survey the lie of the land under the new regime—the potential sensitivity of practicing ritual would have been a minor issue.
Li Peisen’s cave-dwelling in Yang Pagoda village.
Anyway, Li Peisen wasted no time in displaying his political correctness. Amazingly, he now gains an honorable mention in the county gazetteer. In March 1949—just as family members back in Upper Liangyuan were being stigmatised with a “rich peasant” label—he was the very first in the whole county to organise a mutual aid co-op, consisting of three households. Li Peisen’s move to this tranquil village, and his wife’s careful assertion of local status, were to play a major role in enabling the lineage to preserve its Daoist traditions.
Most of the household Daoist traditions in Yanggao county were based on the plain just south of the county-town; in the hills further south in the county, such groups seem to have been quite few even before the 1950s (I listed some groups in my book, p.63).
Under Maoism From early 1949 Li Wencheng took up a series of administrative posts in Yanggao, then part of Chahar province, serving as secretary of county and regional propaganda departments. In 1950 he married Zeng Hua in Yanggao town. She came from East Chang’an bu village, just southwest of Upper Liangyuan. Their three children went on to find work further afield, whereas Li Wencheng’s four siblings continued tilling the land in Yanggao.
By 1952 Li was assistant editor of the financial team of the Chahar Daily, but later that year Chahar province was abolished and he was transferred to Beijing with over twenty other journalists, where they found themselves under-employed. With two others he was soon selected for the Religious Affairs Department of the Cultural and Educational Committee of the State Council. For six months in 1954 he was trained in “religious history, religious policies, and the domestic and foreign religious situation”. He then took part in a study class for Catholic clergy in the Church of the Saviour (Xishiku) in Beijing, along with over a hundred priests and bishops. As he recalled, they mainly studied patriotism and anti-imperialism, on the basis of articles opposing religion by Fang Zhimin 方志敏, a Red Army military commander executed by the KMT in 1935. Whatever the truth of the incident leading to Fang’s execution, [2] this hardly made a promising introduction to the subject. Li Wencheng now worked loyally for the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the Religious Affairs Bureau. Bitter Winter:
By his own admission, he was a Marxist who knew precious nothing (sic) about religion.
But in contrast to all the detail on the War of Liberation, the interview has a typically glaring lacuna between 1954 and 1984. Through successive political campaigns, even Party loyalists had to be very cautious; serving as a cadre was an unenviable task that could easily lead to labour camp, even before the violence of the Cultural Revolution. The interview doesn’t broach Li Wencheng’s duties in monitoring Catholicism through the 1950s and early 60s—a stressful period. After the arrest and imprisonment in 1955 of Bishop Gong Pinmei along with several hundred priests and Church leaders, the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association was founded in 1957, marking a schism with the Vatican, but underground house-churches continued to function. Nor does the article mention Li Wencheng’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. We may never learn the story of how he weathered the period.
The Catholic church, Gaoluo (just south of Beijing)—built in 1931, destroyed in 1966. The village’s Catholic families maintained their faith through the decades of Maoism, reviving since the 1980s but still resistant to the “Patriotic Church”.
Back in rural Yanggao, Miao Jiang (b.1953) came from a devout Buddhist family in West Yaoquan village, somehow maintaining his faith through campaigns, having his head shaved in Datong to become a monk at the extraordinary time of 1968.
While the Li family Daoists kept performing after Liberation, encroaching collectivisation led to ever more desperate poverty, and by 1958 Li Qing was happy to take a state job in the North Shanxi Arts Work Troupe based in Datong city, even though their tours of the countryside were tough. He returned home when the troupe was cut back in 1962, after the worst of the famine. Despite a brief revival, Daoist ritual was silenced by 1964, and through the Cultural Revolution the Li family lived in fear, vulnerable by virtue of their “black” class background.
Even less palatable for a Party stalwart like Li Wencheng would be sectarians and spirit mediums, many of whom somehow maintained clandestine activity under Maoism despite campaigns to suppress them soon after Liberation. In Yanggao, village adherents of the Bright Association (Minghui) and Yellow Association (Huanghui) recited lengthy “precious scrolls” as part of rituals for their own followers; the leader of one such group even transmitted the liturgy to his teenage son early in the Cultural Revolution. Since the death of Mao and the downfall of the Gang of Four, both sectarians and mediums revived, broadly tolerated by the local authorities.
Since the reforms
Miao Jiang has been based at the Buddhist mountain complex of Wutaishan since 1980, as the mountain opened up to a massive reinvigoration of “incense fire”after the depression of the Maoist era. His devotion to restoring temple life there was soon recognised as he was fêted with official titles.
But in utter contrast to Li Wencheng, he has remained aloof from worldly affairs: his allegiance has always been to the dharma, and any organisational responsibilities grew out of his faith. Eschewing the lifestyle of official banquets, he adheres to a simple Buddhist diet, while sponsoring charitable and relief projects. Still, religion needs organisers…
The Li family Daoists had begun to resume activity from around 1980 (see Testing the waters, and Recopying ritual manuals), and were soon busy “responding for household rituals”. In autumn that year, Li Manshan took his first train trip to Beijing, with his cousin Li Xishan. They wanted to buy a sewing machine, not available (or at least substandard) in Datong, but in the end they couldn’t find a good one in Beijing either—so Li Manshan bought a big bag of socks instead.
As Li Wencheng recalled, as he approached his 60th birthday he was expected to retire. But somehow in 1986 he was chosen to serve as General Secretary of the Chinese Taoist Association. Though at first reluctant, being in good health he was happy to keep working. He stayed in the post for thirteen years until retiring in 1999.
Fourth conference of the Chinese Daoist Association, 1986. Source.
Through his early years around Yanggao, first as guerilla, then as cadre, Li Wencheng can hardly have had any contact with folk ritual activity—and like his comrades, had he chanced upon it, he would surely have disdained it. Once on the Party ladder in Beijing the only experience he gained of religion was overseeing CCP policy towards Catholicism. While many devout and prestigious Daoist and Buddhist clerics were recruited to official religious bodies after Liberation, they were often “mobilised” (coerced) as figureheads.
Li Wencheng now found himself responsible for state policy towards Daoism at a time of a spectacular religious revival (for a fine study of the grassroots revival in Fujian, click here). He helped found the Chinese Daoist Academy and the magazine Zhongguo Daojiao, mouthpiece of Party policy; he re-established the system of ordination in Beijing and elsewhere, working with Wang Lixian 王理仙, respected abbot of the Eight Immortals temple in Xi’an. But he doesn’t mention the great Min Zhiting, who was also summoned to the White Cloud Temple around this time (cf. Zhang Minggui, abbot of the White Cloud Temple in Shaanbei, whose efforts to maintain worship on the mountain ever since the 1940s have always involved negotiating local politics).
In 1990 Li Qing led a group of his Daoist colleagues to perform at a major festival of Buddhist and Daoist music in Beijing. The Li family Daoists were lodged in the White Cloud Temple along with several other Daoist groups from elsewhere in China invited for the festival, doing five performances (not rituals) for private invited audiences over fifteen days in the temple and at the Heavenly Altar. Some apparatchiks were opposed to the event, but influential senior ideologues like He Jingzhi and Zhao Puchu supported it. In the end, the Religious Affairs Bureau and the Chinese Daoist Association must have been among the official bodies sponsoring the festival. I wonder if Li Wencheng attended—would he have been curious to encounter Daoists from his old home of Yanggao, or would he have distanced himself from such household ritual specialists?
And I wonder how often he returned to Yanggao to visit his siblings and their children. For funerals there since the late 80s, it has again become routine to hire Daoists to perform rituals—events that Li Wencheng’s relatives would doubtless often attend.
Great Open-air Offering ritual, White Cloud Temple, Beijing 1993. Source: Weibo.
Another comment in the Bitter Winter article that I find rather too stark: perhaps not exactly that Li Wencheng “used Daoism to spread CCP propaganda in Hong Kong and Taiwan”, rather that Daoism could indeed make a useful tool to further diplomatic rapprochement. To this end a significant step in 1993 was his organising of a Great Open-air Offering (Luotian dajiao 罗天大醮) ritual at the White Cloud Temple, bringing together Daoist priests from temples around the PRC—with representatives from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Clips can be found online, such as this by the Daoists of the Xuanmiao guan temple in Suzhou.
In 2015, for the 70th anniversary of victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, Huang Xinyang (left), Deputy Chief of the Chinese Daoist Association, presented Li Wencheng with a commemorative medal. Source.
2018: Li Manshan with Shi Shengbao (b.1948), ritual director of Yangguantun village, Yanggao.
* * *
Li Wencheng’s responsibility in later life for marshalling CCP policy towards Daoism was quite serendipitous. Bitter winter again:
What is most interesting in this biography is that Li changed religions as others change shirts. He was first non-religious, then Catholic, then Daoist.
Interesting indeed, but the comment is somewhat misleading. Li Wencheng was surely never “religious”, and his task of monitoring Catholicism and then Daoism didn’t imply “belief”, any more than it does for ethnographers of religion; no conversion was involved (and anyway, Buddhist and Daoist deities can happily coexist in folk pantheons!). The article goes on:
This did not really matter since his job was to serve the CCP, not religion. He was sent to different religious organisations to “implement the Party’s religious work policies”. He was a typical example of the bureaucrats the CCP selects for the five authorised religions. Many of them do not believe in God or religion. They are there just to control religion on behalf of the Party.
Most appropriately, the official press release celebrated Li as somebody whose life was “an unremitting struggle for the cause of Communism”—not of Daoism or any other religion.
The Party’s efforts to control temple clerics were extensive, and effective; Buddhism was always based mainly in temples, and temple-dwelling Daoist priests too could be efficiently overseen too. But the life of Daoism depended less on temples, and the countless household Daoists throughout the countryside were harder to control—even if Li Wencheng was doubtless involved in the successive efforts to register them.
* * *
One could find similar grassroots religious activity in the home county of any secular Party apparatchik (all the way up to Chairman Mao and his Hunan origins)—I’ve just given these vignettes from my experience of Yanggao. The Li family Daoists remain busy performing rituals in the nearby villages; Miao Jiang, a devout Buddhist since his early youth, found himself becoming a revered master on Wutaishan; Li Wencheng, who never had any sympathy with religion, somehow ended up overseeing major Daoist projects from his Beijing office.
Conversely, Party overseers often lament cadres’ persistent adherence to “feudal superstition”. At the local level, it is perfectly routine for village cadres to consult household Daoists (like Li Manshan) or spirit mediums to “determine the date” or identify an auspicious site; some such cadres may even be ritual specialists themselves. But cadres higher up the Party ladder too may consult “superstitious practitioners” (e.g. here).
Even among those who were earmarked to represent Party religious policy, we find a range of ideology. Some, like Li Wencheng, were entirely secular in their thinking, their sole mission to serve the Party. Temple priests invariably have to pay lip service to the CCP cause; like the broader population, they are used to compartmentalising public and private spheres. Back in the countryside, “faith” may play a certain role for some household Daoists (such as Jiao Lizhong in Hunyuan) but for others it is a minor issue, compared to the mundane exigency of feeding their families while serving the local community.
As evoked movingly in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1993 film The blue kite, everyone was trying to survive, subject to the whims of Party campaigns. Some were able to escape the poverty of rural life by finding an “iron food-bowl” with a Party career, while others remained tied to the land and its rituals. Both were common trajectories. And both the CCP and religious observance, in all their diverse manifestations, are part of the fabric of life in China.
[1] Though I haven’t yet found Li Wencheng’s name in the county gazetteer, it’s a useful source for both the civil war and “revolutionary heroes”, with considerable detail on the period (mainly on pp.15–20 and 50–54), which I haven’t attempted to collate with Li’s own account.
In a post on an enigmatic shop-sign in pinyin I’ve written about the useful term shabi (“fuckwit”), followed in Changing language by zhuang bi (“poseur”). Subcultures have thrived ever since the 1980s’ reforms, but have taken off with the internet. There’s some impressive coverage of popular recent buzzwords reflecting countercultural trends of disillusionment, from “loser” (diaosi 屌丝) and “mourner” (sang 丧) cultures to “lying flat” (tangping躺平). Of course, like the subaltern subjects of Xu Tong’s films, such news makes a welcome counterpoint to reports on the glorious triumphs of the latest Party Plenary session.
An interview with anthropologist Xiang Biao and a New Yorker article by Yi-Ling Liu further introduce “involution” (neijuan内卷)—feelings of burnout, ennui, and despair. Xiang Biao scores points (with me, at least) for alluding to Prasenjit Duara’s theory of state involution. He refers to the pressures of Confucianism, but I haven’t seen wuwei cited as prototypes for the dropout generation, or early Daoist recluses such as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.
The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.
Alienation has always been a theme of Chinese culture. Under Maoist campaigns, one finds hints in the memoir of Kang Zhengguo and it’s evident in much fiction, as well as the films of Jia Zhangke, masterpieces of small-town ennui in the early years of reform. Still, returning to the internet age,
According to Professor Huang [Ping], lying down can be seen as the opposite of involution—a decades-old academic term referring to societies becoming trapped in ceaseless cycles of competition that resurfaced last year [2020] as an online buzzword in China. “In a relatively good social environment, people may feel involuted, but at least they’re trying,” he said. “If it’s worse, people will tangping.”
And Yi-Ling Liu observes tellingly:
China’s crisis is unique in the severity of its myopia and its methods of entrapment. The young high schooler, disillusioned with the monotony of school, cannot easily access subversive subcultures or explore alternative ways of living, because, increasingly, that information is deemed “vulgar” or “immoral” and banned by the government, scrubbed from the digital sphere in the name of “promoting positive energy.” The delivery driver, seeking better working conditions, can’t protest his grievances or organize his fellow workers in an independent union, because he rightly fears that he will be detained. The disillusioned office worker, instead of taking action, will more likely sink deeper into his desk chair. Involution is a new word that helps keep an old system, and those who control it, in place.
* * *
For the new kid on the ennui block, Made in China journal has an intriguing article by Casey Wei, “The involution of freedom in yabi subculture”, with analyses based on class and gender as well as a useful list of further readings.
In yabi 亚逼 the bi is shabide bi, prefixed by ya (Asia, inferior: the “sub” of yawenhua 亚文化, “subcultures” that develop among “like-minded people” 同温层tongwenceng). * Yabi signifies “subcultural resistance under a heavily repressed authoritarian regime, […] a post-internet hotchpotch, influenced by (but not limited to) punk, otaku, e-girl, cybergoth, K-pop and J-pop, Asian babygirl, hip-hop, rave, and techno styles from across the globe”. I’m not sure how relevant are Wei’s ambitious historical perspectives on the “feminine supernatural”, from early imperial history through to the Maoist era (“From goddesses and fox spirits to Holding up half the sky”).
The yabi subculture is often deemed messy and superficial.
Anyway, I’ve penned a couple more haiku (see here):
So much for wuwei Lying flat is so old hat Time now for yabi
Not gonna zhuang bi Lie flat, fold in?—bit too much I’m just a shabi
* * *
Even in our own societies, it’s a challenge to absorb changing culture and language, all the more so with the explosion of digital media. In analysing Brahms manuscripts or medieval Daoist ritual manuals, the ivory tower of academia is estranged from the practical issues of Real Life. Moreover, the vocabulary of those of us who make intermittent study visits to somewhere like China is always going to be partial, based not only on our particular study topics (political, cultural, and so on) but also on our early exposure, and we may find it hard to keep up with a rapidly changing society. **
I have no illusions that I could possibly keep up with UK youth culture (see Staving off old age, Cleo Sol, New British jazz, and so on). Still, chagrin and curiosity combine to encourage us to learn just how far we have fallen behind; and however traditional the topics we study in China, the attitudes of new generations will be influential. Even if we’re hoping to “salvage” Daoist ritual, our fieldwork takes place not in a social vacuum but within an ever-changing context. With the slogans of Maoism long replaced, popular culture and urban ennui seep into rural values, as grandchildren surf their phones on visits back to the countryside to attend family funerals.
* My own coterie being those who will be amused when I identify which kou character I’m referring to by explaining “Yuqie yankoude kou“. Speaking of ya 亚, I love the creative misgrouping of the elements in Lunda YaFei xueyuan 伦大亚非学院 (SOAS) by one of the Li family Daoists!
** Again, my personal lexicon remains based on an incongruous mix of folk ritual terminology and the trite political slogans of the 1950s’ village Party Secretary (here, under “Rapport”).
Today is the Ghost Festival in China, so I’ve been reflecting on calendrical rituals (further to my In search of the folk Daoists of north China, pp.7–8). Usually I draw attention to ritual days, but this seems to be one that I’m inclined to downplay.
Yankou at Xujiayuan temple fair, north Shanxi 2003.
As one of the Three Primes (sanyuan三元) over the annual calendar, the Ghost Festival (Guijie 鬼节, formally Yulanpen jie 盂兰盆节) on 7th moon 15th seems like a major event (see e.g. Stephen Teiser, The Ghost Festival in medieval China). On this evening, groups of temple clerics (both Daoist and Buddhist) still hold Flaming Mouth rituals (yankou, shishi) to exorcise the community, although they were surely performed more commonly before the pervasive impoverishment of temple life over the 20th century.
