Tag Archives: Maoism

TUT: Tibet, Uyghur, Taiwan

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The traumas of Chinese society over the last seventy-five years, and ongoing censorship, have put into ever greater focus the necessity of alternatives to official propaganda (see Sparks, and China Unofficial Archives). The tribulations of the Han Chinese under Maoism—and since—are an essential theme, extensively covered on this site (e.g. China: commemorating trauma, Cultural revolutions, Memory, music, society, and even The qin zither under Maoism).

Dawut
Uyghur anthropologist Rahilä Dawut, “disappeared” since 2017.

But we also need to pay constant attention to the plight of the Tibetans and Uyghurs (both within the PRC and in exile), as well as the perspective from the independent island of Taiwan—a trio for which I’ve just alighted on the handy acronym TUT, sounding like an absurdly genteel and futile English rebuke to CCP excesses.

Roundups—part of my attempts to educate myself:

  • Uyghur culture: over a dozen posts on shrine festivals, Sufi groups, muqam, and so on, featuring the research of Rahilä Dawut, Rachel Harris, Mukaddas Mijit, Musapir, Darren Byler and others
  • Tibet—for Amdo, Kham, TAR, and Dharamsala: over thirty posts on the ravages of Maoism, biography, expressive culture, ritual, opera, and so on, reviewing the work of Jamyang Norbu, Robbie Barnett, Tsering Woeser, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy and others.

For Taiwan, see

Taiwan Daoist ritual:
Left, priests of the Hsien-miao altar, Taipei
Right, Tainan priest Chen Rongsheng (1927–2014, see note here).

See also A roundup of roundups!

A Miao Christian community in Yunnan

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Maidichong

Among the “underground historians” highlighted by Ian Johnson in his latest book Sparks is the documentarian Hu Jie 胡杰. I mentioned his 2016 film The songs of Maidichong village (Maidichongde gesheng 麦地冲的歌声) in my introduction to the China Unofficial Archives site, but it deserves a separate post (for more, see this review by Max Berwald, cited below).

Here’s the film:

Opening strikingly with an elderly village woman singing the hymn Amazing grace to camera, the story is told without apparent rancour by stoic, quietly determined peasants and church elders; by an itinerant rural dentist—and in several thoughtful reflections, a veteran cadre, former secretary on the Yunnan Party Committee, who often visited the village on government business during the high tide of Maoist campaigns:

People’s hearts began to change. At first they were close to the Communist Party, because you brought them practical benefits—land reform. But then came the People’s Communes that actually deprived the peasants of what they were given. Moreover, the famine that followed was what they remembered most. I remember the embarrassment going down to the countryside to implement the minorities policy. We asked them to start by pouring out their past woes [suku 诉苦]. When they did that, they all began with the famine during the Great Leap Forward, all about the commune canteen that made people starve.

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Maidichong, a Miao (Hmong) village just north of Kunming, was evangelized in 1903 by the English Methodist pastor Samuel Pollard.

Maidichong 5

Under Maoism, serious repression intensified with the 1958 Great Leap Forward. We learn of the life, works, and martyrdom of Reverend Wang Zhiming, brutally executed late in the Cultural Revolution:

His death marked a moment of violent confrontation between two competing modernization programmes: Christian missionary modernization, itself part of a colonial project, and nationalist, communist modernization. Both were interested in bringing literacy and modern healthcare to Maidichong—both regarded as key social indicators of development to this day—and both claimed the authority to name the sacred.

Both movements, as Berwald comments, promised “modernity in exchange for loyalty to a political project”. He asks, “How can memories of Christian missionary work ever be mobilized on behalf of a history of resistance by oppressed peoples?”

As one Reverend explains to Hu Jie, Christianity appealed particularly to the Hua Miao subgroup, whom he describes as among the most exploited and impoverished of Miao peoples in the region in the late imperial era.

Screenshot

1980, when the central Party leadership finally implemented a more open religious policy.

A theme common among devotional communities: younger generations since the reform era, lured by material prosperity, modern pop and media culture, are losing commitment to the faith; “development”, which once led people to Christianity, is now drawing them away from it. Still, the Yunnan authorities remains wary of such groups, mounting periodic campaigns.

As Berwald observes, the film doesn’t come across as a portrait of a community in crisis; Hu Jie’s questions don’t force a reckoning with a traumatic past (I suppose this is a similar approach that dawned on me in my studies of Gaoluo village and the Li family Daoists). Berwald concludes:

The faith of this community appears starkly contingent, with the film offering neither an indictment of the imperialism of British missionaries or of any state formation. Rather, what we have is a Christian community freely practicing its faith and remembering particular histories. Songs From Maidichong does not stoop to preach, insisting only “this too”, and forsaking polemical fury as it does so. How radical such an approach appears depends on the audience.

Ian Johnson lists many of Hu Jie’s other documentaries in Sparks. I’ve also just been watching Remote mountain, an utterly bleak film set in the barren northwest, cited in n.1 of Social issues in rural Henan.

* * *

The many rural Christian communities in Yunnan have attracted considerable research, not least from ethnomusicologists. Alongside his studies of Daoist and Buddhist ritual music there, Yang Minkang 杨民康 has published extensively on the topic, e.g. Bentuhua yu xiandaixing: Yunnan shaoshu minzu Jidujiao yishi yinyue yanjiu 本土化与现代性: 云南少数民族基督教仪式音乐研究 (2008).

For the story of a determined community of underground Catholics in north China, click here. Of course, indigenous religious groups too, and indeed the whole of Chinese society, have been subjected to severe traumas, both under Maoism and since the 1980s’ reforms: see e.g. Cultural Revolutions, China: commemorating trauma, and Memory, music, society.

Daoist ritual in north Taiwan: an ethnography

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Chu Chien-ch'eng
Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇,
led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire.
All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1]

Pursuing a major theme that I broached in my superficial survey of music-ritual cultures in Taiwan, I learn much from

  • Yves Menheere, The Way and its powers: an ethnographic account of Taoist practice and religious authority in northern Taiwan (2020),

a lucid study which helps further my education on a topic that I previously found somewhat indigestible.

Menheere cover

The Introduction sets the tone for Menheere’s enquiry:

Why do people put their faith in religious specialists? Why are some people considered to be more adept at communicating with deities, explaining scriptures, blessing objects, or solving problems with ghosts and other malevolent forces?

Contrasting rituals that are “supposed to work” with those that are meant to be carried out “in the correct way”, Menheere finds that “neither efficacy nor proper performance can explain why people put more faith in one particular priest and not another”. In exploring authority and charisma he considers the work of Max Weber, Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming, Vincent Goossaert, and Pierre Bourdieu. 

His useful summary of previous research starts with J.J.M. De Groot in late-19th-century Xiamen (in mainland Fujian); and for Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), studies by Japanese scholars and colonial administrators, notably a 1919 report under the supervision of Marui Keijirō. After World War Two, the pioneering work of Kristofer Schipper (on south Taiwan) and Michael Saso (for Hsinchu in the north) was continued by John Lagerwey for both north and south. Taiwanese scholars have also been industrious, from Liu Chi-wan and Lee Fong-mao to Lü Ch’ui-k’uan, followed by Lin Chen-yuan and others. As Menheere notes, the main focus of such studies has been the description of rituals and the search for the origins of particular practices and traditions; however, scholars adopting more anthropological approaches include Stephan Feuchtwang, David Jordan, John McCreery, Robert Weller, and Chang Hsun.

ji waifang
Offering and Sending Away (che-sang 祭送) ritual segment.
Left: 1930s (from Kajiwara Michiyoshi 梶原通好, Taiwan nōmin seikatsu kō
台灣農民生活考, 1939).
Right: Lim Ch’ing-chih 林清智 (b.1952), 2015. 

For ritual studies, I’ve outlined how by the early 1980s, as the PRC opened up after three decades of Maoist repression, the scope of fieldwork at last expanded to mainland China—fanning out from south Fujian (ancestral home of the Taiwanese Daoist altars) in a succession of major projects, mostly led by scholars with experience of the religious scene in Taiwan. So whereas previously the island was almost the only accessible site where scholars could study the riches of Daoist ritual, a wealth of local traditions now beckoned all over the vast expanses of the PRC, “if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective”, as I wrote (cf. The resilience of tradition).

However, it’s always worth paying attention to the ritual life of Taiwan, subject to fewer disruptions than in the PRC—with research now enriched by access to traditions shared with the southeastern mainland. And since scholarship on both sides of the strait, though based on fieldwork, has stressed the early origins of rituals rather than social ethnography (cf. Debunking “living fossils”—combining these approaches for Fujian, though, is Ken Dean), Menheere offers a fresh perspective.

* * *

The distinction between Redhead (ang-thau 紅頭) and Blackhead (o-͘thau 烏頭) ritual specialists is particular to Taiwan and Fujian; while much discussed, it remains complex. In north Taiwan, Blackhead priests specialise in performing mortuary rituals, and are either Sek-kau 釋教 Buddhists, or Daoists sometimes described by the name Numinous Treasure (Leng-po / Lingbao 靈寶). Redhead Daoists—Menheere’s focus, whom he describes as “the Northern Priests”—refrain from performing funerals. While belonging to the Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一 branch (like Daoists further south in Taiwan), they

carried out rites in ways that were broadly similar, and they were able to work together in ritual performances, which frequently occurred. Their way of working set them apart from priests from central or southern Taiwan, who performed rituals in different ways and were generally unable to work in concert with priests from northern Taiwan. These priests agreed that they belong to the same phai 派 or “branch” of Taoism and that priests from central and southern Taiwan belonged to a different branch. [2]

As Menheere observes, authority is relational: “it depends on the position of the individual priest in a wider network of priests, and it is always socially constructed and cannot be reduced to a particular priest’s personality or individual qualities”.

Between the Introduction and Conclusion, the book is arranged in six unnumbered chapters, to which I will award numbers here.

Chapter 1 (“Gods, ghosts and ancestors”) opens with a description of an exorcistic ritual intended to deter malignant forces of the road (lo-͘soah 路煞) from causing traffic accidents and other misfortunes besetting the community. Menheere goes on to give an overview of the religious environment in which the Northern Priests operate. Apart from large-scale temple ceremonies like the Chio / Jiao 醮 Offering, brief “minor rites” (sio-hoat 小法, or “little things” sio-su-a 小事) are also a regular part of the priests’ duties, often requiring only a single officiant. (I was glad to learn that priests in Taiwan describe the performance of ceremonies as “doing things” (cho-su 做事), cf. banshi 办事 in north China).

Always favouring practical grassroots perspectives above historical theory, Menheere unpacks the meaning of Cheng-it (Zhengyi)—”a term used by priests who shared their particular way of working, which presumed knowledge of two particular sets of rites; and did not perform funerary rites”.

By contrast with Schipper’s account for south Taiwan (e.g. his influential 1985 article), where “classical” and “vernacular” rites are carried out by different specialists, the Northern Priests practise a hybrid tradition, with two categories of rites, the “Way” (Tō / Dao 道) and “Methods” (Hoat / Fa 法): “two separate systems of rites, different in their performance, but referred to by the priests as complementary and sometimes even overlapping”. So Menheere ponders Schipper’s classical / vernacular dichotomy in the northern context, under the headings of language, pantheon, transmission, and the “mental states” of meditation and trance. Again working from the practical standpoint of the priests themselves, he confounds any simple distinction between the two types. Valuably, he notes contingency and modern change:

When we consider the meaning of Tō and Hoat and their associated ritual traditions, we must account for how the terms take shape in local practice and acquire different meanings, rather than ascribe them meaning devoid of social and historical context.

Still, “whether a rite was Tō or Hoat did not, for the priests at least, depend on its historical origins, but on the type of ceremony with which it was associated and on the way it was performed”. Noting that priests freely made use of the two categories during both exorcisms and offerings, Menheere illustrates this with Tō and Hoat versions of the “Worshipping the Lord of Heaven” ritual segment (pai Thin-kong 拜天公).

Chapter 2, a history of the Northern Priests from the Qing dynasty through the Japanese era to modern times, is full of detail on modern developments in their practice, showing that it is not immune to change. For the period since the 1980s, Menheere notes a shift away from healing rituals towards large-scale Offerings—which was attributed to perceived modernisation, notably in medical care. Thus “knowledge of the Tō rites for multiple-day Chio […] was slowly acquired by priests who initially performed mostly Hoat rites”. Moreover,

The expanding ritual market of the 1980s enabled several altars that at the time had only recently been established to rise to prominence. Indeed, some of the most successful and notable altars I observed doing fieldwork only began conducting offerings on a regular basis in the 1980s.

He also suggests a rather recent shift in the way the priests referred to themselves, with the autonym Cheng-it becoming more common.

Chapter 3, “Work and training”, looks at how ceremonies are performed and how the required knowledge to do so is transmitted. Menheere provides a good discussion of the role of “altars” (toan / tan 壇, an important term in south China that is seldom applied to household Daoists in the north), the physical and conceptual locus of a Daoist family tradition; and he gives a useful account of hierarchy and roles within the ritual group. As to personnel,

composition of groups varied from altar to altar and depended on the position of the priest in the field. Priests with more successful altars usually limited hires to their apprentices and a small group of priests that worked almost exclusively for them. Priests with fewer apprentices or fewer opportunities to organise ceremonies, however, had to look outside their immediate ties.

Menheere notes that “family was the principal source of knowledge for a small majority of the priests I observed”, but “recognising a master” from an unrelated family was also rather common. As to training in practice, he again finds variety, followed by a section on how priests assess competency:

A priest’s skills were described with the word kang-hu [gongfu] 功夫, and priests who lacked the physical attributes of the ideal priests—priests that were too short, for instance—could compensate for such perceived shortcomings with their kang-hu.

He continues with a most salient reminder:

It is perhaps worth noting that being familiar with the intricacies of Taoist doctrine as found in its classical texts did not play a role in the training of the priests or judgment of their competency.

