Category Archives: updates

More composite characters

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couplets for blog

Checking in with the Li family Daoists (click here for a roundup—and do watch our film, if you haven’t already!):

In the same vein as Li Qing’s poem to the Eight Immortals (Literary wordplay), his grandson Li Bin has just sent me this image of a cute New Year’s duilian couplet that he spotted, pasted up at a gateway in Anjiazao village in Gucheng district, south of the Daoists’ base at Upper Liangyuan.

At least, it looks like a duilian, with upper (right) and lower (left) columns both apparently comprising seven characters. Actually it’s another of those series of composite characters, each one containing four characters within it. The deciphered text is a fairly standard auspicious New Year’s wish for prosperity, but the visual effect is striking. As you will soon discern, the motto at the top reads

万事如意，招财进宝，三羊开泰，出门见喜。

The right-hand mottoes read

岁岁平安，五谷丰登，春满人间，八方来财，紫气东来，日进斗金，欢聚一堂

and to the left,

年年有余，四季安康，和春京月，七星高照，吉祥如意，恭喜发财，金玉满堂。

In a poor county where literacy levels were low right until the 1990s, I’m impressed by this creativity with the script.

57 shengguan trio

The shengguan group, 2011: left to right Li Bin, Wu Mei, Yang Ying.

Meanwhile, as the world lurches from one crisis to the next, Li Bin and the Yanggao Daoists are busy as ever providing ritual services to their local community. During the pandemic, while he couldn’t lead a ritual band for funerals, he was still in demand to determine the date, site the grave, supervise the encoffinment, and so on; and now that the initial alarm has receded in Yanggao, he again leads his band for the rituals culminating in the burial.

Roundup for 2021!

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Emma Leylah

As I observed in my roundup for 2020, since part of my mission (whatever that is) is to vary the distribution of the diverse posts on this blog, keeping you guessing, this latest annual mélange is an occasion to group together some major themes from this past year. This is only a selection; for reasons of economy, I’ve tended to skip over some of the lighter items. You can also consult the tags and categories in the sidebar.

Some essential posts:

I’m going to emulate Stella Gibbons and award *** to some other *MUST READ!* posts too…

China: on the Li family Daoists, recent and older posts are collected in

and it’s always worth reminding you to watch our film

Elsewhere,

Tributes to three great sinologists:

The beleaguered cultures of the

  • Uyghurs (posts collected here) and
  • Tibetans (posts collected here), including

I’ve begun a growing series on Turkey (with a new tag for west/Central Asia):

Among this year’s additions to the jazz, pop, punk tags are

In memoriam Fou Ts’ong https://stephenjones.blog/2021/01/02/fou-tsong/

WAM:

Bach (added to the roundup A Bach retrospective):

as well as

On “world music” and anthropology:

Patricia Lockwood https://stephenjones.blog/2021/02/13/lockwood/

On gender (category here, with basic subheads):

Germany:

Italy:

Britain (see also The English, home and abroad), and the USA:

More on stammering:

On a lighter note:

Even just for this last year, I realise there’s a lot to read there, but do click away on all the links! And I can’t resist reminding you of some of my earlier favourites, notably

Ma Yuan

One eye open, one eye closed

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See Changing ritual artefacts.

A new draft regulation for Shanxi province (Chinese version here), propounding a ban on producing and selling funeral supplies such as paper artefacts, seems to have adverse implications for ritual activity and funeral shops. But it’s not so simple.

Official attempts to restrict “feudal superstition” and traditional funerary observances have a long history—not just under Maoism but through imperial and Republican eras. Indeed, temples have been destroyed and religious activity controlled throughout the 20th century, notably since the Communist takeover, and campaigns continue today.

But in my post on local government interference in Shandong I pondered the gap between rules and practice at local level. Often-heard phrases like “there’s a policy, but it isn’t implemented” and “one eye open, one eye closed” suggest the dilution of state policy as it works its way down to the grassroots, a long chain elegantly encapsulated in the expression yitiao long, “the whole dragon”.

Li Bin’s first funeral shop in town.

While state surveillance of the larger temples and their clerics has escalated since 2016, recent campaigns aimed at folk practice meet with resistance on social media even as they are diluted locally (for another instance, see here). Ritual specialists, their patrons, and local cadres take such official measures in their stride; campaigns blow over—this blog features several examples. Spirit mediums are a regular target of campaigns, but remain popular; and sectarian groups that are still officially proscribed can maintain activity discreetly (for Yanggao, see here).

Earth burial, long targeted, remains standard throughout rural areas like Yanggao, despite the government’s long propounding of cremation. So since “earth burial supplies can still be sold to ethnic minority residents who observe the custom”, it’s unclear if this rider will also apply to the Han Chinese—in which case, there’s nothing new here. And though a renewed attempt to enforce cremation also appears to be on the cards in Yanggao, a local observer reckons earth burial is safe for at least a dozen years yet—by which time the depletion of the rural population will have escalated yet further.

Over the first few years there after the reforms, officials made some attempts to contain the religious revival; but since household Daoists like Li Manshan’s son Li Bin and his colleagues took up the trade in the early 1990s they have practised without interference (see under The Li family Daoists: a roundup).

In my other main fieldsite of Gaoluo south of Beijing, we can see such manoeuvering in the stories of Shan Fuyi’s wedding in 1966 and the 1997 New Year’s rituals after Deng Xiaoping’s death.

Since the 1980s’ liberalisations, both household Daoists and amateur ritual associations have remained largely unaffected by any official prescriptions/proscriptions. More significant in the modification of ritual behaviour are factors such as migration, the changing tastes of local patrons, and the spread of pop music.

So it remains to be seen if the new draft directive for Shanxi will have any practical impact on local activity. While the destructive effects of state policy need to be reported, they may also serve as clickbait that obscures the maintenance of ritual life, which is stressed in detailed field reports from south China (see e.g. here).

Grave charts 2

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fenpu

Li Manshan’s son Li Bin is still busy chasing around the Yanggao countryside providing mortuary services for the local villagers, both in his solo consultations and as band leader for the rituals of the funeral proper (cf. his 2017 diary).

While most of his work is in the immediate vicinity just south of Yanggao county-town, as we were discussing this post he was emailing me on his phone during breaks from leading his band to recite funerary scriptures for a family in Jining (Ulanqab region, Inner Mongolia), where the Yanggao Daoists also have longstanding connections based on waves of migration north “beyond the pass”.

Among the many tasks over which the chief Daoist presides soon after a death is siting the grave (see my film, from 16.21). To help him, the host family sometimes produces an old grave chart. Li Bin sent me his photos of two such charts in 2019, and now here’s another one, which he consulted recently while siting the grave for a family in the Eastgate quarter of Yanggao town. It was compiled in the 7th moon of 1945, just as Yanggao was being liberated from Japanese occupation.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

In north China, ritual documents that have survived the ravages of Maoism, such as Thanking the Earth memorials, are rather rare. As with the latter, I surmise that such documents were compiled by the relatively affluent (“landlord” and “rich peasant”) families that suffered after the Communist takeover.

Cf. Chinese tomb decoration, ancient and modern.

Images of the Li family Daoists, revised!

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The Pardon, 1991

This is to direct you to a new revision of the photos (click here) on the first page of images of the Li family Daoists (in the top menu: see screenshot below).

I first compiled it early in my blogging days, and since then I’ve added many more posts and photos (see the Li family category in the sidebar, with sub-heads); but this selection still makes a good introduction, so I’ve now overhauled it to make a handy way of surveying some of the topics covered, giving links.

Li images

And do also consult the other pages in that menu:

All this to complement your viewings of my film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist!

For more, see under Ritual paintings of north China.

Coronavirus in China: four posts

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LWL

To date I’ve published four posts on Coronavirus in China—two featuring songs critical of the official response, and two on local ritual activity. How strange it now seems to reflect that when I wrote these, the virus seemed like a distant problem.

  • Here I feature a song by blind bard Liu Hongquan in Shanxi, mourning whistleblower Li Wenliang—also including a harrowing account of rural poverty
  • and this post has some fine songs by Gansu singer Zhang Gasong, with a note on the traditional morality tales he studied with senior blind bards.

I made a digested version of these two posts into an article for the stimulating online magazine First of the Month, and an edited Italian version appears in the journal Sinosfere, also worth consulting.

sdr

  • Moving on to ritual life, here I explore temple activity behind closed doors in Sichuan
  • and this post details the uninterrupted activity of individual household Daoists in north Shanxi, “serving the people” as they meet the constant demand for routine burial services. In a recent update, I note that the full ritual sequence, with the whole Daoist group performing funeral liturgy, has now been restored.

See also the very end of my post on Navajo ritual and musical culture.

Coronavirus 4: household Daoists in Shanxi

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Li Bin’s first funeral shop in town.

Li Bin’s funeral shop in Yanggao town.

To follow my earlier posts on Coronavirus (1, 2, 3), I’ve been catching up, remotely, with the household Daoists of the Li family in Yanggao county of north Shanxi, 300 km west of Beijing on the way to the city of Datong—in normal times, ever more accessible. Whereas my previous posts on the crisis have concerned responses online and behind the closed doors of temples, here we find how ritual activity is still being maintained for routine burials.

In recent years, as the wonderful Li Manshan has begun to take things easier in his eighth decade, his son Li Bin, working since 2007 from the base of his funeral shop in the county-town, has been worked off his feet (for their busy diaries, see here and here; and for the tough life of the household Daoist, here). Not only does he book and lead a band to perform funeral rituals throughout the villages, but he has to organise every stage of the mortuary procedure from death to burial—as well as making routine individual consultations to “determine the date” for weddings, health, journeys, selecting auspicious sites for new buildings, and so on.

Since the Coronavirus scare, strict measures have been in place in north Shanxi, though no cases seem to have been reported there. Many neighbourhoods in Datong city were sealed; in Yanggao town the gated communities monitored all activity. Restaurants and schools have been closed. For a change, there are no traffic jams at the crossroads just north of Li Bin’s funeral shop (my film, from 4.17).

Wedding festivities are on hold, and bereaved families are not currently allowed to invite Daoists or shawm bands to perform group funeral rituals (known as “opening the drum” kaigu 开鼓), as is normally de rigueur. So regular members of the Daoist sextet like Wu Mei and Li Sheng, normally busy reciting the scriptures with wind and percussion for the sequence of rituals they perform for funerals over two (sometimes three) days, now find themselves temporarily unemployed. Golden Noble, another core member of the band who leads the vocal liturgy, can perform the solo mortuary procedures like determining the date, siting graves, and supervising the burial, so he has picked up a bit of work in the immediate vicinity of his home township Houying.

One accomplished Daoist who has only rarely been able to appear with the ritual group since seeking work as a migrant labourer in 2004 is Li Qing’s nephew Erqing. Whereas the other Daoists are active over a small radius, his work has taken him over a large area of north and south China. He has been an important member of our foreign tours. Like Gansu singer Zhang Gasong and countless others, since returning home for New Year he has found himself exiled there.

Erqing and WM

Erqing (right) with Wu Mei, funeral 2009.

Despite the crisis, Yanggao didn’t go into total lockdown. Remarkably, Li Bin is still in considerable demand, individually, to meet people’s routine needs for mortuary procedures; indeed, he is just as busy as ever—the boss continuing to prosper as the workers are laid off?! Few customers have been venturing out to his funeral shop, but he fields constant messages on his smartphone. So he is still called out constantly, driving throughout the countryside but now having to pass through a laborious series of checkpoints on the main roads and at the entrance to every village, where temperatures are taken and all movements registered. Li Bin’s work is considered a legitimate cause for such journeys.

Checkpoints in Yanggao, February 2020. Photos: Li Bin.

In these poor villages that are depleted yearly by urban migration, with the population ageing, conditions of hygiene may have improved since around 2000, but remain far from ideal (for earlier epidemics in Yanggao, see here). Routine burials still need to be held—though currently by the immediate family alone, with one single Daoist carrying out the necessary procedures (see my Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.185–200).

After a death, the immediate task is to summon Li Bin to use his almanacs to determine the date for the burial—which may vary, as usual, from around five days to over a month. Then he has to write the placard announcing the death (yangzhuang 殃狀), supervise the encoffinment, and provide mourning clothes for the kin as well as the paper artefacts (which he and his wife make at their shop) to be displayed and eventually burned at the grave; he has to decorate the coffin, write the tomb tile, depict talismans to be pasted up at the house of the deceased, and choose an auspicious fengshui site for the grave, using his luopan compass to determine its position and alignment. All these tasks are shown in my film, and even over this stressful period Li Bin still continues to perform them constantly.

Exorcistic talismans are pasted around the house of the deceased.

Left: reverse side of tomb tile; right, talismans. My photos, 2011.

Even in normal times some very poor families, unable to afford the elaborate funerary rituals of the full band, have long requested a single Daoist to preside over a simplified burial ritual (known as “settling the burial” anzang 安葬). During the current crisis this has become routine. Mostly it only takes an hour or two, though even now some families expect a rather longer ritual.

Li Manshan: decorating a coffin (2015), and exorcising the house (2013).

Just before the coffin is raised out of the central room of the deceased’s home (my film, from 1.16.31), the Daoist—now wearing a face-mask in addition to his red costume (fayi 法衣) and yinyang hat (riyue guan 日月冠)—exorcises the rooms (qiyang 起殃) by wielding a sheaf of gaoliang stalks and a cleaver, knocking them against the lintels and silently reciting the mantra Qiyang zhou 起殃咒. Then, as the coffin-bearers raise the coffin out of the house, the Daoist uses his cleaver to smash a food-bowl on the floor at the entrance to the room, marking the end of the son’s duties to feed his parent; indeed, “smashing the bowl” (dawan 打碗, more graphically “decapitating the bowl” zhanwan 斬碗) is the term commonly used to describe the whole simplified burial ritual. As he does so, the Daoist silently recites another mantra, the Zhanpen zhou 斩盆咒. These two mantras for dangerous liminal moments serve to protect the Daoist himself.*

Li Bin then accompanies the coffin through the fields to the grave he has chosen, and fine-tunes its alignment in the grave. After returning to the house he performs a further brief exorcism there. He then hurries off to other villages help more bereaved families.

Again, I note the adaptability of the “old rules”; in times of crisis, rituals can be simplified, yet a proper commemoration of grief is still needed. In Li Bin’s notebook he keeps a careful record of all his daily work, noting the precise date and time of death, details of the birth dates of the deceased and their sons and grandsons, the location of the grave, and the date that he determined for the burial.