There’s an extensive Chinese literature on this complex, lengthy Tantric ritual, but the Ghost Festival is far from its only context—besides other temple fairs over the annual cycle, it is (or was) routinely performed for funerals (see many posts under Local ritual).
Notwithstanding the importance of the Ghost King (Guiwang) and the Ten Kings of the Underworld (Shidian Yanjun) in village pantheons, in my experience of rural north China, 7th moon 15th is not (or is no longer?) a major day for rituals with liturgists presiding. Perhaps its liturgical importance varies by region; I’m not sure it depends on the community still having a viable temple, since ritual buildings can be re-activated for important ritual purposes. In my DVD Doing Things on ritual life in north Shanxi, §B5 has brief excerpts from a yankou performed by Buddhist monks for the “main day” of their village temple fair—which falls on 7th moon 3rd, not 15th.
Worshipping the ancestors, Xinzhou 7th moon 15th 1992.
What does endure is the custom of domestic offerings, burning paper at the ancestral graves, as we found in 1992 in Xinzhou on our trip through north Shanxi. Neither there nor in Yanggao is it a day to summon household Daoists to perform rituals.
The Zhaobeikou ritual association leads Releasing Lanterns ritual on Baiyangdian lake,
7th moon 15th, 1993.
For village associations on the Hebei plain, 7th moon 15th may have become less of a focus for communal observance over the 20th century. But the aquatic setting around the Baiyangdian lake (click here) prompts village ritual associations there to go on procession to “Release River [or Lotus?] Lanterns” (fang hedeng 放河/荷燈). Similar rituals are held in nearby counties such as Langfang. in Bazhou, the Zhangzhuang association, with its active group of liturgists, was one of few still performing yankou on the 15th. The association of Lesser Huangzhuang, Jinghai, performed Releasing God Lanterns (fang shendeng) on 1st moon 15th and Releasing Ghost Lanterns (fang guideng) on 7th moon 15th. Around Houshan, the major days to worship the goddess Houtu are 3rd moon 1st and 15th, but 7th moon 1st and 15th also attract many pilgrims.
So we may come across a range of exorcistic behaviour on 7th moon 15th: from burning paper at the ancestral graves, to processions Relasing the Lanterns, to full-scale yankou rituals.
As to the other days of the Three Primes, 1st moon 15th is the day around which the main annual rituals revolve (whereas only domestic offerings are made on New Year’s Day—e.g. Gaoluo); the ritual segments performed are exorcistic, like those for 7th moon 15th. But (again for north China) I haven’t heard of major communal observances for 10th moon 15th—leads welcome…
Anyway, the ritual days of the standard national calendar may arouse false hopes, requiring verification on the ground; once one gets down to the grassroots, other dates may require important calendrical rituals for local deities. In south China, even the major liturgical days of the 1st moon vary by locale. This is a significant fieldwork lesson: to see beneath the tip of the iceberg of temple practice and prescriptive history to digest folk observances at the grassroots (cf. Debunking “living fossils”).
Over a summer hardly bathed in sunshine, but enlivened by football, tennis, Istanbul, and Proms, it may look as if I’m somewhat neglecting China. Still, just since May, posts include
Two surveys of folk ritual and its soundscapes, based on the great Anthology:
Actually, that should be enough to keep you busy (not to mention all the fieldnotes under Local ritual)—indeed, a little break might be welcome… I’m working on several new essays for my site, but in the interim I regularly post on Twitter—other recent China retweets including
There’s a certain random quality to the topics of some of these retweets, but as with my original articles, I like to keep people guessing, and to remind readers of posts which may have escaped attention, or seem particularly apposite. So you may care to check my Twitter feed, or even “follow” me there…
Conor Niland after losing to Adrian Mannarino at Wimbledon 2011. Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images.
The life of the concert soloist may seem glamorous, though the routine of airports, hotels, concert halls, and receptions must wear thin. Still, it contrasts with that of rank-and-file orchestral musos (cf. Mozart in the jungle, and Ecstasy and drudge). Apart from The Money, I note the irony of the soloist being condemned to churning out the same three or four concertos all their lives while the orchestral musos are constantly playing a variety of wonderful music (Mahler—you know that’s who I meant).
By the same token, following Vincent Goossaert’s search for “ordinary Daoists” (theme of his The Taoists of Peking, 1800-1949: a social history of urban clerics), it’s not all about the Du Guangtings and Chen Rongshengs, or about the elite mystical sages of yore. Hence my own search for household Daoist groups like the Li family.
He outlines the three tiers of men’s professional tennis: the ATP Tour for the top 100 male tennis players in the world, the Challenger Tour, mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300—and the Futures tour, “tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers”, which
sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.
As he explains,
Surviving on the Futures and Challenger tournaments isn’t just about being good at tennis. It’s about being able to cope with the strange bedfellows of regular boredom and constant uncertainty. Not many succeed.
He felt trapped:
I phoned Mum from the airport in Geneva, telling her I was tired and would skip Edinburgh and fly home instead. She wasn’t having that. “This is your job now, Conor,” she said. “You can’t just not turn up because you’re tired.” I remembered my friend and one-time tennis partner Pat Briaud’s words: “Your parents don’t mess around.” I turned up and made the semi-final, losing a feisty two-and-a-half-hour match to Britain’s Jamie Baker. It was my 24th match in five weeks. Exhausted, I collected my prize money: $480, before 20% tax.
By contrast with the constant media exposure the stars have to endure, loneliness and isolation are the fate of the rank-and-file.
I made virtually no lasting friendships on tour through my seven years, despite coming across hundreds of players my own age living the same life as my own.
And he describes the difficulty of finding a practice partner. At least the life of orchestral musos is leavened by an embattled camaraderie—and they share a bond in maestro-baiting and deviant behaviour.
I almost never went sightseeing on a day off. That was partly to conserve energy, partly because I had nobody to go with. And in many of the one-horse towns that hosted Futures events, there weren’t any sights to see. […]
I would return to Ireland from three-week trips to these exotic places with no notable stories or experiences. “How was Morocco?” I would be asked. “Fine,” I would say, with nothing else to add. […]
The true unfortunates, though, were the ones who were talented enough to rationally hope to advance. These were people who grew up as the best tennis players in their country, but were stuck between 300 and 600 in the world, not quite contending for the Challenger Tour nor the qualifiers at grand slams, but winning just often enough to keep their tennis dream faintly alive. A Futures tournament referee in the US became infamous for his straight-talking to 28-year-old players: “C’mon man, what are you still doing here?” He was straying out of his lane, but his intentions were good. And he was usually right.
Niland ends with a depressing account of a fruitless Challenger event in Uzbekistan. It all sounds a bit like doing a Messiah in Scunthorpe for a jolly good tea. Whether in music, religion, or sport, ethnographic perspectives like this are always valuable.
Like Beijing nearby, the municipality of Tianjin encompasses a large region, much of it still rural. On ritual and its soundscapes there, my previous articles include
which as ever contain substantial material on ritual traditions. To remind you of my introduction to a similar recent survey for Fujian province in southeast China,
Ritual pervades all genres of folk expressive culture: in the Anthology, it is a major theme of the volumes for folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance. In the instrumental music volumes, even genres that lack explicit liturgical content are also invariably performed for ceremonial occasions—but a further reason to consult them is that the specific rubric of “religious music” has been consigned there. I’ve described the flaws of the Anthology project in my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.
Apart from the Anthology‘s valuable Monographs for opera and narrative-singing and brief textual introductions to genres, its volumes consist mainly of transcriptions, of limited value without available recordings. Conceptually its classifications are rudimentary, but it opens up a world of local cultures.
It’s important to grasp the geography of the large regions covered by such surveys (cf. Layers of fieldwork). At the time of compilation the greater Tianjin municipality comprised four suburban areas (east, west, south, north), five counties (Wuqing, Jinghai, Ninghe, Baodi, * Jixian), and three districts (Tanggu, Hangu, Dagang), all of which had distinctive local traditions.
Useful as always are sketches of some leading groups (pp.1327–39) and brief biographies (pp.1340–56), containing promising leads to further ritual associations and sects.
Volume 1 is entirely devoted to “drumming and blowing” (guchui yue 鼓吹乐). Here the rubric of “Songs-for-winds associations” (chuigehui吹歌会) is misleading (see under Ritual groups of Xushui), compounded by the sub-categories of leading instrument (guanzi, suona, sheng, dizi). While many musicians are versatile on wind instruments, this masks the important distinction between occupational shawm bands and devotional ritual associations led by guanzi. However, there is some valuable historical information bearing on the “classical” style of amateur ritual groups (often known as “music associations” yinyuehui) serving ritual, such as the Tongshanhui 同善会 of Huanghuadian in Wuqing county (p.1336; brief mention here, under “Further leads”). Such groups were to become my main focus (see Menu, under Hebei and Gaoluo).
Nao and bo cymbals of the Tianxing dharma-drumming association, inscribed Xuande reign, 5th year (1429). Besides museums, folk performing groups preserve important evidence for the material culture of imperial China (see China’s hidden century).
Shawm bands always occupy a substantial part of the Anthology coverage. Here the summary introduces traditions for all the municipality’s regions, notably in the north around Baodi and Jixian (pp.36–8, 41–2; groups pp.1338–9, biographies p.1343–4, 1355).
The “great music” of Tianjin.
Still under the heading of “drumming and blowing”, a separate rubric introduces the imposing “great music” (dayue大乐, though here I seem to recall it should be pronounced daiyue) of the Tianjin region. These shawm bands, derived from the Qing court (cf. longchui and Pingtan paizhi in Fujian), were transmitted among the folk through the Republican era until the 1950s, mainly in urban districts but also in the suburbs; but later they became largely obsolete, so the Anthology fieldwork was largely a “salvage” project.
The impressive introduction (pp.599–610) refers to documents from the late Qing, including material on the “imperial assembly” (huanghui皇会), supplementing that of the dharma-drumming associations), and details the use of the genre at weddings and funerals. Besides recordings made for the Anthology in the 1980s, the appetising transcriptions (pp.611–78) utilise early discs that I’m keen to hear—Pathé (Baidai) from 1908 and the 1920s, Shengli 胜利 from the 1930s. Cultural cadres recorded senior artists in the 1950s and even “in the mid-70s”. By the 1980s, surviving musicians were recorded for the Anthology, and took part in the Boxer movie Shenbian神鞭 (Holy whip, 1986).
Shifan band, 1930s.
Volume 2 opens with an introduction to the mixed ensemble shifan十番 (text pp.679–701, transcriptions pp.702–875; further material on the late Qing societies Siru she 四如社 and Jiya she 集雅社 on pp.1327–8). Related to the better-known genres of south China, notablyJiangnan, shifan bands are also found in a few northern regions including Hebei (see my Folkmusic of China, pp.206–8). In Tianjin, where shifan was part of the thriving Kunqu scene before Liberation, the major figure in documenting the tradition was Liu Chuqing 刘楚青 (1909–99) (pp.1341–2), who used his youthful immersion in the culture to compile a major volume in 1987.
Notable among percussion ensembles (pp.876–1138) arethe dharma-drumming associations (fagu hui法鼓会), which my mentors at the Music Research Institute (MRI) in Beijing were excited to discover in 1986 and 1987 while attending major folk music festivals in Tianjin. These groups commonly subsumed a shengguan melodic ensemble—from the 1986 festival, listen to the MRI’s audio recording of the Pudong “music and dharma-drumming association” in Nanhe township, Xiqing district 西青南河镇普东音乐法鼓会. These events led us to the fieldwork of local scholars—notably Guo Zhongping 郭忠萍, author of the valuable overview in the Anthology (pp.876–97; transcriptions pp.898–1009; see also groups pp.1328–34 and biographies pp.1347, 1349), based on her more detailed early publication Fagu yishuchutan (1991).
This section also introduces the percussion of “entertainment associations” (huahui花会): “flying cymbals” (feicha飞镲), stilt-walking (gaoqiao高跷), dragon lanterns (longdeng龙灯), and flower drum (huagu花鼓).
“Religious music” As always, despite my criticism of the term, this is a substantial category in the Anthology, subsuming some major traditions of Buddhist and Daoist ritual.
Jinmen baojia tu shuo (1846).
For major insiders’ accounts by temple clerics Zhang Xiuhua and Li Ciyou before and after the 1949 “Liberation”, see n.1 here, leading to Appendix 1 of my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China and the research of Vincent Goossaert.
Daoist band, Tianjin. Tell us more…
For “Buddhist music” (pp.1141–52) and “Daoist music” (pp.1274–9) the introductions can only serve as a starting point for more sophisticated fieldwork—like the transcriptions (pp.1153–1273 and 1280–1326 respectively). There are slim pickings here—although the section on Daoist temple music provides a remarkable vignette from 1972 (!) on a Pingju opera musician’s visit to Zhang Xiupei 张修培, elderly (former?) abbot of the Niangniang gong temple, to notate his singing for the purposes of “new creation”. This section also introduces Li Zhiyuan 李智远 (1894–1987) of the Lüzu tang and Tianhou gong temples; though laicized after “Liberation”, from 1985 he was able to support the renovation of the Lüzu tang. More promising are the rural areas, where there are always household Daoist bands to explore. The transcriptions end with three items of vocal liturgy from the Western suburbs (pp.1313–26): the popular “Twenty-four Pious Ones” (Ershisi xiao 二十四孝), the “Song of the Skeleton” (cf. the Li family band in north Shanxi), and Yangzhi jingshui 杨枝净水.
The accounts of many folk groups offer glimpses of the sectarian connection. In Yangliuqing township (known for its nianhua papercuts), the Incense Pagoda Old Association (Xiangta laohui 香塔老会, above) of 14th Street (which we visited all too briefly in 1989) had scriptures including Hunyuan Hongyang baodeng混元弘陽寶燈 and Linfan jing临凡經. Tracing their transmission back eleven generations to the Wanli era (1572–1620) of the Ming dynasty, they have remained active exceot for the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution. In the western suburbs the Tianxing dharma-drumming association (pp.1331–2) belonged to the Tiandimen sect, and groups in Dagang district (p.33) also derive from Tiandimen and Taishangmen sects.
For all its flaws, the Anthology remains a valuable resource; but as ever, the groups introduced there call for fieldwork from scholars of folk religion as well as musicologists.
* Rural Baodi is known to Beijing musicologists and other intellectuals for its “7th May Cadre Schools” (Wuqi ganxiao 五七干校), wretched sites of exile during the Cultural Revolution—for scholars of the Music Research Institute at Tuanbowa (Jinghai), scroll down here.
Our 1990s’ project on village ritual groups on the Hebei plain just south of Beijing (overview; fieldnotes listed in the Menu, under Hebei) revealed a wealth of evidence for sectarian activity. Our visits to Xiongxian county (click here, with map) focused on the ritual associations of Hanzhuang, Gegezhuang, and Kaikou villages, but on a “gazing at flowers from horseback” trip to the Mijiawu district in 1995 we could see that there was much to learn there too. I’m prompted to revisit our notes after reading a recent article in Sixth tone, subject of the second half of this post.
Of the five villages in Mijiawu, both East and West villages formerly had Great Temples (dasi 大寺). The Laofomen 老佛門 sectarians in North village had learned from the Buddhist monks of the Great North Temple in West village, who performed rituals among the folk. But the temple, and the monks’ instruments, were destroyed during the Japanese occupation.
At Mihuangzhuang the senior Cheng Wanxiang made an articulate guide to the history of the village ritual association (known by the confusing term yinyuehui 音樂會, “music association”—as well as my overview, note my comments on recent Chinese attention to my work on Gaoluo). The members were originally Laofomen sectarians. The repertoire of their shengguan wind ensemble music derives from three nearby villages: Mijiawu, Hanzhuang, and Bandong. After the end of the Cultural Revolution they restored around 1981, despite a lack of support from the village brigade and the disapproval of the county authorities. Cheng’s family were poor, but they forked out the money to buy sheng mouth-organs, so the others were moved to bring out their grain to buy a drum and other instruments. As he commented, “Village life is so monotonous—the association helps us handle (tiaojie 调节) life, but the brigade won’t support it. The association’s raison d’etre is to do good, and learn proper behaviour (xingshan 行善, xue guiju 学规矩).” Cheng Wanxiang himself went to invite his fellow villagers to study the music—ironic, as he notes, the teacher inviting the pupil! But still no-one cared to learn. Even so, in 1995 there were fifty or sixty households “in the association”.
Some association members.