The following two sections discuss the major ceremonies associated with the two ritual traditions. Chapter 4 explores the links between authority and the correct performance of rituals through a discussion of changes in the programme of the Chio Offering over the past century (with rich material in Appendix A listing sequences for ten such rituals).

After introducing the old “orthopraxy” trope and considering factors inhibiting change, Menheere argues “that despite the importance attached to correct performance, priests did occasionally—at least to a certain degree—have the ability to change the contents of rites and ceremonies and that such changes would not necessarily affect a priest’s authority”.

While the structure of three-day Chio seems quite constant over the century for which we have evidence, five-day Chio (an expanded version of the three-day programme) have also become increasingly common. The main addition here was the fast chanting of various [nationally standard] jing 經 scriptures—which household Daoists in north China have tended to omit in modern times, even though they comprise a major part of their ritual manuals (e.g. Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.211–13, 375–8).

Menheere continues with a detailed account of versions of the recently-elaborated ritual segment Ascending the Platform (teng-tai pai-pio 登台拜表) as interpreted by three different priests (cf. my account of Li Qing’s Pardon ritual):

All priests who performed the versions of the rite had access to Zhang Enpu’s text, yet none chose to follow his text to the letter. Even Master Tiong, who adhered to it most strictly, chose to add elements, attempting to, as he indicated in our discussions, make the rite more “correct”. It is possible that the priests in the other two cases chose to perform a much shorter rite because it was more convenient, not only for themselves, but also for all lay participants, who had to stand and watch the rite throughout.

He concludes the chapter thus:

The example of “Ascending the Platform” demonstrates that priests did have flexibility in revising rites in ways that did not transform them altogether. They were the experts, and as long as the performance of particular rites fulfilled expectations, the patrons neither grasped minor changes nor challenged a priest’s authority.

exorcismScene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual:
the patron blows out a flame to send away the im 陰 fire.

Chapter 5 focuses on the links between authority and efficacy in the exorcistic Toa-po-͘un 大補運 Great Improvement of Luck, the major healing ceremony of the Northern Priests, when the patron often suffers from a serious medical condition. While careful not to add further layers of anthropological abstraction to the complexities of the ritual system itself, Menheere again begins with theoretical perspectives; [3] then, setting forth from the research of Hsu Li-ling, he moves on to elements in the adaptable programme for the Great Improvement of Luck ritual, and five vivid case studies from his own fieldwork (note the lists of ritual segments in Appendix C).

If patrons were not familiar with the logic of the Toa-po-͘un, they were generally free to interpret the ceremonies in ways not directly derived from the meanings enacted in the rites. For patrons, the “effective meaning” was found, not so much in the symbolism of the rite, but in the fact that a priest, possessing a body of specialised knowledge to which they had no access, was involved and employed his knowledge to interact with and implore deities to intercede. Such an attitude, combined with the spectacle of the ceremony and the impressions it left on the spectators, predisposed observers to connect the performance to any event during or after the ritual proceedings.

Menheere ends the chapter by considering efficacy (ling 靈)—the core of Chinese popular religion, according to Valerie Hansen and Adam Yuet Chau:

Patrons did not hire priests to conduct Toa-po-͘un because they knew the rituals would work. They hired priests because they believed in the potential of the ritual and that it was the right course of action. These beliefs were bolstered by, not so much prior successes in Toa-po-un performances, but by a priest’s connections with institutions and trusted individuals.

He argues that

efficacy was the product of authority, rather than the other way around. A priest did not become a great priest because he cured his patients, he came in the position to cure his patients—or not—because he had become a great priest.

Lin Changtong groupThe Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei,
with Lin Ch’ang-tung 林昌桐 (1947–2019) presiding.

In Chapter 6 Menheere further ponders the way the organisation of ceremonies is distributed and how this relates to the idea of a field of priests. Recurring occasions include

ceremonies organised in honour of a deity’s anniversary; Worshipping the Dipper ceremonies, which many temples organised once or twice a year; ceremonies conducted for the construction of a new temple, the restoration of an old one, or the consecration of a new statue; and ceremonies held to feed the hungry ghosts during the seventh lunar month. Priests also commonly performed exorcisms […] as well as temple ceremonies held for the benefit of the ancestors of the faithful. On some of these occasions, temples could also choose to organise a Chio, but this was less common.

While he notes some exceptions,

more common, recurring ceremonies were typically conducted by the same priest; that is, the priest responsible for a ceremony on one occasion returned to perform the ritual again.[…] In some cases, relationships between temples and altars spanned multiple generations.

He finds that “patrons unconnected to either a priest or a temple resorted to other ways to find a priest”, mainly through local or personal networks.

Priests occasionally recounted how territorial claims were violently enforced in the past, but during my fieldwork, I was not aware of any violent incidents. Still, priests could be visibly displeased when they felt other priests were infringing on their perceived territory and would try to use their own local connections to displace the infringing priests if they felt that this was indeed happening.

Menheere details various procedures in organising the Chio Offering—“the most elaborate and important ceremonies in the Northern Priests’ repertoire”, which (nonetheless) few of them had a chance to organise during their career. There was considerable competition between priests for the task of presiding over this ritual. Temples might appoint a chief priest directly, solicit bids, or appoint through divination.

Knowledge of particular forms of ritual was a prerequisite to conduct ceremonies, but knowledge in itself did not guarantee success. The most knowledgeable priests were not necessarily those conducting the most ceremonies.

Still, “priests who inherited a successful altar had the best chances at claiming a dominant position in the field”. He ends the chapter thoughtfully by suggesting further factors that may need including:

It would probably be easier to develop new contacts and lead a flourishing altar in areas where fewer priests operated than in an area with many active priests. We must also consider historical conditions and change. The situation was quite different in the 1980s, when the market for religious services, including the ceremonies of the priests, was quickly expanding and a priest’s method of entering the field may have been less important.

In his Conclusion, Menheere reminds us that

terms like Tō, Hoat, Chio, and Cheng-it (and their Mandarin equivalents) have specific meanings that are locally and historically embedded, can change over time, and should not be taken for granted. […] Ritual practices can change, even if they are part of a tradition that highly values correct practices and sees immutability as a defining feature of what actually constitutes correct practice. While such changes can be triggered by external factors, specialists themselves do play an important role in shaping changes.

* * *

Time for my inevitable spiel: after silent, immobile text, nothing can compare to experiencing the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of Daoist ritual for real—here, for instance, is a “Great Improvement of Luck” ritual in 2022, just one of many online videos uploaded by the Wei Yuan Altar:

And to sample the more “classical” Tō tradition, click here for a 1977 introduction to a temple inauguration, filmed by Patrice Fava (another scholar whose grounding in Taiwanese ritual bore fruit on the mainland)—see his Un taoïste n’a pas d’ombre: mémoires d’un ethnologue en Chine (2023), pp.30–31, 53.

* * *

While I’m in awe of their erudition, some scholars of Daoist ritual seem so committed to the Wisdom of the Ancient Sages that their accounts may seem more prescriptive than descriptive, almost evangelical; in both Chinese and English, they can speak only to a highly limited audience. Instead Menheere, with his clear style, refrains from unduly mystifying either the priests or their rituals.

The Way and its powers is valuable for incorporating ethnography, modern change, and ritual theory—all largely absent from the field as it took shape—into the established concerns of scholarship on Daoist ritual, which (first for Taiwan, later for the PRC) has come to be dominated by the salvage of medieval ritual structures and texts. The study of ritual traditions in mainland China might look quite different if the ethnographic approach had found more of a voice in Taiwan.

SJ, Easter 2024.

[1] Sadly, Menheere’s original PhD thesis (2017) contains a mere three images (the published version has none!), so I’m grateful to him for helping me illustrate this post with some of his splendid fieldwork photos. Images by Patrice Fava are found in John Lagerwey’s attractively-illustrated book Le continent des esprits (1991); though the captions don’t give locations, I’m told that they show rituals and priests from both north and south Taiwan.

For transliterations of terms and names I have followed Menheere’s practice, based (for Taiwanese) on the “Church” romanization and (for Mandarin) on Wade-Giles, with some pinyin equivalents added for terms with wider significance (such as Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一).

[2] Menheere comments further: “Taoist Blackhead priests were active in different areas in northern Taiwan, but only in locations such as Hsinchu and Tamsui would they regularly carry out other ceremonies in addition to funerals. In both areas, however, they had to compete with the Northern Priests”. Michael Saso gave an early taxonomy of the ritual life of Hsinchu in “The Taoist tradition in Taiwan” (1970).

Similar distinctions are commonly found in mainland south China, e.g. in Hunan; in the north I don’t recall hearing of household Daoists who refrain from performing funerals—if there are any areas where they do so (also for regions such as south Jiangsu), then I’m keen to learn. In north Shanxi the Li family Daoists used to perform rituals for both the living and the dead, but mortuary rituals now comprise the great majority of their business (see Ritual change in north Shanxi, and my film). Note also my major rethink of the Zhengyi–Quanzhen dichotomy.

[3] Here, besides the sources that he cites, it’s worth consulting Catherine Bell’s surveys of the field of ritual studies.

Central Asia: shashmaqom at SOAS

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Bukhara old
Old Bukhara (screenshot from Invisible Face of the Beloved).

Last week on the eve of Nowruz, just back from Istanbul, I was happy to attend a concert of shashmaqom  in the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, featuring two fine musicians from the Academy of Maqam in Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Sirojiddin Juraev on long-necked lutes and Khurshed Ibrohimzoda on vocals and tanbur plucked lute.

As I seek a rudimentary education on this suite repertoire of refined Sufi poetry accompanied by instrumental ensemble, in my explorations below (typically) I merely “gaze at flowers from horseback” 走马观花.

Shashmaqom originated from the numinous cultural metropolis of Bukhara, with related traditions evolving in centres such as Tashkent and Ferghana. For the greater region, Theodore Levin has adopted the term Transoxania, favoured by his fieldwork colleague Otanazar Matyabukov (“OM”)—stressing its “underlying geographic and social coherence rather than its more recent ethnic and political divisiveness”.

mapFrom The hundred thousand fools of God.

Basic sources on shashmaqom include an essay by Alexander Djumaev, the Musics of Central Asia site; Will Sumits’ chapter 15 in Michael Church, The other classical musics (cf. Musics lost and found, chapter 17); “Central Asian Republics” in The Rough Guide to world music: Europe, Asia, and Pacific; and sections in the New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians and The Garland Encyclopedia of world music.

Rather than attempting to define “classical” (cf. What is serious music?!, Joining the elite musical club, and in the introduction to my series on the Beatles) or to regard shashmaqom as a “living fossil” of courtly art music from a bygone society, it surely makes sense to understand such a tradition as part of the widespread, shifting maqam family of repertoires crossing national and class boundaries, albeit subject to canonisation (“maqām-isation”) even before the interventions of modern state regimes (see Rachel Harris, The making of a musical canon in Chinese Central Asia, pp.9–10, 97–9, 107–8).

Under the Soviet era, while shashmaqom was the object of official posturings about its “national”, “elite”, or “popular” status, it “found itself at the centre of a nationalistic tug-of-war” (in Sumits’ phrase), with competing Tajik and Uzbek versions. 

Levin cover

So it’s high time for me to revisit Theodore Levin‘s “pioneering cultural odyssey” The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (1996, with CD). Despite its brilliant title, I suppose I was somewhat resistant to the book at first: reading it just at a time when I was deep in Chinese traditions of village ritual that were (then) remarkably unmediated by conservatoire-style remoulding, I found it unfortunate that so many of Levin’s interlocutors were representatives of state ensembles. Whereas Veronica Doubleday and John Baily, living in Herat on the eve of the Soviet invasion, had been able to immerse themselves in the grassroots world of social musicking, Tashkent was different; when Levin arrived there in 1977 his institutional base was doubtless inevitable. On that initial stay he can have had little access to the social milieu that OM later described to him (pp.33–4):

The entire unofficial cultural network and economic system that supported the central events in Uzbek social life—the toy (wedding), âsh (literally, “food”—an early morning quasi-religious gathering of men given separately by the fathers of both bride and groom before every Uzbek marriage), and ziyâfat, gap, gurung, or majlis, as intimate evening gatherings of friends for conversation, food, and music are variously called—had existed all along in the shadow of the official cultural life played out in concert halls and theatres, at public ceremonies and on radio and television.

muqam

Source: The other classical musics.

The tradition of gap is related to the Uyghur mäshräp, now the object of a new wave of repression in Xinjiang.

But if Levin too was perhaps frustrated that his initial clues to this elusive world were largely based on second-hand accounts rather than direct observation, he writes most insightfully about his encounters, with revealing stories of senior musicians’ lives. On his later visits to Tashkent with OM from 1990, he was able to attend gap and âsh ceremonies, meeting latter-day abdâl Sufi dervish “fools of God” (cf. Uyghur ashiq).

Back in 1977 Levin regarded the shashmaqom as stagnating—”a musical system propped up from above by the policies of Uzbekistan’s culture apparat” (“Frozen music”, pp.47–51):

Though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something had seemed not right about the performances of Shash maqâm I heard when I first came to Tashkent. Put simply, they lacked life. As taught at the Tashkent Conservatory, the Shash maqâm could have been compared to a dying person being kept clinically alive on a respirator. The respirator was controlled by the Ministry of Culture. It was the Ministry that had approved of the resuscitation of the moribund Shash maqâm in the late 1950s and had stage-managed its ideological repositioning as a leading exemplar of Uzbekistan’s “national” music (this after a near-death experience in the early 1950s in which the Ministry had decreed that the Shash maqâm had been too close to the feudal culture of the emirs, too distant from “the people”, too infused with undercurrents of Sufism, and thus had to be suppressed).