Li Bin’s father Li Manshan too has to respond to the requests of his local clients, zooming round on his motorbike to determine the date, choose burial plots, and smash bowls. Sure, all this is their livelihood; but like their forebears right back to the 18th century, they are like parish priests, “serving the people”—a cliché now commonly used with a rather satirical edge, but in this case true. Meanwhile elsewhere in Yanggao, in neighbouring counties (see my other posts on Shanxi under local ritual), and doubtless further afield, other Daoists too will be continuing to meet the needs of their rural clients.

By 23rd February, with no new cases of the virus reported in Yanggao, roadside checks were easing and officials were only monitoring travellers’ temperatures, not registering their details. I wonder how long it will take for the more elaborate funeral rituals to be restored, with the other Daoists joining Li Bin in performing the full sequence of vocal liturgy, accompanied by wind and percussion.

Update
Indeed, since late February the full ritual sequence has been restored, with Li Bin booking the whole Daoist band to perform funerals; but since he has still been busy doing all the solo mortuary tasks, only on 5th April could he lead his group for the first time since the lockdown, “opening the drum” at a funeral in Upper Liangyuan.

 

silent mantras

 

* Though the texts of these two silent mantras don’t appear in any of the Li family’s surviving ritual manuals, Li Manshan eventually found them for me in his little blue pocket-book, which he copied in the 1980s from a similar notebook of his late great father Li Qing (for whom, see e.g. here, and, for his ritual manuals, here).

Seeking instruction with Li Manshan one day, I joked that I had learned them, “reciting” them for him, lips firmly closed—providing us with another creative topos (e.g. in France).

 

 

 

Coronavirus 3: temples, Sichuan

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sdr

Daoist temple ritual, Sichuan, lunar New Year’s Eve, 2020. Photo: Volker Olles.

To follow my first two posts featuring songs commenting on the Coronavirus outbreak in China (here and here), I now consider how local ritual life has been adapting to the crisis at the grassroots.

* * *

Reflecting the age-old adaptability of ritual practice, much activity has moved to a virtual life on WeChat. I’m grateful to Volker Olles, based at Chengdu in Sichuan for his project on Daoist ritual traditions there, for this vignette. As he wrote on 17th February:

All temples are still locked down, but Daoist clerics in the sanctuaries will occasionally perform rituals or offer incense and candles in the name of adherents (thanks to WeChat!). ​So the temples are still working—behind closed doors. Through Wechat, people can even participate in rituals by having their names added in ritual documents. In this regard, WeChat is a real blessing, allowing communication, payment of liturgical fees (fajin 法金), and feedback by means of video sequences of the rituals posted by the clerics.

I spent the Spring Festival in a remote Quanzhen Daoist temple in Chongzhou, west of Chengdu, just when the lockdown started. The liturgies at Chinese New Year’s Eve and the welcoming of the God of Wealth were properly performed by the Daoists, burning masses of ritual documents (shuwen 疏文), with the help of lay adherents—who were partly stuck at the temple and unable to return home on time. ​

All religious institutions are closed and closely monitored by the authorities. I also had to register with the local government and the Bureau of Religious Affairs. However, I’m back in Chengdu now, and we all hope that spring (in the best sense) finally will arrive.

notice

Public notice [my translation—SJ]

Owing to the severity of the current Coronavirus outbreak, for the health and safety of everyone to pass a secure, auspicious, and blessed New Year, the temple Management Committee has decided after investigation:

From 8am on 24th January 2020 the temple is temporarily closed to outsiders. All activities seeking blessing to greet the New Year will be managed according to the law by the temple priests. Please do your best not to visit the temple, in order not to come into mutual contact, and to prevent the contagion of the virus. All prayers for blessing and the elimination of calamity are to be liased via WeChat. We request the great masses and the faithful to share [this information].

During the current initiative to restore traditional Chinese rites, when you meet, please clasp your hands in greeting and avoid shaking hands!*

Xizhu Daoist Temple Management Committee, Chongzhou
24th January 2020​

Huolei
Note also Ian Johnson’s article on the response to the outbreak from temples, mosques, and churches, covering charitable donations and rituals from all over China—including a Purifying the Land ritual at the Changchun Daoist temple in Wuhan; as well as a new Daoist song Huolei jiangmo lu 火雷降魔錄 by Sichuan dramatist Zhang Shuzhi.

For a Daoist priest’s memorial tablet for victims of the virus, click here; and for an update from Shanghai, here.

In my next post on Coronavirus I report on the busy schedule of the household Daoists of the Li family in Shanxi, even through the crisis, as they continue to meet the needs of their rural clients for routine burials.

* I now also see that as the virus spreads around the world, churches in Italy are issuing directives on ritual hygiene and online worship.

Coronavirus: mourning Li Wenliang, and blind bards

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LWL

WeChat: “In this world there are no heroes descended from heaven, there are only ordinary people who come forward”.

Among the many areas of life in China that are suffering under the lockdown prompted by the Coronavirus outbreak are collective events such as life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies among rural communities.

SGL guiwang

Ghost king, South Gaoluo.

The grand New Year’s rituals from the 12th to the 16th of the 1st moon that take place throughout villages in north China, such as those of Gaoluo village in Laishui county south of Beijing, have had to be cancelled—though their purpose is precisely to “destroy the hundred diseases” (dui baibing 丢百病).

It reminds me of a story that villagers told me about the New Year’s rituals in 1997 (Plucking the winds, pp.317–18: passages below modestly edited). After thefts of the association’s ritual paintings the previous year, the New Year’s rituals now made a focus for a cultural fight-back. In preparation they managed to retrieve some of the paintings handed over the Baoding museum during the Cultural Revolution, and had handsome new donors’ lists (also stolen) rewritten and repainted from my photos, ready to display in the lantern tent.

But just as everyone was preparing for an ostentatious New Year, the death of Premier Deng Xiaoping threatened to disrupt it. A typical bit of mental juggling was now required in order for the village rituals to continue undisturbed. Deng died on the 11th day of the 1st moon in 1997, with remarkable, if uncharacteristic, attention to the rural calendar. When his death was announced, just before the major rituals around the 15th, the “commune” (as they still call the district authorities) dutifully ordered that New Year’s celebrations should be cancelled, and the village brigade had to tell the ritual association not to perform. As one musician confided, “I turns it over in my head: when someone dies in the village, we play for them, so didn’t we oughta be able to play when Deng Xiaoping dies too? So I reckons, how about writing a motto ‘In mourning for Deng Xiaoping’, pasting it up outside the lantern tent, and playing as usual?” The village’s “southern” ritual association followed suit, and the New Year’s rituals went ahead.

I love this story: in order to make sure that Premier Deng’s death will not get in the way of their customary entertainment, they profess respect by pointing out the traditional use of ritual to venerate the dead. As with all the best scams, its sincerity is unassailable. Things had changed a lot in the two decades since Chairman Mao’s death in 1976. Then the ritual association had virtually ceased to exist, and villagers had obeyed central orders without question out of genuine, indeed almost “superstitious”, belief in the Great Helmsman. Since 1978 villagers doubtless had a lot to thank Deng for, but there were ironies. It was thanks to Deng’s liberalizations that the association had been able to revive, but it was threatened by new pressures; it was also thanks to him that people no longer placed blind faith in leadership, and were now disinclined to let his death take priority over their local culture.

Villagers regarded the 1997 New Year as the most lively in living memory, perhaps partly by necessity, to legitimize the association’s new leadership and fight back against the theft of the paintings.

In many regions “rites of affliction” have long been an important part of the repertoire of ritual specialists—serving a symbolic rather than medical function. In the current crisis, however, such large-scale gatherings are unthinkable.

1965 poster campaign combining public hygiene and eliminating superstition: “Incense ash cannot cure disease” and “Human diseases are not an offence of the gods and ghosts”—another reminder (see e.g. here, under “Expressive culture”) that even at such a revolutionary time, plenty of people still thought so.
Source: https://chineseposters.net.

Elaborate funeral rituals, for which among the many locals attending are kin returning from distant parts of the country, have also been put on hold. Still, in Yanggao county in Shanxi, far from both the source of the outbreak in Wuhan and major urban centres like Beijing, the Li family Daoists, individually, are still in demand to provide routine burial services, as I describe here.

On local government websites (e.g. those of Laishui and Yanggao counties) I haven’t yet found any explicit bans on collective ritual activities—only bland, formulaic warnings proclaiming the state’s resolute response to the crisis. But morbidly creative slogans everywhere hammer out the message:

slogan

No visits for New Year this year
Those who come to visit you are enemies
Don’t open the door for enemies.

For the response in Tibetan regions, see e.g. here; and for concerns over Xinjiang, here.

* * *

 Even if folk musical activities are suspended, there are signs that local performers are reflecting the outbreak, in what Confucius would have called “the sentiments of the people” (minqing 民情). First, some background.

I’ve already written at some length about blind bards and shawm players. The blindmens’ propaganda troupe of Zuoquan county in the Taihang mountains of east-central Shanxi has a history dating back to 1938, under Japanese occupation. One of the most illuminating and harrowing books on rural life in north China is

  • Liu Hongqing 刘红庆, Xiangtian er ge: Taihang mangyirende gushi 向天而歌: 太行盲艺人的故事 [Singing to the heavens: stories of blind performers of the Taihang mountains] (2004, with VCD, and abundant photos by Wang Jingchun).

LHQ book

One of innumerable such groups throughout the countryside, the Zuoquan troupe has always adapted to the changing times, from the warfare of the 1940s through Maoism to the reform era. In the latter period they began to perform stories criticising corruption.

The book’s author Liu Hongqing (see e.g. this interview) is the older brother of blind performer Liu Hongquan, whose life features prominently. Though Hongqing escaped the rural life to become a journalist, he kept in regular contact with his family, providing vivid stories of the troupe’s itinerant lifestyle (cf. Li Qing’s stint in the Datong Arts-Work Troupe from 1958 to 1962) and writing with great empathy about the lives of poor peasants.

ZQ pic

Liu Hongqing also pays great attention to the wretched fate of women in a rural area that remained chronically poor under Maoism. Two twins in the troupe had an older sister, four of whose five children were born blind. After she died in 1963 the burden of caring for the whole family fell upon the oldest daughter Chen Xizi, then 15 sui. She too was ill-fated. Her first daughter died at the age of 11 sui after going dumb the previous year; her son, born in 1968, was blind, dumb, and disabled; a second daughter died at the age of 7 sui; and a third daughter was herself left with three daughters at the age of 32 sui after her husband died. But amazingly, Chen Xizi’s youngest son endured great tribulations to become a researcher at Shanghai Communications University—the family’s only hope in an ocean of misery. Chen Xizi’s older brother Xizhao, a fine shawm player who died at the age of 55 sui in 1998, “bought” four wives, all mentally disabled.

After the death of another blind performer in the troupe, his widow had moved in with his younger brother, a common expedient (xuqin 续亲) in poor communities where early deaths were common and widows vulnerable.

Such stories, all too common in rural China (note e.g. Guo Yuhua’s ethnography of a Shaanbei village, and Bards of Henan), make an important corrective to rosy state propaganda, putting into perspective scholarly accounts of machinations within the central leadership; and the fierce, anguished singing and playing of groups like this are utterly remote from the bland, cheery ditties of official troupes.

The Zuoquan performers are instrumentalists too—Liu Hongquan is a fine shawm player (for thoughts on the way shawm-band music reflects suffering, see here). Like others in the troupe, he has taken several adopted sons, forming a network of well-wishers throughout the villages where they perform. Like blind performers in north Shanxi, they had their own secret language (p.69), based on the ancient qiezi 切字 phonetic system.

TQ

Tian Qing (left, in white) with the blind performers of Zuooquan.

The group was soon promoted by eminent cultural pundit Tian Qing (see e.g. here, and this video). Following his visit to Zuoquan they gave their first Beijing performance in 2003. From 2007 the popular TV presenter and director Yani took them to heart, engaging with their lives in a documentary filmed over ten years.

Since being enrolled under the aegis of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, while continuing their itinerant lifestyle performing for rural ceremonial, they have become media celebrities, promoted in regular TV appearances.

But even once absorbed into the state apparatus, such folk groups are not always mere mouthpieces for state propaganda. We may tend to think of folk-songs as commemorating events in the distant past—even when describing traumas such as famine, they tend to refer to early famines before the 1949 revolution. Itinerant performers like blind bards are occasionally enlisted to explain state policies among the folk, but they may also express resistance. With such topical songs hardly appearing in the collections of Chinese fieldworkers, it’s hard to judge how common they are. In Bards of Shaanbei (under “Old and new stories”) I explored the themes of AIDS, SARS, and Mo Yan’s fictional portrayal of a bard protesting at unjust local government requisitions, also linking to a protest song by Beijing blindman Zhou Yunpeng.

* * *

And so to Coronavirus and the debate over freedom of speech. The Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang was among the first whistleblowers (among a multitude of tributes, see e.g. here and here). Before his death on 6th February at the age of 34 he was punished for “spreading false rumours”. Though the central Party later backtracked on criticising him (and by April he was officially deemed a martyr), the widespread tributes on Chinese social media mourning his death were largely an outpouring of popular resentment against the state’s irredeemably secretive policies in reaction to the outbreak—at a time when popular resistance to state power (notably in Xinjiang and Hong Kong) is otherwise muted. But online discussions continue to be censored.

A tribute to Li Wenliang, posted on WeChat on 8th February and only deleted by the 13th, featured a folk-song movingly performed by none other than Zuoquan blindman Liu Hongquan (contrast his rosy forecast here). Do listen to the song, since you can no longer hear it on WeChat:

The lyrics were written by Peking University economist Zhang Weiying, a native of Shaanbei who in 2019 composed, and sang, a Xintianyou folk-song in defence of dissident law professor Xu Zhangrun (see this article in a lengthy series by Geremie Barmé; for his translation of Xu’s essay on the virus, see here, and here; cf. this article in Chinese by Zhang Qianfan, another righteous scholar). Zhang Weiying’s lyrics for the new song commemorating Li Wenliang adopt the distinctive idiom of Shaanbei folk-song language, hard to render in translation:

At dead of night appeared a star
The whole world weeping in unison, Oh brother, for you

Snowflakes flurrying over three thousand leagues
Sleepless for the first time, Oh brother, and who’s it for?

Semi-translucent like lighting eggshell lanterns
First they sealed your lips, Oh brother, then they sealed the city

All over the world people’s feelings are bitter
When has it become to hard to tell the truth, Oh brother, about one’s feelings?