Like Xie Yongxiang in Hanzhuang, Cheng Wanxiang made some fine distinctions. The temple fair over three days around 3rd moon 15th was known as Granny Assembly (Nainai hui 奶奶會) or Favourable Incense Assembly (Shunxiang hui 顺香會), made up of old women. A tent was set up, with paintings of Wusheng laomu and “Granny” (Houtu) (see The Houshan Daoists), and the association helped out. Again, the purpose of the Favourable Incense Assembly was to “do good” (a common theme, as villagers denied “superstitious” elements), but they stopped activity in 1937. The association hadn’t made the pilgrimage to Houshan, but some of the old women had.
The Laofomen sect was also distinct. They cured illness by using tea-leaves and qigong, not incense. They too “did good”, not accepting gifts; there was no charge—they even fed members. Their main scriptures were Dafa jing 大法經 (for Presenting Offerings, shanggong 上供), “precious scrolls” to the God of Earth and the Ten Kings (Tudi juan 土地卷, Shiwang juan 十王卷), as well as the ubiquitous Incantation to Pu’an (Pu’an zhou 普庵咒). Some were “recited scriptures” (nianjing 念經), some “wind-music scriptures” (chuijing 吹經). They kept performing them after the Japanese invasion, but less well. So the yinyuehui also served the Laofomen. After Liberation the Laofomen was suppressed, but its members continued curing illness. Their scriptures were burned at the start of the Cultural Revolution.
* * *
I’m reminded of these notes not only because since 2016, these villages are being swallowed up in the vast new XiongAn airport, but since Mibeizhuang is the subject of a recent article in Sixth tone about the village’s erstwhile thriving trade in funeral paraphernalia.
Welcome to the so-called “Wall Street of the underworld,” where businesses stock approximately 10,000 different types of goods, such as paper flowers, effigies, and elegiac couplets, for traditional Chinese funerals and memorial ceremonies.
In villages, towns, and cities around China, individual familes (such as household Daoist Li Bin with his wife in Yanggao, north Shanxi) often open funeral shops, and some run thriving businesses. In Mibeizhuang the local memorial supply industry didn’t begin to take shape until around 2003.
Elderly residents credit this transformation to Yang Wenyuan, who at the time was Party secretary of Xiong County, where the village is located. He oversaw development of the main street, attracted suppliers and buyers, and helped organize the local workforce, dividing labor between production and sales.
I’m incredulous to read that Mibeizhuang “accounts for 90% of China’s funeral supplies market, recording an annual output of about 1 billion yuan ($137.94 million)”.
Forty-something Li and his wife used to sell donkey meat burgers in downtown Baoding, but they decided to return to their native village in 2014, renting a 60-square-metre space to open a one-stop supermarket offering “almost anything one might need in the afterlife.” The shelves are stocked with all kinds of paper products: beverages, vegetables, cell phones, televisions, cooking gas cylinders, electric-powered farm tricycles, and passports. The store also receives orders for custom-made products, such as full-size replica camouflaged tanks; luxury goods including Lamborghinis, Porsches, Mercedes, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles; and even a scaled-down three-story villa with a butler, maids, and a courtyard.
However, recently there has been a downturn in the market,
stemming from two major factors: policy and progress. In recent years, local authorities across the country, including in Baoding, have introduced “civilized memorial” regulations targeting the manufacture or sale of “feudal and superstitious” goods such as spirit money and other paper offerings. […]
In late March, local vendors received a text notification about the Baoding Civilized Memorial Initiative on their cell phones. Like similar policies rolled out by cities in Jiangsu, Shandong, Guizhou, Hunan, Shaanxi, and other provinces, the initiative aimed to prohibit the production and selling of “feudal and superstitious” memorial supplies. The penalties for violating these new regulations include steep fines and the confiscation of goods.
While this directive is having an impact on business, “there are too many traders, so it’s difficult to tackle everyone,” and people are quick to find ways to bend the rules. I’ve discussed the influence of official directives on local ritual cultures in posts on Shandong and Shanxi.
In addition, the emergence of new technologies is providing people with cheaper and more sustainable options for funeral and memorial ceremonies.
Anyway, after our notes on the history of sectarian activity in Xiongxian, I was intrigued to find this further update on the constantly shifting ritual scene there.
There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics
—Mao Zedong
For those with access to WeChat, the CDTM音网 public account there is clearly a major resource for Chinese music studies. On their recent post is a substantial introduction to my 2004 book Plucking the winds, a diachronic ethnography of ritual life in Gaoluo village just south of Beijing (see this roundup)—just as I finally get round to working on a new film on the 1995 New Year’s rituals there!
The WeChat article is based on a review of my book by Zhang Lili—though it was originally published in 2019, she is more thoroughly familiar with my work on Gaoluo than anyone in China, and the CDTM editors have done an attractive job, adding colour images as well as tracks from the audio CD that comes with my book.
While I’m both honoured and diffident at finding Chinese scholars taking note of my work, I like to cite the (satirical) saying 外来的和尚会念经 “The monk from outside knows how to recite the scriptures”: after all, there are plenty of fine Chinese ethnographers from whom we can learn (such as Guo Yuhua and Xiao Mei).
And it reminds me how hard it is for PRC scholars to absorb Chairman Mao’s wise words “There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics”. I addressed this issue in the Coda of Plucking the winds (pp.344–355; Chinese translation in Zhongguo yinyuexue 2005/3), and in this post on self-censorship.
Through the period that I was doing fieldwork, I came to feel that such topics were not entirely out of bounds in the PRC, but now I understand that it is increasingly impossible to air them. This is not the fault of Chinese scholars—even before any higher authority can censor their work, they instinctively censor themselves (cf. Tibet: ritual singing in an Amdo community).
So in China, all this talk of “social context” largely steers clear of politics. The WeChat review mentions “campaigns” in passing, but at the heart of my historical account is the travails of the Maoist decades: the trauma of collectivisation, the breakdown of revolutionary hero and vocal liturgist Cai Fuxiang, the famine, the brief revival of 1961–64 before the Four Cleanups and Cultural Revolution. A good introduction to these themes, based on my book, is my post South Gaoluo: a tribute to two ritual leaders.
In the earlier chapters of Plucking the winds, other topics that PRC scholars instinctively downplay (again, quite understandably) are the 1900 Boxer massacre and the story of the Catholics. I also emphasise the support of village cadres—through all regimes—for their local cultures. And I continue to observe crises and conflicts for the period since I made my base in Gaoluo—theft, ideological disputes within the association, and so on.
South Gaoluo: left, the 1930 donors’ list; right, the 1931 Catholic church.
So if Chinese musicologists are indeed searching for what is special about my work, how it differs from that of their own, then it is this inclusion of politics in the story. * If my book has any importance, then that is it; it could point the way for Chinese scholars, but in the current climate, such a perspective can only remain opaque. I’m not complaining, and I’m not so naive as to expect more coverage of these topics in China—just saying, like… And perhaps my own emphasis on politics in my posts on this blog is in part an attempt to fill the gap (e.g. Memory, music, society, and Gansu: connecting social trauma and expressive culture).
Senior members of the ritual association, 1995.
* * *
Another recurring theme of mine is that research on such groups shouldn’t be confined to musicological circles (see e.g. Unpacking “Daoist music”). As I explain in my overview of our Hebei project, despite the misleading name yinyuehui 音樂會, these are ritual organizations, and as such they are the proper subject of scholars of folk religion (ample evidence in our fieldnotes, under “Hebei” in the Menu). At the same time, as I also keep saying, soundscape should always be a major aspect of such study.
So yet again I find myself having to bang on about that term yinyuehui! Having used the literal translation “Music Associations” in Plucking the winds, I later avoided the term, since both its components are likely to confuse urban-educated people:
yinyue 音樂 refers not to any “music” (and certainly not to any secular music), but strictly to the solemn shengguan wind ensemble that serves funerals and calendrical rituals in conjunction with vocal liturgy and percussion—all transmitted via Buddhist and Daoist temples. Sure, that’s quite a mouthful…
nor is hui 會 a secular term—it’s not an “association” in the modern sense of xiehui 协会 (as in “Chinese Musicians’ Association”, and so on), nor is it a cosy amateur entertainment “club”; rather, it’s the hui of huidaomen 會道門, so they are ritual organizations descended from sectarian groups (such as Hunyuan, Hongyang, and LaoFomen) under the umbrella term of “White Lotus” religion. (The term huidaomen, of course, may alarm timid PRC students, since CCP propaganda generally prefixes it with the adjective “reactionary”!)
So a narrow focus on “music” entirely fails to capture the essence of these ritual groups. Yet besides politics, folk religion too is an increasingly sensitive issue in the PRC; scholarship there looks ever more sanitised.
The CDTM editors prepared the review with impressive urgency, and I didn’t have time to haggle over the title—to better reflect my own approach to the topic, I might have suggested
The travails and soundscape of folk religion in north Chinese society 华北民间宗教社会活动的风波与音声
* Perhaps I should specify. In Western studies of Chinese music, I feel that the ideology of elite theorists plays an excessive role, from the writings of Confucius to textual sources on the Tang court, Ming imperial Daoism, and notably the revolutionary operas and songs of the Maoist era. What I discuss is not that whole apparatus, but thick ethnographic description of the impact of campaigns on the lives of ordinary people and the ability of grassroots communities to maintain their local traditions.
Wang Yongping 王永平, Xinyang yu xisu: shehui wenhuashi shiyexiade Tangdai daojiao 信仰與習俗—社會文化史視野下的唐代道教 [Beliefs and customs: Tang dynasty Daoism from the perspective of socio-cultural history] (2023; 725 pages).
Judging by a review by Franciscus Verellen (on which this post is based), this bulky recent tome looks as if it might revive my long-dormant interest in the culture of the Tang dynasty. That is where I came in, under the aegis of Denis Twitchett and Laurence Picken at Cambridge—at a time when we had no access to the PRC, and when scholarship there was in abeyance (see Ren Erbei).
From 1986, as I finally began visiting China, I soon defected from dry, silent ancient history, plunging into fieldwork on living rural traditions (see e.g. here). But I’m curious to dip my toes back in the stream, to see how I now feel about Tang scholarship—whether I can find early historical research meaningful, as scholars explore new perspectives.
Were I to retread this path, Wang’s ouevre alone would keep me busy—books such as Tangdai youyi 唐代游艺 (Tang entertainments, 1995) and Daojiao yu Tangdai shehui 道教与唐代社会 (Daoism and Tang society, 2002). Verellen summarises the main themes of this latest volume, which he calls “a monumental contribution to both Daoist and Tang studies”, exploring “the broad impact of Daoism on the everyday life of Tang society” under four main themes:
Daoism and the Tang social order, with special reference to the place of women
the trajectories of selected Daoist priests and their networks of social relationships
Daoism in daily life under the Tang, notably the Daoist imprint on seasonal festivals, folk customs, and popular practices
the interaction and different degrees of integration between the Three Teachings (Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism).
Chapter 1 demonstrates the vogue for the immortality cult. If Wang claims that the influence of Daoism was significantly greater on the upper than on the lower classes, and that its influence among women was exceptionally high, I’d like to see these points qualified in detail.
His emphasis on the role of women is welcome, although Verellen comments that Wang hardly takes the growing international scholarship on Tang Daoism into account—such as Jia Jinhua’s Gender, power, and talent: the journey of Daoist priestesses in Tang China (2018). And I wonder if Wang has absorbed the groundbreaking early work of Laurence Picken on Tang music—again including Daoist influences and the role of female performers.
Wang documents lives and legends of Tang female immortals in the writings of Du Guangting and the Taiping guangji. While he pays ample attention to courtly Daoism, later chapters turn to folk customs (spells and incantations, supplications, offerings, talismans, and so on—techniques to expel ghosts and banish evil, seek good fortune, and avoid calamity) and the “folklore” of Daoist methods of prayer, divination, and the Retreat-Offering ritual.
Wang notes the Daoist imprint on annual festivals and customs, arguing that through the Tang there was a particularly close relationship between Daoist worship of deities / immortals and folk beliefs, due to the fact that the pantheon venerated by Daoists was constantly replenished by deities derived from folk religion. Such research reveals constant change—in society, deities, festivals; the culture of imperial China was not timeless, as the confrontation with CCP secularization might tempt us to suppose. Fashions for deities such as the Jade Emperor, the City God, the Stove God, Wen Chang, and Erlang have long fluctuated.
Verellen makes an interesting point:
Without denying the fundamentally religious character of Daoism, Professor Wang’s approach coincidentally accords with the policy of the CCP, of which he is a member, to valorize Daoism as popular culture and national heritage.
This seems somewhat harsh: the current slogans of “popular culture” and “national heritage” may have a somewhat insidious influence, but they can also go towards protecting local ritual traditions; and Party membership is an entirely routine insurance for almost any career in the PRC. Still, Verellen goes on:
Skirting the pitfall of reductionism, the book presents a wealth of valuable materials, drawn from an impressive range of contemporary Tang sources.
Of course history and ethnography are different animals. But admirable as all this looks, until we discover ciné footage from the Tang I don’t think silent, immobile early textual sources can compete in my attention with observing the “heat and bustle” of folk religious life at close quarters, or seeking the guidance of ritual specialists in person.
Like most early expressive culture, Tang music—not just courtly genres, but all kinds of musicking in folk society—remains elusive. Kitsch modern “recreations” for the concert platform only exacerbate the problem (cf. Chinese clichés: music).
Erlangen made a suitable and nostalgic venue for the film, having been the scene of the last concert on the delightful 2013 German tour of the Li family Daoists—my post on which I’ve just augmented. I even stayed in the same hotel, bringing back many fond memories of them.
Partly because I can now take a further step back, and partly because I’ve just been editing my new documentary about Gaoluo, I’m all the more aware how demanding the Li Manshan film is—longer, I think, than the new one will be. But I remain amazed at all the technical and personal detail it contains, and all the work that went into it.
In the discussion following the screening, the bright audience made stimulating comments. Among them was Fabrizio Pregadio, * scholar of early Daoist internal alchemy, whose own work as editor of The encylopedia of Taoism and an invaluable reference guide to the Daoist canon doesn’t render him unmoved by the modern practice of peasant Daoists in the poor countryside of north China!
Click here for more thoughts arising from screenings of my film, here for reflections on the Erlangen showing, and here for a roundup of posts on the Li family Daoists.
Left: outside the hotel, where the Li family Daoists relaxed in 2013 Right: Bell Street, after my Chinese name…
* I often wonder if his surname predestined him to become a scholar of religion!
The book comes with an audio CD—but its taken me all this time (Like, Hello?) to realise that from my video footage I could create a beautiful film devoted entirely to the 1995 New Year’s rituals around 1st moon 15th—my first extended stay in the village.
So I’m admiring the creative editing skills of the splendid Andrea Cavazzuti 老安, himself a fine film-maker. Long resident in Beijing (see this interview; for his photos from the early 80s, click here), and an old friend of the Li family Daoists in Shanxi, he’s currently spending time in Milan, so I’ve just spent a few intensive days with him there crafting a rough cut, while relishing the joys of Italy after a long absence.
It’s been inspiring to revisit the 1995 footage, nostalgic to recall the kindness and good humour of the villagers, and fascinating to collaborate in editing.
Alongside the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of the village’s four ritual associations exchanging New Year’s greetings as they parade to their respective “lantern tents” adorned with exquisite god images, are the shengguan wind ensemble, the “civil altar” (wentan 文壇) singing hymns (as well as the Houtu precious scroll)—and in particular the moving, exhilarating percussion suite, led by the great Cai An. It’s also moving to see senior masters like He Yi, Li Shutong, and Yan Wenyu, who maintained the village’s ritual life through the tribulations of Maoism. But ritual activities in Gaoluo already belong to another era…
UPDATE: you can now watch the film here, making a worthy companion to my portrait film on the Li family Daoists!
The famine, and glimpses of the early 1960s’ cultural revival in response to desperation (for more on the national famine, and Ukraine, see here, and under the famine tag)
Enduring social issues: the films of Jiang Nengjie—with a note on mining elsewhere (now with a link to Hu Jie’s bleak film set in the mountains of Qinghai).
Talking with Chinese people, when one doesn’t understand a bit of dialect or an obscure term, they sometimes adopt a device that supposedly solves the problem, as the wise Victor Mair describes in his recent post on Language Log:
Countless are the times I’ve seen people writing Chinese characters in the air to tell which of dozens of homophones they might be referring to. They say, “You know, it’s this one”, and then their index finger goes flailing through the air. It never works, because there are no points of reference from one stroke to the next or between one component and the next, plus they are writing backward with regard to the person to whom they are trying to describe the character.
It works a bit better writing sinoglyphs in the air if the drawer and the viewer stand facing the same direction—but not much.
Writing characters with your finger works a lot better if you do it on a surface—your palm, a table, a car hood, whatever, but it’s still far from ideal, because the movements are ephemeral.
I would add that while the palm is indeed a surface (and I can usually just about work it out when someone “writes” the character in my palm), more often they write it in their own palm, which is facing them, not you, so you can’t even see it properly… As a foreigner one feels a certain obligation to pretend one has understood, perhaps to avoid losing face, or to reassure them that you are literate and “have culture”. So while gratified to learn that it can be a challenge even for such a master as Prof. Mair, when I’m perplexed in such a situation I still find it a tad embarrassing, since Chinese people together seem to find it a perfectly satisfactory solution.