Still, as I learned of the troubled maintenance of folk ritual activity in China through the Maoist decades (see e.g. Gaoluo), I doubted if the turgid state ensembles could really have monopolised the musical market before 1990. Indeed, Levin continues with a vivid section on Turgun Alimatov (1922–2008), whom he met between 1990 and 1994. As Alimatov recalled, after his radio ensemble was disbanded in 1952,

I played at weddings with two brothers named Bâbâ Khan and Akmal Khan Sofixânov. Their father, Sofi Khan, was a famous hafiz [classical singer]. In those years, there were several musical dynasties which had a high calling […]. In contrast to other singers, the Sofixânovs performed exclusively songs with a religious content. They were religious people themselves, even during the time when religion was strictly forbidden. People who rejected religion simply didn’t associate with them, and for their part, the Sofixânovs stayed away from atheists. They were invited to the houses of believers.

Alimatov told Levin how he used to take part in many Sufi zikr-samâ rituals at which the Sofixânovs would perform (cf. Turkey). And he contrasted such devout behaviour with that of a lowly class of musician known as attarchi—with whom he also used to associate (cf. the underworld of old Lhasa). On this CD (Ocora, 1995), recorded by Levin, Alimatov moves from long-necked bowed lute sato to the plucked tanbur:

The ghijak spike fiddle is common to Transoxania and Xinjiang. But whereas in Xinjiang the soulful satar had long been at the heart of the Uyghur muqam, in Transoxania the sato had long been dormant when Alimatov revived it in the 1950s, followed by his pupil Abduvali Abdurashidov in Dushanbe (see below). And here is Alimatov on tanbur in 2001, recorded by Jean During, leading scholar of Central Asian maqam:

Levin continues with a revealing account of Arif Xatamov, another “unrepentant traditionalist who bemoaned the spiritual superficiality of contemporary music”—here’s a 2013 CD from Alchemy (as playlist):

And in the following chapter on Bukhara (note Levin’s CD Bukhara: musical crossroads of Asia [Smithsonian Folkways, 1991] and Shashmaqam: the tradition of Bukhara [New Samarkand Records, 1999]), while learning of the depth of Sufi and Jewish traditions he pursues shashmaqom in greater depth, finding more “frozen music”:

The worker’s state whose goal had been to eliminate class barriers in art had vilified the Shash maqâm as an elite art and tried to expunge it from cultural life. When that had failed, it had then tried to transform the Shash maqâm into a popular art. But Soviet cultural stategists had gotten everything reversed. In Bukhara, the Shash maqâm and other “heavy” music had been a popular art. And when they had tried to turn this music into a “national” folk art, they had inadvertently created an elite art: elite, that is, because it had all but lost its audience. No-one wanted to listen to a music whose soul had been usurped by the state.

The ponderous ideology of the state troupes still persisted in the early years after independence from Soviet rule. But since then, as the concert market has liberalised, shashmaqom has found a niche in the “Heritage” and “world music” industries, affording a home for some fine, creative musicians.

The hundred thousand fools of God continues with chapters on musical life in the south of Uzbekistan, Khorezm, the Upper Zarafshan and Yagnâb, and Shahristan, where Levin encounters a range of musical activity in social contexts—Sufi rituals, weddings, epic singers, healers. The book is another accessible classic of ethnomusicology, valuable both as an account of the nuanced views of musicians striving to emerge from the Soviet-style cultural yoke, and in paving the way for detailed ethnographies of traditional musicking in Transoxania.

* * *

Anyway, if I find a radical gulf (or might I say gap) between folk and conservatoire in Han-Chinese musicking, it seems I should be rather more broad-minded on the journey further west. In 1950s’ China, when “old artists” were recruited to the new state song-and-dance ensembles and arts-work troupes, they often found themselves busy accompanying a bland, politicized repertoire quite divorced from their former folk practice, which they now abandoned. [1] Conversely, prestigious musicians in the Uyghur homeland and in Central Asia, rather separately from their duties in the state ensembles, often seem to have quietly maintained more traditional styles and contexts.

While I’m keen to learn more about shashmaqom-related grassroots social life (however attenuated by modernization), this kind of music is always easier to find online in commodified versions on stage—including this short UNESCO presentation. Here’s a film from the Aga Khan Music Programme, which has played a major role in enhancing the global profile of Central Asian musics, and in sponsoring centres such as the Academy of Maqam:

  • Invisible face of the beloved: classical music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Music of Central Asia, vol. 2 (2006):

Vol. 7, In the shrine of the heart: popular classics from Bukhara and beyond (2010), introduces other regional traditions worth pursuing.

Abduvali Abdurashidov, the main guide in Invisible face of the beloved, leads this fine Tajik chamber ensemble on sato at a 2010 Paris concert, with singer Ozoda Ashurova, [2] Pasha Hanjani on ney—and a young Sirojiddin Juraev, whose visit to SOAS inspired this little survey:

Abdurashidov appears on the CD Tadjikistan: chants et musiques classiques (Ocora, 2013):

I’m enthralled by the CD Shashmaqom: Dugoh maqomi (Inédit, 2002), again recorded by Jean During:

For more, see again here, under Audio and video recordings, §8.

Again (cf. Taiwan), I note that one consequence of a superficial survey like mine is an undue attention to the “star” performers, rather than the unsung participants who are at the heart of grassroots musicking (cf. China).

The hundred thousand fools of God concludes in Queens, New York, where a notable Bukharan Jewish tradition of shashmuqom has taken root. The Ensemble Shashmaqam there is comprised of emigrés from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (heard on Levin’s 1991 Smithsonian Folkways CD Central Asia in Forest Hills); in this concert they celebrate the artistry of three leading women performers who have performed with the ensemble over the years. In 2014 Evan Rapport supplemented Levin’s account in Greeted with smiles: Bukharian Jewish music and musicians in New York.

* * *

SOAS Tajik
The SOAS concert. Via Twitter.

So much for homework. Since China opened my eyes and ears to musicking as a vital part of social gatherings (life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies, and so on; cf. Society and soundscape), I’ve had conflicting feelings about “concerts”—events that we so easily take for granted. Of course I grew up with Western Art Music in concert (see e.g. here), and I’ve been complicit in presenting Chinese ritual traditions on stage (e.g. here, and on tour with the Li family Daoists—contrast my film); just that I’m sometimes struck by how such reification can skew our impression of the vitality of expressive culture in local society.

As Djumaev observes, while the new academies seek to adapt the traditional master-apprentice (ustod-shogird) system, a range of strategies for transmission has emerged in response to changing times. Still, however sensitively accomplished musicians may devise classroom teaching, I still find it an alien, stultifying environment for such a culture (cf. Training Daoists in Shanghai).

At SOAS last week, the concert and the preceding workshop were engagingly introduced by Saeid Kordmafi, new lecturer in the Music Department. In duet Sirojiddin Juraev (YouTube playlist) and Khurshed Ibrohimzoda have a wonderful understanding, their musicking at once natural and intense, never showy. Ibrohimzoda’s vocal items (some incorporating a vertiginously high tessitura—apparently his personal taste rather than a feature of the tradition) alternated with instrumental solos on plucked lutes and an intimate meditation on bowed sato. For all my concerns about the academy, their spiritual focus would surely have impressed venerable senior masters like Turgun Alimatov and Arif Xatamov. The dancer Madina Sabirova adorned two items, the singing in the lively finale revealing a more popular folk style.

Across the muqam world, as Levin (pp.55–6) notes, “rigidly structured, closed repertoires like the Shash maqâm had given way to autonomous pieces performed in a relatively personalised style”. The innovations of Turgun Alimatov remind him of Jean During’s remarks on modern change in Persian art music, characterising the shift as a “transformation from classical formalism to Romanticism”,

in which music is cleansed of its status as a sacred object in order to become recentred in the interiority of the individual. […] The values of inspiration, creativity, originality, and personality of style and improvisation have become exalted to the detriment of conformity to standards, fidelity to repertoire, and fixed composition.

While I might suspect that this downplays the creative individuality of the master musicians of Yore, it looks like an inexhaustible topic for debate.

In its latest reinvention of tradition for the concert platform, shashmaqom is most beguiling—I just wonder whether it might be creating a new kind of “frozen music”. As always, I’d like to learn about its prospects for a viable social life beyond the concert hall.

* * *

See also under West/Central Asia: a roundup, Posts on Uyghur culture, and The 2002 Silk Road Festival. For other expressive cultures under state socialism and since its demise, see Resisting fakelore, Musical cultures of East Europe, Folk traditions of Poland, and Sound and sovereignty in Ukraine.
There’s always much to learn from Bruno Nettl, such as his taxonomy of responses to the growing hegemony of Western musics (Abandonment, Impoverishment/reduction, and Isolated preservation—the latter perhaps especially salient here); his wide-ranging unpacking of “improvisation“; and his insights on the conservatoire ethos in Western Art Music.

With thanks to Rachel Harris.

[1] See e.g. A Daoist serves a state troupe. Though the opera and narrative-singing troupes were also the objects of intense remoulding (see e.g. my post on Gansu, and sequel), their musicians were often better able to preserve a more traditional style.
Re my aversion to the conservatoire, I’m reminded of the Chinese text on the SOAS T-shirt, magnificently misread by one of my Daoist mentors as “anti-academy”…

[2] For the modern admission of female singers into maqam ensembles, see again Djumaev. For the Ferghana tradition, a female star of maqom is Munojot Yoʻlchiyeva (b.1960), also introduced by Levin (pp.77–80). In Europe, CDs have been issued by Ocora (1994, 1998) and World Network (1997). Here she is in concert:

China Unofficial Archives

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minjiian dang'an

Following Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks, with the intrepid underground journalist Jiang Xue and others he has created an important new website

Making a valuable corrective to Party propaganda, it’s a repository of alternative sources on the history of modern China,

dedicated to making accessible the key documents, films, blogs, and publications of a movement of Chinese people seeking to reclaim their country’s history. Unlike official government or university archives, the China Unofficial Archives is open, free, and accessible to anyone from any walk of life. The site is fully bilingual in Chinese and English.

See also the initial curator’s notes.

The site is still growing, with new sources in the pipeline. The sidebar lists useful rubrics:

  • Era
  • Format
  • Theme
  • Creator.

Themes—covered by Western academics (see e.g. Cultural Revolutions, and under my Maoism tag), but whose Chinese sources are less easily accessed—include

  • Land reform before and after 1949
  • Covid-19
  • Famine
  • Farmers’ rights and rural issues
  • Non-Han ethnic minority groups
  • Women and feminism,

and (still in progress),

  • Faith-based persecution and crackdown—including yet another moving film by Hu Jie on the tribulations of a Christian Miao community in Yunnan, Maidichongde gesheng 麦地冲的歌声 (The songs of Maidichong village, 2016), subject of a separate post.

I will doubtless be posting on some topics that particularly interest me—for instance, I’m keen to get to grips with

one of the rare official Chinese publications on what remains a highly sensitive subject (cf. Gansu: connecting social trauma and expressive culture, and sequel).

minjiandanganguan famine

Note also the Other resources menu. For updates, follow on Twitter.

Fujian: instrumental groups as a gateway to the study of ritual

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contents

Fujian province in southeast China is one of the most vibrant areas to explore folk and ritual expressive cultures, which its local scholars have been particularly avid in documenting. Its traditions—always rooted in life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies—are known to outsiders largely through the Minnan region in the south of the province, particularly the treasury of nanyin ballads [1]—not least because much of the culture of the island of Taiwan across the strait derives from its Hokkien migrants (click here).

The visits of my early fieldwork years were inevitably superficial, “gazing at flowers from horseback” 走马观花. For background, Li Quanmin’s 1961 field report—during a lull between Maoist campaigns—was already based on collections by local cultural workers. After the hiatus of the Cultural Revolution, Fujian minjian yinyue jianlun 福建民间音乐简论 (1986) by Liu Chunshu 刘春曙 and Wang Yaohua 王耀华 made a worthy survey for the early reform era, including both vocal and instrumental genres.

Meanwhile the compilation of the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples was under way; and it’s taken me all this time to get round to browsing the 2,775 pages (!) of the two instrumental music volumes for Fujian,

  • Zhongguo minjian qiyuequ jicheng, Fujian juan 中国民间器乐曲集成, 福建卷 (2001),
    again with the experienced Wang Yaohua as editor-in-chief.

Ritual pervades all genres of folk expressive culture: in the Anthology, it is a major theme of the volumes for folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and dance. In the instrumental music volumes, even genres that lack explicit liturgical content are also invariably performed for ceremonial occasions—but a further reason to consult them is that the specific rubric of “religious music” has been consigned there. I’ve described the flaws of the Anthology project in my

  • “Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.

Conceptually the Anthology‘s treatment of genres is rudimentary, but it opens up a world of local cultures. Apart from the valuable Monographs for opera and narrative-singing, its volumes consist mainly of transcriptions, of limited value without available recordings. For Fujian, whereas nanyin is amply documented on CD and film, most other genres are unique to the province and hardly known outside their own locale. So I find these volumes a revelation, opening up many perspectives (particularly for the late imperial and Republican eras) and making one of the most impressive introductions to the riches of expressive culture in China. It confirms my observations about the resilience of tradition in the PRC—for all the cultural riches of Taiwan, they are dwarfed even by the single province of Fujian, despite the traumas of three decades of Maoism there.

* * *

The main rubrics adopted for the instrumental volumes of the Anthology (a rough-and-ready national framework, based on the classification developed since the 1950s and later elaborated by Yuan Jingfang) are:

  • “compound” (zonghexing 综合性, referring mainly to a substantial vocal component)
  • “silk-and-bamboo” sizhu 丝竹
  • “drumming and blowing” guchui 鼓吹
  • “blowing and beating” chuida 吹打, with a more diverse instrumentation than guchui
  • percussion bands luogu 锣鼓
  • “sacrificial music” jisi yinyue 祭祀音乐 and “religious music” zongjiao yinyue 宗教音乐(Buddhist, Daoist, both temple and household—the latter covered far more comprehensively in separate projects by Chinese and foreign scholars).

Besides all the articles introducing particular local traditions, brief yet instructive sections are appended with histories of some notable groups (pp.2687–99) and biographies of performers (pp.2700–19), sampled below.