When you blew the whistle in the twelfth moon no-one listened
Amidst the bustle of the first moon, Oh brother, the sound of your song was silenced

Lighting lanterns at New Year to see you off
But throughout the land, Oh brother, it’s like observing the Feast of the Dead

Bright blue skies of Sovereign heaven
Now that the whole nation has awakened, Oh brother, you are already far away

Now that the whole nation was awakened, Oh brother, you are already far away.

LWL lyrics

The Party has also recruited performers to play a more orthodox role in promoting public health, such as this epic singer from Inner Mongolia:

(more here) and this song in the style of Huadengxi opera in Guizhou, filmed to promote awareness of the crisis.

And during the 2022 outbreak, here’s a great thread on ache-hamo opera at a roadside Covid checkpoint in Tibet:

For more songs from north China on the virus, see here; for temple ritual in Sichuan, here; and for continuing activity of household Daoists in Shanxi, here.

Amidst the widespread publicity on the global ramifications of the virus, it’s worth considering its effects on poor rural communities in China and their collective observances. Perhaps some of you have further instances of how folk culture is suffering, responding, resisting?


Appendix
A beguiling online post from Duyi Han shows murals purporting to come from a Hubei church, paying homage to Coronavirus medical workers. On reflection it’s clearly a virtual creation, but it makes an impressive and ingenious artistic tribute:

church murals

One has to read carefully to interpret this sentence as implying that it’s a virtual project:

The project sees the walls and ceilings of a historic church in Hubei province transformed into a large mural depicting figures dressed in white decontamination suits.

It’s clarified in this interview, but if one took that literally, some doubts might soon spring to mind—I append mine below merely to show you how gullible I was initially, how little I know about logistics of life in Hubei over these weeks—and how careful we have to be about what we find online, “nowadays”:

  • Where is this chapel, and how many Chinese churches have such classical architectural features?
  • Did the congregation not demur at the loss of their original Christian images?
  • Who is the artist, and if working alone (?), however could the murals be completed so quickly?  Supposing Hubei churches have been closed since the outbreak, OK I guess the artist could get a key.
  • We have to imagine them somehow finding a vast amount of paint (assuming there’s a well-stocked shop that’s open over this period), and putting up scaffolding…
  • And how about all the stages of painting murals, and drying times in winter?

Still, it’s easy to take at face value. Incidentally, apart from the major Daoist temple complex of Wudangshan, I haven’t sought material on folk ritual life around Hubei (as ever, we might start with the “instrumental music” volumes of the Anthology for Hubei), though the scene is (or was, before the virus struck) doubtless more active than this report may suggest.

Recent updates on the Li family Daoists

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One of the great things about this internet thingie (“don’t think it’s going to catch on”) is that it allows me to keep updating my film and book on the Li family Daoists.

After a flurry of posts from my visits to Yanggao last year (see here), here’s a reminder of recent additions to my material:

For much more, see under updates and vignettes in the “Li family” category of the sidebar.

stele

 

 

A new memorial stele

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IMG_3287.JPG

Altar to Li Qing and his wife Xue Yumei in the central room of Li Manshan’s house, 2018.

The revered household Daoist Li Qing (1926–99) occupies a special place in the affections both of his own family and of the many Yanggao people whom he helped over his long career. With his generous character and thorough mastery of ritual practice, he guided the ritual band through the years of Maoism, and upon the revival he recopied the family manuals and trained new disciples. Among many posts, see the links here, as well as my film and book.

When the “filial kin” decide to erect a stele, it’s customary to do so for both parents together—Li Qing’s wife Xue Yumei (1925–2016) was also much loved (she features in a moving scene of the film, from 36.46, recalling their 1945 wedding). The family were going to wait for the 3rd anniversary of her death, but in the end they decided to hold the simple ritual in 2018, on the 1st day of the 10th moon—along with Qingming in the 4th moon, the main day annually for paying respects at the ancestral graves. Before Liberation some more well-to do lineages had grave charts, but Li Manshan never saw one for the Li family.

stele

Photo: Li Bin.

The handsome stele was ordered by the couple’s grandson Li Bin, used to providing such mortuary equipment at his funeral shop in Yanggao town. Along with Li Manshan, the whole family (“filial children and virtuous grandchildren”, as in the inscription) gathered at the lineage gravelands outside Upper Liangyuan village to erect the stele. Presenting offerings of incense, liquor, cigarettes, biscuits, cakes, and fruit, they “reverently kowtowed” while burning a set of paper artefacts and paper spirit money.

paper money

The artefacts, made by Li Bin and his wife at their funeral shop, were those commonly used for funerals in Yanggao: a siheyuan courtyard house, gold and silver dou 斗 vessels, a money-tree (yaoqian shu 摇钱树), gold and paper mountains, a car, and wreaths.

By contrast with south China, such steles are not so common in the Yanggao countryside, but in 2014 the family of Li Qing’s Daoist uncle Li Peisen (another crucial figure in the transmission) had also erected one for him and his wife Yang Qinghua at their home of Yang Pagoda just south, where they had moved to escape the rigours of Maoism.

And all this reminds us that household Daoists like the Li family provide a complete mortuary service for the local community of which they are part ( see e.g. Li Bin’s diary, and this post on funerary headgear).

Li Bin’s first funeral shop in town.

For more updates on the Li family, see here—most recently this diary of Li Manshan’s activities so far this year.

Li Manshan’s latest diary

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LMS

After recent excursions further afield, it’s high time for another update on the Li family Daoists in Yanggao.

The venerable Li Manshan, now 74 sui, may have been taking a back seat to his son Li Bin in the family’s ritual services over the last couple of years, but he’s still busy zooming around on his motor-bike, as I now learn from his recent diary.

LMS 1992

In a break during a funeral, Li Manshan consults with another family to determine the date for a future burial. August 1992.

He has been meaning to limit his work to the immediate vicinity, and focus on determining the date; whereas for funeral consultations he has to visit the bereaved family, for other requests (weddings, timing of journeys, siting of houses, and so on) he can just await patrons at home. But since he has served most of these villages frequently over the last four decades, such as Pansi, Luotun, Wujiahe, Houying, Sibaihu, Shizitun, he still often has to lead the band for lengthy and tiring funerals, and not always so nearby.

2019 (dates in lunar calendar)

1st moon

  • 1 and 2: to Wujiahe to determine date for burial
  • 5–6: funeral at Wujiahe
  • 7–8: another funeral at Wujiahe
  • 8–9: funeral at Luotun
  • 10: major snowfall—made paper artefacts at home
  • 13–14: funeral at Anzao
  • 18: ritual for third day after death at Qiaojiafang
  • 19–20: funeral at Qiangjiaying
  • 21: funeral in Tianzhen; determined date for burial at Pansi
  • 22–24: 3-day funeral at Qiaojiafang
  • 24–25 funerals at Yaogou (Tianzhen) and West Zhanjiawa (Gucheng district, can’t find on map)

2nd moon

  • 1: funerals at Pansi, West Yaoquan, and Luotun
  • 5–6: funerals at Houying and Zanniangcheng
  • 8–9: funeral at Wujiahe; determined date at Tiantun
  • 13–14: funerals at South Renyao and Zhaojiagou
  • 14–15: funeral at Tiantun
  • 18–19: funeral at Upper Liangyuan (his home village)
  • 21–22: funerals at Yangheta (Tianzhen) and Anzao
  • 23: funeral in southern suburbs of Datong
  • 24–25: funeral at Xingyuan
  • 26–27: funeral at Pansi

3rd moon

  • 1: funerals at Pansi and Yangyuan
  • 3–4: funeral at Wujiahe
  • 5–6: funeral at Yaogou
  • 8–9: funeral at Anzao
  • 11–12: funeral at Balitai
  • 15–16: funeral at Shizitun
  • 18–19: funeral at Qiangjiaying
  • 21–22: funeral at Yaozhuang (Yangyuan)
  • 23–24: funeral at Sibaihu
  • 24th–25th: funeral at Shizitun

4th moon

  • 2–3: funeral at Houying
  • 4–5: funeral at Wujiawa (Datong)
  • 6–7: funeral at Taishan village in Datong suburbs
  • 8–9: funeral in Yituquan [good village name, this: “One-spit stream”] (Yangyuan)
  • 13–14: funeral for the wife of our wonderful friend Li Jin in Yanggao town

For some of these funerals Li Manshan works together with Li Bin, but the latter also often has to lead a separate band, as well as doing his own consultations to determine the date. As with Li Bin’s diary from 2017, we can see that improved transport has enabled them to perform funerals in different villages concurrently—never an option before the 1980s when they had to walk everywhere.

So while Old Lord Li deserves to take things easy, he still can’t easily turn down requests. I can understand why he longs for the contemplative life of the temple priest. Belief endures in the powers of the Daoists to deliver the soul, and for now they are still much in demand, as they have been for the last forty years—but with the rural population continuing to dwindle, this can’t last.

For the busy schedules of Li Manshan and Li Bin even during the Coronavirus, see here.

Meditation: update with translation!

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LMS

Hardly had I published this series of links to posts on the Shunzhi emperor’s Buddhist meditation on impermanence, and what it’s doing in the ritual manuals of the Li family Daoists, when I realized that I would be churlish not to provide a rough translation, for those readers less than fluent in classical Chinese—of whom I hope there are many!

So I’ve now added it under the original post, here. Help welcome…

Grave charts

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fenpu

For the Li family Daoists in Yanggao, north Shanxi, in addition to my film and book you can find subheads under the Li family category in the sidebar for updates and vignettes. I’ve filed some under both—here’s another one.

Over the days following a death in Yanggao, among the many solo tasks of household Daoists like Li Manshan and his son Li Bin (along with determining the date for the funeral, writing the yangzhuang placard, supervising the encoffinment, decorating the coffin, and so on) is to determining a suitable site and alignment for the grave in the fields outside the village (see my film, from 16.21).

To help the Daoist in this task, some lineages still preserve grave charts (fenpu 墳譜). Only lineages that were relatively well-to-do before Liberation had them made, and rather few have survived the ravages of Maoism.

My main energies are devoted to the ritual performance of the Daoist band for the funeral proper—including my attempt to understand the texts that the Daoists perform then, with the help of their ritual manuals. From my notes:

As my frame of reference gradually expands—from the instrumental music to the ritual to local history to the wider activities of the Daoists—I am often out of my depth, but Li Manshan has developed a fine sense of where the borders of my research might lie. One day, as I query some abstruse comment of his on the correct timing for the burial in accord with the calendrical indications, he says with a twinkle in his eye, “Hey Steve, you don’t have to understand everything!”

So, like Li Manshan’s many almanacs to help him determine the date, the grave charts are way beyond my competence; but in a society where so much has been lost, they offer a glimpse of former geomantic knowledge in the area.

This vignette accompanies the scene in the film (Daoist priests of the Li family, p.190):

We have just had supper at Li Manshan’s house after an unusually rainy day. Around 7pm he gets a call. A rich entrepreneur in town is to collect him to go to a grave siting (kanfen) outside Lower Liangyuan for his mother. Li Bin has already determined the date. The entrepreneur, in mourning weeds, arrives in one of the poshest cars I have ever seen, and we keenly set about getting it all muddy. Collecting two grave-digger types in the village, we reach the sodden fields as it gets dark. It’s like Glastonbury, only without the irritating music. While I film with night-shot, Li Manshan takes out his luopan compass from its bag, and conscientiously checks the alignment with the compass and some string, consulting the family’s old grave chart.

By the time they finally finish it’s pitch dark. Oblivious of my presence, they blithely stride off with their torches, leaving me stumbling over grave mounds into puddles. At least I finally seem to have achieved that chimera of the fieldworker, becoming a fly on the wall. They come back to rescue me with their torches, and we all clamber back into the posh car and set to work making it all muddy again.

In some cases, such as when the old ancestors are buried elsewhere, Li Manshan really has to look for an appropriate site in the fields before using his compass for the specifics. On one such morning we spend considerable time seeking a suitable spot, driving round, getting out, studying the lie of the land. Me, I’m just looking for an Italian coffee bar.

Some of the grave charts look to have been written from memory since the 1980s, but on Li Bin’s travels through the countryside to assist funeral families he is sometimes shown some older ones. Here are a couple of photos he took from a chart made by a lineage in Xujiayuan north of the county-town, dated 1937:

And Li Bin recently came across one in nearby Yangyuan county, also apparently from before Liberation—here are three of its seven pages:

YY fenpu 3

Online you can find further images of grave charts, and general introductions in Chinese like this and this. For a sequel, see here.

Guide to another year’s blogging

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Li Manshan doing paperwork for Hoisting the Pennant ritual, 2003 https://stephenjones.blog/the-film/

Struggling to encompass all this? I know I am. While we inevitably specialize in particular topics, it’s important to build bridges. I guess it’s that time of year when another guide to my diverse posts may come in handy—this is worth reading in conjunction with the homepage and my roundup this time last year.

I’ve added more entries to many of the sidebar categories and tags mentioned in that summary. I’ve now subheaded many of the categories; it’d be useful for the tags too, but it seems I can’t do that on my current WP plan. Of course, many of these headings overlap—fruitfully.

Notably, I keep updating and refecting on my film and book on the Li family Daoists. I wrote a whole series resulting from my March trip to Yanggao (helpfully collected here) and Beijing (starting here, also including the indie/punk scene). Other 2018 posts on the Li family include Yanggao personalities and Recopying ritual manuals (a sequel to Testing the waters).

To accompany the visit of the Zhihua temple group to the British Museum in April, I also did a roundup of sources on the temple in the wider context of ritual in Beijing and further afield, including several posts on this site.

I’ve posted some more introductions to Local ritual, including

Gender (now also with basic subheads) is a constant theme, including female spirit mediums—to follow the series on women of Yanggao, starting here. Or nearer home, Moon river, complementing Ute Lemper.

Sinologists—indeed aficionados of the qin, crime fiction, and erotica—may also like my post on Robert van Gulik (and note the link to Bunnios!).

I’ve added a few more categories and tags, notably

Women of Herat https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/29/women-of-herat/

Twin Peaks https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/17/twin-peaks/
The conformist https://stephenjones.blog/2018/11/08/the-conformist/

The film tag is developing, with a side order of soundtracks—for some links, see here.

cof
Gepopo https://stephenjones.blog/2018/09/13/gepopo/

I’ve given basic subheads to the language category (note this post on censorship), which also contains much drôlerie in both English and Chinese. Issues with speech and fluency (see stammering tag) continue to concern me, such as

Following Daoist football, the sport tag is worth consulting, such as The haka, and a series on the genius of Ronnie.