For simpler cases, one is accustomed to widely-understood verbal descriptions of a character—whether by depicting its component parts, such as for the surnames Wu (koutian wu 口天吴 “wu with mouth and heaven”) and Li (muzi li 木子李 “li with wood and son”), or by stating its use as part of an unambiguous binome, like my own Chinese surname (zhongbiaode zhong 钟表的钟 “zhong as in clock”, a bit like “cat as in catastrophe”). * This can get pleasantly silly, like when I tell rural ritual specialists (or other friends who share my abstruse predilections) which character for kou I’m referring to: “Yuqie yankoude kou 瑜伽焰口的口” (“kou as in the Yogacara Flaming Mouth ritual“), establishing a niche complicity…
Left, Yankou shishi ritual manual, 1922 (see here, under Gaoqiao). Right, former monks performing a funerary yankou ritual, Beijing suburbs 1993.
Talking of which, in the early 1990s I used to visit the elderly former monk Benxing in his bare room at the Zhihua temple, listening as he told me about the ritual life of old Beijing, and his own story. As I was taking notes, sometimes I had to query how to write a character that came up in conversation—not so much Buddhist terms as the names of people, streets, or villages. This was long before the days of mobile and internet, and he didn’t even have a little dictionary—but what he did have was a copy of the voluminous Flaming Mouth ritual manual, which he now used for the same purpose. Having learned thoroughly to recite it in his youth before Liberation (and still sometimes performing the ritual for patrons in the suburbs), Benxing was able to fast-forward mentally through the entire text until he came across the character in question, and then deftly flick through the manual to show me!
Back to oral descriptions: one evening in Shaanbei in 2001 with my two fieldwork colleagues at a grotty hostel in Jiaxian county-town, I was telling them how I’d been reading up on the origins of the county Jinju opera troupe in the nearby village of Mutouyu (木头峪, “Wood Gulch”) which had made important innovations before Liberation, performing for Chairman Mao at the Baiyunshan temple fair in 1947. ** I had great fun trying (with studied ineptitude) to explain how to identify the characters for the village:
木头的木，嗯，木头的头。。。嗯，木头峪的峪！ mu as in mutou [wood]—um—tou as in mutou [wood]… um [finding it a challenge to evoke the final character, and then triumphantly:]—yu as in “Mutouyu”!
* * *
So much for mundane communication—an altogether more cosmic air-writing device is that of the Daoist priest at the altar during rituals, depicting complex fu 符 talismans that can only be understood by the gods. Brilliantly (if perhaps controversially?!), in his 2005 film Han Xin’s revenge, on Daoist ritual in Hunan, Patrice Fava renders the characters visible on screen as the priest depicts them!
Screenshots from Han Xin’s revenge: Left, Zou Qishan writes the secret names of the deity Wang Lingguan 王灵官 Right, Chen Demei inaugurates the puppet-statue of Han Xin.
In this clip Chen Demei depicts the taboo characters for the astral deity Ziwei 紫微讳:
* A distant English variant of this (though far more boring, rigid, and infuriating) is the NATO phonetic alphabet (F for Freddie, U for Uniform, C for Charlie…)—making a further gruelling ordeal when you finally get through to an institution on the phone, charmingly satirised by Bridget Christie. “Cat as in catastrophe, dog as in dogmatic” is part of a joke about trying to buy broccoli, which I’ll save up for another time…
** See e.g. the Shaanxi volume of the Monograph on opera in the great Anthology: Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shaanxi juan 中国戏曲志, 陕西卷, p.536 (above), and latterly online articles such as this. As ever (for Baiyunshan, see e.g. here), such an outline invites us to “read between the lines” to recreate the socio-political picture of the day.
Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇, led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire. All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1]
Yves Menheere, The Way and its powers: an ethnographic account of Taoist practice and religious authority in northern Taiwan (2020),
a lucid study which helps further my education on a topic that I previously found somewhat indigestible.
The Introduction sets the tone for Menheere’s enquiry:
Why do people put their faith in religious specialists? Why are some people considered to be more adept at communicating with deities, explaining scriptures, blessing objects, or solving problems with ghosts and other malevolent forces?
Contrasting rituals that are “supposed to work” with those that are meant to be carried out “in the correct way”, Menheere finds that “neither efficacy nor proper performance can explain why people put more faith in one particular priest and not another”. In exploring authority and charisma he considers the work of Max Weber, Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming, Vincent Goossaert, and Pierre Bourdieu.
His useful summary of previous research starts with J.J.M. De Groot in late-19th-century Xiamen (in mainland Fujian); and for Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), studies by Japanese scholars and colonial administrators, notably a 1919 report under the supervision of Marui Keijirō. After World War Two, the pioneering work of Kristofer Schipper (on south Taiwan) and Michael Saso (for Hsinchu in the north) was continued by John Lagerwey for both north and south. Taiwanese scholars have also been industrious, from Liu Chi-wan and Lee Fong-mao to Lü Ch’ui-k’uan, followed by Lin Chen-yuan and others. As Menheere notes, the main focus of such studies has been the description of rituals and the search for the origins of particular practices and traditions; however, scholars adopting more anthropological approaches include Stephan Feuchtwang, David Jordan, John McCreery, Robert Weller, and Chang Hsun.
For ritual studies, I’ve outlined how by the early 1980s, as the PRC opened up after three decades of Maoist repression, the scope of fieldwork at last expanded to mainland China—fanning out from south Fujian (ancestral home of the Taiwanese Daoist altars) in a succession of major projects, mostly led by scholars with experience of the religious scene in Taiwan. So whereas previously the island was almost the only accessible site where scholars could study the riches of Daoist ritual, a wealth of local traditions now beckoned all over the vast expanses of the PRC, “if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective”, as I wrote (cf. The resilience of tradition).
However, it’s always worth paying attention to the ritual life of Taiwan, subject to fewer disruptions than in the PRC—with research now enriched by access to traditions shared with the southeastern mainland. And since scholarship on both sides of the strait, though based on fieldwork, has stressed the early origins of rituals rather than social ethnography (cf. Debunking “living fossils”—combining these approaches for Fujian, though, is Ken Dean), Menheere offers a fresh perspective.
* * *
The distinction between Redhead (ang-thau 紅頭) and Blackhead (o-͘thau 烏頭) ritual specialists is particular to Taiwan and Fujian; while much discussed, it remains complex. In north Taiwan, Blackhead priests specialise in performing mortuary rituals, and are either Sek-kau 釋教 Buddhists, or Daoists sometimes described by the name Numinous Treasure (Leng-po / Lingbao 靈寶). Redhead Daoists—Menheere’s focus, whom he describes as “the Northern Priests”—refrain from performing funerals. While belonging to the Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一 branch (like Daoists further south in Taiwan), they
carried out rites in ways that were broadly similar, and they were able to work together in ritual performances, which frequently occurred. Their way of working set them apart from priests from central or southern Taiwan, who performed rituals in different ways and were generally unable to work in concert with priests from northern Taiwan. These priests agreed that they belong to the same phai 派 or “branch” of Taoism and that priests from central and southern Taiwan belonged to a different branch. [2]
As Menheere observes, authority is relational: “it depends on the position of the individual priest in a wider network of priests, and it is always socially constructed and cannot be reduced to a particular priest’s personality or individual qualities”.
Between the Introduction and Conclusion, the book is arranged in six unnumbered chapters, to which I will award numbers here.
Chapter 1 (“Gods, ghosts and ancestors”) opens with a description of an exorcistic ritual intended to deter malignant forces of the road (lo-͘soah 路煞) from causing traffic accidents and other misfortunes besetting the community. Menheere goes on to give an overview of the religious environment in which the Northern Priests operate. Apart from large-scale temple ceremonies like the Chio / Jiao 醮 Offering, brief “minor rites” (sio-hoat 小法, or “little things” sio-su-a 小事) are also a regular part of the priests’ duties, often requiring only a single officiant. (I was glad to learn that priests in Taiwan describe the performance of ceremonies as “doing things” (cho-su 做事), cf. banshi 办事 in north China).
Always favouring practical grassroots perspectives above historical theory, Menheere unpacks the meaning of Cheng-it (Zhengyi)—”a term used by priests who shared their particular way of working, which presumed knowledge of two particular sets of rites; and did not perform funerary rites”.
By contrast with Schipper’s account for south Taiwan (e.g. his influential 1985 article), where “classical” and “vernacular” rites are carried out by different specialists, the Northern Priests practise a hybrid tradition, with two categories of rites, the “Way” (Tō / Dao 道) and “Methods” (Hoat / Fa 法): “two separate systems of rites, different in their performance, but referred to by the priests as complementary and sometimes even overlapping”. So Menheere ponders Schipper’s classical / vernacular dichotomy in the northern context, under the headings of language, pantheon, transmission, and the “mental states” of meditation and trance. Again working from the practical standpoint of the priests themselves, he confounds any simple distinction between the two types. Valuably, he notes contingency and modern change:
When we consider the meaning of Tō and Hoat and their associated ritual traditions, we must account for how the terms take shape in local practice and acquire different meanings, rather than ascribe them meaning devoid of social and historical context.
Still, “whether a rite was Tō or Hoat did not, for the priests at least, depend on its historical origins, but on the type of ceremony with which it was associated and on the way it was performed”. Noting that priests freely made use of the two categories during both exorcisms and offerings, Menheere illustrates this with Tō and Hoat versions of the “Worshipping the Lord of Heaven” ritual segment (pai Thin-kong 拜天公).
Chapter 2, a history of the Northern Priests from the Qing dynasty through the Japanese era to modern times, is full of detail on modern developments in their practice, showing that it is not immune to change. For the period since the 1980s, Menheere notes a shift away from healing rituals towards large-scale Offerings—which was attributed to perceived modernisation, notably in medical care. Thus “knowledge of the Tō rites for multiple-day Chio […] was slowly acquired by priests who initially performed mostly Hoat rites”. Moreover,
The expanding ritual market of the 1980s enabled several altars that at the time had only recently been established to rise to prominence. Indeed, some of the most successful and notable altars I observed doing fieldwork only began conducting offerings on a regular basis in the 1980s.
He also suggests a rather recent shift in the way the priests referred to themselves, with the autonym Cheng-it becoming more common.
Chapter 3, “Work and training”, looks at how ceremonies are performed and how the required knowledge to do so is transmitted. Menheere provides a good discussion of the role of “altars” (toan / tan 壇, an important term in south China that is seldom applied to household Daoists in the north), the physical and conceptual locus of a Daoist family tradition; and he gives a useful account of hierarchy and roles within the ritual group. As to personnel,
composition of groups varied from altar to altar and depended on the position of the priest in the field. Priests with more successful altars usually limited hires to their apprentices and a small group of priests that worked almost exclusively for them. Priests with fewer apprentices or fewer opportunities to organise ceremonies, however, had to look outside their immediate ties.
Menheere notes that “family was the principal source of knowledge for a small majority of the priests I observed”, but “recognising a master” from an unrelated family was also rather common. As to training in practice, he again finds variety, followed by a section on how priests assess competency:
A priest’s skills were described with the word kang-hu [gongfu] 功夫, and priests who lacked the physical attributes of the ideal priests—priests that were too short, for instance—could compensate for such perceived shortcomings with their kang-hu.
He continues with a most salient reminder:
It is perhaps worth noting that being familiar with the intricacies of Taoist doctrine as found in its classical texts did not play a role in the training of the priests or judgment of their competency.
The following two sections discuss the major ceremonies associated with the two ritual traditions. Chapter 4 explores the links between authority and the correct performance of rituals through a discussion of changes in the programme of the Chio Offering over the past century (with rich material in Appendix A listing sequences for ten such rituals).
After introducing the old “orthopraxy” trope and considering factors inhibiting change, Menheere argues “that despite the importance attached to correct performance, priests did occasionally—at least to a certain degree—have the ability to change the contents of rites and ceremonies and that such changes would not necessarily affect a priest’s authority”.
While the structure of three-day Chio seems quite constant over the century for which we have evidence, five-day Chio (an expanded version of the three-day programme) have also become increasingly common. The main addition here was the fast chanting of various [nationally standard] jing 經 scriptures—which household Daoists in north China have tended to omit in modern times, even though they comprise a major part of their ritual manuals (e.g. Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.211–13, 375–8).
Menheere continues with a detailed account of versions of the recently-elaborated ritual segment Ascending the Platform (teng-tai pai-pio 登台拜表) as interpreted by three different priests (cf. my account of Li Qing’s Pardon ritual):
All priests who performed the versions of the rite had access to Zhang Enpu’s text, yet none chose to follow his text to the letter. Even Master Tiong, who adhered to it most strictly, chose to add elements, attempting to, as he indicated in our discussions, make the rite more “correct”. It is possible that the priests in the other two cases chose to perform a much shorter rite because it was more convenient, not only for themselves, but also for all lay participants, who had to stand and watch the rite throughout.
He concludes the chapter thus:
The example of “Ascending the Platform” demonstrates that priests did have flexibility in revising rites in ways that did not transform them altogether. They were the experts, and as long as the performance of particular rites fulfilled expectations, the patrons neither grasped minor changes nor challenged a priest’s authority.
Scene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual: the patron blows out a flame to send away the im 陰 fire.
Chapter 5 focuses on the links between authority and efficacy in the exorcistic Toa-po-͘un 大補運 Great Improvement of Luck, the major healing ceremony of the Northern Priests, when the patron often suffers from a serious medical condition. While careful not to add further layers of anthropological abstraction to the complexities of the ritual system itself, Menheere again begins with theoretical perspectives; [3] then, setting forth from the research of Hsu Li-ling, he moves on to elements in the adaptable programme for the Great Improvement of Luck ritual, and five vivid case studies from his own fieldwork (note the lists of ritual segments in Appendix C).
If patrons were not familiar with the logic of the Toa-po-͘un, they were generally free to interpret the ceremonies in ways not directly derived from the meanings enacted in the rites. For patrons, the “effective meaning” was found, not so much in the symbolism of the rite, but in the fact that a priest, possessing a body of specialised knowledge to which they had no access, was involved and employed his knowledge to interact with and implore deities to intercede. Such an attitude, combined with the spectacle of the ceremony and the impressions it left on the spectators, predisposed observers to connect the performance to any event during or after the ritual proceedings.
Menheere ends the chapter by considering efficacy (ling 靈)—the core of Chinese popular religion, according to Valerie Hansen and Adam Yuet Chau:
Patrons did not hire priests to conduct Toa-po-͘un because they knew the rituals would work. They hired priests because they believed in the potential of the ritual and that it was the right course of action. These beliefs were bolstered by, not so much prior successes in Toa-po-un performances, but by a priest’s connections with institutions and trusted individuals.
He argues that
efficacy was the product of authority, rather than the other way around. A priest did not become a great priest because he cured his patients, he came in the position to cure his patients—or not—because he had become a great priest.
The Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei, with Lin Ch’ang-tung 林昌桐 (1947–2019) presiding.
In Chapter 6 Menheere further ponders the way the organisation of ceremonies is distributed and how this relates to the idea of a field of priests. Recurring occasions include
ceremonies organised in honour of a deity’s anniversary; Worshipping the Dipper ceremonies, which many temples organised once or twice a year; ceremonies conducted for the construction of a new temple, the restoration of an old one, or the consecration of a new statue; and ceremonies held to feed the hungry ghosts during the seventh lunar month. Priests also commonly performed exorcisms […] as well as temple ceremonies held for the benefit of the ancestors of the faithful. On some of these occasions, temples could also choose to organise a Chio, but this was less common.
While he notes some exceptions,
more common, recurring ceremonies were typically conducted by the same priest; that is, the priest responsible for a ceremony on one occasion returned to perform the ritual again.[…] In some cases, relationships between temples and altars spanned multiple generations.
He finds that “patrons unconnected to either a priest or a temple resorted to other ways to find a priest”, mainly through local or personal networks.
Priests occasionally recounted how territorial claims were violently enforced in the past, but during my fieldwork, I was not aware of any violent incidents. Still, priests could be visibly displeased when they felt other priests were infringing on their perceived territory and would try to use their own local connections to displace the infringing priests if they felt that this was indeed happening.
Menheere details various procedures in organising the Chio Offering—“the most elaborate and important ceremonies in the Northern Priests’ repertoire”, which (nonetheless) few of them had a chance to organise during their career. There was considerable competition between priests for the task of presiding over this ritual. Temples might appoint a chief priest directly, solicit bids, or appoint through divination.
Knowledge of particular forms of ritual was a prerequisite to conduct ceremonies, but knowledge in itself did not guarantee success. The most knowledgeable priests were not necessarily those conducting the most ceremonies.
Still, “priests who inherited a successful altar had the best chances at claiming a dominant position in the field”. He ends the chapter thoughtfully by suggesting further factors that may need including:
It would probably be easier to develop new contacts and lead a flourishing altar in areas where fewer priests operated than in an area with many active priests. We must also consider historical conditions and change. The situation was quite different in the 1980s, when the market for religious services, including the ceremonies of the priests, was quickly expanding and a priest’s method of entering the field may have been less important.