As throughout China, social performance is dominated by ensembles (see e.g. Liaoning), some occupational, others amateur. By contrast with the “conservatoire style”, instrumental solos play a very minor role in folk practice—here represented only by pieces for the zheng zither around Zhao’an and Yunxiao (pp.1683–1754), just east of Chaozhou in east Guangdong—another enclave for zheng solo repertoires.

* * *

Even for the Quanzhou region of south Fujian, while nanyin 南音 is a main focus, it is only part of a diverse scene. Nanyin has become a significant cultural element in the rapprochement between Fujian and Hokkien communities overseas. With so much research elsewhere, the Anthology section (pp.31–46, transcriptions pp.37–354) may not detain us long, though we should also consult other volumes, notably those for narrative-singing—both “music” (Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Fujian juan 中国曲艺音乐集成, 福建卷, pp.45–1102!) and the monograph (Zhongguo quyi zhi, Fujian juan 中国曲艺志, 福建卷).

Beiguan 北管 is a major genre in Taiwan (see again here), but in Fujian (where it is particular to Hui’an county near Quanzhou) it has a far less extensive repertoire (pp.355–60, transcriptions pp.361–97; biographies 2716–18).

Local traditions under “silk-and-bamboo” (a rubric as unwieldy as the others) include

  • shiyin 十音 of the Pu–Xian region (Putian and Xianyou) (aka shiyin bayue 十音八乐, with the added format of shawms and percussion: for video clip, see under Walking shrill)
  • “guyue” 古乐 of Zhao’an in the southern Zhangzhou region, related to Chaozhou ensemble music and the zheng zither repertoire
  • shiban 十班 groups around west Fujian.

Anxi da guchui
“Greater guchui” procession in Anxi.

Shawm-and-percussion bands, again serving life-cycle and calendrical observances, are ubiquitous throughout China, including all regions of Fujian—though they are hardly known outside local communities. Under the heading of “guchui” are introductions to

  • Ningde in northeast Fujian (for a shawm band in Xiapu, see also pp.2696–8).
  • around Fuzhou, Annan chi 安南伬 (and introduction to a renowned band in Linpu village, pp.2691–2)
  • in Fuqing south of Fuzhou, jin guchui 金鼓吹
  • “lesser guchui” of Xianyou and “greater guchui” of the Pu–Xian region.

Pingtan paizhi biosBiographies of Pingtan paizhi master Wang Shanglong and Chen Renzhen.

Since imperial times, shawm bands were often transmitted through regional military garrisons, such as

  • longchui 龙吹 around Quanzhou (text pp.784–5, transcriptions pp.786–96), introduced in my Folk music of China pp.312–18, CD #12 (in the sidebar on this blog, audio gallery #15, with commentary here), and another instance is
  • paizhi of Pingtan island 平潭排只 (text pp.663–4, transcriptions pp.665–708; biographies of Wang Shanglong 王 尚 龙 [1846–1917] and Chen Renzhen 陈人祯 [1911–88] p.2707, with a brief introduction to the latter’s band on p.2695).

Changtai Qinghe guanThe Qinghe guan society in Changtai.

For south Fujian, further sections document

  • shiyin 十音 around Quanzhou (Folk music of China, pp.318–20)
  • naoting 闹厅 of Yongchun (cf. film footage of Yongchun migrants to Malaysia, here)
  • shawm bands in Anxi and Xiamen
  • for Changtai near Zhangzhou, greater guchui and lesser bayin—introducing the Qinghe guan 清和馆 society, whose masters trained over fifty groups in the vicinity.

Raoping chui

Transmission of Raoping chui in rural Longyan, p.931.

  • Around west Fujian:
    • Raoping chui 饶平吹 of Longyan (and introduction to a village band pp.2695–6)
    • shifan diao 十番调 of Yongding
    • wuyin 五音 of Shanghang
    • and genres in Wuping, Liancheng, and Changting.
  • In central Fujian, bands in counties of Sanming municipality.
  • In the north, shawm bands in counties of Nanping municipality
  • In the east (opening vol.2), shawm bands of the She minority 畲族 around Xiapu, Fu’an, Ningde, and Yong’an.

“Blowing and beating”
Under the rubric of chuida (a more diverse instrumentation than the “guchui” shawm bands):

  • around the provincial capital Fuzhou, shifan 十番 (for various groups in the region, see also pp.2692–4)
  • shijin 拾锦 of Fuding, and genres in Fu’an and Gutian
  • in the Zhangzhou region, Siping luogu 四平锣鼓 of Nanjing 南靖 county (see also p.2696).
  • in north Fujian, Shifan luogu 十番锣鼓  [2] of Wuyishan, and groups in Pucheng.

Percussion ensembles include

  • taiping gu 太 平鼓 around Fuzhou, and
  • goutou 沟头 of Fuqing
  • jin guluo 金鼓锣 of Zhouning further north
  • genres in the south and west of the province.

Ritual
As we saw, while all genres of expressive culture are pervaded by ritual, in the Anthology the major rubric of “religious music” has been allotted to the instrumental music volumes. Though the articles of the lengthy section for Fujian (pp.1757—2683) fall far short of detailed monographs elsewhere (e.g. the Daojiao yishi congshu series for household Daoists), they constitute subsidiary references that may yet offer further clues (for early film footage, see Religious life in 1930s’ Fujian).

Ningde mediums
Exorcists, She minority. Source.

In the constant struggle with taxonomy (note the thoughtful studies of Catherine Bell), the editors’ ritual categories are unsatisfactory—in folk practice, even the terms “Buddhist” and “Daoist” are porous, as is clear from several volumes of the Daojiao yishi congshu. Before the listings of temple and household Buddhist and Daoist genres under “religious music”, they have inserted a section on “sacrificial music”, comprising

  • “Three in One” (Sanyi jiao 三一教) groups in the Pu–Xian region (see also biography of Liu Maoyuan 刘茂源, b.1916, pp.2710–11)—note Kenneth Dean, The Lord of the Three in One: the spread of a cult in southeast China (1998)
  • for the She minority around Ningde and Fu’an, a rather detailed article with the misleading title “music of mediumistic rituals” wushu daochang yinyue 巫术道场音乐 (pp.1837–42, liturgical texts with scores 1843–93; also biography of sixth-generation master Zhong Fuxing 钟福星 [b.1930], p.2718). Known here as wangshi 尫师 (an interesting character, wang), such ritual specialists are Daoist exorcists in the Lüshan or Maoshan tradition, presiding over the complex liturgical sequences of jiao Offering and mortuary rituals (cf. this 2017 article), just like their Han Chinese counterparts elsewhere in the province (below under “religious music” > Daoist > household)—as distinct from the self-mortifying spirit mediums who also play a significant role in Fujian rituals (see e.g. Dean’s splendid film Bored in heaven).

Fuzhou chanhe
Chanhe ritual, Fuzhou.

For both simplicity and clarity, these sections might rather have been subsumed under the single rubric of “religious music”—which includes

Buddhist:

  • liturgy of temple monks: Guanghua si temple in Putian, Kaiyuan si in Quanzhou, and Nan Putuo si in Xiamen
  • household ritual specialists:
    • chanhe 禅和 amateur ritual societies in Fuzhou (introduced en passant in my Folk music of China, pp.295–6)—another substantial section (see also biography of Xie Guiming 谢桂铭, b.1913, p.2709)
    • xianghua 香花 household priests in Putian (cf. Meixian in east Guangdong).

Putian DaoistsHousehold Daoist rituals, Putian.

Daoist:

  • liturgy of temple priests: Xiamen and Zhangzhou
  • household ritual groups in Putian, Xianyou, and Nan’an (for the latter, see also biography of Daoist Li Shi 李湿 [b.1932], pp.2712–13)—the scores useful, at least, for liturgical texts. Again, these sections will merely supplement detailed studies by scholars of religion.

Nan'an ritualSegments of mortuary rituals, Nan’an (again, cf. Ken Dean).

* * *

Even limiting our scope to instrumental music, it takes considerable conceptual adjustment to broaden our view of the musical culture of Fujian from nanyin to a multiplicity of groups such as shawm bands and ritual specialists. Unsatisfactory as the Anthology may be, beyond merely documenting “pieces” it reminds us that the lifeblood of all these traditions is social—and ritual—practice. Many individual genres are doubtless the subject of articles in Chinese journals since the publication of the Anthology, and one could make a base in any one county, indeed any one village, combining a wealth of material by observing life-cycle and calendrical activities. Meanwhile, even before consulting several thousand further pages of the Anthology for vocal and dance genres, these volumes provide valuable clues to the local ceremonial cultures of Fujian, the life stories of its transmitters, and social change, making a gateway to our studies of ritual life.

[1] This is a common reductive view. In surveying Chinese expressive culture, we must always beware merely regarding south Jiangsu as silk-and-bamboo, Hebei as songs-for-winds, Shanxi as “eight great suites”, and ethnic minorities as “good at singing and dancing”—just as we may reduce Spain to flamenco, Indonesia to gamelan, and so on.

[2] Shifan 十番 is a rather common term for instrumental ensembles in both south and north China, the best-known traditions being the Shifan gu 十番鼓 and Shifan luogu 十番锣鼓 of south Jiangsu, authoritatively studied by the great Yang Yinliu before and after Liberation.

Music–ritual cultures of Taiwan

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Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do

—Christopher Small, Musicking

Through the Maoist decades after the 1949 Communist takeover, while the society of mainland China was constantly beset by a succession of iconoclastic traumas, the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan was considered a bastion for the maintenance of traditional Chinese culture.

What I suspect hasn’t always been clarified is that Taiwan cannot embody that culture as a whole: naturally, its heritage largely reflects the traditions of the particular regions from which they were descended on the southeastern mainland—and it was that, until the 1980s, which was the only peep-hole through which we could view the enormity of Chinese culture. *

But then, as “reform and opening” swept the PRC, ritual and other folk performance activity—that outsiders could only assume to have been extinguished there after the Communist takeover of 1949—began reviving on a vast scale, along with an array of central and regional scholars keen to resume fieldwork and research. And at the forefront of discoveries was the region of south Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan (see e.g. C.K. Wang, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean, John Lagerwey). As fieldwork expanded to other parts of the southeast (see Daoist ritual in south China), it soon became clear that there was a vast repository of local traditions of ritual and expressive culture to document all over China (see The resilience of tradition)—if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective. The research of Taiwanese scholars was now able to inspire fieldwork on the mainland.

Still, the main genres of Taiwan have rather little bearing on the kind of ritual traditions that were coming to light in the north Chinese countryside, or even in east-central China; indeed, they only represent a small selection from the diverse range of genres around Fujian, as becomes clear by consulting the volumes of the monumental Anthology (for now, see here, with a further post to follow).

I also think of the transformation of Tibetan studies. After 1950, exile communities (led by TIPA in Dharamsala—see e.g. Zlos-gar, 1986) had been considered as the sole heirs to the culture of Tibet; but by the 1990s scholars began shifting towards the mature ethnographic assessment of its vicissitudes under the Chinese yoke (under Recent posts on Tibet, see e.g. Labrang 1). In her wise article “Easier in exile?, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy ponders the different challenges of doing fieldwork among Tibetans in Lhasa and Dharamsala (see The enchanting world of Tibetan opera).

* * *

Taiwan
Besides the small minority of aboriginal groups (c2%), the main populations of Taiwan are Hoklo (Holo, c70%), Hokkien speakers originating from the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou regions of south Fujian; and Hakka (c15%), descended from the mainland regions of east Guangdong and west Fujian (click here and here for the expressive cultures of both groups). Refugees from elsewhere in China fleeing to Taiwan in the 1940s also brought some staged vocal genres with them.

With Taiwanese society subject to far fewer traumatic social upheavals than on the mainland, cultural forms were certainly better maintained there. But as in any modern society, there are no “living fossils”: besides the island’s complex colonial legacy, performers and patrons have to negotiate the incursions of modernity and popular media (see Society and soundscape, notably the work of Bruno Nettl).

Since the clampdown in the PRC under Xi Jinping, perspectives regarding the mainland and Taiwan are modifying (see The Queen Mother of the West); having myself been busy studying the maintenance of local ritual cultures in the PRC, it’s high time for me to re-assess my approach. So as sometimes happens on this blog (e.g. Precious scrolls, and even A jazz medley), this basic overview of music–ritual traditions is as much for my benefit as yours…

Surveys
In English, starting points include articles in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, The Garland encyclopedia of world music (Wang Ying-fen pp.423–9, Hsu Tsang-houei pp.523–9), Wang Ying-fen in The Rough Guide to world music, Europe, Asia & Pacific (3rd edition, 2009), and even wiki.

At the forefront of studies of traditional music in Taiwan was Hsu Tsang-houei 許常惠 (1929–2001), who gravitated from WAM-style composition to fieldwork on folk traditions. ** Among his surveys are Taiwan yinyue shi chugao 台灣音樂史初稿 (1991, I think) and (with Cheng Shui-cheng) Musique de Taiwan (1992). See also Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬, Taiwan chuantong yinyue gailun 台灣傳統音樂概論 (2005, 2007), in two volumes on vocal and instrumental music.

Genres
Among the most popular topics are nanguan and Daoist ritual—both, since the 1980s, informed by fieldwork on either side of the strait. Amateur nanguan 南管 music societies, performing exquisite chamber ballads for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, have long been deeply embedded in community life (see this post). Nanguan is the subject of much research, both in Fujian and Taiwan. Wang Ying-fen has published extensively on the Taiwan scene in both Chinese and English—I particularly admire her articles on the risks inherent in state promotion of nanguan (such as this), worthy contributions to studies of the thorny issue of heritage.

Temple fairs, with vibrant processions, remain a major part of life in Taiwan. Regional traditions of Daoist ritual (for the north, click here) are the focus of generations of Taiwanese and foreign scholars. For the former, alongside many distinguished scholars, Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬 has paid notable attention to ritual soundscape (e.g. Daojiao yishi yu yinyue 道教儀式與音樂, 1994). Another major theme in ritual studies is the worship of the female deity Mazu, widespread both in Taiwan and around the southeastern coast of the mainland.