Some posts are instructively linked in chains:

More favourites may be found in the *MUST READ* category. Among other drôlerie, try this updated post, one of several on indexing and taxonomy; and more from the great Philomena Cunk.

Most satisfying is this collection of great songs—still not as eclectic as it might become:

Do keep exploring the sidebar categories and tags!

 

 

The Li family Daoists: a roundup

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Li Manshan doing paperwork for Hoisting the Pennant ritual, 2003 https://stephenjones.blog/the-film/
Li Qing leading the Pardon, 1991. My first visit.

Li category

*UPDATED!*

After the latest screening of my film, perhaps it’s worth giving links to some of the major posts (so far!) on the Li family Daoists—even with the subheads in my category for them (film, on tour, rituals, updates, vignettes) it’s easy to get lost…

The basic material is

On ritual, see e.g.

Ritual painting (detail), Artisan the Sixth, early 1980s https://stephenjones.blog/god-images-old-and-new-1/

Among the vignettes: for Yanggao, try

and a whole series of updates from March–April 2018 (see archives in the sidebar), led by

and including

Jpeg

as well as their continuing activities while under lockdown earlier this year:

Other posts (reflecting material from my book) include

On tour, you can start with

part of a whole series from May 2017, hotly followed by

as well as

Also useful are articles on other characters in Yanggao, such as

Shanxi sect https://stephenjones.blog/2017/06/14/women-of-yanggao-23-sectarians-and-mediums/

And there’s much, much more to explore if you use those subheads, and keep clicking away on the links within the posts…

Slapping the coffin, and headgear

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LMS huacai

Li Manshan decorates a coffin.

Apart from the liturgy of the Daoists that is my main topic, many other concomitant mortuary observances tend to fall under the domain of “folklore”.

After a death in rural Yanggao, among all the complex arrangements shown in my film, there’s a tiny exchange (from 14.11) where the son of the deceased reads out Li Manshan’s prescription for the funeral arrangements.

I’ve never witnessed Slapping the Coffin (yicai 移材, my book, pp.186–7), but I now find a little description in Wu Fan’s notes from our 2003 fieldwork in Yanggao:

According to the “old rules”, Slapping the Coffin follows the nocturnal Escorting Away the Orphan Souls ritual segment and the lengthy Crossing the Soul [aka Sitting Through the Night] instrumental sequence from the shawm band or Daoists (my book, p.128). Around half an hour after the band has fallen silent, when all is quiet, the oldest son and oldest daughter slap the coffin with their palms, crying out “Go, then” (Zouba, zouba 走吧，走吧). Then the son leads the way, sweeping the path while the daughter takes the paper cart (now often a car) from the funeral artefacts, kowtowing all the way to a crossroads, where the cart is burned.

See also Allan Marett’s comment below on a Song-dynasty Zen collection.

By 2003 this procedure had commonly been simplified for some time, and even Sitting Through the Night was optional. But it’s an instance of all the minutiae formerly observed by the kin, beyond the more public rituals of the Daoist band—”customary” rather than “religious”.

The kin still observe elaborate, ancient distinctions in their funerary headgear—these are just the appendages for the female kin:

IMG_3250.JPG

Headgear appendages for female kin. Left to right: 1–2 daughters, wife; 3–7 sisters’ daughters, wives of sisters’ sons; 8–9 granddaughters, wives of grandsons; 10–11 maternal granddaughters, wives of maternal grandsons. Made by Li Manshan’s wife.

Left, sister; right, granddaughters.

But as ever, “customs differ every 10 li“. We should document both religious and customary rituals. Neither is timeless: we need to show how they change within local societies.

While we’re talking headgear, I’m very fond of this image from my film, of Daoist hats hanging out to dry after being washed—a reminder that ritual equipment has to be maintained:

yinyang hats

 

 

 

Update on Yanggao ritual

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Gushan yinyang 2003

Following my links to images of Yanggao temple murals, I’ve also updated my post More Daoists of Yanggao with photos of the temple at Gushan—recent ones from Hannibal Taubes, and my own images of 2003 rituals there, including a fine sectarian group.

So do (re)visit the post—useful background for ritual groups there apart from the illustrious Li family. Not to mention many more articles on other counties of north Shanxi, Hebei, and so on, linked under Local ritual.

Gushan sect 2003.3

The cult of Elder Hu

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* Yet another in a series of vignettes (starting here) from my recent stay with the wonderful Li Manshan (for similar excursions, see here and here). *

Hutu statues

Altar to Great Lord Hudu, Lower Liangyuan temple 2018.

My time with Li Manshan last month also gave me the chance to renew my acquaintance with Elder Hu, most intriguing of local deities in the region.

Surveying “cultic buildings” just northeast of Yanggao in the troubled 1940s, the intrepid Belgian missionary Willem Grootaers drew attention to a local cult of the deity Hutu 胡突 or Hudu 胡都, aka Elder Hu (Hulaoye, Huye, Hushen 胡老爺, 胡爺, 胡神) or even Dragon Hu (Hulong 胡龍). His temples are often known as Hushen miao 胡神廟. See

  • Willem A. Grootaers, “The Hutu god of Wanch’üan, a problem of method in folklore”, Studia Serica VII (Chengdu, 1948), pp.41–53. [1]

Around the Xuanhua region Grootaers and his Chinese assistants found fourteen temples devoted to Elder Hu, as well as six more with tablets in the temples of other gods; as a lateral image in Dragon King temples he appeared sixteen times.

I have already published brief introductions to the cult in Yanggao. [2]

In south China one often find “cults,” in the common sense of groups (whether voluntary or ascriptive) devoted to a particular deified local territorial personage. Much work on southern Daoism is complemented by studies of such gods. One finds some cults in north China too, although they are more often to “national” deities. Such groups may or may not include ritual specialists performing complex sequences of ritual and liturgy.

But one important regional deity whom people in north Shanxi and northwest Hebei do worship is Elder Hu. Perhaps an ancient general, his proper name Hutu (or Hudu) may be Mongol. Closely related to the Dragon King deities, he too is thought to have power over rain and the elements. In Upper Liangyuan there was a statue of him in the Temple to the Three Pure Ones (my book, pp.46–9), but in Yanggao the main sites for his worship, still today, are the temples of Zhenmenbu (for recent images from Hannibal Taubes, see here), Xujiayuan, and Lower Liangyuan. Here I introduce the latter two.

Xujiayuan
The Xujiayuan temple (formally named Temple of Clear Clouds Qingyun si 清雲寺, though as usual it is commonly identified simply by the name of the village) is part of a network of early temples lining the border north of the county-town, just beneath the remains of the Great Wall. From our 2003 notes:

In the main temple the three god statues (from left to right) were Pineapple Tree King God (Boluoshuwang fo, responsible for water), Watery Heaven God (Shuitian fo, one of the Heavenly Officers tianguan), and Elder Hu (Hulaoye, responsible for rain, not water in general). On either side of Elder Hu were small dragon statuettes. There was also a portable statuette to Elder Hu to be taken on procession.

XJY 03 clothing statue 1

Clothing a god statue, Xujiayuan 7th-moon temple fair 2003.

The various local legends about Elder Hu are not consistent. Xujiayuan villagers said that his old home was Hujia village quite far further east in Tianzhen county (see map below), so the village always donates to the Xujiayuan temple fair (in 2003 they gave 300 yuan). According to the temple’s abbot Miaoyun, Elder Hu was an ancient general called Hutu; the common people erected a temple to him after he was wrongfully executed by an emperor and the climate went awry (xingfeng zuolang 興風作浪).

Several online sources on the temple claim that Elder Hu was a grand court official called Hu Tu 胡秃 [sic] in the Warring States period. Unjustly executed, his soul wouldn’t disperse, whereupon The Jade Emperor enfieoffed him as a god. In the early Tang dynasty, during natural disasters in the 6th year of the Zhenguan era (632 CE), Elder Hu rescued the populace by scattering buckwheat, and they built a temple to him in thanks.

Most village temples in the region are unstaffed, but the Xujiayuan temple had about eight resident Buddhist monks when we visited in 2003. The main day for the temple fair is 7th moon 3rd; it begins on the 1st and finishes on the 4th. This is a most vibrant event, with many stalls, and an opera troupe, shawm bands, and the temple’s own monks all performing an impressive nocturnal yankou ritual (see the DVD Doing Things with my book Ritual and music: shawm bands of Shanxi, §B5).

Another major ritual of Xujiayuan is the rain procession on 5th moon 18th, bearing aloft the statuette of Elder Hu. The temple is the centre of a parish (she 社) of twelve villages (still known as “brigades”—note the casual elision of imperial and Maoist vocabulary), although by 2003 it was mainly the four nearby village that were taking part actively. Elder Hu “deputes the dragons” (fenglong 封龍) to release rain.

Lower Liangyuan
Today on the plain southeast of Yanggao county-town, with no temples still standing in Upper Liangyuan, the most important temple in the area is in the sister village of Lower Liangyuan just north. Its formal name is Temple of Efficacious Source (Lingyuan si 靈源寺).

XLY 03 temple name

7th-moon temple fair 2003.

The survival of the temple is due in large measure to the sprightly Yuan Xiwen 袁喜文 (b.1934!), still blessed with a youthful spirit within the body of a fit 50-year-old.

Yuan Xiwen 2013

Yuan Xiwen, 2013.

Serving as a brigade accountant and cadre under Maoism, he did what he could to protect the temple, and led the revival of its temple fair upon the 1980s’ reforms. He has recently compiled a detailed genealogy of thirteen generations of the Yuan lineage (my film, from 57.46). Local society depends on men with such charisma.

The village has long had a larger population than Upper Liangyuan (1,120 in 1948, 1,805 in 1990, according to the county gazetteer), although since then it continues to suffer from the inevitable drift to the cities.

Back in 2013 we strolled over there to find Yuan Xiwen sitting in lotus posture on the kang in his bare house. He too told us a charming local legend about Elder Hu, detailed enough to have a certain authentic value:

Dragon Hu came from Jiaocheng village, southwest of Datong. [3] He held the post of looking after the cabinet official (geyuan 閣員) Wang Qiu 王囚 in Shandong province. Wang agreed to his request to return home for a visit to his old home. So Dragon Hu began the journey home, riding the clouds (jiayun 駕雲) from Shandong to Jiaocheng. Once he reached north Shanxi, he passed through “nine dragon mouths” (jiu longkou) in all.
[For villages marked * below I know of active temples today; the others remain to be explored. The legend doesn’t track his earlier progress from Shandong—however did we manage before satnav?!].

At Wayaokou (Tianzhen county) there was a heavy downpour; he rode on through Zhendagou 镇大沟 (?), Zhenmenbu*, and Xujiayuan*, where he rested his horse (yinma 飲馬). Continuing his journey south, he rested his horse again at Liujiaquan, then at Lower Liangyuan* at midday, then on to Tailiang 太梁 (?) [which, said Yuan Xiwen, still had a decrepit old temple to him], to Lower Shenjing (?), and one other village which escaped me.

Throughout Dragon Hu’s progress, all the places he passed through were beset by hailstones. The Heavenly God (Tianshen) was angry, and made him pay a forfeit. So Dragon Hu pinched three ears of wheat into the shape of a shuttle, creating what is now buckwheat…

There’s clearly a lot more fieldwork to be done here—but how exciting it may be for someone to pursue!

Towards a modern history of the temple
Yuan Xiwen recalled the village’s last rain procession, and temple fair, before Liberation. In the 7th moon of 1947 some three hundred villagers went on procession to the Xujiayuan temple, with big drums, gujiang shawm bands, and banners bearing the characters “Silence!” (sujing 肅靜), both there and back. From 1st to 3rd they stayed at Xujiayuan, returning on the 4th, holding their own temple fair from 5th to 7th.

The temple only had around a dozen mu of land; it was common land, not “owned”, and anyway there were no resident clerics, only one shabby temple keeper. This was surely typical—far from the great temple estates further south.

As collectivization escalated, the temple buildings were taken over by the Supply and Marketing Co-op (Gongxiao she 供销社). The god statues were taken away in 1956, to a little shrine in between the Lower and Upper villages; people still worshipped surreptitiously before them. The temple was only assaulted in 1966 at the opening of the Cultural Revolution; the murals were further damaged while it was used as a classroom. It was not until 1987 that Yuan Xiwen was able to lead the first temple fair there after the revival.

The modern religious history of this and other villages is closely related to the fates of sectarian groups. Though village temples were public sites, they made a natural base for sects like the Way of Yellow Heaven and the Way of Nine Palaces. [4] By the 1940s Lower Liangyuan was a hotbed of such groups. After the Yiguan dao sect was introduced to Yanggao in the 1940s, 200 of the 240 households in Lower Liangyuan are said to have belonged. While the villagers’ more public religious activities were somewhat separate, the sectarian persecutions of the early 1950s inevitably affected their spirits. Still, the sects survived underground until reviving along with more public ritual behaviour from the 1980s.

I should add that (as far as I know) there is no separate “cult” of sectarians worshipping Elder Hu, nor  any scriptures to him.

March 2018
Over the years I’ve often passed by the temple—for instance when the Treasuries are burned before it during funerals (my film, from 1.03.56). But it’s been ages since I took a close look at the interior, so Li Manshan calls up the wonderful Yuan Xiwen and we stroll over there. They’re in the middle of a meeting of the clansmen—his younger brother is there. I’d have learned more about the temple images if Yuan had come to the temple with us, but he’s too busy with his family. Later Li Manshan tells me the temple committee had recently lost the temple’s old divination list, [5] and how rumours flew around about an inside job—until they found it again.

XLY list main

Divination list, 1882 (Guangxu 8th year).

The villagers don’t seem to know of any surviving steles—though after our discoveries in the Upper village, there may still be room for exploration in nearby ditches.

The temple has belatedly been taken under the wings of the county Bureau of Cultural Preservation, and (judging from my 2003 photos) some of its old murals seem to have been retouched. Though they clearly date from the late Qing (not the Ming, as the temple minders airily claimed), their beauty is rare in Yanggao villages—by contrast with the amazing wealth of such murals in nearby Yuxian.

XLY 03 outside

The front complex during the 7th-moon temple fair, 2003.


XLY temple exterior

March 2018.

The interior complex
Inside the temple the main complex facing south onto the courtyard now has two rooms: a central hall to the Dragon Kings, and an east room to Elder Hu.

Rear block from courtyard

View of main rooms from courtyard.

The main altar of the central hall has statues of six dragon gods before a mural of the Jade Mother of the Five Dragons (Yulong shengmu 玉龍聖母):

Rear central room central gods

Central hall, 2018.