In his Conclusion, Menheere reminds us that
terms like Tō, Hoat, Chio, and Cheng-it (and their Mandarin equivalents) have specific meanings that are locally and historically embedded, can change over time, and should not be taken for granted. […] Ritual practices can change, even if they are part of a tradition that highly values correct practices and sees immutability as a defining feature of what actually constitutes correct practice. While such changes can be triggered by external factors, specialists themselves do play an important role in shaping changes.
* * *
Time for my inevitable spiel: after silent, immobile text, nothing can compare to experiencing the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of Daoist ritual for real—here, for instance, is a “Great Improvement of Luck” ritual in 2022, just one of many online videos uploaded by the Wei Yuan Altar:
And to sample the more “classical” Tō tradition, click here for a 1977 introduction to a temple inauguration, filmed by Patrice Fava (another scholar whose grounding in Taiwanese ritual bore fruit on the mainland)—see his Un taoïste n’a pas d’ombre: mémoires d’un ethnologue en Chine (2023), pp.30–31, 53.
* * *
While I’m in awe of their erudition, some scholars of Daoist ritual seem so committed to the Wisdom of the Ancient Sages that their accounts may seem more prescriptive than descriptive, almost evangelical; in both Chinese and English, they can speak only to a highly limited audience. Instead Menheere, with his clear style, refrains from unduly mystifying either the priests or their rituals.
The Way and its powers is valuable for incorporating ethnography, modern change, and ritual theory—all largely absent from the field as it took shape—into the established concerns of scholarship on Daoist ritual, which (first for Taiwan, later for the PRC) has come to be dominated by the salvage of medieval ritual structures and texts. The study of ritual traditions in mainland China might look quite different if the ethnographic approach had found more of a voice in Taiwan.
[1] Sadly, Menheere’s original PhD thesis (2017) contains a mere three images (the published version has none!), so I’m grateful to him for helping me illustrate this post with some of his splendid fieldwork photos. Images by Patrice Fava are found in John Lagerwey’s attractively-illustrated book Le continent des esprits (1991); though the captions don’t give locations, I’m told that they show rituals and priests from both north and south Taiwan.
For transliterations of terms and names I have followed Menheere’s practice, based (for Taiwanese) on the “Church” romanization and (for Mandarin) on Wade-Giles, with some pinyin equivalents added for terms with wider significance (such as Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一).
[2] Menheere comments further: “Taoist Blackhead priests were active in different areas in northern Taiwan, but only in locations such as Hsinchu and Tamsui would they regularly carry out other ceremonies in addition to funerals. In both areas, however, they had to compete with the Northern Priests”. Michael Saso gave an early taxonomy of the ritual life of Hsinchu in “The Taoist tradition in Taiwan” (1970).
Similar distinctions are commonly found in mainland south China, e.g. in Hunan; in the north I don’t recall hearing of household Daoists who refrain from performing funerals—if there are any areas where they do so (also for regions such as south Jiangsu), then I’m keen to learn. In north Shanxi the Li family Daoists used to perform rituals for both the living and the dead, but mortuary rituals now comprise the great majority of their business (see Ritual change in north Shanxi, and my film). Note also my major rethink of the Zhengyi–Quanzhen dichotomy.
[3] Here, besides the sources that he cites, it’s worth consulting Catherine Bell’s surveys of the field of ritual studies.
It’s always worth consulting the Taiwan series Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore”, introduced here). I look forward to reading the two volumes (2023, vols. 221 and 222) of
“Special issue on popular beliefs, religious texts, and local communities in the sinophone world: in memory of Professor Daniel L. Overmyer” 民間信仰、宗教經典與地方社會：紀念歐大年教授專輯.
Indeed, Overmyer would have been much pleased by these studies.
Part One, with an Introduction by Chao Shin-yi and Wang Chien-chuan, has articles on spirit writing and sects in Taiwan, south Jiangsu, and Yunnan. Part Two comprises articles by
John Lagerwey on the history and customs of an Anhui village, focused on its chief temples, ancestor halls, and festivals—in particular, fengshui
Wu Xiaojie and Liu Yun, exploring Pu’an beliefs in anlong xietu (Retaining the Dragons and Thanking Earth) rituals
Chen Minghua on the Luo sect and the Green Gang (Qingbang)
Nikolas Broy on the Taiwanese longhuapai initiation festival and zhaijiao vegetarian sects
Xu Tianji and Luo Dan on the sectarian scriptures of ritual experts in southeast Hebei
Wang Yao on the pantheon emerging from the cult of the General of the Five Paths (Wudao jiangjun 五道將軍) in Hongtong, Shanxi
Ma Zhujun on gender, intimacy, and deity-human relationships in “precious scrolls” about the Lady of Mount Tai in north China, with a focus on gender.
For a survey of ritual and musical traditions in Taiwan, and some background on how their modern histories vary from those of the mainland, click here. Many of my own field reports on local ritual in rural north China are collected here.
I still find it worth reminding you of my page Rethinking Zhengyi and Quanzhen, for its fundamental rethink of Daoist ritual practice.
In my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China (2011) I began exploring the false dichotomy between Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi 正一) and Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) branches(note especially pp.17–18). The page on my blog augments the material there in the light of further fieldwork.
Whereas the household Daoist groups of south China have dominated previous research, numerous groups of household Daoists are also active throughout the north—and they may nominally belong to either Orthodox Unity or Complete Perfection branches. But such simplistic pigeonholing may distract us from the details of their ritual practice; in both their rituals and ritual manuals I can rarely discern any significant distinction between them. When the Complete Perfection branch evolved in the 12th century, its priests (both temple and household) inherited a long tradition of Orthodox Unity ritual practice: as John Lagerwey once observed to me, “that was the only show in town”. And while a distinct Complete Perfection literature did evolve (see my book, pp.203–207), their ritual practice never developed into a separate corpus of Complete Perfection ritual texts.
That explains why such an august Complete Perfection temple priest as Min Zhiting was constantly citing Orthodox Unity ritual manuals from the Daoist Canon; and why the best mainstream source for the ritual texts of the Li family (Orthodox Unity) household priests in Yanggao is the repertoire of modern “Complete Perfection” temple practice like the Quanzhen zhengyun and Xuanmen risong.
Household Zhengyi Daoists of the Li family, Shanxi.
In some places now—since around 2000—the picture is further confused by a certain “centripetal” tendency. With wider access (such as the internet), some groups that have always been Orthodox Unity may be exploring ways of “legitimising” themselves by seeking manuals from prestigious central sites like the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, and having costumes and hats made which make them appear to be Complete Perfection Daoists. They may even reform their “local” ritual practice by adopting elements from the “national” White Cloud Temple.
The local ritual scene is further obfuscated by a tendency among some scholars (both local and central) to assume that if a group is household-based, then they must be Orthodox Unity—a problem I have already queried. We really must debunk this assumption. Among my articles on Local ritual, the household Daoists of Changwu in Shaanxi turn out to belong to the Huashan branch of Complete Perfection, and the household Daoists of Guangling in Shanxi appear to come from a Longmen tradition. Actually, this is not so clear-cut—even non-Quanzhen priests might adopt Longmen titles (note sources by Vincent Goossaert cited in my In search of the folk Daoists, p.18 n.34).
So while both the ritual texts and ritual sequences of the two notional branches are rather similar, what always makes local traditions distinctive is the way in which the texts are performed. Even here there’s another erroneous cliché that needs debunking. Generations of scholars of Daoist music have parroted the notion that in style the “music” of Orthodox Unity (conceived narrowly as “household” or folk) Daoists is more popular and lively, whereas that of Complete Perfection (again, conceived narrowly as austere monastic) Daoists is solemn, slow and restrained. This derives entirely from an unfounded theory about household and temple practice. We only need to watch my film about the Li family band to realise this simply won’t do. The basic style of Orthodox Unity Daoists (exemplified by the zantan hymns that permeate all their rituals) is extremely slow and solemn—but as you can hear, it is indeed punctuated by exhilarating moments. The idiom of (household!) Complete Perfection Daoists is certainly no more “solemn”. Both branches may use melodic shengguan instrumental ensemble—and if anything, that of the Orthodox Unity groups tends to be more slow and solemn.
Indeed, when I showed Li Manshan my videos of funeral segments by the Complete Perfection household Daoists in Shuozhou just south of Yanggao, he found their performance “chaotic” (luan). Orthodox Unity groups in Yanggao like that of Li Manshan pride themselves on the “order” (guiju) of their performance. My only ongoing note on this is that several household Complete Perfection groups (such as in Shuozhou and Guangling) may have preserved the element of fast tutti a cappella recitation of the jing scriptures better than in some Orthodox Unity traditions like those of Yanggao. But that doesn’t bear on the false stylistic dichotomy. Like Life, It’s Complicated… We always need to expand our database and use our critical faculties, rather than parroting outdated clichés.
Do refer to my original page, with its greater detail! More essays on conceptual issues in Chinese ritual under Themes in the top menu—besides many fieldnotes on Local ritual…
While Daoism and Zen have long become glib buzzwords in the West, some such as R.H. Blyth and Alan Watts have given informed treatments, and some like Gary Snyder embody the ethos. In another post I alluded to Daoist wuwei while feeling sad that we can’t attribute the expression “Don’t just do something, stand there!” to Miles Davis.
Helen De Cruz contributes a thoughtful study from her background as performer and scholar of baroque lute and archlute. In studying a Zamboni prelude with her teacher, she elaborates on his advice “Be more Zen”:
to give shape to the extemporising, improvisatory nature of a prelude one should achieve more with less, giving an air of effortlessness to quick runs using difficult and sometimes awkward grips. The composition of a prelude embodies the aesthetic of studied effortlessness: at first, the notes sound spontaneous, searching, reaching, as if the player is merely tuning her instrument and improvising. But then, as the harmonies are given increasingly definite shape through blossoming arpeggios, the ear inclines to expect the next note with increasing confidence, and finally it all comes together: the earlier hesitant notes get their meaning, and the mind discerns the cohesive whole—it turns out not a single note was coincidental.
The term sprezzatura * (akin to “effortless grace” or “studied carelessness”) was introduced by the Italian Renaissance philosopher and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione in his etiquette manual Il Cortegiano (1528), written for the “small but chic” court at Urbino. Essential skills for the courtier included dancing, wrestling, fencing, horse riding, sports (such as tennis), and playing a musical instrument. The goal was “to steer away from affectation at all costs, […] to practice in everything a certain nonchalance [sprezzatura] that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”.
While the concealment of art can be affected, the aesthetic is still prized today—for instance, in men’s fashion,
where one aims for an appearance of effortless grace in what is in reality a carefully curated wardrobe. It is part of how athletes are judged. […] The aesthetician Tom Cochrane equates sprezzatura with the aesthetic of cool, which he describes as containing “elements of aesthetic power or sublimity, specifically an elevation above the passions and indifference to danger.” The graceful courtier is (seemingly) unconcerned with the effect he has on the audience. Ultimately, he is unconcerned with himself, he has lost all self-consciousness in the intrinsic beauty of his actions.
De Cruz notes that early discussions often focused on the practice of ritual. “To achieve true mastery, you must lose yourself in a skilled task that harmonises you with your physical and mental environment, and you will achieve mental quietude as a result.” Inevitably, I think of my great household Daoist mentors Li Qing and his son Li Manshan, both lowly peasants; this is also a question of charisma, not always a major theme of studies of Daoist ritual…
The early Daoist classic Zhuangzi evinces the art of the bell-stand maker, wheelwright—and butcher: as de Cruz explains a much-discussed passage,
Lord Wenhui watches in silent admiration as his butcher (who is also his cook) is cutting up an ox: “every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee—zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou music [ancient ritual items, the former part of rain ceremonies].
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way [dao], which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now – now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes.”
“Perception and understanding have come to a stop, and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.”
Zhuangzi also tells the story of a man swimming in fast-running currents, who tells Confucius:
I have no way [無道wu dao]. I began with what I was used to, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That’s how I can stay afloat.
De Cruz comments astutely:
Note the details in this story: the man has long hair that streams down, rather than being tied up in a knot, indicating he is of lower class. He sings not in a ritual context, as the Confucians would require, but out of sheer, unadulterated joy. Confucius is the main Confucian sage but (in Zhuangzian fashion) cannot fathom how someone is able to make such a dive and come out alive. Rather than a specific affectation, the swimmer has “no way.” He exhibits the essence of sprezzatura in his graceful movements and his indifference to danger.
For both folk and art music in the time of Vermeer, click here.
She cites the 17th-century English lutenist Mary Burwell:
One must then sit upright in playing to show no constraint or pains, to have a smiling countenance, that the company may not think you play unwillingly, and [to] show that you animate the lute as well as the lute does animate you. Yet you must not stir your body nor your head, nor show any extreme satisfaction in your playing. You must make no mouths, nor bite your lips, nor cast your hands in a flourishing manner that relishes of a fiddler [!]. In one word, you must not less please the eyes than the ears.
the aptitudes for which [playing the harpsichord] calls are natural to everyone—much like in walking, or, if you like, running.
She cites the flow theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Self-forgetting opens the mind to the intrinsic beauty of skills we exhibit in the flow state,
explaining
In Zhuangzi’s butcher and swimmer and in Mary Burwell’s lutenist, the practitioner refuses to be identified with their performance, thus overcoming the self-centredness that often accompanies achievement.
This may be one reason why I became so resistant to Beethoven, for whom struggle—audible struggle—was central, becoming dominant in the romantic aesthetic of the virtuoso concerto soloist, striving to overcome.
De Cruz concludes:
We achieve an overall pleasing effect when we are in harmony with our physical constraints. When we achieve wuwei in skilled performance, we deliberately submit ourselves to our environment and to the limitations of our bodies—we place our actions rather than ourselves centre stage. We can say that sprezzatura presents a philosophy of life, an approach to our environment and our surroundings that acknowledges our bodily imperfections and our situatedness, and that yet enables us to achieve through non-action and mental stillness a kind of perfection that our audience can delight in and enjoy. Sometimes the beauty and wonder we bring into the world has more to do with our non-action than with our action.
Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel […]
Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream […]
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!
I’m both amused and bemused when readers of my posts react to the myriad highlighted links with a certain alarm at finding themselves pursuing my arcane thought-processes down the rabbit-warren that this blog has become (e.g. in my annual roundups, “like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw”).
The links are of two kinds: to articles, websites, or pdfs by other authors, and to other posts on this site. They are rarely a red herring, or a wild goose chase—honest guv. While the Plain People of Ireland are quite entitled to their dismay, the consternation of erudite academics seems curious, when they are used to taking in their stride in-text references and ponderous Teutonic footnotes (like de Selby in The third policeman)—keen to consult a reference to Karlgren’s Grammata Serica Recensa which in turn will lead them to early Sogdian manuscripts and thence to medieval viniculture… Only you no longer have to spend a day consulting index cards in a library. And I like to think that I’m performing a public service by distracting such scholars for a moment from their niche focus on Song-dynasty Daoist ritual texts or baroque performance practice—whether by broadening the scope of enquiry or by being reminded of an apposite joke (see e.g. my taxonomy of Chinese jokes, under The joys of indexing). And (suitably equipped with a long ball of string) you can always find your way back to where you started.
Sir, you try my patience!
I don’t mind if I do—you must come over and try mine sometime.
— Groucho.
Even those less obsessively monocultural readers must be used to consulting websites full of links to related topics—like when an online article about the latest pompous idiocies of The Haunted Pencil leads you to other iniquities of the Tory “government”. Perhaps part of the challenge of my personal labyrinth is that its associations are so diverse, keeping you guessing. But that’s Like Life, innit?!
Oops, I seem to have done it again here… Please excuse me! But anyway, my Word Press stats suggest that remarkably few readers ever click on the links (even within roundups, or playlists such as this, where not doing so is like consulting a library catalogue but not looking at any of the books)—which causes me a certain distress 😟 (see The art of emoji)… Go on, give it a whirl!
Fujianprovince in southeast China is one of the most vibrant areas to explore folk and ritual expressive cultures, which its local scholars have been particularly avid in documenting. Its traditions—always rooted in life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies—are known to outsiders largely through the Minnan region in the south of the province, particularly the treasury of nanyin ballads [1]—not least because much of the culture of the island of Taiwan across the strait derives from its Hokkien migrants (click here).
The visits of my early fieldwork years were inevitably superficial, “gazing at flowers from horseback” 走马观花. For background, Li Quanmin’s 1961 field report—during a lull between Maoist campaigns—was already based on collections by local cultural workers. After the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, Fujian minjian yinyue jianlun福建民间音乐简论 (1986) by Liu Chunshu 刘春曙 and Wang Yaohua 王耀华 made a worthy survey for the early reform era, including both vocal and instrumental genres.