The composite genre of beiguan 北管 (good wiki page here, with links) is again performed mainly for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, largely by occupational groups; while closely related to vocal drama, it’s best known for its loud outdoor shawm-and-percussion bands. Here’s a short documentary about the master Qiu Huorong 邱火榮 (b.1937):

Most flexible of popular operatic forms is gua-a-hi (gezai xi 歌仔戲). And more popular in Taiwan than shadow puppets and marionettes, glove-puppetry (budai xi 布袋戲) has adapted to changing times; the former tradition was transmitted by masters such as Li Tianlu 李天祿 (1910–98), whose early life is evoked in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 film The puppetmaster.

Narrative-singing is best known through Chen Da 陳達 (1905–81) on the Hengchun peninsula. He was “discovered” in 1967 by Hsu Tsang-houei and Shih Wei-liang 史惟亮 as part of their fieldwork for the Folk-song Collection movement, forerunner of several state-sponsored organs in Taiwan. Here’s Shih Wei-liang’s recording from 1971:

In the north of the island, the blind female singer Yang Xiuqing 楊秀卿 (b.1934) is also renowned.

(As in the PRC, please excuse me if I fall into the old Songlines trap of giving undue attention to “star performers”—whereas in-depth ethnography soon uncovers the myriad unsung bearers of tradition, such as Vincent Goossaert’s “ordinary Daoists”, or rank-and-file members of festive groups.)

Like beiguan, the Hakka bayin 八音 ensemble is dominated by shawms and percussion. Here’s the CD Taiwan: mountain songs and bayin instrumental music (Inedit, 2006; as playlist):

As in mainland China, the vocal polyphony of minority peoples (notably Amis, Bunun, Tsou, Paiwan, Rukai—around 2% of Taiwan’s population) has attracted much attention, with many recordings issued of aboriginal singing, such as Polyphonies vocales des Aborigènes de Taiwan (Inedit, 1989):

and Taiwan: music of the Aboriginal tribes (Jecklin, 1991) (playlist):

As in mainland China, while such traditions struggle to remain relevant in a modernising society, national cultural bodies have adopted particular genres as symbols of identity. Expressive culture has made a major component in the rapprochement between the PRC and overseas Chinese communities. Wind Records in Taipei issued a succession of CDs of mainland genres in conjunction with the Music Research Institute in Beijing, notably an important series of archive recordings (folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and instrumental music, as well as minority polyphony), and of the qin zither. The journal Minsu quyi, with its detailed studies (mostly in Chinese) on ritual, theatre, and folklore, also expanded its scope from Taiwan to the mainland.

* * *

Growing political tensions encourage us to pay renewed attention to Taiwan, and to support beleaguered democracy. While it’s fruitful to study the genres introduced above on both sides of the strait, the island remains a conducive environment for both performance and research. Now I’m keen to see someone with fieldwork experience in both societies, such as C.K. Wang, Wang Ying-fen, Ken Dean, or Adam Yuet Chau, expounding the different trajectories of the diverse traditions there, and the challenges that they face.

* Now, none of these comparisons quite work, but…
While it’d be far too parochial to imagine the Isle of Wight as a refuge from a radical government in mainland UK, perhaps we might visualise Cuba becoming a liberal sanctuary from a Gilead-style fundamentalist north America (see The handmaid’s tale)—or even Sicily as the sole isolated outpost for tradition while mainland Europe languishes in the grip of authoritarian regimes.

In chapter 10 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China I made a similarly rash comparison, seeking to incorporate north China into our overview of Daoist ritual (cf. this post, again):

It is rather as if our knowledge of Christianity in the whole of Europe were based almost entirely on Sicily and Puglia, with the odd footnote on the Vatican and Westminster Abbey. We may like what we find in those places, perhaps considering it more exalted, mystical, and ancient—but that is another issue.

Without at all playing into the greasy hands of PRC propaganda, one might consider Taiwan (culturally, not politically, since it is clearly an independent nation! Cf. China has always been part of…) as just one among over thirty provinces of China, all of whose forms of expressive culture are dominated by long-established local folk traditions while also featuring some “national” genres and styles from other regions.

** If Yang Yinliu wasn’t the Chinese Bartók, then Hsu Tsang-houei wasn’t the Taiwanese Yang Yinliu (whereas Bill Evans was the Bill Evans of jazz).

In memory of Seiji Ozawa

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The great Seiji Ozawa died last week (tributes; obituaries e.g. NYT; see also nippon.com). *

Born in 1935 to parents based in Mukden (Shenyang) during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, he returned with his family to Japan in 1941. His rise to conducting stardom was meteoric. A pupil of Hideo Saito (1902–74), in 1959 he won a conducting competition in Besançon. This led to an invitation to study with Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux in Boston, where he soon won the Koussevitzky Prize; this began his close association with the Tanglewood Festival. Gaining a scholarship to study with Herbert von Karajan in West Berlin, he was spotted by Leonard Bernstein, who made him assistant conductor of the New York Phil in 1961. Here Bernstein introduces Ozawa conducting the overture to The marriage of Figaro in 1962:

Ozawa remained the only conductor to have studied under both Karajan and Bernstein (cf. Unlikely bedfellows).

Messiaen Ozawa 1962
Meeting Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod on their honeymoon in Japan, July 1962.

In 1963, still little-known in the USA, Ozawa appeared on What’s my line (cf. Anna Mahler on You bet your life, 1952!). By the late 60s, in contrast to the staid, ageing Teutonic maestros to whom concert-goers were accustomed, he exuded a rock-star vibe that no-one has since been able to emulate (NYT: “with his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless energy, he captured the popular imagination early on”; Peter Gelb: “a symbol of male beauty on the podium that I don’t think the world had seen before.”) As Norman Lebrecht commented (The maestro myth, pp.137–41):

Ozawa sported a Beatle fringe, flowery shirts and cowboy boots, and wore a roll-necked sweater instad of a dress-shirt at concerts. His appointment was clearly aimed at rejuvenating the Symphony Hall subscription list. Oriental mysticism was all the rage among the East Coast college kids who escaped conscription to Vietnam; and Ozawa was, they said, something else.

Ozawa 1973

In the early 70s I too basked in his charisma at London concerts, hearing him conduct an exhilarating Symphonie fantastique, as well as November steps—Takemitsu’s music becoming known partly thanks to Ozawa’s advocacy.

Ozawa LennyBaseball with Lenny, Japan 1970.

Here Ozawa directs Maki Ishii’s Sō-Gū II for Gagaku and Orchestra (1971):

Ozawa acted as music director of the Boston Symphony from 1973 to 2002, a tenure that “many thought too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’ “.

Screenshot

According to the NYT, he played a role in easing tensions between China and the USA in 1979, when the Boston Symphony toured China, still emerging from the Cultural Revolution (cf. the 1973 visits of the Philadelphia and London Philharmonic). Peter Gelb, then the orchestra’s publicity director, said that Ozawa had been crucial in making the tour happen, Chinese officials feeling “a connection with him since he had spent part of his childhood in China” (hmm, I wonder how that worked…).

Noting Ozawa’s fine ear for timbre and nuance, some magical selections:

Ravel: this playlist, with the Saito Kinen orchestra that he nurtured, contains his 2015 recordings of both L’enfant et les sortilèges and Shéhérazade (cf. my main Ravel page, and links). Here’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, from a concert in 2007:

Ozawa’s 1968 recording of Messian’s glorious Turangalîla, with Jeanne and Yvonne Loriod (on 2 LPs, with November steps), is on this playlist—here’s the fifth movement Joie du sang des étoiles (Gramophone: “turbo-thrusted to the point of kinky delirium”):

and the sixth, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (“an early window into Ozawa’s ear for obsessive detail and softer-than-soft textures”):

Ozawa also conducted the 1983 premiere of Messiaen’s monumental opera Saint François d’Assise.

All this can only be matched by Mahler 2, live in 1995 for a Nagasaki peace concert:

In 2016 Ozawa’s conversations with Haruki Murakami were published as Absolutely on music (introduced here and here). See also this Gramophone roundup from 2014, and the magazine’s review of his complete DG recordings. For more maestros, see The art of conducting: a roundup.

* As I write, the regular Guardian is strangely devoid of an obituary—a gap filled by the East London and West Essex Guardian, whose readers seem rather less likely to be avid tofu-eaters. Update: Guardian notice here.

Roundup for 2023!

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As I reflected in last year’s roundup,

like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order.

In order for this exercise to be worthwhile, you’ll have to click on the links! Ideally, spread the word by reposting on one of those “Social Media” Thingies They Have Nowadays… Even if you only read a dozen of these posts, then my labours will not have been in vain!

I’m going to adopt Stella Gibbons’ drôle device in Cold Comfort Farm, drawing attention with *** to passages (mostly posts, in this case—indeed, the book’s protagonist is Flora Poste) Not To Be Missed. And this list isn’t even exhaustive—the committed masochist can consult the monthly archive in the sidebar, scrolling waaay down.

I’ll begin with Nicolas Robertson, who alas joined the Heavenly Choir in November (see my tribute). His extraordinary anagram tales (introduced and listed here***), a kind of fantasy Esperanto fiction, are among the highlights of this blog, and in further tribute to his brilliant mind I have recently added two more:

So here are listings under some main themes (many, of course, belong under several themes, which is the point of giving them categories and tags, listed in the sidebar):

China (culture and ritual, Maoism and politics):

East Asia, other:

This year’s additions to my education in Tibetan and Uyghur cultures:

Turkey and West/Central Asia (see roundup):

Modern Europe:

Ethnomusicology and world music:

Jazz (see roundup***):

Pop:

Western Art Music:

Sport (see roundup):

Film/TV:

Loft best new

Arising from the transformation of my home:

Other:

For roundups of previous years’ musings, see 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. And here’s a roundup of roundups! The homepage is always useful for navigation.

And it’s always worth reminding you to watch my portrait film***
on the Li family Daoists, raison-d-être of this whole blog!

Gansu: a sequel

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This complements Gansu: connecting social trauma and expressive culture (which includes links to my other posts on Gansu)—as well as my post on a young bard during Covid. *

Seeking clues in the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples, in my first post I cited the Monograph on Opera for Gansu; here I address the Monograph on Narrative-singing (Zhongguo quyi zhi, Gansu juan 中国曲艺志，甘肃卷)—with less than satisfactory results.

In studying Chinese expressive culture, the neat categories of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera are porous, and best understood as a continuum, from solo singing through small-scale dramatic storytelling to fully-staged drama—onto which we might also map the spectrums of ceremonial–entertainment and amateur–occupational (see also my roundup of posts on narrative-singing).

I introduced the Anthology at length in

  • “Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”, Ethnomusicology 47.3 (2003), pp.287–337.

As I outlined in my review (NB §4.8), whereas much of the other volumes is dominated by musical transcriptions whose value it is hard to assess in the absence of recordings, the monographs on narrative-singing and opera contain some of the richest material for the imperial and modern histories of a wide variety of folk genres.

Across all volumes of the Anthology, the abilities and enthusiasm of collectors and editors varied widely by province (see e.g. Hebei, Liaoning). Of course the general tone of PRC publications is sanitised, but whereas some volumes of the monographs afford glimpses of the social trauma that people suffered under Maoism, my high hopes of the Gansu narrative-singing volume were deflated; there’s a remarkable lack of references to the single defining period in people’s lives, the famine and political terror of the late 1950s.

To understand such variations in coverage and tone, one would have to learn about political conditions in Gansu cultural departments over the period it was compiled—the allegiances of officials and their stance towards the Maoist era. The opera monograph (which alludes only a little more frankly to political traumas of Maoism, as you see from my previous post) was published in 1995, and the volume on narrative-singing music (Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng, Gansu juan 中国曲艺音乐集成, 甘肃卷) in 1998. However, the work for the narrative-singing monograph was fruitlessly protracted. It began in 1986; a draft was produced by 1996, but the work was interrupted from 1997 to 2003, and not until 2005 was a final version completed, its 855 pages published at last in 2008 (see Afterword, pp.827–8). Still, the text appears to contain no dates since 1985. From here I can’t assess the balance of lethargy and controversy in the long delay, but one suspects that political ghosts from the early reform era still lurked—even before the more thorough clampdown on expression under XI Jinping.

* * *

Gansu QYZ 15

On early 1950s’ attempts to “reform” the old occupational troupes (Overview, p.15)—
one of numerous passages requiring us to read between the lines.

The Overview (pp.3–21) outlines historical periods from early imperial times right through to the 1980s’ reform era. The style of the section on the early years of the PRC is bland, falling entirely within the boundaries of acceptable CCP historiography. Upon Liberation, cultural officials made efforts to register and control the mass of locally active groups (notably “narrative-singing festive bands and itinerant artists” quyi shehuodui yu liusan yiren 曲艺社火队与流散艺人).

During the campaign to Eliminate Feudal Superstition, some ancient genres and traditional items ceased to be performed. In the struggle against Anti-Rightists, some artists and narrative-singing workers were classified as Anti-Rightist elements and suffered politically. These abnormal phenomena were not corrected until 1962. (p.18)

As elsewhere (e.g. Gaoluo in Hebei, such as here, under “The 1961–64 restoration”) there was indeed a brief lull in the early 60s between extreme leftist campaigns, but any “correction” was highly precarious. Most glaringly, this section avoids any mention of the famine.

Official sources have long been more able to make limited acknowledgement of the casualties of the Cultural Revolution than of the preceding fifteen years of Maoist campaigns. Still in standard terms, the Overview goes on to describe the assault on traditional culture and its representatives from 1966—the closure of teahouses, the banishing of cultural workers to the countryside, the destruction of a wealth of material collected since Liberation, and some cases of victimisation and murder.

In particular regions, the phenomenon appeared of people being paraded, sentenced, and even persecuted to death for secretly performing, secretly watching, secretly narrating, or secretly listening to traditional narrative-singing.