XLY Rear central mural 2003

Jade Mother of the Five Dragons, 2003.

On the rear wall, to the west and east of these central images, are further murals to the mythical emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu:

Elder Hu https://stephenjones.blog/2018/04/20/elder-hu/

My 2003 photos of the above:

Further murals adorn the side walls—for the River God (heshen 河神) to the west, Efficacious Immortal (lingxian 靈仙) to the east (I think):

Rear hall central west wall

Central hall, mural on west side wall.

To the east of this central hall is the room to Hutu (photo at top of article). To one side of the main altar is a small portable statuette for processions, carried in a palanquin that rests by the west wall:

The side walls bear murals depicting the progress of Hutu through his domain:

Hutu west wall mural

Outside, to the west of the rear complex an old pillar capital survives (for much, much more, cf. Hannibal’s photos from nearby Hunyuan, and Yangyuan):

Rear block exterior west carving

The front complex
At the main entrance of the complex is a central room to Śakyamuni, flanked by his attendants Mañjuśrī (Wenshu) and Samantabhadra (Puxian). To its west is a room to Dizang and the Ten Kings:

Dizang statues

The west and east side walls bear Ten Kings murals repainted since the 1980s—here are two details:

Dizang west wall Kings

Dizang east wall murals

For even more recent images from Hannibal Taubes, see here.

* * *

But in the end I want to return to real human beings. As disembodied “cultural relics” these images may have no particular artistic merit; however numinous they may be, they’re still silent and static. In between the common fates of falling apart or becoming museums, temples are for living people, for interaction under changing social conditions; their gatherings are full of life, “hot and noisy“.

I can’t help thinking back to August 1992, my second visit to Li Manshan’s father the great Li Qing, when I even attended a funeral he led at Lower Liangyuan—alas, I had only just missed the village’s 7th-moon temple fair! Li Qing told me that two Daoist bands took part (later the temple committee only invited one). All his colleagues, with whom he had been performing rituals since the 1930s, would have taken part, like Li Yuanmao, Li Zengguang, Kang Ren, and so on.

After the 1980s’ revival I suspect they didn’t restore a fuller sequence of the jiao 醮 Offering, for whose segments Li Qing had recently recopied ritual manuals (I doubt they chanted any of the jing scriptures, for instance)—but still, their ritual programme may have been rather more complex than it later became (my book, pp.237–43). For Hoisting the Pennant, did they sing the hymn Yuyin 玉音 at the central pole? And how I would have loved to witness their Communicating the Lanterns; by the time I attended it at the temple fair in 2003, Li Qing was no more, and his pupils were less than familiar with the ritual.

XLY yangfan 03

7th-moon temple fair 2003, Hoisting the Pennant: the final chase. Front left, on nao cymbals: Erqing, shortly before he was lured away to become a migrant labourer. Photo: Wu Fan.

* * *

So this little introduction to Elder Hu gives you an idea of what we were up to before our brief yet charming encounter with the local constabulary on the walk home to the Upper village.

[1] Part of an extraordinary series that also includes

  • “Les Temples Villageois de la Region au Sud-est de Ta-t’ong (Chansi Nord), leurs Inscriptions et leur Histoire”, Folklore Studies 4 (Beijing 1945), pp.161–212.
  • with Li Shih-yü and Chang Chi-wen, “Temples and history of Wan-ch’üan (Chahar); the geographical method applied to folklore”, Monumenta Serica 13 (1948), pp.209–316 (for Hutu, see pp.272–274).
  • with Li Shih-yü and Chang Chi-wen, “Rural temples around Hsüan-Hua (South Chahar), their iconography and their history”, Folklore studies 10.1 (1951), pp.1–116.
  • with Li Shih-yü and Wang Fu-shih, The sanctuaries in a north-China city: a complete survey of the cultic buildings in the city of Hsuan-hua (Chahar) (Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques vol. 26), Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1995 (for Hutu, see pp.7–9, 70­–73, 109–10).

[2] Ritual and music of north China: shawm bands in Shanxi, pp.73–84; Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.49–50; Wu Fan provides further detail (Yinyang, gujiang, pp.61–71, 150–59).

[3] Yuan Xiwen said it was in Shanyin county, which it isn’t now—but anyway, judging by the logic of the route, and the limited radius of the cult, not the county considerably further south.

[4] See Yanggao xianzhi, pp.610–15; Zhao Jiazhu, Zhongguo huidaomen shiliao jicheng, pp.159–62. The Yiguan dao was a particular scapegoat; though in some respects inquisitors were quite meticulous, I suspect the name served as an umbrella term, a rallying-call for persecution. The campaigns of the early 1950s are a growing theme of research.

[5] Cf. Wu Fan, Yinyang, gujiang, pp.280–85.

At home with a master Daoist

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As weird holidays go, this is pretty weird…

To supplement my various articles on particular themes (a ghost village, a funeral, the murals of Artisan the Sixth, Elder Hu, In search of temples, and so on), this diary records the more domestic side of my recent trip chez Li Manshan—like my notes on our French tour last May, the kind of thing one hardly finds in inscrutable accounts of hallowed Daoist ritual.

As I land in Beijing, pausing only to catch up with my wonderful hosts Matt and Dom and to buy a SIM card, I take the midnight train to Yanggao—smashing my personal best time for Fastest Ever Escape From Beijing. You may like to begin by reading my updated description of my first couple of days there.

Catching up
Despite improved transport and smartphones, progress seems superficial. This is still another world from the skyscrapers and Party congresses touted by the international media. Like anywhere else in the world, indeed. And it’s hard to see evidence of greater repression—people are well used to it.

Li Manshan’s home village of Upper Liangyuan still has some over six hundred dwellers, which counts as a lot round here; but it seems forlorn, stagnant. It’s ever clearer that the rural population is “left behind”—elderly people sitting outside awaiting their turn. Litter remains an intractable problem, blighting what might almost be an idyllic landscape.

Having been worked off his feet for many years, now that Li Manshan is in his 70s he’s giving way to Li Bin, who’s busier than ever. Li Bin has three funerals to do today, one a solo attendance at the grave (“smashing the bowl”, “without scriptures”) for a Catholic family, who still need the procedures for the date and siting of the burial. On the 17th (or rather the 2nd, chu’er—I soon get used to the lunar calendar) he has to smash two more bowls.

So now Li Manshan only works nearby—decorating coffins, doing grave-sitings and visits to determine the date for burials, as well as the occasional funeral. Soon after I arrive he zooms off on his motor-bike to Yangguantun to decorate a coffin. I’m happy to try and sleep off my journey from London.

doggie

Visitors are always announced by a barking dog, like a doorbell. The Lis have a new doggie, rarely off its tether by its kennel in the courtyard. It’s frozen. When I tell Li Manshan’s wife (busy making funerary headgear) about our poncey UK winter gilets for dogs, she shrugs, “He’s fine, he’s got fur ain’t ‘e?!”

LMS wife sewing

Li Manshan’s (only) disciple Wang Ding returns from a funeral to unload the decorations for the soul hall, now improved and more convenient. Renting out this equipment to funeral families is another source of income for Li Manshan. Giving Wang Ding a hand, I tell him I wrote a little post about him after our little French tour last year; he hasn’t got internet, so he will look at my blog at Golden Noble’s place. He can speak pretty good Yangpu, but even after all these years I find their dialect as tough as ever.

I hardly bother to wear my glasses any more—like clarinetist Jack Brymer, who when rehearsing a contemporary piece would wear his for the first five minutes, and then only keep them on if he thought it was worth it…

The domestic routine
Li Manshan’s first tasks on rising are to fold the bedding, take out the chamber pot, fetch kindling for the kitchen stove and our little stove in the west room, and boil water. He does his bit with the housework: sweeping, mopping, stoking the stove, preparing water—though he leaves most of the cooking to his wife. The little coal stove is cute and effective, but mafan. At last I learn that the central foyer is called tangdi 堂地. Both living rooms are equipped with a low wooden table, actually rather handsome but covered in plastic, to place on the kang, used for meals and writing. Plastic rules OK—and a jolly good thing too.

meal

Our diet consists mainly of baozi dumplings, [1] noodles, crêpes, mushrooms, eggs, bits of meat, meatballs, doufu, cabbage, nuts. Sometimes our meals evoke the classic film Yellow Earth—indelible image of the fieldworker overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of poverty and traditional culture. But we giggle a lot too.

Again Li Manshan stresses how much he prefers country life. I soon get used again to its basic routines, not least visits to the latrine in the southwest corner of the courtyard—taking paper (The Thoughts of Uncle Xi would be useful, but it’s not to hand/arse), and a torch if dark, to balance on a ledge; adjusting trousers, squatting (not getting any easier)…

Amazingly, for my visit in autumn 2013 Li Manshan modified his old latrine, building a little roofed pier (so to speak) over a floor on pillars projecting from the spacious pit. Like the world, it was built in seven days. After designing it on paper, he borrowed 230 bricks, as well as stone slabs, tiles, and so on, from neighbours; then he got down and dirty over a week at the height of summer. I felt embarrassed, but he pointed out that it would be good for them too.

We refer to it as The London Embassy (Lundun dashiguan, pronounced like “Taking turns to squat in the big shithouse”). The great Beijing cultural pundit Tian Qing even bestowed his illustrious calligraphy on Li Manshan, albeit in the more polite version.

So (thanks to me) the latrine is pretty comfortable, but it makes a suitable image to imagine the poverty of the olden days (including the Maoist era—a sobering contrast with the bright propaganda posters of the time): the old and infirm trudging to an open pit in the snow, with no paper, no sanitary products, no torches in the dark.

I’m so pampered, compared to Li Manshan’s lifetime “enduring suffering” (shouku 受苦). From my book (pp.132–3):

Shoulders unable to carry, hands unable to grasp, soft and sensitive skin…

Coming across this phrase in 2013 as I made inept attempts to help Li Manshan with the autumn harvest, I thought it might have been coined to parody my efforts. Rather, it’s a standard expression used to describe the travails of urban “educated youth” in performing physical labour after being sent down from the cities to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution to “learn from the peasants”. The experience was a rude shock for such groups all over China; brought up in relatively comfortable urban schools to believe in the benefits of socialism, and often protected from understanding the tribulations of their own parents, they were now confronted not just by the harshness of physical labour, but by medieval poverty.

Li Manshan is thrilled with my little gift of a set of UK coins, working out which is which. He proudly offers me a black banana, white and tasty on the inside, but decides to eat it himself; we have a giggle over glossy modernized bananas (cf. “banana republic, but minus the bananas”). His wife passes the time by playing “matching pairs”, a kind of dominoes. A female friend of hers drops by for a chat. They’re all very humorous, beneath a somewhat dour exterior. Li Manshan and his wife seem like counsellors.

In reply to villagers’ curious enquiries about how many kids I have, Li Manshan is now in the habit of replying wu, which they hear as “five” 五 but in his creative head means “none” 无. This surprisingly shuts them up—I worry about having to embroider stories about their careers, my numerous grandkids, and so on, but no. Anyway, Li Manshan would be up for this. He observes that since my surname is Zhong 钟 (Clock), my son might be named Biao 表 (watch).

We share a nice supper of noodles, and more dumplings. The CCTV evening news is on as wallpaper [Breaking news! CCP holds meeting! Xi Jinping still in power! Old gits in suits dead bored!]. It’s ignored until the weather forecast comes on, but Li Manshan loves the nature programmes.

“Wotcha doing when you get back to Beijing?”, he goes.
“I’m going to be giving lectures (jiangke)…”
His local dialect, or his lively mind, instantly converts this to jieka “stammering”:
“Old Jonesy, you don’t have to go back to Beijing to stammer—you can just keep on stammering away here!”

I manage both.

Writing
Though Li Manshan is doing fewer funerals these days, he has always got ritual paperwork to do—whether it’s writing talismans, shaping paper for funerary artefacts, or writing mottos for the soul hall (our film, from 10.41;  Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.194–200).

He’s bought big reams of thick paper from Yangyuan county. He recalls that when Li Qing recopied the ritual manuals in the early 1980s, mazhi hemp paper was available from the Supply and Marketing Co-op.

One day our siesta is disturbed by a group coming to ask Li Manshan to “determine the date”. After seeing them off he spends the rest of the afternoon writing several dozen sets of four-character funerary diaolian mottos for the soul hall (my film, from 10.43)—enough for a couple of months. Again he recalls how Li Qing used to write them in the scripture hall for each particular funeral. I devise a new game: arranging the squares in a different order to make a popular phrase or saying. For starters, how about 東方妙，西方福 (“oriental mysticism is all very well, but things are kinda cushy over here”).

A trip into town
One morning we call up the wonderful Li Jin to arrange a nice quiet lunch in town, just the three of us. Li Manshan’s wife chooses a posh shirt and jacket for him.

In 1953, when he was 8 sui, Li Manshan walked into town with his auntie to see the big xiangong parade there. Now we walk up to the main road to catch the No.2 bus into town; it arrives soon, a mere 3 kuai each, taking under half an hour—fun, and good to be independent. I go to have my head shaved at my favourite barbershop, and we meet up with Li Jin at Li Bin’s funeral shop. But then Li Manshan’s (much) younger brother Third Tiger shows up too, and he drives us in his posh car to a posh restaurant (attached to a posh hotel) up a little hutong, with no sign (which is always a good, um, sign)—we’re the only customers. But then entrepreneur Ye Lin (another old mate, formerly head of the Bureau of Culture) arrives too, and Li Bin; so altogether it’s less of a quiet meal than I hoped.

lunch LJ LB LMS

lunch Sanhu

Third Tiger has brought a case of Chilean 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon from Central Valley, a gift from a friend. We polish it off, though later the ganbei toasting seems a bit unsuitable…

Third Tiger had been looking forward to early retirement from his important state job—even claiming in my film (from 55.23) that he’d like to get back to Daoist ritual—but it won’t be happening any time soon. He’s done well as a Party cadre, his only flaw being that he can’t really hold his drink—this should surely be the first question on the application form:

How much baijiu liquor can you knock back before you fall over?

Inevitably Third Tiger foots the bill. I remind my companions of the donkey joke—I’m inadvertently “cadging a free meal wherever I go” again…

After lunch, Li Bin takes us on a fruitless visit to the Cultural Preservation Bureau to learn that the compilation of Yanggao temple steles is still not published. Then we drop in on a shop up the road to sort out a standoff between my camera and my Mac; the guy is even more pissed than me, but does a fine job. We exchange cigarettes, and he refuses any money.