Meanwhile the compilation of the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples was under way; and it’s taken me all this time to get round to browsing the 2,775 pages (!) of the two instrumental music volumes for Fujian,
Zhongguo minjian qiyuequ jicheng, Fujian juan中国民间器乐曲集成, 福建卷 (2001), again with the experienced Wang Yaohua as editor-in-chief.
Ritual pervades all genres of folk expressive culture: in the Anthology, it is a major theme of the volumes for folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance. In the instrumental music volumes, even genres that lack explicit liturgical content are also invariably performed for ceremonial occasions—but a further reason to consult them is that the specific rubric of “religious music” has been consigned there. I’ve described the flaws of the Anthology project in my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.
Apart from the Anthology‘s valuable Monographs for opera and narrative-singing and brief textual introductions to genres, its volumes consist mainly of transcriptions, of limited value without available recordings. Conceptually its classifications are rudimentary, but it opens up a world of local cultures.
For Fujian, whereas nanyin is amply documented on CD and film, most other genres are unique to the province and hardly known outside their own locale. So I find these volumes a revelation, opening up many perspectives (particularly for the late imperial and Republican eras) and making one of the most impressive introductions to the riches of expressive culture in China. It confirms my observations about the resilience of tradition in the PRC—for all the cultural riches of Taiwan, they are dwarfed even by the single province of Fujian, despite the traumas of three decades of Maoism there.
* * *
The main rubrics adopted for the instrumental volumes of the Anthology (a rough-and-ready national framework, based on the classification developed since the 1950s and later elaborated by Yuan Jingfang) are:
“compound” (zonghexing综合性, referring mainly to a substantial vocal component)
“silk-and-bamboo” sizhu 丝竹
“drumming and blowing” guchui 鼓吹
“blowing and beating” chuida 吹打, with a more diverse instrumentation than guchui
percussion bands luogu 锣鼓
“sacrificial music” jisi yinyue 祭祀音乐 and “religious music” zongjiao yinyue 宗教音乐(Buddhist, Daoist, both temple and household—the latter covered far more comprehensively in separate projects by Chinese and foreign scholars).
Besides all the articles introducing particular local traditions, brief yet instructive sections are appended with histories of some notable groups (pp.2687–99) and biographies of performers (pp.2700–19), sampled below.
As throughout China, social performance is dominated by ensembles (see e.g. Liaoning), some occupational, others amateur. By contrast with the “conservatoire style”, instrumental solos play a very minor role in folk practice—here represented only by pieces for the zheng zither around Zhao’an and Yunxiao (pp.1683–1754), just east of Chaozhou in east Guangdong—another enclave for zheng solo repertoires.
* * *
Even for the Quanzhou region of south Fujian, while nanyin 南音 is a main focus, it is only part of a diverse scene. Nanyin has become a significant cultural element in the rapprochement between Fujian and Hokkien communities overseas. With so much research elsewhere, the Anthology section (pp.31–46, transcriptions pp.37–354) may not detain us long, though we should also consult other volumes, notably those for narrative-singing—both “music” (Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Fujian juan 中国曲艺音乐集成, 福建卷, pp.45–1102!) and the monograph (Zhongguo quyi zhi, Fujian juan 中国曲艺志, 福建卷).
Beiguan 北管 isa major genre in Taiwan (see again here), but in Fujian (where it is particular to Hui’an county near Quanzhou) it has a far less extensive repertoire (pp.355–60, transcriptions pp.361–97; biographies 2716–18).
Local traditions under “silk-and-bamboo” (a rubric as unwieldy as the others) include
shiyin 十音of the Pu–Xian region (Putian and Xianyou) (aka shiyinbayue 十音八乐, with the added format of shawms and percussion: for video clip, see under Walking shrill)
“guyue” 古乐 of Zhao’an in the southern Zhangzhou region, related to Chaozhou ensemble music and the zheng zither repertoire
shiban 十班 groups around west Fujian.
“Greater guchui” procession in Anxi.
Shawm-and-percussion bands, again serving life-cycle and calendrical observances, are ubiquitous throughout China, including all regions of Fujian—though they are hardly known outside local communities. Under the heading of “guchui” are introductions to
Ningde in northeast Fujian (for a shawm band in Xiapu, see also pp.2696–8).
around Fuzhou, Annan chi 安南伬 (and introduction to a renowned band in Linpu village, pp.2691–2)
in Fuqing south of Fuzhou, jin guchui 金鼓吹
“lesser guchui” of Xianyou and “greater guchui” of the Pu–Xian region.
Biographies of Pingtan paizhi master Wang Shanglong and Chen Renzhen.
Since imperial times, shawm bands were often transmitted through regional military garrisons, such as
longchui 龙吹 around Quanzhou (text pp.784–5, transcriptions pp.786–96), introduced in my Folk music of China pp.312–18, CD #12 (in the sidebar on this blog, audio gallery #15, with commentary here), and another instance is
paizhi of Pingtan island平潭排只 (text pp.663–4, transcriptions pp.665–708; biographies of Wang Shanglong 王尚龙 [1846–1917] and Chen Renzhen 陈人祯 [1911–88] p.2707, with a brief introduction to the latter’s band on p.2695).
shiyin十音 around Quanzhou (Folk music of China, pp.318–20)
naoting 闹厅 of Yongchun (cf. film footage of Yongchun migrants to Malaysia, here)
shawm bands in Anxi and Xiamen
for Changtai near Zhangzhou, greater guchui and lesser bayin—introducing the Qinghe guan 清和馆 society, whose masters trained over fifty groups in the vicinity.
Transmission of Raoping chui in rural Longyan, p.931.
Around west Fujian:
Raoping chui饶平吹 of Longyan (and introduction to a village band pp.2695–6)
shifandiao 十番调 of Yongding
wuyin 五音 of Shanghang
and genres in Wuping, Liancheng, and Changting.
In central Fujian, bands in counties of Sanming municipality.
In the north, shawm bands in counties of Nanping municipality
In the east (opening vol.2), shawm bands of the She minority 畲族 around Xiapu, Fu’an, Ningde, and Yong’an.
“Blowing and beating” Under the rubric of chuida (a more diverse instrumentation than the “guchui” shawm bands):
around the provincial capital Fuzhou, shifan 十番 (for various groups in the region, see also pp.2692–4)
shijin 拾锦 of Fuding, and genres in Fu’an and Gutian
in the Zhangzhou region, Siping luogu 四平锣鼓 of Nanjing 南靖 county (see also p.2696).
in north Fujian, Shifan luogu 十番锣鼓 [2] of Wuyishan, and groups in Pucheng.
Percussion ensembles include
taiping gu太平鼓 around Fuzhou, and
goutou 沟头 of Fuqing
jin guluo 金鼓锣 of Zhouning further north
genres in the south and west of the province.
Ritual As we saw, while all genres of expressive culture are pervaded by ritual, in the Anthology the major rubric of “religious music” has been allotted to the instrumental music volumes. Though the articles of the lengthy section for Fujian (pp.1757—2683) fall far short of detailed monographs elsewhere (e.g. the Daojiao yishi congshu series for household Daoists), they constitute subsidiary references that may yet offer further clues (for early film footage, see Religious life in 1930s’ Fujian).
In the constant struggle with taxonomy (note the thoughtful studies of Catherine Bell), the editors’ ritual categories are unsatisfactory—in folk practice, even the terms “Buddhist” and “Daoist” are porous, as is clear from several volumes of the Daojiao yishi congshu. Before the listings of temple and household Buddhist and Daoist genres under “religious music”, they have inserted a section on “sacrificial music”, comprising
“Three in One” (Sanyi jiao 三一教) groups in the Pu–Xian region (see also biography of Liu Maoyuan 刘茂源, b.1916, pp.2710–11)—note Kenneth Dean, The Lord of the Three in One: the spread of a cult in southeast China (1998)
for the She minority around Ningde and Fu’an, a rather detailed article with the misleading title “music of mediumistic rituals” wushu daochang yinyue 巫术道场音乐 (pp.1837–42, liturgical texts with scores 1843–93; also biography of sixth-generation master Zhong Fuxing 钟福星 [b.1930], p.2718). Known here as wangshi 尫师 (an interesting character, wang), such ritual specialists are Daoist exorcists in the Lüshan or Maoshan tradition, presiding over the complex liturgical sequences of jiao Offering and mortuary rituals (cf. this 2017 article), just like their Han Chinese counterparts elsewhere in the province (below under “religious music” > Daoist > household)—as distinct from the self-mortifying spirit mediums who also play a significant role in Fujian rituals (see e.g. Dean’s splendid film Bored in heaven).
Chanhe ritual, Fuzhou.
For both simplicity and clarity, these sections might rather have been subsumed under the single rubric of “religious music”—which includes
Buddhist:
liturgy of temple monks: Guanghua si temple in Putian, Kaiyuan si in Quanzhou, and Nan Putuo si in Xiamen
household ritual specialists:
chanhe 禅和 amateur ritual societies in Fuzhou (introduced en passant in my Folk music of China, pp.295–6)—another substantial section (see also biography of Xie Guiming 谢桂铭, b.1913, p.2709)
xianghua 香花 household priests in Putian (cf. Meixian in east Guangdong).
Household Daoist rituals, Putian.
Daoist:
liturgy of temple priests: Xiamen and Zhangzhou
household ritual groups in Putian, Xianyou, and Nan’an (for the latter, see also biography of Daoist Li Shi 李湿 [b.1932], pp.2712–13)—the scores useful, at least, for liturgical texts. Again, these sections will merely supplement detailed studies by scholars of religion.
Segments of mortuary rituals, Nan’an (again, cf. Ken Dean).
* * *
Even limiting our scope to instrumental music, it takes considerable conceptual adjustment to broaden our view of the musical culture of Fujian from nanyin to a multiplicity of groups such as shawm bands and ritual specialists. Unsatisfactory as the Anthology may be, beyond merely documenting “pieces” it reminds us that the lifeblood of all these traditions is social—and ritual—practice. Many individual genres are doubtless the subject of articles in Chinese journals since the publication of the Anthology, and one could make a base in any one county, indeed any one village, combining a wealth of material by observing life-cycle and calendrical activities. Meanwhile, even before consulting several thousand further pages of the Anthology for vocal and dance genres, these volumes provide valuable clues to the local ceremonial cultures of Fujian, the life stories of its transmitters, and social change, making a gateway to our studies of ritual life.
For a survey of folk traditions around the Tianjin municipality, again based on the Anthology, see here.
[1] This is a common reductive view. In surveying Chinese expressive culture, we must always beware merely regarding south Jiangsu as silk-and-bamboo, Hebei as songs-for-winds, Shanxi as “eight great suites”, and ethnic minorities as “good at singing and dancing”—just as we may reduce Spain to flamenco, Indonesia to gamelan, and so on.
If you appreciate our film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist (*watch here*), then the book is an essential companion—further augmented on this site by a series of vignettes and updates, rounded up here.
Introduction, and reviews from Ian Johnson, Stephan Feuchtwang, and Vincent Goossaert:
In vocal traditions of Chinese expressive culture (as I keep harping, or drumming, on), the neat pigeon-holes of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera disguise a continuum from solo singing though to fully-staged genres with larger forces, all oscillating between a range of points along the ceremonial–entertainment continuum—see my
“Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337, e.g. §4.4.
Within the Anthology, one often needs to consult all three rubrics: folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera—and indeed dance. Along with my focus on ritual traditions and instrumental ensembles, narrative-singing (aka “story-telling”) is often relevant to my studies. So I’ve recently added a tag in the sidebar for shuoshu说书 (aka shuochang说唱, or in official parlance quyi曲艺)—I’ll try and keep updating this roundup.
Another issue of taxonomy in the Anthology: whereas “religious music” is largely consigned to the instrumental music volumes, some ritual groups accompanying their vocal liturgy only with percussion are found within the narrative-singing volumes, such as the household Daoists of Changwu in Shaanxi. Also classified somewhat uncomfortably under “narrative-singing” is the substantial theme of
“precious scrolls” (baojuan)—surveyed here, with links to Hebei, Gansu, and south Jiangsu.
Of course, rather than being constrained by narrow categories, we need to place the variety of expressive cultures in social context. Studies of “narrative-singing” often highlight the refined urban entertainment of urban stages and teahouses, with a largely sinological, literary approach to late imperial history—itself a worthy topic—tending to reify performances that are in fact animated by a strong element of improvisation. And as with folk-singing, opera, and indeed instrumental music, this may distract us somewhat from the ethnography of changing modern society. In rural China, ritual contexts are strong; much story-telling takes place in the context of temple fairs and domestic blessings. The rural perspective is significant across all genres, but I find it particularly salient in coverage of narrative-singing. It may also remind us of the importance of poverty. Itinerant blind performers are prominent.
Salutary instances include these two posts on Shanxi:
Here I introduce Liu Hongqing’s harrowing exposé of the lives of poor peasant families in the Taihangshan mountains, based on a blindmens’ “propaganda troupe”.
Other regions featured on this site, in more or less depth, include
Through the Maoist decades after the 1949 Communist takeover, while the society of mainland China was constantly beset by a succession of iconoclastic traumas, the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan was considered a bastion for the maintenance of traditional Chinese culture.
What I suspect hasn’t always been clarified is that Taiwan cannot embody that culture as a whole: naturally, its heritage largely reflects the traditions of the particular regions from which they were descended on the southeastern mainland—and it was that, until the 1980s, which was the only peep-hole through which we could view the enormity of Chinese culture. *
But then, as “reform and opening” swept the PRC, ritual and other folk performance activity—that outsiders could only assume to have been extinguished there after the Communist takeover of 1949—began reviving on a vast scale, along with an array of central and regional scholars keen to resume fieldwork and research. And at the forefront of discoveries was the region of south Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan (see e.g. C.K. Wang, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean, John Lagerwey). As fieldwork expanded to other parts of the southeast (see Daoist ritual in south China), it soon became clear that there was a vast repository of local traditions of ritual and expressive culture to document all over China (see The resilience of tradition)—if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective. The research of Taiwanese scholars was now able to inspire fieldwork on the mainland.
Still, the main genres of Taiwan have rather little bearing on the kind of ritual traditions that were coming to light in the north Chinese countryside, or even in east-central China; indeed, they only represent a small selection from the diverse range of genres around Fujian, as becomes clear by consulting the volumes of the monumental Anthology (for now, see here, with a further post to follow).
I also think of the transformation of Tibetan studies. After 1950, exile communities (led by TIPA in Dharamsala—see e.g. Zlos-gar, 1986) had been considered as the sole heirs to the culture of Tibet; but by the 1990s scholars began shifting towards the mature ethnographic assessment of its vicissitudes under the Chinese yoke (under Recent posts on Tibet, see e.g. Labrang 1). In her wise article “Easier in exile?, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy ponders the different challenges of doing fieldwork among Tibetans in Lhasa and Dharamsala (see The enchanting world of Tibetan opera).
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Taiwan Besides the small minority of aboriginal groups (c2%), the main populations of Taiwan are Hoklo (Holo, c70%), Hokkien speakers originating from the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou regions of south Fujian; and Hakka (c15%), descended from the mainland regions of east Guangdong and west Fujian (click here and here for the expressive cultures of both groups). Refugees from elsewhere in China fleeing to Taiwan in the 1940s also brought some staged vocal genres with them.
With Taiwanese society subject to far fewer traumatic social upheavals than on the mainland, cultural forms were certainly better maintained there. But as in any modern society, there are no “living fossils”: besides the island’s complex colonial legacy, performers and patrons have to negotiate the incursions of modernity and popular media (see Society and soundscape, notably the work of Bruno Nettl).
Since the clampdown in the PRC under Xi Jinping, perspectives regarding the mainland and Taiwan are modifying (see The Queen Mother of the West); having myself been busy studying the maintenance of local ritual cultures in the PRC, it’s high time for me to re-assess my approach. So as sometimes happens on this blog (e.g. Precious scrolls, and even A jazz medley), this basic overview of music–ritual traditions is as much for my benefit as yours…
Surveys In English, starting points include articles in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, TheGarland encyclopedia of world music (Wang Ying-fenpp.423–9, Hsu Tsang-houei pp.523–9), Wang Ying-fen in The Rough Guide to world music, Europe, Asia & Pacific (3rd edition, 2009), and even wiki.
At the forefront of studies of traditional music in Taiwan was Hsu Tsang-houei許常惠 (1929–2001), who gravitated from WAM-style composition to fieldwork on folk traditions. ** Among his surveys are Taiwan yinyue shi chugao台灣音樂史初稿 (1991, I think) and (with Cheng Shui-cheng) Musique de Taiwan (1992). See also Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬, Taiwan chuantong yinyue gailun台灣傳統音樂概論 (2005, 2007), in two volumes on vocal and instrumental music.
Genres Among the most popular topics are nanguan and Daoist ritual—both, since the 1980s, informed by fieldwork on either side of the strait. Amateur nanguan 南管 music societies, performing exquisite chamber ballads for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, have long been deeply embedded in community life (see this post). Nanguan is the subject of much research, both in Fujian and Taiwan. Wang Ying-fen has published extensively on the Taiwan scene in both Chinese and English—I particularly admire her articles on the risks inherent in state promotion of nanguan (such as this), worthy contributions to studies of the thorny issue of heritage.