At least this suggests that there were plenty of people indulging in such illicit activities—indeed, they must have been commonly taking such risks ever since the mid-1950s. An instance, again from the Cultural Revolution: like errentai performer Guo Youshan in Inner Mongolia (see Xu Tong‘s film Cut out the eyes), in the section on Liangzhou xianxiao (p.73, see below) we learn that the blind performer Zhang Tianmao 张天茂 (b.1935) was struggled for “singing in secret” (touchang 偷唱). (Zhang survived to become a celebrity of the genre in his 80s, lauded for the reified Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) project (see e.g. here), performing on stage and issuing many CDs. Such reversals of fortune were commonplace throughout the society).

Rather than documenting the escalating desperation throughout society as collectivisation and the commune system were enforced, CCP historiographers have always found it far more comfortable to toe the line by latching onto the firm dates of prestigious official events. As in the opera monograph, the “Major events” section (pp.25–52) documents the grand official festivals, with new troupes performing new items throughout the whole period—when the only major events that could have mattered to people were constant hunger and threat of arrest. By contrast with the revealing material in the Appendices of the Hunan (and Henan, n.1 there) volumes, I learn little from the few documents between 1956 and 1962 from the Gansu Bureau of Culture (pp.815–20).

Gansu baojuan
Dai Xingwei, transmitter of the Hexi baojuan tradition, copying a scroll. Source.

A major context for rural narrative-singing, obscured by the propaganda of state modernisation, is ritual. Gansu is among the main regions where “precious scrolls” (baojuan 宝卷) are still performed (see e.g. recent studies by Li Guisheng 李贵生 and Wang Mingbo 王明博, Cheng Guojun 程国君, and Liu Yonghong 刘永红; see also under Ningxia; cf. Hebei). Known in Gansu as “reciting scrolls” nianjuan 念卷 (pp.67–70, 625–6) or “morality tales” shanshu 善书, since 2006 these genres have been reified for the ICH project, resulting in the publication of many early manuscripts (see e.g. this survey by Cheng Guojun 程国君; for largely literary perspectives in English, see the work of Victor Mair and Wilt Idema)—while avoiding references to the traumas of their senior transmitters.

Similarly religious in content and context are the “virtuous and filial” xianxiao 贤孝 genres,  notably “Hezhou xianxiao” (pp.95–7) around Linxia, and “Liangzhou xianxiao” (pp.71–3) around Wuwei (such official names, coined since the 1950s, are generally misleading—e.g. Xi’an guyue, Jiangnan sizhu, Hebei chuige). Meanwhile “religious music” was cannily redefined as instrumental ensemble music for performance on stage.

The Monograph proclaims the CCP cultural authorities’ attempts to reform and “develop” the ritual genres of Gansu, but as fieldwork in Shaanbei shows, such efforts were sporadic, and traditional contexts obstinate.  Many such genres were dominated by blind performers. In 1984 a national musical contest for blind artists was held in Beijing (p.73).

Gansu QYZ 84

A passage on “singing fengshui” (chang fengshui 唱风水) around Qingyang in east Gansu (pp.83–5) provides a tiny clue to the surreptitious survival of ritual:

After the founding of the PRC, since large-scale activities like jiao Offerings, rain prayers, and temple rituals came under suspicion for their colouring of feudal superstitious activities, they went underground (xiaosheng yinji 消声隐迹). But small-scale activities organised by household heads, like mortuary rituals (祭祀亡灵), pacifying the dwelling and house-building (anzhai jianfang 安宅建房), still persisted. Whoever suffered a death in the family, whether rich or poor, they would invite a fengshui master to sing a few sections of scripture. […] The reward was agreed in advance by both sides.

(“Rewards” were always a matter of negotation; at such horrific times, performers would have been desperate for any kind of remuneration. Peasant families in Tianzhen, north Shanxi, still managed to invite Daoists in the “years of difficulty”—but even the village cadres came to lift the coffin just so they could get some free gao paste to eat.)

One even wonders how a solo genre like “telling of spring” (shuo chun 说春) (pp.122–4), auspicious New Year’s songs apparently sung by itinerant beggars, could have fared during times of extreme adversity. In these monographs, other useful sections bearing on traditional activity include “Performing customs” (yanchu xisu) (pp.622–34) and “Anecdotes and legends” (Tiewen chuanshuo) (pp.641–61).

Zhang Huixian

Even the Biographies (pp.777–807) contain slim pickings. We can only imagine the tribulations of performers like Zhang Huixian (1892–1970, above), one of few female baojuan performers, based in a village in Jingchuan county (p.790).

But no-one was safe—neither poor itinerant peasant performers nor the officially-recognised representatives of the state troupes; neither obstinate traditionalists nor enthusiastic Party reformers. Wen Bingheng 文炳恒 (1913–58, p.801), organiser of folk performing groups in Heshui county, took part keenly in CCP cultural projects before and after the 1949 “Liberation”.  But during the Three Antis (sanfan) campaign of 1951, in blowing the whistle on the corruption of “a certain cadre” he was erroneously classed as a counter-revolutionary element; in 1958 he was sentenced to death.

A different kind of danger: Yang Wensheng 杨文生 (1933–58, pp.806–7), performer of xiangsheng skits with the PLA, was “martyred” in the south Gansu region during a campaign against “bandits”—presumably referring to Tibetan insurgents (among my posts on Tibet, see e.g. here) (we’re not told about Tibetans who perished under the Chinese onslaught).

Of course the biographies can only be selective, featuring just some of those whom the collectors and editors identified as leading bearers of tradition; the mass of lowly performers in the countryside remain largely unsung. Despite the vast loss of life around 1960, death dates at the time are not prominent in the biographies—though one feels almost as bad for those who survived the horrors of Maoism.

* * *

I still regard the Anthology as an essential basic source to open doors onto the depth of folk expressive culture in China. Besides the wealth of data on early history in the monographs, I suppose it’s stating the obvious to observe that for more rewarding material on the Maoist era we would have to seek out unofficial memoirs (see Ian Johnson’s excellent recent book Sparks), which are in short supply.

Alas, it’s already getting late to rectify the glaring omissions of official sources by doing fieldwork. One might decide to write a biography of one folk performer, or document one genre over a defined period; documenting the transformations of the scene since the 1980s’ reforms would make a valuable project in itself. We might even find a senior artist, perhaps born in the 1940s, to offer clear recollections of the late 1950s. Even as the Maoist era recedes, the famine and the whole political climate of the time will always be the elephant in the room.

* * *

* Related posts include China: commemorating trauma, Guo Yuhua, and China: memory music, society; more broadly, cf. links under Society and soundscape.

Gansu: connecting social trauma and expressive culture

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Gansu map
Gansu: regions. Source.

The province of Gansu was chronically poor even before the horrifying abuses its people suffered under Maoism, culminating in (but not limited to) the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. Nor should we forget the non-Chinese ethnic inhabitants of the region, who were targeted just as brutally through the period—see under Recent posts on Tibet, notably for Amdo (e.g. Labrang, here and here).

I was again reminded of Gansu by Ian Johnson’s fine book Sparks, highlighting a brave group of students in Tianshui denouncing the heartless, mendacious Party during the 1960 famine. Here I’ll reiterate themes that I began to explore in China: memory. music, and society, the Maoist labour-camp system, Famine and expressive culture, and Cultural Revolutions.

Many documents on Gansu are to be found in Yang Jisheng’s definitive exposé Tombstone, as well as the China famine 1959–1961 site. Before the studies of Frank Dikötter (Mao’s great famine) and Xun Zhou, Jasper Becker already gave a useful introduction to the disaster in Gansu in his 1996 book Hungry ghosts.

The Hexi corridor, leading deeper into the oasis towns of Central Asia, is perhaps most widely known by the early Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang, projecting a proud image of the glories of ancient Chinese culture. So again Ian Johnson does well to remind us of the memoirs of Gao Ertai, revealing bitter political turmoil there in the 1960s.

Qingshui Daoists

Looking again at this undated image (in the “Instrumental music” [sic] volumes of the Anthology) from the Qingshui Bureau of Culture (“Welcoming Water ritual of Huashan Daoists” 清水道教华山派科仪中的“迎水”), I surmise it was taken in the 1980s.

I’ve long felt that Gansu was a major lacuna in coverage of household Daoist ritual. I’ve noted recent developments in Wuwei (Another Daoist debate), and in Jingyuan county northeast of Lanzhou (Maoist worship in Gansu). Counties where some of the most active Daoist groups are based, such as Zhangye, Jingtai, and Tongwei, are among those where the famine was particularly severe (for the famine in Tongwei, see e.g. Dikötter pp.307–9).

Gansu Daoists https://stephenjones.blog/2018/09/15/mao-worship/

More images from the “instrumental music” volumes of the Anthology for Gansu:
Daoists of the Daode guan temple, Zhangye county;
Cao Jixiang’s Daoist band performing the Ten Offerings ritual, Jingtai county;
Cao Jixiang’s band seated.

However, most scholars of Daoism still gravitate to the image of imperial grandeur, focusing on manuscripts with ancient ancestry rather than documenting transmission history since the mid-20th century, or people’s lives. But whether we’re interested in Daoist ritual before 1949 or before the Song dynasty, the condition in which we find it today is permeated by the bitter experiences of its practitioners and patrons since the 1950s.

The range of expressive culture in Gansu—folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, shawm bands, and so on, embodies the sound of suffering. Vignettes on some genres include

For Gansu in recent Chinese movies, see

In such extreme conditions of social disintegration, it seems most unlikely that anyone could muster any energy to perform, either for ceremonial or entertainment—but even in extremis (indeed, particularly in extremis), villagers resorted to their religious traditions, staging rituals to alleviate adversity and to resist collectivisation (note The temple of memories); and (as in Hunan and Hebei) refugee groups banded into itinerant folk performing troupes in a desperate bid to survive. Not just local archives, but some published county gazetteers (like that of Yanggao in north Shanxi), give impressively frank accounts of the famine years.

Gansu famine
Source.

The great Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples may be flawed, but if used selectively it can yield useful material—particularly the Monographs on Opera and Narrative-singing (as I explain in my extensive review of the whole project, cited here). The Appendices of the Narrative-singing Monograph for Hunan reproduce concerned documents from regional Cultural Bureaus over the period, providing startling evidence of social disruption. I discuss the equivalent volume for Gansu in a separate post, but the Opera Monograph (Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Gansu juan 中国戏曲志, 甘肃卷 [1995]) doesn’t include such documents. The introductory Overview, under “Opera in Gansu since the founding of the PRC” (pp.25–34) has terse hints at the crisis.

Right from the 1949 “Liberation”, Gansu was part of the national drive to “rescue” the rich heritage of regional genres, led by the new cultural units set up at county, regional and provincial levels (for brief accounts of a plethora of state-funded and amateur groups, note pp.436–524) . But from 1957, Party “rectification” was infecting such institutions, and the ensuing Anti-rightist campaign was bitter and destructive. Even as society collapsed further with the 1958 Great Leap, leading to the famine, opera workers were regimented to create new dramas reflecting the agenda of high socialism.

The 1959 “celebrations” around the 10th anniversary of the founding of the PRC featured new items from eleven genres—not just qinqiang and Peking opera, but regional folk styles like shadow-puppetry of south Gansu 陇南影子腔, qingshui quzi 清水曲子, Yulei huadeng xi 玉垒花灯戏, Wuwei xianxiao 武威贤孝, and daoqing from east Gansu 陇东道情. The latter was now adapted into the staged form Longju 陇剧, with a newly-formed state troupe embarking on a prestigious national tour. But

From 1960, Gansu suffered a succession of natural disasters [sic], and opera work went into crisis; with a great increase in the proportion of sick and injured, many opera troupes were unable to maintain regular activity.  Some troupes used the pretext of touring to go to Xinjiang in search of food.

Again, fleeing to the northwest was a common measure—indeed, at the time, many Uyghurs were taking refuge even further northwest in the USSR (cf. the long migration of the Dungan people).

By 1962, in a common pattern throughout China, many county-level troupes were laid off, and many artists migrated or changed trades. At the same time (cf. Hunan),

some opera troupes and informal folk opera groups used the opportunity to perform bad and forbidden operas such as Shazi bao 杀子报 and Da shangdiao 大上吊, and in some regions harmful customs (louxi 陋习) from the past like “exorcising the stage” (datai 打台, jitai 祭台, pp.594–5), and singing holy dramas (chang shenxi 唱神戏) were revived, creating an adverse social influence. After the general improvement over the whole province from 1963, this was corrected [sic].

The “chronicle of major events” for 1959 to 1964 (pp.70–75), supplemented by lists of official opera festivals for those years (pp.684–98), has a typical list of glamorous official events, giving no hint of the unfolding disaster. As ever, we have to read between the lines. With a basic awareness of the disastrous social climate, even the roster of official festivals over the period makes disturbing reading. Those chosen for the state performing troupes were in a small minority of folk artists throughout the countryside. Life in the urban troupes might provide them with a tenuous lifeline as long as they were still able to function, but institutions were becoming ever more vulnerable: with political campaigns targeting “rightists” and anyone who dared speak out, they too lived in a climate of fear. One can only imagine that even the state performers would have been severely malnourished, at the risk of being sent to labour camp, while their families back in the countryside were starving (cf. household Daoist Li Qing in north Shanxi).

Gansu page

Even before the imminent casualties of the early Cultural Revolution, death rates around 1960 among folk performers would have been just as high as among the general population. Although I don’t find such dates prominent among the biographies of celebrated artists in either the Opera Monograph or other volumes for Gansu, among the countless lives cut short there are doubtless tragic stories to be told—like those of (p.674, above) qinqiang performers Xin Xing’an (1930–59), who died after being “struggled” at the height of the Anti-rightist campaign, and Chen Huiying (1930–61), portrayed as working herself to death in the spirit of self-sacrifice.

* * *

Like Henan and Anhui, Gansu was an extreme case, but most of the senior performers I was meeting in other regions from 1986 to 2018 shared similar experiences that were none too simple to elicit. The adjacent region of Shaanbei, with its barren loess hills, shares a history of poverty and famine, not least under Maoism: among posts listed here, note the work of Guo Yuhua.