Li Bin is happy to take us home to Upper Liangyuan, and on the way we drop in on the grandson of the great Li Peisen at his funeral shop, to see if he can show us the three manuals not in Li Qing’s collection, which I didn’t copy. He and his wife seem affable, but he can’t find them. It’s hard to know if he’s being cagey: he does show Li Manshan Li Peisen’s thick Yuqie yankou volume, so maybe he really can’t find the others. I ask him, without much hope, to call Li Bin if he does find them. Li Manshan cares more about this than I do.

I’ve also been wondering if the related Wang lineage in Baideng has any ritual manuals we haven’t seen, but when Li Manshan calls up Wang Fei there, he says they have no more than him.

More Heritage flapdoodle
Next to the main sign above his funerary shop, Li Bin has optimistically put up a new sign: “Hengshan Daoist Music, Training Base”.

HSDYT shop placard

This pie-in-the-sky still has precisely no takers, but Li Bin remains involved in a mysterious project with the county Bureau of Culture. We all laugh at the emptiness of the title—but it acts like a protective talisman, a kind of insurance policy.

Pacing the Void: Old Lord Li gets online
Like me, Li Manshan got his first smartphone after returning from France last year. He can read WeChat messages, but hasn’t cared to try and get online—yet. I think he can do it. Actually, WeChat doesn’t seem such a big deal here—sure, the younger people are on it, but the main way of communicating is just phoning. So there.

Getting online with my Mac thanks to the wifi of Li Manshan’s cool shepherd neighbour, I show him the charming TV version of The Dream of the Red Chamber with child actors. He loved reading the novel in the 1980s.

I give him a guided tour of my blog, starting with the posts I wrote about our French tour last year (e.g. here), my tribute to his carpentry skills, and the trio on Women of Yanggao (starting here). We look further at the ritual paintings in Li Peisen’s collection, which leads us to seek murals by Artisan the Sixth.

Then I introduce him to my other world, telling him about Yuan Quanyou, Hildi, and the 80th-birthday party for the great Stephan Feuchtwang where Rowan and I played Bach on erhu and sanxian—after listening to the recording there (now also sounding a bit crap), I try to attone by playing him Sun Huang’s astounding Saint-Saens (or Sage Mulberry, as he’s known in China), but he’s underwhelmed—the conservatoire erhu is of even less relevance to him than to me. And he’s none too clear about the qin zither, despite painting it regularly on coffins (my film, from 18.30).

LMS huacai

Li Manshan decorates a coffin, 2013. Top: qin zither.

I tell him again about the adorable crazy Natasha, showing him my tribute to her—it was he who helped me regain the will to live after her death in 2013.

Over the next few days Old Lord Li becomes ever more scholarly, devouring the new book on the modern history of the county (only up to 1949, alas!), the gazetteer, and all the online stuff I show him. (You may note that he has reverted to his old hat—was the baseball cap he wore in France a haute-couture choice to impress the laowai?!)

He gets into Ming reign-periods online. I show him the Baidu article on the 1449 Tumu incident (very near Yanggao), making the link with the disgraced palace eunuch Wang Zhen and the Zhihua temple. As he gets hooked on some pre-Tang story in the county gazetteer, I turn the tables on him, commenting “I dunno about that, I wasn’t even born then!”

As he gets used to scrolling on my Mac keypad, I show him the blurb for the Chinese introduction to the already-voluminous Daojiao yishi congshu series, which he reads carefully. When I show him Hannibal Taubes’ amazing site, he thinks that Yanggao temple murals are not so well preserved as those of Yuxian—but I suspect it could also be that Hannibal is really on the case.

I tell Li Manshan of the useful saying “When the rites are lost, seek throughout the countryside”, which is always a succinct way of explaining what we’re doing traipsing around poor villages.

On my blog he’s interested to pore over ritual manuals from other areas. I find an online text for the pseudo-Sanskrit mantra Pu’an zhou, which they never sang, only played on shengguan. When we listen to my recording of Ma yulang with the Gaoluo ritual association (playlist # 10, with commentary here), he’s shocked at how crap they are! I explain that they’re an amateur group, not like our occupational Daoists working together daily. But he’s curious to learn if the melody is similar to their version, a question I haven’t yet addressed.

We discuss the Kangxi yun section in the hymn volume that Li Qing recopied in 1980—I’ve often wondered what it’s doing there, as part of a series of shuowen solo recitations formerly used for the shanggong Presenting Offerings ritual segment. It was actually written not by the Kangxi emperor but by his father Shunzhi. The version copied by Li Qing is a variant.

Kangxi yunAs we read up further, we now speculate that since Kangxi saw the poem on a visit to Wutaishan, and as Buddhist ritual manuals do contain poems, it could have got into one such manual there; spreading further north, it might thence have got into Daoist manuals too—which, after all, contain plenty of Buddhist elements (my book, e.g. p.226).

I wonder if the title Kangxi yun is distinctive to the Li family. If Li Fu copied it from the manuals of his master in Jinjiazhuang, it wouldn’t have been at all old when it was copied by the Zhang family Daoists there. More work for a historian there… Li Manshan buries himself in the Baidu articles on Shunzhi’s mother and Nurhaci.

He knows nothing of Trump, Syria, or the Ukraine famine. While envying him his blissful ignorance, I embark on a political education session; he reads avidly when I show him the relevant Baidu articles. The article on the Ukraine famine looks rather good—though one can hardly expect Baidu to compare it to the Chinese famine following the Great Leap Backward.

After returning from a brief trip to Waterdrop 滴滴水 village with Li Bin, I check the 1948 and 1990 population statistics (first two columns below) in the county gazetteer, but they seem incongruous. Old Lord Li inspects the table for the whole of Zhangguantun district and deftly corrects them. Clever guy!

renkou edits

Born at a different time in another place, Li Manshan might have become a university professor.

2nd moon 28th
As yet another idée fixe in Airplane goes, “Looks like I picked the wrong day to” get my head shaved—it’s really rather cold. Li Manshan kept reading till late last night. We stay home for a study day. He fields another “determining the date” request by phone.

Before midday a couple comes for a prescription about her illness. They’ve come all the way from Datong county, learning of his reputation on the grapevine. Sure, people may also consult mediums, and of course hospitals—the latter terribly expensive, but as Li Manshan observes, their best bet.

LMS krz

The mood is serious as ever when the wife throws the coins and Li Manshan writes down the results. They watch him work it all out, in silence; then she asks questions, the conversation deepening. Li Manshan feels his role (often) is to console them, to lend moral support. As he later tells me, in fact the prescription looks ominous, and mostly he trusts the coins, but he can’t tell them “You’ve had it”, can he? They persuade the couple to stay for lunch (baozi dumplings, cabbage and doufu, onions), washed down at the end with water from the pot. It’s a friendly and sincere scene. They only paid him with five cigarettes, and Li Manshan was fine with that.

Li Manshan’s siesta is devoted to further reading, and he’s only just nodded off when another guy comes for a prescription.

Another great supper: thick-sliced noodles with eggs, dunking meatballs in the broth. Li Manshan glances over at the news, nudging me—some Party bigwig is being interviewed, the caption reading:

中国人大代表 Zhongguo Renda daibiao
Representative of the Chinese People’s Congress,

which he brilliantly converts from three binomes into

中国人，大代表 Zhongguoren dadabiao
Chinese bloke, big cheese.

We fall about laughing. I just love the way this man’s mind works! The following week I’m showing my film at People’s University in Beijing, which is also abbreviated as Renda—so I manage to press the expression into service there.

I clean my teeth in the courtyard, enjoying using my fancy electric Rabbits Don’t Shit, sorry I mean toothbrush (its first outing in China). Since Li Manshan always shoves a fag in my gob as soon as I get back anyway, I beat him to the draw. Whenever I spot an unfamiliar brand, I ask him, “Landlord? Poor peasant?”

3rd moon 1st (chuyi)—which, I note guiltily, is Saturday.

courtyard in snow

Right: sunflower stalks stored for use in making funerary treasuries.

OOH it’s snowing! I’ve been hoping to go in search of more Daoists to Yingxian county with Li Bin and bright young Taiyuan ethnographer Liu Yan, but my carefully laid plans come to nought; the motorways are closed. Li Manshan sweeps the pathway to the latrine, then zooms off back to Yangguantun to smash the bowl in a simple burial for the poor family there. When he decorated the coffin on 2nd moon 25th it was the fourth (not third) day after the death. He explains that there’s no difference between rich and poor in determining the date: it may turn out that poor families also have to store the coffin for over twenty days.

I discreetly perform much-needed ablutions. Li Manshan comes home frozen, unable to see through the snowstorm on his motor-bike. Gradually it eases up.

I show him my photos of the funeral I attended yesterday. He’s always been a laissez-faire leader, but even he draws the line at Wu Mei playing drum while on his mobile. We get a riff going:

“Maybe he was following the drum patterns online?!” he jokes.
“Oh yeah, right—I always felt sorry the so-called Hengshan Daoist Music Ensemble because they were too poor to afford music stands, but now they can read from their mobiles! You’re dead keen on ‘development’, aren’t you?!”—referencing the rose-tinted cliché common in online articles about him.
“Naughty disciple!”
“Naughty master! 青出于蓝。。。”

Wang Ding turns up on his dinky sanlun truck and we help him unload more altar decorations into the south room of the courtyard, redecorated as the village Training Base of the so-called Hengshan Daoist Music Ensemble—and thus, like its town counterpart, entirely unused.

3rd moon 2nd (Sunday, known as libai ba, eighth day of the week, as on their electronic wall-clock)
Foggy at first, gradually the sun comes out. For the first time Li Manshan worries about his cough, and resolves to quit smoking—which, impressively, he manages for nearly a whole hour. Actually he’s not smoking as much as in the old days when he was busy doing funerals with the band.

Having taken a siesta after our fascinating excursion to find murals by Artisan the Sixth, I go outside to clean my teeth, but yet again my oral hygiene is thwarted by the arrival of “Fag Devil” Li Sheng, who insistently shoves another fag in my gob. Typical…

I keep up with Tweety McTangerine’s latest lunacies by consulting the Guardian online. But I dissolve in fits of laughter at Stewart Lee’s latest offering there.

3rd moon 3rd
At 7am a guy comes to discuss some work. At 8.20 the formidable wife of an old friend of Li Qing’s comes to moan about her son’s marital problems. Li Manshan is courteous, but considers her “crazy”. I understand virtually nothing, but eventually she makes an effort with me as she pours out her grievances, slapping me regularly on the arm. Village poverty and problems seem intractable, despite advances and propaganda. The only solution touted is thorough urbanization, bringing its own worrying prospects.

Li Manshan isn’t feeling too well, but he takes a break from making paper artefacts to accompany me on a visit to the temple to Elder Hu in the Lower village.

3rd moon 4th
On our last day together, after returning from an intriguing trip to Jinjiazhuang, Old Lord Li suddenly thinks of the slow hymn Eternal Homage (Yong guiyi 永皈依), and we have a nice session on it. It’s one of his favourites, but they rarely use it, and now he can’t remember the opening. He can’t read cipher notation, only gongche solfeggio, so he gets me to sing it from Li Qing’s cipher-notation score. Their more recent green volume has gongche solfeggio underneath too, so he can just about follow it once I get him going.

Yong guiyi textSo Li Manshan gets to record me singing a piece I barely know, but I never get to record him. Anyway he always sets off from a really low pitch, so the result tends to sound a bit like Tibetan chanting. When the band sings a cappella hymns for funerals, Golden Noble has a good ear for starting off on a pitch suitable for the range.

In the version they learned, the first section ends after Fo you Niepan shi 佛有涅槃时. Li Qing’s cipher-notation score isn’t divided into sections, but their more recent green volume is. The latter uses the degree shang 上 as do—including the shengguan suites, which I find strange. Li Manshan is fine once he gets through the opening phrase.

Yong guiyi jianpu

We take a siesta before my journey back to Beijing, but soon wake up. Absurdly, he now asks me to transpose Li Qing’s cipher-notation score of the major shengguan melody Yaozhang into gongche solfeggio. Without thinking to consult the precious photos of Li Derong’s old score (which Li Manshan no longer has) I wrongly assume that it would use the early shengguan system with he 合 as do, but hey. After singing it for him as he records it on his phone, I explain to him that he’ll need earphones to play it back…

Li Bin has another busy day today, having to do two reburials as well as decorating a coffin, so I’ll take a cab to the station. This no longer feels so distant. Li Manshan insists on coming along to see me off, and we leave before 4, dropping his wife off at Baideng township for a hairdo. He refuses to let me pay for the cab. My total expenses for nine inspiring days in Yanggao came to 24 kuai—just over £2.

We take the ring road, passing loads of new high-rises, and bid each other a fond farewell. The station is virtually empty, and the train isn’t busy either.

Back in Beijing, I feel like a country bumpkin. Showing my film three times over the next week, I’m happy to make Li Manshan a big star there. After the last screening I call him up to report, and to wish him well before I go back to London.

[1] As in the poseur’s celebrated line (Fieldworkers’ joke manual No.37), useful when someone asks if you know any classical Chinese:

[smugly] “I studied the Four Classics and Five Scriptures—Confucius, Mencius, various dumpling shapes, I’ve studied them all!”
Wo xuedeshi sishu wujing—Kongzi Mengzi baozi jiaozi, dou xueguole!
我学的是四书五经。孔子孟子包子饺子，都学过了！

Oh well, it’s funny in Chinese—Trust Me I’m a Doctor (there goes another 200 kuai).
Similar story here!

In search of temples—and another Daoist lineage

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* This is the latest in a series of vignettes (starting here) from my recent stay with
the wonderful Li Manshan (for similar excursions, see here and here) *

Jinzhuang LWM

“Nothing to see here—move along please.”

The still-extant main gateway, main hall, and music tower date from the Ming and Qing, occupying 800 square metres. The main hall is three rooms wide, two rooms deep, with single eaves and a “hard-mountain” vaulted roof 单檐硬山顶. Most of the murals have been covered over in mud, and some are exposed to the elements.

That’s the enticing account in the 1993 Yanggao county gazetteer article on the Dragon King temple (Longwang miao) of Jinjiazhuang village, west of Li Manshan’s home in Upper Liangyuan. [1] Even if the temple was now in poor repair, I was keen to see it. Besides, I’ve always meant to make a pilgrimage to this village, where Li Manshan’s ancestor Li Fu began learning Daoist ritual in the 18th century (see Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.71–3).