Temple fairs, with vibrant processions, remain a major part of life in Taiwan. Regional traditions of Daoist ritual (for the north, click here) are the focus of generations of Taiwanese and foreign scholars. For the former, alongside many distinguished scholars, Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬 has paid notable attention to ritual soundscape (e.g. Daojiao yishi yu yinyue道教儀式與音樂, 1994). Another major theme in ritual studies is the worship of the female deity Mazu, widespread both in Taiwan and around the southeastern coast of the mainland.
The composite genre of beiguan 北管 (good wiki page here, with links) is again performed mainly for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, largely by occupational groups; while closely related to vocal drama, it’s best known for its loud outdoor shawm-and-percussion bands. Here’s a short documentary about the master Qiu Huorong 邱火榮 (b.1937):
Most flexible of popular operatic forms is gua-a-hi (gezai xi歌仔戲). And more popular in Taiwan than shadow puppets and marionettes, glove-puppetry (budai xi 布袋戲) has adapted to changing times; the former tradition was transmitted by masters such as Li Tianlu 李天祿 (1910–98), whose early life is evoked in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 film The puppetmaster.
Narrative-singing is best known through Chen Da陳達 (1905–81) on the Hengchun peninsula. He was “discovered” in 1967 by Hsu Tsang-houei and Shih Wei-liang 史惟亮 as part of their fieldwork for the Folk-song Collection movement, forerunner of several state-sponsored organs in Taiwan. Here’s Shih Wei-liang’s recording from 1971:
In the north of the island, the blind female singer Yang Xiuqing楊秀卿 (b.1934) is also renowned.
(As in the PRC, please excuse me if I fall into the old Songlines trap of giving undue attention to “star performers”—whereas in-depth ethnography soon uncovers the myriad unsung bearers of tradition, such as Vincent Goossaert’s “ordinary Daoists”, or rank-and-file members of festive groups.)
Like beiguan, the Hakka bayin 八音 ensemble is dominated by shawms and percussion. Here’s the CD Taiwan: mountain songs and bayin instrumental music (Inedit, 2006; as playlist):
As in mainland China, the vocal polyphony of minority peoples (notably Amis, Bunun, Tsou, Paiwan, Rukai—around 2% of Taiwan’s population) has attracted much attention, with many recordings issued of aboriginal singing, such as Polyphonies vocales des Aborigènes de Taiwan (Inedit, 1989):
and Taiwan: music of the Aboriginal tribes (Jecklin, 1991) (playlist):
As in mainland China, while such traditions struggle to remain relevant in a modernising society, national cultural bodies have adopted particular genres as symbols of identity. Expressive culture has made a major component in the rapprochement between the PRC and overseas Chinese communities. Wind Records in Taipei issued a succession of CDs of mainland genres in conjunction with the Music Research Institute in Beijing, notably an important series of archive recordings (folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and instrumental music, as well as minority polyphony), and of the qin zither. The journal Minsu quyi, with its detailed studies (mostly in Chinese) on ritual, theatre, and folklore, also expanded its scope from Taiwan to the mainland.
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Growing political tensions encourage us to pay renewed attention to Taiwan, and to support beleaguered democracy. While it’s fruitful to study the genres introduced above on both sides of the strait, the island remains a conducive environment for both performance and research. Now I’m keen to see someone with fieldwork experience in both societies, such as C.K. Wang, Wang Ying-fen, Ken Dean, or Adam Yuet Chau, expounding the different trajectories of the diverse traditions there, and the challenges that they face.
* Now, none of these comparisons quite work, but… While it’d be far too parochial to imagine the Isle of Wight as a refuge from a radical government in mainland UK, perhaps we might visualise Cuba becoming a liberal sanctuary from a Gilead-style fundamentalist north America (see The handmaid’s tale)—or even Sicily as the sole isolated outpost for tradition while mainland Europe languishes in the grip of authoritarian regimes.
In chapter 10 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China I made a similarly rash comparison, seeking to incorporate north China into our overview of Daoist ritual (cf. this post, again):
It is rather as if our knowledge of Christianity in the whole of Europe were based almost entirely on Sicily and Puglia, with the odd footnote on the Vatican and Westminster Abbey. We may like what we find in those places, perhaps considering it more exalted, mystical, and ancient—but that is another issue.
Without at all playing into the greasy hands of PRC propaganda, one might consider Taiwan (culturally, not politically, since it is clearly an independent nation! Cf. China has always been part of…) as just one among over thirty provinces of China, all of whose forms of expressive culture are dominated by long-established local folk traditions while also featuring some “national” genres and styles from other regions.
** If Yang Yinliu wasn’t the Chinese Bartók, then Hsu Tsang-houei wasn’t the Taiwanese Yang Yinliu (whereas Bill Evanswas the Bill Evans of jazz).
Precious scrolls of village ritual associations near Houshan, Hebei: left, “Demon-queller scroll”, Lijiafen; right, “Ten Kings scroll”, Jijiagou.
My sideline in “precious scrolls” (baojuan寶卷) [1] goes back to our 1990s’ field project on the central Hebei plain, when we were impressed to find a substantial treasure-trove of early editions in villages of Yixian and Laishui counties—and particularly to witness them still being performed by the liturgists of amateur ritual associations there (see under The Houshan Daoists and The Houtu precious scroll).
While the central Hebei plain, and the living performance of its early sectarian scriptures, remain my main focus in baojuan studies, after this recent note on the traditions of Gansu my wider interest has been further piqued by the latest in a succession of anthologies:
whose 50 volumes contain 150 precious scrolls, each with an introductory synopsis. They belong mainly to sectarian groups such as Wuwei 無為, Huangtian dao 黄天道, Xi Dacheng jiao 西大乘教, and Hongyang jiao 弘阳教 / Hunyuan jiao 混元教, many of which feature in our fieldnotes on Local ritual in Hebei (see e.g. Ritual groups of Jinghai).
As instances of texts that we found in rural Hebei, vols. 24 and 25 comprise six editions of the “Demon-queller scroll” Huguo youmin Fumo baojuan護國佑民伏魔寶卷, performed until recently for mortuary rituals in villages around Houshan. Of early printed scrolls that we found in Gaoluo village, the “White Clothes scroll” Xiaoshi Baiyi Guanyin pusa song ying’er xiasheng baojuan銷釋白衣觀音菩薩送嬰兒下生寶卷 is in vol.29, and the Fuguo zhenzhai lingying Zaowang baojuan 富國鎮宅靈應竈王寶卷 in vol.38 (cf. the Gaoluo editions, from 1745 and 1720 respectively). The compendium also includes the “Dizang scroll” 地藏王菩薩執掌幽冥寶卷 (vol.29) and “Ten Kings scroll” 泰山東嶽十王寶卷 (vol.30), preserved by nearby village ritual associations in early editions. In this region at least, the most commonly performed scrolls address the major preoccupations of Chinese villagers: birth (to Guanyin and Houtu), and death (to Demon-queller, Dizang, and the Ten Kings).
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I can’t keep up with the “baojuan fever” that has grown since the 1990s. These notes serve as much for my benefit than yours—rather, perhaps, we constantly seek to refine and clarify our earlier studies.
Baojuan is an umbrella term for a range of texts. Many scholars have considered baojuan more as “folk literature”, or as a textual window onto early sectarian religion, than as a living performance tradition. Pu Wenqi’s own long-term research set forth from studying sectarian (if not always “secret”) folk religion in north China—under the aegis of the great Li Shiyu 李世瑜 (1922–2010); and it was Li Shiyu who blazed a trail in unpacking structural elements of baojuan in ritual performance, which are among the many themes discussed by later specialists.
The research paths of scholars have depended largely on which among the diverse types of baojuan were prevalent in their own region and to which they had access (cf. “blind people groping at the elephant“). As a broad outline, the early “religious” style has mainly been found near Beijing, while later “folk” texts are common in east-central China and the northwest.
Actually, in my earlier posts (based on Plucking the winds, and Appendix 3 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China) I appear to have had a basic grasp of the place of the Hebei scrolls in baojuan studies. As I noted, “while scholarship on the precious scrolls has tended to be more historical and sinological than contemporary and ethnographic”, “the whole point of these precious scrolls is that they are performed for rituals—they’re not musty tomes to be read silently in libraries.” What struck me about the Hebei scrolls was that they belonged very much to the early “religious” type of baojuan, but were still part of a living tradition—most performers we met were liturgists within ascriptive village-wide ritual associations, which had sectarian connections within living memory. And we found the classic structure of early religious baojuan to which Li Shiyu drew attention in 1957: 24 chapters (pin品 or fen分), each incorporating ten-word form, qupai labeled melodies, and so on (see under The Houtu precious scroll).
Of course, just as baojuan only constitute only one small sub-head among the vast mass of Daoist and Buddhist scriptures, they were just one component of the manuals performed by the liturgists whom we visited (see A tribute to two vocal liturgists, Gaoluo: vocal liturgists, Funerals in Hebei). (And zooming out still further, as Adam Yuet Chau reminds us, we need to overcome the hegemony of discursive/scriptural texts, when so much of the meaning of religious activity in society is relational and non-literate!)
Background Early advocates for the study of baojuan were Gu Jiegang from 1924, and Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎, inspiring a succession of articles in the 1930s and 40s. In the first catalogue, published in 1951, Fu Xihua 傅惜华 listed 246 scrolls in Baojuan zonglu宝卷总录—the same title that Li Shiyu used for his 1960 catalogue, listing 618 scrolls in 1,487 editions.
Since the 1980s, as baojuan came out into the open both in performance and research, scholars have reflected further on origins and classification. Two authoritative figures in baojuan studies are Pu Wenqi濮文起and Che Xilun 车锡伦. Following Che Xilun’s useful 2001 retrospective, his major book Zhongguo baojuan yanjiu中国宝卷研究 (2009) contains both an overview and case studies. Similarly, alongside chapters on specific themes, Pu Wenqi and Li Yongping 李永平 eds., Baojuan yanjiu 宝卷研究 (2019), includes surveys by Pu Wenqi himself and by Wang Mingbo 王明博 and Li Guisheng 李贵生. In English, the detailed studies of Rostislav Berezkin on traditions of baojuan performance in south Jiangsu include useful introductions to the wider topic (cf. my Appendix under Ningxia).
Che Xilun has distinguished “religious baojuan” before the Kangxi reign (1662–1722) from later “folk baojuan”—with subdivisions: [2]
A) Before the Kangxi reign: “religious baojuan” 明正德 (1505–21) 以前“佛教世俗化宝卷”: “演释佛经” “讲唱因缘” 正德后“民间宗教宝卷”: “宣讲教义” “讲唱故事”
B) After the Kangxi reign: “folk baojuan” “劝世文” “祝祷仪式” “讲唱故事”: “神道故事” “妇女修行故事” “民间传说故事<” “俗文学传统故事” “时事故事” “小卷”
Catalogues and anthologies By the 1990s, catalogues were expanding significantly, such as
Che Xilun, Zhongguo baojuan zongmu中国宝卷总目 (2000, after a 1998 Taiwan edition), listing 1,585 scrolls in over 5,000 editions.
Wide-ranging anthologies of the texts themselves were also published, such as
Wang Jianchuan 王见川 and Lin Wanchuan 林万传 (eds), Ming-Qing minjian zongjiao jingjuan wenxian 明清民间宗教经卷文献 (1991) (12 vols, 207 texts) and the 2006 sequel edited by Wang Jianchuan, Che Xilun, et al. (12 vols, 204 texts), mostly consisting of baojuan.
Ma Xisha 马西沙, another long-term scholar of folk sectarian religion, has also addressed baojuan, including the major anthology
Zhonghua zhenben baojuan中华珍本宝卷 (2013) contains 30 vols, with 138 texts,
before Pu Wenqi’s recent collection with which I opened this survey.
Regional fieldwork and research Much of the collection work has long consisted in editing baojuan held in libraries and private collections, but fieldwork became an increasingly important source of texts—often bringing further insights from observing living performance (in another useful overview, see §3 and §5 here).
There had been a few such projects under Maoism, in a period when both performance and research were becoming increasingly risky (cf. the work of Yang Yinliu and his colleagues at the Music Research Institute in Beijing). [3] But fieldwork could only begin in earnest with the liberal reform era since the 1980s. Around Tianjin and further afield, Li Shiyu resumed his work with alacrity—now with a keen disciple in Pu Wenqi.
South Jiangsu and Zhejiang became popular sites for fieldwork, with a particular focus on ritual groups around the Suzhou region, notably Jingjiang (see here, and n.1 here). Again, many texts were published, [4] and fieldwork encouraged scholars to observe actual performance practice—often in the context of zuohui 做会 religious gatherings. In English, after a 2001 article by Mark Bender on the Jingjiang tradition, Rostislav Berezkin has expanded the field in a series of detailed articles.
Another lively site for baojuan studies was the Hexi corridor of Gansu (here I cited this recent survey by Cheng Guojun 程国君). Local cultural workers such as Duan Ping 段平 and Fang Buhe 方步和 were early collectors. [5] The numinous ancient site of Dunhuang tempted some researchers to embroider a connection with early bianwen religious narratives there—a tendency (akin to the persistent “living fossil” shtick, and further mired in romantic fantasies of the Tang and Silk Road) that Che Xilun disputed in his 1999 article “Ming-Qing minjian zongjiao yu Gansude nianjuan he baojuan” 明清民间宗教与甘肃的念卷和宝卷. Nearby, baojuan traditions were also discovered in the Mani assemblies 嘛呢会 of largely Tibetan areas of eastern Qinghai (see e.g. Liu Yonghong 刘永红, Qinghai baojuan yanjiu 青海宝卷研究, 2013); see also under Ningxia.
The baojuan of south Jiangsu and Gansu, while numerous (and again based in ritual performance), are mostly in the later “folk” style, not so early as the early 24-chapter sectarian scrolls that we found on the Hebei plain. For north China, besides Pu Wenqi, other scholars paying attention to the latter kind of baojuan include Cao Xinyu, Yin Hubin尹虎彬, and Liang Jingzhi 梁景之.
In the great Anthology of folk music of the Chinesepeoples, baojuan falls within the scope of the relevant provincial volumes for narrative-singing: Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng 中国曲艺音乐集成, and particularly the historical material of Zhongguo quyi zhi 中国曲艺志 (see e.g. under Famine and expressive culture). Foreign scholars of baojuan include Daniel Overmyer (for north China), Rostislav Berezkin (south Jiangsu), Victor Mair and Wilt Idema (Gansu).
As always, silent library study cries out (sic) to be enriched by documenting the soundscape and bustle of ritual in social life (cf. More films). To complement the vast corpus of published texts, and textual studies of their ritual context, even a modest collection of audio/video recordings of baojuan in folk performance is most desirable (my usual caveat: I refer to field recordings, rather than the reified, sanitised staged versions of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project!). The CD with my 2004 book Plucking the winds has a paltry two audio tracks from the Houtu scroll (one of which features on the playlist on this blog, with commentary here—and I look forward to making a new documentary on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo!!!). And click here for a video clip from a ritual performance by a group in Shaoxing.
[1] Though I use the term “precious scrolls”, which has attained a certain niche currency, allow me to repeat Dan Overmyer’s observation (n.3 here) that baojuan is more properly rendered as “precious volumes”.
[2] I’m not sure how useful is Che Xilun’s further distinction between “literary” and “non-literary” baojuan (按照宝卷的内容和题材，又可将宝卷分为“文学宝卷”（包括各个时期讲唱故事的宝卷及民间宝卷中的“小卷”和部分“祝祷仪式”宝卷）、“非文学宝卷”（包括宗教宝卷中“演释佛经”“宣讲教义”的宝卷和民间宝卷中的“劝世文”及部分“祝祷仪式”宝卷）两大类。)
[3] In south Jiangsu, Jiangsu nanbu minjian xiqu shuochang yinyue ji江苏南部民间戏曲说唱音乐集 (1955) was part of a project collecting material on opera and narrative-singing. And for Jiexiu in Shanxi, Zhang Han 张颔,Shanxi minjian liuchuande baojuan chaoben山西民间流传的宝卷抄本 (1957) used material collected in 1946—see also Li Yu 李豫, Shanxi Jiexiu Zhanglan diqu baojuan wenxue diaocha baogao 山西介休张兰地区宝卷文学调查报告 (2010), and the chapter by Sun Hongliang 孙鸿亮 in Baojuan yanjiu.
[4] E.g. Zhongguo Heyang baojuan ji 中国河阳宝卷集 (2007); You Hong 尤红 et al. eds, ZhongguoJingjiang baojuan 中国靖江宝卷 (2007); Lu Yongfeng 陆永峰 and Che Xilun 车锡伦 eds, Jingjiang baojuan yanjiu 靖江宝卷研究, 2008; Che Xilun ed., Zhongguo minjian baojuan wenxian jicheng, Jiangsu Wuxi juan 中国民间宝卷文献集成·江苏无锡卷 (2014, 15 vols).