The famine, and the whole Maoist era, are major themes in my own work on the Gaoluo village ritual association and the Li family Daoists, and in our fieldwork in Hebei and Shanxi (see under Local ritual). There’s always a complex story to be told, as in this extraordinary 1959 image of former Buddhist monk Daguang with his young ritual disciples in North Xinzhuang village in the Beijing suburbs—at the height of the Great Leap and the famine:

North Xinzhuang 1959

Lives of Chinese women

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Two new books

Among many stimulating articles on the site of the China Books Review, two caught my attention, on the lives of Chinese women.

It’s an important topic, much studied—when socialist revolutions always promise more for women than they deliver. [1] Both reviewers point out the increasing sensitivity of broaching such issues: as Irene Zhang observes, such works are all the more notable “in a Chinese media landscape increasingly hostile to feminists, and with state organs intent on stamping out grassroots activism”.

That comment comes from Zhang’s review of

  • Yi Xiaohe 易小荷, Yanzhen 盐镇 [Salt town] (2023).

Yan zhen cover

The book gives “profiles of ten women of different generations, occupations, and social statuses” in the small town [2] of Xianshi in Sichuan—“a former brothel madam, a cotton fluffer’s wife, a hotelier, a lesbian village cadre, a struggling mother, a butcher’s daughter, a beautician, a divorced university dropout, an orphaned migrant worker, and a 17-year-old prostitute.”

Zhang observes:

Interwoven through the ten profiles are themes that define rural womanhood: discrimination, domestic violence, family duty, and resilient entrepreneurship. 

As Yi Xiaohe sums up,

Life in Salt Town is a series of tiny cuts and open wounds. Women are trying to stanch the bleeding, while men are adding salt to the wounds.

Zhang’s review makes some salient [sic] critical points, concluding:

Rural Chinese women live with deep intergenerational trauma from centuries of deprivation and state violence, with few guarantees of institutional protection. They still struggle to move upward in a stubbornly discriminatory society all too happy to exploit their labor. While tackling the topic is commendable, in Salt town the big-city writer looks at the small town the same way we look at this history today—from a safe distance. What hurts Xianshi’s women is still at large.

* * *

In the same issue is a review by Zheng Churan—one of the “Feminist Five”:

  • Zhu Xiaobin 朱晓玢, Tade gongchang buzaomeng: shisanwei nügong dagong shi 她的工廠不造夢 ──十三位深圳女工的打工史 [Her factory makes no dreams: the working stories of thirteen Shenzhen female workers] (2022).

Zhu Xiaobin cover

Whereas Salt town soon became a bestseller in the PRC, Zhu’s book, published in Taiwan, is banned in mainland China. It tells the stories of thirteen women—as Zheng observes, a more diverse sample than in Lesley T. Chang’s 2008 book Factory girls: from village to city in a changing China.

Her Factory Makes No Dreams tells the stories of individual rebellion by female workers: escaping from arranged marriages; choosing to live alone instead of in abusive domestic situations; going on strike against unfair working conditions; and defying patriarchal society by participating in feminist movements against sexual harassment.

The review goes on:

Reporting the stories of female factory workers inevitably touches upon sensitive topics that can provoke the ire of authorities: gender inequality; exploitation of workers; “stability maintenance” measures to crack down on protest; an unfair household registration system; and shocking wealth disparity. 

In conclusion, Zheng writes:

Where once the voices of female workers were heard, now the Chinese state has dismantled these windows into their lives. This is lamentable for the Chinese people, not only because they no longer have the opportunity to hear the stories and demands of workers from different classes, but because a greater crisis lurks ahead. With declining employment rates in China, low birth rates and escalating social conflict—when stability maintenance policies can no longer quell the anger of those who face injustice—without these bridges to the public, will the people still be able to navigate their difficulties peacefully and without violence?

[1] Among many authors to read in in English are Elisabeth Croll, Gail Hershatter, Harriet Evans, and Leta Hong Fincher. For my paltry observations on the lives of women in China (mainly in the rural north) and elsewhere, click here; see also Chinese translations of Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney.

[2] Small towns (zhen), or townships, between the county-towns and the villages, are an important nexus: see e.g. Dong Xiaoping here.

Sparks

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Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s underground historians and their battle for the future (2023).

Following The souls of China (2017), Ian’s valuable survey of the diverse manifestations of religious activity in the PRC, this is a most admirable study—thoughtful and eminently readable. Ian’s website lists the many rave reviews by people far more qualified than me, so I need hardly add to them; but I’d really like to spread the word still further. For his teaching notes, click here.

Sparks revolves around the control of history (“a battleground for the present”), and the role of memory in countering official propaganda. While “dissidents” are well documented for the Soviet bloc (for the USSR itself, Ian refers to Orlando Figes’ The whisperers; see also under Life behind the Iron Curtain), their Chinese counterparts have been less prominent in the public eye (see e.g. China: memory, music, society).

The book’s protagonists are “underground historians” (Sebastian Veg: “amateur or one might say guerrilla historians”), waging an “asymmetrical battle between a few, often beleaguered citizens opposing an overwhelmingly strong state”. While much of the material here is available in niches of academia (the work of the counter-historians has been highlighted by Western scholars such as Geremie Barmé, David Ownby, and Sebastian Veg), Ian portrays even activists who are already quite well-known with great clarity and perception. A major thread through all this is the personal missions of Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue.

Ai Xiaoming (left) and Jiang Xue—among the images by Sim Chi Yin that enrich the book.

As noted in a review by Han Zhang, Ian’s first book on China, Wild grass (2004), covered a not dissimilar group of activists during a relatively liberal period. Whereas after the authoritarian clampdown since 2016 his tone might seem less upbeat, nonetheless the work of those introduced in Sparks continues to inspire hope, even amidst the gruesome litany of atrocities, persecutions, and cover-ups that they document.

Ian meshes the successive eras of modern China: pre-Liberation, Maoism, the “reform and opening” of the 1980s and the early 21st century, back to the current retrenchment under Xi Jinping.

This conviction of history’s importance drives a movement of underground historians that has slowly gained momentum over the past twenty years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad group of some of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists, and journalists. Some are outsiders and might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property, and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures, and prison to publish samizdat journals, banned books, and independent documentary films. They seek to correct the Party’s misrepresentation of the past and change their country’s slide toward ever-stronger authoritarian control. And they do so by using new technologies to publicize the regime’s failings, often linking current problems to debacles of the past.

It’s long been clear that not all Chinese people gullibly accept Party propaganda. As the state reverts to more draconian policies, while the growth in new technology helps the security surveillance apparatus, righteous Chinese historians also use it to find ways to evade censorship. And their mission is important for our understanding of China:

If people grow up thinking that the Chinese Communist Party played a key role in fighting the Japanese, took power thanks to popular support, and is led by a group of meritocratic patriots, then they will have a hard time understanding why China is prone to purges, corruption, and political violence.

* * *

Sparks is in three parts, The Past, The Present, and The Future. The chapters are interspersed with vignettes on Memory.

Ai Jiabiangou

Part One opens with the labour camp of Jiabiangou in the poor northwestern province of Gansu, a series of determined investigations culminating in the long documentaries of Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bing. And this is no mere documenting a traumatic past, as Ai Xiaoming’s experience spells out:

The “hit, smash, loot” tactics of the Cultural Revolution that she and her family had experienced were not unique and are not dead; it is how the party regularly deals with people who have different views—especially when they dare touch on Communist Party history.

Still in the northwest, the memoirs of Gao Ertai (a Jiabiangou survivor) reveal the political turmoil at the Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang in the 1960s.

Spark
Members of the Spark group, 1960:
Tan Chanxue, Sun Ziyun, Zhou Shanyou, Ding Hengwu.

A major theme is the work of Hu Jie and Jiang Xue on the short-lived magazine Spark, published by a group of students in Tianshui in 1960. At first they had the upright resolve to make the people’s desperate plight during the famine known to the central leadership, but soon, as it became clear that the latter had compelled the chain of regional and local cadres to report fictitious, exaggerated grain yields, they penned cogent critiques denouncing the people’s communes and the whole socialist edifice. Forty-three of those involved were soon arrested and sentenced to long prison terms; two of the leaders, Zhang Chunyuan and Du Yinghua, were executed in 1970.

Ian cites the solitary anti-Nazi propaganda of Otto and Elsie Hampel under Hitler, driven to tell the truth even if the attempt was futile—a story evoked in Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone / Alone in Berlin.

Xinghuo
Spark 1st edition, 1960: “Give up your fantasies and prepare to fight!”.

From 2008 Hu Jie filmed compelling interviews with many of the original Spark group, still passionate in their determination to speak the truth. He released a moving documentary online in 2013 (note the mournful shawms from 3.00 to commemorate Du Yinghua):

In “Memory: Snow’s visit”, Ian introduces Jiang Xue’s own work on Spark with a vignette on her extended, intimate interview with Xiang Chengjian in 2016—here’s the film, edited by Tiger Temple (see below) (slightly different edit here):

Just as moving is an earlier film by Hu Jie, Searching for Lin Zhao’s soul (2004), on the horrifying fate of a young Peking University student, unable to compromise her democratic ideals as society disintegrated in the wake of the Anti-Rightist campaign, who was imprisoned for six years before she was executed in 1968:

Ian looks back at the Party’s machinations, casualties, and pathological purges at Yan’an in the wartime Shaanbei Base Area, with the stories of Liu Zhidan and Liu Jiantong’s banned 1962 novel about him; of Gao Gang, Wang Ming, and Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun. Even after a palatable version of the Maoist era was being fabricated in the 1980s, and as “Red tourism” swept the country, Gao Hua embarked on a scathing indictment of the Yan’an period.

Ian gained experience of the Party’s control of archives in his study of the fate of the Maoshan temples since the 1930s (see Ritual life around Suzhou). Under Xi Jinping, with history ever more rigidly controlled, the National Museum of China has become a mere propaganda showcase.

In Part Two we meet the novelist Wang Xiaobo and his wife Li Yinhe, documenting subaltern lives; and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, whose research on “the sufferers” in Yangjiagou village thoroughly demolished the Shaanbei myth. In Xi’an (setting for the cult novels of Jia Pingwa) Ian accompanies Jiang Xue to visit citizen journalist Zhang Shihe (“Tiger Temple”), with his bitter past as a child labourer in the Cultural Revolution. We eavesdrop on meetings of the editors of the Zhiwuzhi public forum.

Returning to Ai Xiaoming, Ian explains her background, and her support for rights-defender lawyers. Assessing the current retrenchment she comments,

The severe political pressure unleashed through governmental response has made it clear that it is unshakable, it does not need to listen, it has idolized itself. What happened in the past, the demonization of those critical of the government, is taking place once again.

The mass murders of the early Cultural Revolution in Daoxian county, Hunan, where—at the instigation of the Party—over 9,000 were murdered in August 1967, have been exhaustively researched by Tan Hecheng, and published in English as The killing wind: a Chinese county’s descent into madness during the Cultural Revolution. Ian provides a vignette on Yu Luoke’s exposé of the massacre in Daxing county in the Beijing suburbs at the same time. Yu was arrested and executed in 1970, but since 2016 his story has been circulating again.

A couple of instances of how such scars should impact on our fieldwork: in the 1990s I was impressed to find amateur Daoist and Buddhist ritual groups in Daxing, but I never learned of the 1967 massacre there. Ian comments further:

One survey of local gazetteers [Yang Su, Collective killings in rural China during the Cultural Revolution] shows that between four hundred thousand and 1.5 million people perished in similar incidents, meaning there were perhaps another one hundred Dao County massacres around this time.

And, from a distance, I’ve long been curious about the expressive culture of Gansu province—including its household Daoist traditions. The counties that scholars of religious and musical life should do fieldwork are among those where the most disturbing abuses under Maoism took place—so somehow we have to integrate society and culture into our studies.

Ian visits retired film historian Wu Di, co-founder of Remembrance (one of a whole series of samizdat journals), taking up the shocking topic of high-school girls in Beijing torturing and beating their vice-principal Bian Zhongyun to death in 1966—subject of another harrowing film by Hu Jie, Though I am gone, recounted by her bereaved husband:

This leads the Remembrance group to debate the career of Red Guard poster-girl Song Binbin, who witnessed (at least) the murder.

In Sichuan we meet Huang Zerong, who, undaunted by over two decades in labour camp as a “Rightist”, in his old age began publishing an unofficial history magazine, Small scars of the past—earning him another prison sentence, a fine, and close surveillance. In a reproach to the reluctance to “dwell on the past” (common among many traumatised peoples), he explains the importance of the 1958 Anti-Rightist Campaign:

Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would have not have been Tiananmen.

Fanning out from Beijing, Cui Yongyuan (Oral History Centre) and Wu Wenguang (Village Documentary Project and Folk Memory Project, focusing on the Great Famine) have done impressive work.

LWL
Li Wenliang.

Part Three, “The Future”, reveals shifting concerns. Ian documents the Coronavirus in Wuhan and whistle-blower Li Wenliang; while the Party was busy suppressing the truth, the awful realities of life under a draconian lockdown were again exposed by independent counter-historians, including Ai Xiaoming, along with front-line diarist-reporters like Zhang Zhan and the reputable novelist Fang Fang. Ian’s account is always nuanced:

The events in Wuhan show the potential anger, dissatisfaction, and critical thinking that lies beneath the surface. People like Ai Xiaoming, Jiang Xue, Tiger Temple, and Tan Hecheng represent a minority of Chinese. But their well-articulated critiques resonate when people are shaken from their lethargy.This is why one way to look at the Wuhan outbreak is as an example of government power. But a more convincing explanation is that it was a classic example of the repeated eruptions against unchecked government authority.

fig.68
Lhasa, 1966: from Woeser’s Forbidden memory.

The ever more vexed flashpoints of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong are another major area for underground historians. Ian introduces the work of Tsering Woeser on her father’s photos of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa, and the Tibetan stories collected in Conflicting memories. We learn of the travails of Hong Kong and the elimination of the free publishing world there. Part Three ends, perhaps rather more tangentially, with another trip with Jiang Xue to visit the Zhongnanshan hermits (also outside society), alongside an account of the lockdown in Xi’an.