Over the years, whenever I ask Li Manshan about the temple, he merely shrugs—nothing left there, he says (and he should know). Still, now that he’s getting ever deeper into local history, I finally show him the passage in the gazetteer, and he quite sees why I’m curious, deciding that we should make a trip over to Jinjiazhuang the next day.

On my last morning with Li Manshan he is already up and busy when I wake at 6. After breakfast he fields yet another call asking him for a burial date (my book, pp.186–9), and then he asks his nice cab-driving neighbour to take us over to Jinjiazhuang in his posh new car, bought last year. Unusually, our driver can even talk standard Chinese—though when he and Li Manshan talk among themselves it might as well be Swahili.

Heading northwest, we reach Jinjiazhuang soon after passing under an elevated section of the new high-speed train line. First we check out the Temple to the Perfect Warrior (Zhenwu miao)—small but perfectly formed, in a typical elevated position (cf. Hannibal Taubes’s photo from nearby Yuxian) in what is now the middle of the village. [2]

Jinzhuang ZWM

A friendly woman fetches the keys for us to take a look inside. The interior has recently-made statues and murals, and seems to be “in use”—though of course, such temples are too small to hold temple fairs.

(left) central altar: The Perfect Warrior flanked by attendants;
(right) mural on the east wall, with the Great Lords of the Three Primes.

This affords me scant consolation for finding not the slightest trace of the famous Dragon King Temple; nor, indeed, of the Temple to the Perfect Warrior in Upper Liangyuan (cf. Li Manshan’s map of his village, and our film, from 8.18).

SLY ZWM site

Another reason why Hannibal Taubes is jolly clever: derelict site of the Temple to the Perfect Warrior in Upper Liangyuan. My photo, 2018.

Then to the site of the celebrated Dragon King Temple, which now turns out to be a drab concrete plaza (see photo at top of page). Even more distressingly, the temple was still standing until twenty years ago; so at least the county gazetteer wasn’t making it up. We meet an old guy who recalls it, and had seen an old stele, long vanished—but he’s illiterate, so he had no idea what it said.

What I don’t get is this. OK, the temple had probably been becoming more and more decrepit for many decades, but if it merited an entry in the 1993 county gazetteer (which not even the Lower Liangyuan temple did, for instance), then why would they demolish it in 1998? By then the county authorities should even have been nominating it for preservation; but even if not, you might think the villagers themselves would see its value (whether for their own culture or—if they had a modicum of canny foresight—as a tourist attraction). But I recall how in Upper Liangyuan no-one cared much about our discovery of the two old steles there (my book, pp.46–9): as young people leave, these villages have long lacked a sense of community, and there is little concern for old buildings.

Another Daoist lineage
While we’re chatting with locals at the magnificent Ming temple—or rather, drab concrete plaza—the village yinyang Zhang Nan (b.1956) shows up, and invites us over to his clean and spacious house for a chat. He’s great; of course Li Manshan has known him for ages, and as usual gets along well with him; our driver is good company too. On our way home they comment that Zhang has a slight stammer; I was so busy stammering myself that I didn’t even notice.

Zhang Nan and LMS

Zhang Nan with Li Manshan.

The Zhang lineage moved here from Hongtong in the early Ming, like the Lis (my book, pp.70–71) and so many others all over north China. Zhang Nan knows of seven generations of yinyang before him (as ever, note the alternation of single and double given names):

  • 1st generation: Lianzhu 連珠
  • 2nd generation: Kui 奎
  • 3rd generation: Wenbing 文炳
  • 4th generation: Bi 弼
  • 5th generation: Deheng 德恆
  • 6th generation: Mei 美
  • 7th generation: Jincheng 進成
  • 8th generation: Nan 楠

Right down to his grandfather, all his forebears performed Daoist ritual, but his father only did kanrizi divination, as does Zhang Nan himself. With more time we might have elicited further names from earlier generations—brothers, cousins, and other disciples.

Assuming that Li Fu (first of nine generations in our Li family of Upper Liangyuan) would have learned ritual from a Daoist family that already had a tradition of at least a few generations, then “first-generation” Zhang Lianzhu must have had still earlier Daoist forebears. So this would make the Zhangs of Jinjiazhuang the longest Daoist lineage that we know of in Yanggao. And where did they learn?!

Though short of revelatory, our excursion to Jinjiazhuang made a good way to spend my last day with Li Manshan—not entirely a wild goose chase.

[1] The gazetteer entry appears not under Temples (miaoyu 庙宇) but under the “Ancient architecture” (gu jianzhu 古建筑) section of Cultural artefacts (wenwu 文物, pp.475–6)—a section that includes the Temple to Elder Hu at Xujiayuan but, strangely, not its sister temple at Lower Liangyuan (see The cult of Elder Hu).
[2] Cf. Willem A. Grootaers, “The hagiography of the Chinese god Chen-wu (The transmission of rural traditions in Chahar)”, Folklore studies 11.2 (1952), pp.139-181, and perceptive updates from Hannibal Taubes.

God images old and new, 1

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ZQ mural

1 A village artisan
This is the first of two articles (sequel here) that together might be called

Uncle Xi and the Ten Kings of the Underworld.

In both rural and urban China, paintings of the Ten Kings of the Underworld (Shiwang xiang, or Shidian Yanjun) were commonly displayed for funerals, and in some places they still are. In this article I introduce Artisan the Sixth, who painted a set of Ten Kings for the great Daoist Li Peisen; and I go in search of his kang murals.

LHJ 456 Kings detail

Diplomacy

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XLY temple
Last week I walked over with Li Manshan to the Lower Liangyuan temple to take another look at its old (and recent) murals. It’s one of the staging posts of the funky deity Hutu (Elder Hu), whose temples Willem Grootaers wrote about in the 1940s.

In my early days in Hebei we had a couple of harmless run-ins with the constabulary in Hebei, as well as one a bit later in Shaanbei (see under §2 here). I’ve never had any hassles at all in Yanggao, but as we’re walking home a passing police-car stops us and the two cops, friendly enough, ask Li Manshan politely where I’m from and who I am. With great presence of mind (resembling Clifford Geertz’s wonderful story about fleeing from the police in a Bali village after a cock-fight) Li Manshan replies authoritatively,

“He’s from England—he’s a professor of music!”

I’ve heard him call me many things, but never that. Getting the hang of it, I chip in,

“Master Li is an international star!”

Peering sceptically at our incongruous double-act, the cops digest this unlikely information. Easily satisfied, they drive off down the dusty track, leaving Old Lord Li and me to light up and continue our walk home.

So, although my enquiries have less and less to do with music, I seem to be protected by the goddess of music—a Chinese Saint Cecilia.

LMS Rome

 

Yet another village funeral

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ZJYT lingtang
On my recent trip to Yanggao I spent most of my time at home with Li Manshan, making little trips to nearby villages with him or his son Li Bin. But of course I had to check out a funeral and catch up with the other Daoists, so Li Bin came to collect me to drive to Zhu Family Cavetop.

The village population, 749 “mouths” in 1990, has now declined to only a couple of hundred at most. By the time we arrive, the other Daoists have already Opened the Scriptures at the soul hall, singing the Hymn to the Three Treasures as prescribed. After Li Bin delivers the paper couplets and diaolian inscriptions, we go to the scripture hall, which today is conveniently the little room on the south side of the funeral family courtyard, right by the soul hall—so no need for the usual long procession.

I catch up with my old mates Golden Noble and Wu Mei, whom I haven’t seen since our French tour last May. Golden Noble has high blood pressure and is off the fags and booze; Wu Mei is sweet as ever. They check out my blog on their phones.

ZJYT jingtang

The cosy atmosphere of the scripture hall.

Li Sheng

Li Sheng makes repairs to his sheng.

Li Sheng, another regular member of the band and a dedicated chain-smoker (my nickname for him is Fag Devil 烟鬼 Yangui—the gui in falling 4th tone!), is as hyper as ever. His manic energy reflects both in his quickfire dialect and in his fine sheng playing—he struggles to conform to the solemn immovable posture of the Daoists of which Li Bin is a master. He comes from a renowned gujiang shawm-band family from the nearby township of Shizitun. He didn’t know what year he was born; chatting in 2013, he only knew that he was 60 sui, so I translated that to 1954. He is twelve years younger than his brother, a wonderful cultured gujiang also called Li Bin. They learned with their distinguished blind father Li Zhonghe (1908–88), who was still playing in his eightieth year. Again, these two Li families have long been on good terms—the great Li Qing sometimes played in Li Zhonghe’s shawm band in the 1970s. Li Sheng’s older brother went off to work as a cadre in the mines in Datong around 1970, and Li Sheng did some work there too, as well as doing petty trade in Datong, returning around 2000. He has four daughters and one son.

To make up the numbers for the Daoist personnel today, Li Bin has booked two yinyang I haven’t met before, both from hereditary traditions. They’re nice, but turn out to be of somewhat limited abilities. While the gujiang shawm bands have a reputation for smoking dope, some Daoists do too, crushing annaka amphetamine pills into their cigarettes to give them energy (cf. my book, p.325). In the scripture hall my new mates use tinfoil to smoke annaka through a rolled-up 1-kuai note.

As I soon learn when I take a session on small cymbals, the new drummer “calls the beat” arbitrarily, so I keep getting confused about where to place the down-beat. This is just as irritating as an old Daoist I met a few years ago who kept beating out the syncopations on small cymbals, no matter whether we were anywhere near a cadence—”unruly” (bu guiju), as Li Manshan tuts.

The band makes up for the time saved on procession by playing “little pieces” and popular errentai melodies as they arrive at the soul hall. But no-one here cares anyway, and it’s the latest in a long line of funerals where they merely need to go through the motions, with the simplest ritual sequence possible. None of the kin, returning from the big cities for the funeral, kneels or kowtows. No-one pays attention to the Daoists even when they launch into a showy errentai sequence (except in the afternoon, when they even applaud).

Along with the kin we have a good communal lunch in the big tent set up outside, with disposable (yicixing) plastic crockery—I never miss an opportunity to use the expression yicixing (“one-off”), corpsing the Daoists. Meals at Yanggao funerals have improved as ritual practice has declined.

I take a siesta along with three other yinyang in a heap on the little kang brick-bed. The pop band on the truck outside starts up around 3pm, but there’s only a tiny audience even for this, and they soon drift off too. After the Daoists’ first visit of the afternoon, a group of travelling beggars shows up—the usual personnel, with head-mikes, an erhu, fan, and clappers.

ZJYT beggars

Funeral beggars.

ZJYT LB on daguan

Li Bin on large guanzi, flanked by Golden Noble (left) and Li Sheng.

For the Daoists’ second visit of the afternoon they only play a popular errentai medley. For the third session Li Bin (who usually plays sheng mouth-organ) leads the hymn Diverse and Nameless on large guanzi—good, in tune, with a fine new instrument he’s found. For a change Wu Mei plays drum, but he’s somewhat distracted by using his mobile at the same time… The beggars return, and then the Daoists play another errentai sequence. I’m bloody cold and less than riveted (as we say in the orchestral biz, “Of all the funerals I’ve attended in Yanggao… this is one of them”), so I get Li Bin to take me back to Upper Liangyuan before the Invitation ritual. As I get home Li Manshan and his wife are busy making paper artefacts together.

As Li Manshan observes at the end of my film,

Things ain’t what they used to be
今非昔比

Fashion notes

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funeral pop better

Pop outside gateway for a village funeral, Yanggao 2018.

Two lists, just possibly somewhat partial, of what is In and what is Out in rural north China:

Things that are at no risk of going out of fashion:

  • hawking and spitting / emptying contents of nose onto the floor
  • exchanging cigarettes
  • “leather” miniskirts
  • corruption
  • piles of stinking rubbish by the roadside
  • pollution
  • getting legless (for which there’s a nice Yanggao term, erjinban 二斤半)

(If Uncle Xi is as omnipotent as China-watchers suggest, then WTF?!)

Oh, and

  • Hymn to the Three Treasures as first sung hymn (Opening Scriptures) on arrival at the soul hall (my film, from 21.32).

Things that have gone out of fashion (cf. my book, Coda pp.357–61):

  • the Thanking the Earth ritual
  • funerary Communicating the Lanterns, Crossing the Bridges, yankou
  • shengguan suites for earth and temple scriptures
  • yunluo frame of ten pitched gongs, and dizi flute
  • reed-matting on the kang brick-bed (Plastic Rules OK)
  • Serving the People [remind me when that was In?]
  • pop music at funerals!!!

The latter came as a surprise to me. As you see in one of the most striking images of my film (from 30.32), whereas in the early 1980s villagers were glad to restore the “old rules”, by the 90s they were much more excited* by the pop bands performing on a truck outside the soul hall. Their acts soon became quite innovative. But over the last few years even the audience for pop has dwindled, as people can watch the Real Thing (sic) on their phones.

*In Li Manshan’s words: leqilaile 乐起来了!

A ghost village

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This mini-series will be more edifying if you’re familiar with my film and book on the Li family Daoists—or perhaps it’ll lead you to them!

From my book (pp.310–11):

As young villagers abandon the stagnant countryside to seek laboring work in the towns, it is mainly the elderly who are left behind; younger people still stuck there seem listless and devoid of prospects. In the hills, some new villages have been built in rather better surroundings nearby, like Yang Pagoda and Sujiayao. Around 2009 half of the population of Renjiayao paid a one-off fee of 50,000 kuai to move to the new village of Xinhebu, built just south of the county-town as part of a state poverty-alleviation project; the new village has four hundred households, assembled from various poor villages. Now only a couple of dozen poor elderly people are left behind in Renjiayao. Most of the population of Gaojiayao have been relocated to Luotun, itself none too prosperous but at least on the plain. Just southeast of Upper Liangyuan, Shankoutou, always tiny, is nearly deserted now. Ghost villages are emerging. And meanwhile the plain villages too are depleted of young labour.

Soon after midnight on the day I land in Beijing, I take the night train to Yanggao. As I leave Beijing I also abandon the modern calendar: instead of Monday 12th March it is now 2nd moon 25th. The train is quite empty, and I doze fitfully on my bunk (for a fuller diary, see here).

Arriving at 5.36am, I get off at the sleep station along with five others. Li Manshan’s son Li Bin is there to meet me; the roads in the county-town have been mended, so at last the street before his funeral shop is passable. After stopping off to unload my gifts, he drives me to Upper Liangyuan to stay with his father. Driving along new roads smooth as a baby’s bottom, we pass the new elevated section of the train line—soon the journey from (and more importantly, to) Beijing will take a mere hundred minutes! Even the track from the main road to the village is improved since my last visit.