[5] As in all walks of life, both performers and scholars bore the scars of Maoist campaigns. Following her tribulations around 1960 as one of the Spark protesters blowing the whistle on the famine, Tan Chanxue 谭禅雪 was based from 1982 to 1998 at the Dunhuang Research Institute, where as part of her studies of Dunhuang folklore she published articles on, and editions of, baojuan.
Pursuing the theme opened up by Hannibal Taubes’ guest post on the Chinese temple in Chico, I’ve been admiring the hefty tome
Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, Chinese traditional religion and temples in North America, 1849–1920: California (2022; 523 pages, large paperback format).
An impressive work of scholarship, published under the auspices of the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee (CINARC), the book is an elegy to the remains of popular Daoism that nearly died a century ago but was central to Chinese people’s lives in North America from the mid-19th century. Hannibal is far more able than I to identify salient themes, so below I consult his thoughtful review.
Among the wealth of illustrations on almost every page, many are reproductions of original black-and-white images, assembled from substantial local archives—perhaps a future edition might include a section of colour plates showing more recent photos. The CINARC website is a rich resource for many such images.
The topic is geographically distinctive, addressing migrants from the Pearl River Delta in the far south of China to the far west of America. As Hannibal notes,
Some counties in the Gold Rush hills had Chinese temples years before any Christian church was built, while yearly Chinese camp-meeting festivals in the mountains attracted thousands of worshippers, with Zhengyi-sect Daoist priests, great sacral processions, and deity-figures ten feet tall. By 1930 almost all of this had vanished.
Pondering reasons for the neglect of the subject, Ho and Bronson suggest:
Perhaps the main reason for a lack of scholarly interest has been an almost exclusive focus on immigration, anti-Chinese violence, economics, and racism. This has meant adopting a victims’ perspective, reciting long lists of grievances and instances of White hostility. However, we feel that a different perspective is needed, one that focuses on the sources of the courage and mental balance shown by Chinese immigrants.
They posit various provisional elements that may partially account for the rapid, severe decline in religious observances, including conversion to Christianity, white prejudice, progressivist politics, (interestingly) a lack of Chinese women—and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Anyway, the USA proved a less viable site for Chinese religion than southeast Asia.
By the late 19th century the early mining communities * servicing the gold rush gave way to agricultural centres. Both in San Francisco and the hinterland, the secret societies were major patrons.
Apart from newspaper reports (often negative in their portrayal), the study is based largely on the material evidence of the temples themselves—inscriptions, ritual objects, ledgers, and so on, “that we feel brings us closest to what interests us most: to hear, if only faintly, the voices of the pioneers who withstood astonishing hardships to build Chinese America”.
Section 1, “Spiritual and social aspects of temples”, clearly addresses the salient issues, discussing
Why temples mattered
Where they existed and who built them
Functions
Worship
Temples and communities.
Temples served as refuges, hostels, clinics, and meeting places. They were sources of ethnic pride, and centers of community life. And most importantly, the deities they housed stood at the very center of a Chinese-American identity and psychological survival. The early immigrants withstood enormous pressures from physical hardship, cultural prejudice, threatened violence, and concern for loved ones back in China. They needed those temples. For many, the temples were the central institutions of an exile’s life.
Unpacking the ambiguity of the common term joss-house (“joss” deriving from Portuguese deus), the authors identify types of affiliated temples and their parent associations: shrines associated with districts of origin associations (huiguan), charitable halls (shantang), clan associations (zongci), tradesmen’s guilds (hanghui), and secret societies (“tongs”), as well as some independent temples.
Ho and Bronson go on to discuss individual and communal worship, ritual roles (mortuary services, divination, spirit mediums), cultural reinforcement (including education, and opera), secular functions, and investment. They detail the gods invoked (temples with single and multiple deities), life-cycle and calendrical rituals, “bomb festivals” (paohui), and (of special interest to scholars of Taoist ritual) communal festivals for the jiao Offering ritual, known as tachiu (dajiao 打醮, pp.66–73). They discuss the founding, ownership, control/management, and financing of temples.
Section 2 looks at “The physical side of temples”:
Exteriors and siting
Entrances and interiors
Furnishings with fixed and variable locations
Suspended furnishings
Inscription boards
Equipment for processions
Other furnishings.
Overall, “very few Chinese religious buildings were close copies of homeland prototypes”.
Sections 3 and 4 are a detailed inventory of individual temples. Section 3 discusses San Francisco, “by far the most important Chinese religious centre outside Asia” in the late 19th century. Section 4 documents centres outside the Bay Area—mining, agricultural (farm labour), coastal, and urban (despite the great importance of railroad workers in building the West, they were too transient to sponsor temples). This section really opens our minds to the wealth of history in the hinterland, in communities such as Auburn, Marysville, Oroville, and Weaverville.
Ho and Bronson’s concluding remarks survey the spatial and temporal distribution of temples; White views (often disparaging) on the phenomenon; and Chinese American religion in Chinese eyes, making astute distinctions between the perspectives of Chinese businessmen, officials, secret societies, religious professionals, and sojourners.
As Hannibal observes,
Ho and Bronson’s tome will now be the standard reference work on this subject and should be on the shelf of everyone interested in Chinese art and religion, Asian-American studies, immigrant visual cultures in the Americas, and California generally. The authors note that they are considering a follow-up volume that will treat Chinese temples in North America outside of California. Let us hope that this work is completed and that the two volumes can be published together under the imprint of a major press, with color photographs and a few editorial tweaks, as befits this important scholarship.
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My only little contribution to the study of the Chinese diaspora is this tribute to Ray Man, Cantonese music pioneer in London. For the decline of Catholic worship among south Italian migrants in New York, see The Madonna of 115th street.
One point that Hannibal makes in his fine review seems to go rather against the grain of recent scholarship on religious life in post-Mao China. This isn’t the place to assess the vast religious revival that took place there after the demise of the Maoist commune system, but, making a somewhat ambitious comparison between the decline of temples in China and America, Hannibal opens with the statement “Sometime between 1850 and the present, almost all the temples in China vanished.” On the revival since the 1980s, he comments (n.9): “Even areas that appear to have rebuilt their temples en masse still experienced massive losses compared to pre-Communist numbers.” And
Those temples that still physically stood were bulldozed to build apartment complexes, or left to moulder and collapse in half-abandoned villages. Other areas have rebuilt their temples, sometimes in massive numbers, but from the preservationist standpoint this only compounds the destruction, since little care is taken to retain or record the original structures.
These are points worth making, but they downplay the significance of the vast revival. Though much fieldwork on recent Daoist activity (in volumes such as Daojiao yishi congshu) has a retrospective agenda, religious life has resurfaced widely, on a large scale (see e.g. Ken Dean, Adam Yuet Chau, Ian Johnson, and regions such as Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Shaanbei). Moreover, temples are not the only yardstick to assess Chinese ritual life; material artefacts can only tell us so much (cf. China’s hidden century).
While the particular religious ethos that Ho and Bronson’s study reveals will be more familiar to specialists in the ritual history of the Pearl River Delta than to those focusing on other regions of south (and certainly north) China, the whole history of religious life in local communities in the PRC, with their diverse social and economic factors, is utterly different from that in the American West—and from that of the Chinese diaspora in southeast Asia, where ties with the mainland were much stronger and enduring.
* Cf. religious processions of mining communities near Beijing, n. here.
like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order.
In order for this exercise to be worthwhile, you’ll have to click on the links! Ideally, spread the word by reposting on one of those “Social Media” Thingies They Have Nowadays… Even if you only read a dozen of these posts, then my labours will not have been in vain!
I’m going to adopt Stella Gibbons’ drôle device in Cold Comfort Farm, drawing attention with *** to passages (mostly posts, in this case—indeed, the book’s protagonist is Flora Poste) Not To Be Missed. And this list isn’t even exhaustive—the committed masochist can consult the monthly archive in the sidebar, scrolling waaay down.
I’ll begin with Nicolas Robertson, who alas joined the Heavenly Choir in November (see my tribute). His extraordinary anagram tales (introduced and listed here***), a kind of fantasy Esperanto fiction, are among the highlights of this blog, and in further tribute to his brilliant mind I have recently added two more:
So here are listings under some main themes (many, of course, belong under several themes, which is the point of giving them categories and tags, listed in the sidebar):
The province of Gansu was chronically poor even before the horrifying abuses its people suffered under Maoism, culminating in (but not limited to) the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. Nor should we forget the non-Chinese ethnic inhabitants of the region, who were targeted just as brutally through the period—see under Recent posts on Tibet, notably for Amdo (e.g. Labrang, here and here).
Many documents on Gansu are to be found in Yang Jisheng’s definitive exposé Tombstone, as well as the China famine 1959–1961 site. Before the studies of Frank Dikötter (Mao’s great famine) and Xun Zhou, Jasper Becker already gave a useful introduction to the disaster in Gansu in his 1996 book Hungry ghosts.
The Hexi corridor, leading deeper into the oasis towns of Central Asia, is perhaps most widely known by the early Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang, projecting a proud image of the glories of ancient Chinese culture. So again Ian Johnson does well to remind us of the memoirs of Gao Ertai, revealing bitter political turmoil there in the 1960s.
Looking again at this undated image (in the “Instrumental music” [sic] volumes of the Anthology) from the Qingshui Bureau of Culture (“Welcoming Water ritual of Huashan Daoists” 清水道教华山派科仪中的“迎水”), I surmise it was taken in the 1980s.
I’ve long felt that Gansu was a major lacuna in coverage of household Daoist ritual. I’ve noted recent developments in Wuwei (Another Daoist debate), and in Jingyuan county northeast of Lanzhou (Maoist worship in Gansu). Counties where some of the most active Daoist groups are based, such as Zhangye, Jingtai, and Tongwei, are among those where the famine was particularly severe (for the famine in Tongwei, see e.g. Dikötter pp.307–9).
More images from the “instrumental music” volumes of the Anthology for Gansu:
Daoists of the Daode guan temple, Zhangye county;
Cao Jixiang’s Daoist band performing the Ten Offerings ritual, Jingtai county;
Cao Jixiang’s band seated.
However, most scholars of Daoism still gravitate to the image of imperial grandeur, focusing on manuscripts with ancient ancestry rather than documenting transmission history since the mid-20th century, or people’s lives. But whether we’re interested in Daoist ritual before 1949 or before the Song dynasty, the condition in which we find it today is permeated by the bitter experiences of its practitioners and patrons since the 1950s.
The range of expressive culture in Gansu—folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, shawm bands, and so on, embodies the sound of suffering. Vignettes on some genres include
In such extreme conditions of social disintegration, it seems most unlikely that anyone could muster any energy to perform, either for ceremonial or entertainment—but even in extremis (indeed, particularly in extremis), villagers resorted to their religious traditions, staging rituals to alleviate adversity and to resist collectivisation (note The temple of memories); and (as in Hunan and Hebei) refugee groups banded into itinerant folk performing troupes in a desperate bid to survive. Not just local archives, but some published county gazetteers (like that of Yanggao in north Shanxi), give impressively frank accounts of the famine years.
The great Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples may be flawed, but if used selectively it can yield useful material—particularly the Monographs on Opera and Narrative-singing (as I explain in my extensive review of the whole project, cited here). The Appendices of the Narrative-singing Monograph for Hunan reproduce concerned documents from regional Cultural Bureaus over the period, providing startling evidence of social disruption. I discuss the equivalent volume for Gansu in a separate post, but the Opera Monograph (Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Gansu juan 中国戏曲志, 甘肃卷 [1995]) doesn’t include such documents. The introductory Overview, under “Opera in Gansu since the founding of the PRC” (pp.25–34) has terse hints at the crisis.
Right from the 1949 “Liberation”, Gansu was part of the national drive to “rescue” the rich heritage of regional genres, led by the new cultural units set up at county, regional and provincial levels (for brief accounts of a plethora of state-funded and amateur groups, note pp.436–524) . But from 1957, Party “rectification” was infecting such institutions, and the ensuing Anti-rightist campaign was bitter and destructive. Even as society collapsed further with the 1958 Great Leap, leading to the famine, opera workers were regimented to create new dramas reflecting the agenda of high socialism.
The 1959 “celebrations” around the 10th anniversary of the founding of the PRC featured new items from eleven genres—not just qinqiang and Peking opera, but regional folk styles like shadow-puppetry of south Gansu 陇南影子腔, qingshui quzi 清水曲子, Yulei huadeng xi 玉垒花灯戏, Wuwei xianxiao 武威贤孝, and daoqing from east Gansu 陇东道情. The latter was now adapted into the staged form Longju 陇剧, with a newly-formed state troupe embarking on a prestigious national tour. But
From 1960, Gansu suffered a succession of natural disasters [sic], and opera work went into crisis; with a great increase in the proportion of sick and injured, many opera troupes were unable to maintain regular activity. Some troupes used the pretext of touring to go to Xinjiang in search of food.
Again, fleeing to the northwest was a common measure—indeed, at the time, many Uyghurs were taking refuge even further northwest in the USSR (cf. the long migration of the Dungan people).
By 1962, in a common pattern throughout China, many county-level troupes were laid off, and many artists migrated or changed trades. At the same time (cf. Hunan),
some opera troupes and informal folk opera groups used the opportunity to perform bad and forbidden operas such as Shazi bao 杀子报 and Dashangdiao 大上吊, and in some regions harmful customs (louxi 陋习) from the past like “exorcising the stage” (datai 打台, jitai 祭台, pp.594–5), and singing holy dramas (chang shenxi 唱神戏) were revived, creating an adverse social influence. After the general improvement over the whole province from 1963, this was corrected [sic].
The “chronicle of major events” for 1959 to 1964 (pp.70–75), supplemented by lists of official opera festivals for those years (pp.684–98), has a typical list of glamorous official events, giving no hint of the unfolding disaster. As ever, we have to read between the lines. With a basic awareness of the disastrous social climate, even the roster of official festivals over the period makes disturbing reading. Those chosen for the state performing troupes were in a small minority of folk artists throughout the countryside. Life in the urban troupes might provide them with a tenuous lifeline as long as they were still able to function, but institutions were becoming ever more vulnerable: with political campaigns targeting “rightists” and anyone who dared speak out, they too lived in a climate of fear. One can only imagine that even the state performers would have been severely malnourished, at the risk of being sent to labour camp, while their families back in the countryside were starving (cf. household Daoist Li Qing in north Shanxi).
Even before the imminent casualties of the early Cultural Revolution, death rates around 1960 among folk performers would have been just as high as among the general population. Although I don’t find such dates prominent among the biographies of celebrated artists in either the Opera Monograph or other volumes for Gansu, among the countless lives cut short there are doubtless tragic stories to be told—like those of (p.674, above) qinqiang performers Xin Xing’an (1930–59), who died after being “struggled” at the height of the Anti-rightist campaign, and Chen Huiying (1930–61), portrayed as working herself to death in the spirit of self-sacrifice.
* * *
Like Henan and Anhui, Gansu was an extreme case, but most of the senior performers I was meeting in other regions from 1986 to 2018 shared similar experiences that were none too simple to elicit. The adjacent region of Shaanbei, with its barren loess hills, shares a history of poverty and famine, not least under Maoism: among posts listed here, note the work of Guo Yuhua.
The famine, and the whole Maoist era, are major themes in my own work on the Gaoluo village ritual association and the Li family Daoists, and in our fieldwork in Hebei and Shanxi (see under Local ritual). There’s always a complex story to be told, as in this extraordinary 1959 image of former Buddhist monk Daguang with his young ritual disciples in North Xinzhuang village in the Beijing suburbs—at the height of the Great Leap and the famine:
The lantern tent, New Year 1998, with new and newly-copied donors’ lists.
Photo from German Central Asian Expedition, undated (early 20th century):
The Dunhuang region today. Source: Google Maps.
Konghou, Cave 285, 6th century (detail).
Henan municipalities. 
[3] 
The Li family Daoists perform the 
Li Wencheng in 2021. Cool trousers, eh. Source: Weibo.
Li Peisen’s cave-dwelling in Yang Pagoda village.
Great Open-air Offering ritual, White Cloud Temple, Beijing 1993.
Ghost King, 
Yankou at Xujiayuan temple fair, north Shanxi 2003.
The Zhaobeikou ritual association leads Releasing Lanterns ritual on Baiyangdian lake,
Nao and bo cymbals of the Tianxing dharma-drumming association,
Shifan band, 1930s.
Jinmen baojia tu shuo (1846).
Some association members.
Scene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual:
The Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei,
For both folk and art music in the time of Vermeer, click 
Biographies of Pingtan paizhi master Wang Shanglong and Chen Renzhen.
The Qinghe guan society in Changtai.
Household Daoist rituals, Putian.
Segments of mortuary rituals, Nan’an (again, cf.
Stephen Jones: a blog 