Li Manshan is now only doing funerals nearby—Li Bin has very much taken over, and he’s always worked off his feet. After taking me to Upper Liangyuan he has bowls to smash that morning in three villages—the solo ritual that poor families sometimes request instead of the usual lengthy liturgical sequence with the whole band.

As the sun rises, the wise and adorable Li Manshan comes out to greet me. I say hello to the family’s new doggie, occasionally let off its tether in the courtyard. After lighting the stove Old Lord Li soon has to zoom off on his motor-bike to Yangguantun to decorate a coffin (my book, pp.190–92). I stay home to try and sleep off my jet-lag, only waking up to be fed by his wife Yao Xiulian. Over baozi dumplings I ask a bit more about her background: born to a poor-peasant family in 1951, she was one of five kids. Unlike the illustrious Li Qing, who sent all his children to school, Yao Xiulian’s parents declined to let her and her sister attend, so she remained illiterate. The only city she’s ever visited is nearby Datong, where her daughter lives.

By the time I wake from my siesta Li Manshan is back and fast asleep. A neighbour drops by for a gossip; he wakes up and joins in. I get used again to the basics of country living, though after all these years I still find the local dialect really tough. I get online courtesy of his cool shepherd neighbour. We have a nice supper of noodles and then retire to the west room to chat till late.

Next morning we wake just before dawn. After a relaxed breakfast with Li Manshan and his wife, a guy shows up to ask him for a “determining the date” prescription (see my book, pp.185–9): it’s for “moving the earth”, so Li Manshan writes it on red paper.

We stroll over to the site of the old Zhenwu miao temple (see map), hoping naively to find a neglected stele like we did for the Fodian miao and Sanqing dian temples (my book, pp.46–9), but there’s nothing to see at all. The woman living opposite invites us in for a chat; she’s a Protestant, one of a tiny community that has sprung up in the village over the last few years. Hedging her bets, she has a Xi Jinping poster on the wall, next to her Christian calendar. Li Manshan is always affable, popular with everyone. It’s getting quite hot, so I leave my jumper at her place.

I’ve long wanted to visit Shankoutou (the kou pronounced kio in Yanggao dialect!), the next village south, 2 Chinese li (1 kilometre) distant—mainly because it’s so tiny. When I ask Li Manshan, “Is there a temple there?” he replies, “Every house is a temple!” I can’t think how to convey the wryness of this aperçu.

SKT walk

So we set off, first along a narrow track through a barren gulley, then emerging into open country, following Li Manshan’s internal Daoist satnav up and down to a frozen river. Fording it, we climb the slope up to a reception committee of nine free-roaming donkeys awaiting us.

SKT

Figures in the county gazetteer give a 1948 population of 63; according to our hosts, in 1970 there were 100 dwellers (under the people’s communes the village counted as the 9th brigade of Upper Liangyuan); back with the gazetteer, by 1990 there were still 75 villagers. Now only five aging families, eleven people, are still “left behind” here. But it’s hardly the mysterious ghost village I envisaged, and my only reward is the murals around the kang brick-bed in the house of a family that invites us in; they were painted in the late Cultural Revolution, which counts as “old” round here. They also have a Xi Jinping poster on their wall.

kang mural

Kang murals, 1973.

On the walk back we stay west of the river, the idyllic vista marred only by the cement factory, with its stink and pollution. Old Lord Li sets off over the fields he was given after the land division, which he now rents out. I call him a landlord, and he takes it in the spirit in which it was meant. Reaching Upper Liangyuan again we pass by the site of the Sanguan miao temple and Li Qing’s old house. As I collect my jumper from the Protestant woman I wish her a Happy Easter. Stopping off to chat with various friends, with the usual copious exchanges of cigarettes, we get home by midday.

Weather report from north Shanxi

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courtyard in snow

Li Manshan’s courtyard.

OOH it’s snowing today in north Shanxi!

After a rather underwhelming funeral in Zhu Family Cavetop* village yesterday (on which more anon), this morning Li Bin has to do the burial with the band there and then go off on his own to “smash the bowl” in two other villages (see my book, pp.193–4). But the snow won’t deter him, not being a wimpy Englishman; Li Manshan has just zoomed off on his motor-bike to smash a bowl too.

Traipsing across the slippery courtyard to the latrine in the southwest of the courtyard is even more of an adventure than usual, and I “literally” (as the argot has it) freeze my arse off as I squat there, the wind biting into my buttocks (TMI—Ed.). At least there’s a little roof. And at least I can go back indoors—the family doggie is tethered in its kennel in the courtyard. Here dogs and cats are just animals, not sentimental anthropomorphic consolations.

 

*Zhujiayaotou: why the final “tou“? Most “cave” villages in Yanggao are just XXX Family Caves (Renjiayao, Sujiayao, Gaojiayao, and so on). This is yet another example of my fatuous etic questions to which Li Manshan gives short shrift…

Ritual paintings of Li Peisen

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LPS 5

Until the 1950s, household Daoists in north Shanxi displayed paintings for funerary, temple, and other rituals—notably of the Ten Kings (cf. Hebei), as well as representations of deities worshipped during other funerary rituals like the Pardon. Such images are now rarely displayed, and I have found few in the collections of Daoist families. Many were casualties both of political campaigns and a more general impoverishment of ritual practice.

One exception to this (recent) paucity of images in north Shanxi is the array of paintings handed down by the great Daoist Li Peisen (1910–85) to his son Li Hua. Some he seems to have painted himself, perhaps in the 1940s; others appear to be rather older.

In the main article I reflect on the specific use of such paintings in space and over time, and their subsidiary role to the ritual soundscape.

 

Diary of a household Daoist

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LMS 1992

August 1992: In a brief break between ritual segments of a funeral led by Li Qing, his son Li Manshan consults with another family to determine the date for a future burial.

In my book (pp.18–21) I gave instances of the daily ritual schedules of household Daoists Li Manshan and his son Li Bin. They’re always so busy that Li Bin has only just found time to report back to me on what they’ve been up to recently. Apart from all the necessary research into the ancestry of ancient ritual texts, and so on, such diaries are an illuminating aspect of the ethnography of Daoist ritual practice. Apart from my film and book, Li Bin is also one of the protagonists of Ian Johnson’s The souls of China.

Li Manshan, now 72 sui, has recently been scaling down his activities a bit—mainly doing funerals in the immediate vicinity, and determinining the date. But since the band’s “triumphant return” (Kaixuan guilai 凯旋归来, on which more anon) from our mini-tour of France in May—and indeed throughout the previous months—Li Bin has hardly had a moment of free time. As he tells me,

The thing that’s the most hassle is when I get two or three concurrent funerals, having to arrange personnel and all the equipment. Each band needs suitable liturgists, wind players, percussionists, and someone to write the documents. And I have to make sure all the various sets of costumes and equipment are complete.

Until the 1950s their ritual work consisted of three types of “scriptures”: funerals, temple fairs, and (through the winter) Thanking the Earth rituals for individual families. The latter two types are now rare, so since the 1980s’ revival the vast majority of their business consists of funeral rituals and all the associated proprieties surrounding a death. But for reputable Daoists like Li Manshan and Li Bin, this alone can be a full-time occupation. In this area south of the county-town they are the most popular group performing such tasks, but there are others.

Before we look at Li Bin’s diary day by day, some more background. Funerals commonly last one and a half days. It’s very tiring work, performing from 7am to nearly midnight on the first day, with a whole series of long processions. As I say in my book,

Excuse the facile analogy with Western art music, but just the seven visits to the soul hall are like doing two motets and five cantatas over the course of the day—plus a few oratorios, and (previously, for temple fairs) six long symphonies.

For the wind players (like Li Bin) especially, accompanying the liturgy is tough physical work.

And on the following morning they make the lengthy burial procession from 8am to midday—as well as all the solo work of Li Manshan or Li Bin in exorcizing the house and checking the precise alignment of the coffin in the grave. Apart from singing the vocal liturgy, they have to double on the wind instruments and ritual percussion.

As I have also described (my book, ch.17), in addition to the two other core members Golden Noble and Wu Mei, Li Bin and Li Manshan need a pool of deps—some regular, others occasional—from the ranks of other local Daoist families and shawm bands. Using his smartphone, Li Bin has to keep a careful note of the fees he owes them; and he’s constantly driving round from village to village with his car packed with ritual equipment—ritual instruments and costumes, paper artefacts, mourning weeds for the kin, duilian and diaolian mottos to paste up at the soul hall and scripture hall, and so on.

Li Manshan prepares most of the mottos at home; he, Li Bin, or Golden Noble will also have to find moments during the funeral to write other ritual documents to be burned for particular ritual segments. At least recently they have deputed to the junior Daoists the lengthy and fiddly task of decorating (and later dismantling) the soul hall.

Usually the first day’s rituals come to a close around 11pm with Yellow Dragon Thrice Transforms Its Body (magnificent percussion coda to the Transferring Offerings ritual) and the Escorting Away the Orphan Souls segment (see my film, from 1.11.07), but sometimes the host asks them to do a lengthy Sitting through the Night sequence into the small hours (playlist, track 3—see my notes). Until quite recently the six Daoists routinely dossed down for the night in a row on the kang brick-bed of the “scripture hall” (making room for me too, a fond memory), but now with the improved road network, given the rather basic conditions of most scripture-hall hosts, they sometimes zoom off back home on their motor-bikes. If the funeral isn’t too far away, Li Bin often drives back to his home in town—not least in case he needs to bring more equipment for the burial next morning or his next stop thereafter. But each night on reaching home after a seventeen-hour day, he always remembers to light incense before the statuette of Zhang Daoling in his funeral shop.

Apart from determining the date for funerals, siting the grave and decorating coffins (also both lengthy processes), booking the band, and then performing the rituals—not to mention the daily business of running his funeral shop and making paper artefacts with his wife—Li Bin is always busy doing consultations to determine the date for weddings, construction work, journeys, and so on.

I have to field constant phone-calls every day. Sometimes I determine the date over the phone for “moving the earth” (dongtu 动土) for building work. Over the phone people can go on for ages about weddings or opening a new business—often when I’m right in the middle of some really busy arrangements. It’s a real hassle, but I can’t refuse…

Free-lance musos in London would be only too happy to have such a full diary, but it comes at a cost. As a freelancer myself, I’m glad he’s in work; he has bills to pay, but I hope he gets a bit of time off occasionally. We can well understand why Daoists don’t want their sons to continue in the family tradition.

Li Bin 2011

Li Bin (Li Manshan’s son, 9th generation) on sheng, 2011.

These notes cover the period from their flight home from Paris on 22nd May through to 8th August.

From the map below we can also see the rather typical radius of their ritual activity. Apart from the occasional funeral in Yanggao town, and a rare visit to Datong city, they work mostly in a small area in east-central Yanggao, around the Li family’s old home of Upper Liangyuan and Gucheng district just south. You can click on the place-names in the sidebar to see dates. For another map of the area (also indicating location of other Daoists groups now and before the 1950s) see here.

The Li band may cater to the mortuary needs of many of these individual villages a dozen or so times each year. And they have done so for several generations, with many trusted friends in places like Yangguantun, Pansi, Luotun, and so on.

May
22: we take 23.20 flight from CDG to Beijing;
23: landing at 15.20, 21.40 train from Beijing station.

  • 24: our train from Beijing arrives at Yanggao at 3.44am. At 4am [!] I drive down to Upper Liangyuan (dropping off Li Manshan at home) to help the Sun family prepare for funeral, then I drive back to town again to fetch equipment for them. I determine the date of the burial for 3rd June. 8am: to Shangzhuang to determine the date for a burial there (1st June).
  • 25: I decorate the coffin for Shangzhuang.
  • 26: I decorate the coffin for Upper Liangyuan, and site the grave.
  • 27–28: funeral at Upper Liangyuan for Zhao Xilin (date already determined before French tour).
  • 29: making paper artefacts, preparing for the Shangzhuang and Upper Liangyuan funerals.
  • 30–31: two concurrent funerals at South Luoyao and Pansi
  • 31–June 1: funeral at Shangzhuang.
    June
  • 1: after the Shangzhuang burial, to Houguantun to determine date for burial (12th June, a simple solo “smashing the bowl” ritual—see my book, pp.193–4).
  • 2–3: Upper Liangyuan funeral. After burial, back home to make more paper artefacts.
  • 4–5: funeral at Anzao.
  • 6: making paper artefacts.
  • 7–8: funeral at Zhaoshizhuang.
  • 9–11: three days free to make paper artefacts. Hardly any rest since we came back from France.
  • 12–13: two funerals, at Huiquanzi (in Yangyuan, Hebei) and Houguantun.
  • 15–16: funeral for Sun family in Upper Liangyuan (Li Manshan’s home village).
  • 20–21: two funerals, in Wangguantun and Yanggao county-town.
  • 22–23: funeral at Shizitun; 23 pm I determine the date in Luotun, for burial on 4th July.
  • 25–26: funeral in Lower Liangyuan.
  • 28–29: funeral at Shizitun; 29 pm I determine the date in Yangguantun, for another burial on 4th July.
    July
  • 1–2: funeral at Yousuoyao; I also determine the date in Houguantun, for burial on 8th July.
  • 3–4: funeral at Luotun. [4: burial at Yangguantun]
  • 7–8: two funerals, at Yangguantun and Houguantun. 8: after the burial at Yangguantun, another old person has died, so I go to determine the date—for 5th August.
  • 9: three families come to determine the date for their weddings.
  • 11–12: funeral in Datong
  • 14–15: concurrent funerals in Anzao and Zhanjiayao.
  • 16: coming-of-age party (yuansuo 圆锁) in town for friend’s son (cf. the scene of the party for Li Bin’s own son in my film, from 5.25).
  • 18: massive downpour in the northern hills; two killed as floods carry off a tractor [Li Manshan summoned to determine the date for a burial there].
  • 20–21: funeral at Upper Liangyuan.
  • 22–23: funeral in the county-town.
  • 27–28: funeral at Fantun (just east in Tianzhen).
    August
  • 2–3: funeral at Lower Niangcheng.
  • 4–5: funeral at Yangguantun.
  • 7–8: funeral at Sibaihu. On the afternoon of the 8th, after the burial, just northeast all around Jijiazhuang, Lanyubu, and South Xutun, extreme windstorm and hailstones destroyed cornfields; one family in Jijiazhuang lost 40 mu of peppers.

For Li Manshan’s ritual schedule for 2019, see here; and during the Coronovirus scare, here.

 

With thanks as ever to Li Bin and his son Li Bingchang
(also an Ariana Grande fan, I learn).