The excellent Conclusion confronts the underlying questions: are the odds too great, is resistance to the authoritarian state useless, are those few who resist doomed to failure? Ian ponders how we should engage with China, challenging conventional wisdom on how to view it—when

the dominant way of understanding China is that nothing happens there except a string of dystopian horrors: surveillance, cultural genocide, mindless nationalism.

But

Government propagandists can flood the media with their version of reality or slow down unwanted information. This sophisticated form of censoring means that most people will still agree with the government version of events. And yet enough people now have access to alternative interpretations of the past that questioning has become widespread and persistent, despite harsher and harsher crackdowns. […]

The fact that people still resist and do so in a more coordinated form than at any time in the past, seems more significant than the banal point that an authoritarian regime is authoritarian.The fact is that independent thought lives in China. It has not been crushed.

He goes on,

The Party does not always win. Despite overwhelming odds, people inside China today still publish works and make films that challenge authority. Their ideas continue to spread, and when problems in society reach a critical point, people look to them for ways of thinking about their country. This is why Xi Jinping has made control of history one of his signature policies—because he recognises counter-history as an existential threat.

Thus Ian queries whether amnesia has really triumphed:

Saying that “most people” don’t know or care is a truism applicable to almost every society in every era; what matters is that many Chinese do know and continue to battle, today, to change their society.

Moreover,

Prosperity is not inevitable. For any country, it requires constant self-reflection and an ability to think up new solutions to new problems. The Chinese Communist Party’s ability to do so is open to question, especially when we consider its decade-long aversion to meaningful economic reform and its failure to build a top-ranked education system for non-elites.

Before the extensive Bibliography comes a useful Appendix on Exploring China’s Underground History. Ian notes dGenerate Films, Icarus Films, and the Chinese Independent Film Archive, while on YouTube there are channels for Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Tiger Temple—I’ve featured some of his recommendations above. He also offers a succinct list of recommended books. And an important new site, the China Unofficial Archives, has just gone live (see my introduction). Endnotes (a system that I much admire, cf. Eat the Buddha) provide detailed further references.

* * *

One naturally characterises such figures as “brave”. Guo Yuhua, herself long punished by the authorities and harassed by state security, told me she doesn’t feel particularly brave: rather she acts out of a sense of duty—part of a long tradition of righteous scholars throughout Chinese history, as Ian observes. One can only feel the deepest respect for the people who have stood up for truth, and for those who document their labours.

Still, these are people whom most of us wouldn’t normally encounter—or might not be aware of encountering. So where might The Masses stand on all this—those who swallow their scruples for the sake of a quiet life for themselves and their families? One finds plenty of resentment, of course, and even resistance—such as from organised religious groups; and individual cynicism is often heard, both from those clearly targeted, like “reactionaries”, and from the peasantry, who suffered just as grievously and in larger numbers. But just as distressing are the fates of the many who fervently believed in the Party, yet were assaulted in successive campaigns.

Foreign scholars may visit China for a variety of reasons. However much we may wish to eschew politics, and however much we like and esteem our friends in China, the gruesome history of the Party, trampling people’s lives, is the essential backdrop to all the topics that we study in modern (and indeed imperial) China—including history, culture (art, architecture, music, literature), and religion (see my post Cultural Revolutions). Mao was right about one thing: “There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics”. No walks of life have been untouched by all this, and Sparks should be essential reading for us all.

Song of suffering

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Uh-oh, I’ve been cajoled into giving local partygoers another burst on the erhu fiddle—* I’m more used to people asking me not to play it… This gives me another pretext to roll out my old excuses, such as “It was in tune when I bought it”, and “I just sort of… picked it up” (cf. my early days with Ray Man).

Along with Abing’s inescapable Erquan yingyue (immortalised in Yang Yinliu‘s 1950 recording), the plangent Jianghe shui (literally “River waters”, but often rendered, suitably, as “Song of suffering”) has been a mainstay of the erhu concert repertoire since the 1960s (see here, and David Badagnani’s notes).

Jianghe shui score

The concert piece derives from a melody of traditional shengguan ritual wind ensembles in south Liaoning—sadly, I can’t find a rendition, so we’ll just have to imagine it from other recordings, such as the guttural shawms on #6 of my Audio Gallery in the sidebar (notes here). Soon after the 1949 “Liberation” it was adapted to the conservatoire style (for which see here, and here) as a solo for the double guanzi oboe (shuangguan)—here’s Gu Xinshan with the Lüda Song and Dance Troupe of Dalian in 1956:

Hu Zhihou on (single) guanzi, with a sparsely-inflected rendition:

and Hu Haiquan on suona shawm:

Indeed, the melody has re-entered the folk repertoire in Liaoning, as we can hear on #12 of the Ocora CD Chine: musiques de la première lune.

But Jianghe shui soon came to be known mainly as an erhu solo, accompanied by yangqin dulcimer, following Huang Haihuai’s 1962 arrangement—click here for his recording from 1963.

Min 1963
Min Huifen, 1963.

It became a signature piece of the great Min Huifen—here she is in 2007:

Even conservatoire solos were largely a male preserve until the 1980s (see e.g. the archive CD-set Xianguan chuanqi here), when women players began to dominate; see e.g. Song Fei’s lecture-demonstration on her own highly emotive interpretation.

In between the flexibility of the traditional wind ensemble style and the rigidly-prescribed  conservatoire version, all I might add is that while playing Jianghe shui on erhu it’s always worth bearing in mind the plaintive timbre of the double reed. And I learn much from the sheer physical dynamism of the great players, their kinetic grace with both hands and arms. Of course I can’t even begin to emulate the sheer technical perfection of conservatoire virtuosos, but I can just about get away with it before an audience that has never heard real Chinese musicians who can actually play it. And as a change from my usual diet of rural funerals and temple fairs, it’s an interesting challenge to think myself into the heart-on-sleeve romanticism of the conservatoire style.

Dongfang hong

In 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the wind version was included in the dance film The East is Red, in the overture depicting The Masses’ Sufferings under the Old Society (here, from 2.02). That conformist image may still resonate with some of the old Party faithful, but we might also hear Jianghe shui as evoking the sufferings inflicted on the people since “Liberation”, through all the campaigns of the Maoist era (see e.g. Guo Yuhua’s brilliant Narratives of the sufferers, China: commemorating trauma, and China: memory, music, society). Anyway, quite apart from conservatoire romanticism, the varied soundscape of the peasants themselves—local opera, folk-song, blind bards, shawm bands—is deeply imbued with suffering.

* Cf. my bold attempt to play Bach à la chinoise; for some real—nay astounding—erhu playing, don’t miss Sun Huang’s Saint-Saëns! Click here for an exquisite 1950s’ duet with qin zither. See also A brief guide to Chinese fiddles, and even Indian and world fiddles.

Resisting fakelore

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Kundera and Pawlikowski

Kundera

In memory of Milan Kundera (1929–2023; wiki, obituary), a favourite of mine is his first novel,

  • The joke (Žert, 1967).

Joke cover

Kundera worked on the book in the years following his expulsion from the Party in 1950. Published briefly before the Prague Spring was crushed, it shows personal and political to be enmeshed, as well as the degradation, nihilism, and duplicity of life under state socialism—through a brilliant exposé of the “fakelore” indignities to which the regime subjected traditional culture in Moravia.

For insights on the musical elements of The joke, I recommend

  • Michael Beckerman, “Kundera’s musical joke and ‘folk’ music in Czechoslovakia, 1948–?”, in Mark Slobin (ed.), Retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern Europe (altogether a useful volume—see under Musical cultures of East Europe).

Joke film

With The Ride of the Kings pageant as the novel’s climax, Kundera saw through the propaganda:

… Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise. […]
The state supported folk music and festivals in an attempt to show, quite simply, that in this “people’s paradise” the folk, at least, were alive and well.

Cynical as Kundera’s alter ego Ludvik is, he has a genuine attachment to the folk culture that was now being distorted. But his revenge is hollow. Here’s an excerpt from the 1969 screen adaptation by Jaromil Jireš:

Just as fascinating is Jireš’ short film about the Ride of the Kings:

* * *

Cold War

All this, and more, is brilliantly evoked in the Polish movie

Ravishingly filmed in black-and-white, it’s a visual and musical tour de force. The early scenes, soon after the Communist takeover, are revealing in themselves. Fieldworkers Wiktor and Irena avidly record folk musicians in the countryside, then help develop the sanitised style of the “Mazurek” song-and-dance ensemble (based on the real-life  Mazowsze troupe), until the folk ethos is further compromised by numbers in service of the Party agenda.

My post on folk traditions of Poland opens with this brief period of energy in the collection of folk music after the Communist takeover. The soundtrack, masterminded by Marcin Masecki, illuminates the whole drama. Opening strikingly with a gutsy song accompanied by bagpipe and fiddle in a snowy village, the early scenes, with Irena and Wiktor inspired by the project, communicate the whole excitement of discovering folk culture through fieldwork (see also Musics lost and found).

As in The joke, prescriptive apparatchiks play a disturbing role. Their companion Kaczmarek, soon to become director of the new state troupe, doesn’t share their enthusiasm; this revealing exchange is horribly familiar to me from meetings with cultural cadres in China:

You’re not afraid it’s too crude, too primitive?
No, why?
Where I come from, every drunk sings like this.

Kaczmarek is also a believer in racial purity. Listening to a beautiful recording they’ve just made:

What language are they singing in?
Lemko.
Thought so. Shame.
Why?
That it’s not ours.
Mr Kaczmarek, whether it’s ours or not is none of your business.

They record a young girl singing an unadorned Dwa serduszka (Two hearts)—a song which punctuates the story in successive reincarnations:

Kaczmarek soon becomes director of the new state troupe, spouting sonorous platitudes. As Peter Bradshaw comments:

Of course, they are not “welcoming tomorrow”—they are welcoming the past, a hyperreal, state-sanctioned, quaintly fabricated time of “folk” tradition that will combine Soviet obedience and ethnic conformity. […]
This kind of genteel artistic display is vital for foreign diplomacy, for establishing relations with Russia and a prestigious display for the west. It is a world of privileged foreign travel, with fears of defection.

Auditioning for the troupe is young singer Zula. Though she looks the part, she’s “a bit of a con”— not from politically-correct peasant stock, on probation, and choosing to sing a song learned from a Russian movie. Himself resistant to ideology, Wiktor is charmed by her energy, spirit, and originality. As Zula goes “from victim to victor and back again”, their fatal attraction now unravels over fifteen years from Poland to East Berlin, Paris, and Yugoslavia.

Cold War 3

While many peasants were nonplussed by the state troupes’ misappropriation of their culture, the film does well to observe that this new sanitised style was welcome to some audiences who perhaps (like Kaczmarek) found folk music unpalatable in its raw form. After one glossy spectacle, an audience member comes up to Wiktor and Irena:

I never believed in all this folky stuff. But this—it moved me. You are a genius. To take something so… and make it so beautiful. Thank you both—this is the most beautiful day of my life!

At a tense meeting a stony-faced Party Boss dictates the direction the troupe is to take:

In your repertoire you access priceless treasures of our People’s culture. This is highly commendable. We want you to become a living calling-card for our Fatherland. But I think it’s time for you to add something new to our repertoire—about Land Reform, World Peace and the threats to it. A strong number about the Leader of the World Proletariat. And we, in turn, will do everything in our power to show our gratitude. […]

Irena politely protests:

I would like to express gratitude on behalf of the whole ensemble for your appreciation of our hard work. But when it comes to our repertoire, it’s based on authentic folk art. The rural population doesn’t sing about Land Reform, Peace and Leaders—simply doesn’t do it, so it would be difficult.

But the canny Kaczmarek hastily reassures the Boss:

Comrade Bielecka, I assure you that our nation is not so ignorant, including its rural elements. Quite the contrary. And it will sing about those issues—as long as it is encouraged, and given direction. This, I believe, is exactly what I believe the role of our ensemble should be.

The principled Irena soon quits, while Wiktor (a male archetype straight out of a Kundera novel) bides his time as musical director—and as Zula’s lover. Not to toe the new ideological line could destroy lives.

And all that’s just in the first half-hour—essential viewing for the impact of state socialism on expressive culture, more eloquent than volumes of worthy academic analysis.

While the ensemble is in East Berlin on tour in 1952, Wiktor defects, going on to eke a living at a jazz club in Paris. Over the following years the lovers’ brief encounters become ever more bleak as they come together and pull apart, until the degradation of their final meetings back in Poland, crossing paths again with Kaczmarek. Peter Bradshaw again:

A love affair thrashes and wilts in the freedom of a foreign country, and then begins to submit to the homeland’s doomy gravitational pull.

Cold war richly deserves all the praise it has gained. Now I’m also keen to watch Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida (trailer here), set in 1962.

Under Life behind the Iron Curtain, see also Czech stories, Madonna pilgrimage in Communist Poland, and Polish jazz, then and now.

* * *

The state’s manipulation of folk culture that Kundera and Pawlikowski evoked was a common element throughout the Soviet bloc, such as sharovarshchyna in Ukraine—and also a major theme in China.

sfg-50s

The great Yang Yinliu made wise comments as early as 1953 on the gulf between folk and conservatoire styles—ideological tensions that were replicated in countless county-towns (for a renowned peasant ensemble “blowing with the wind” during the 1958 Great Leap Forward, see Ritual groups of Xushui, under Qianminzhuang; cf. A Daoist serves a state troupe).

And the impasse has continued in the “Golden Age” myth, idealising the Glorious Past (see Debunking “living fossils”). Even in cases where local cultures have not been explicitly targeted by the state for remoulding, scholars may unwittingly impose their own agendas, notably in the flummery of “Intangible Cultural Heritage“. See also Different values, and The politics of ethno-trad.

Some recent themes

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I never know which of my diverse topics will prove popular. In a way I’m not bovvered—you don’t spend half your life doing fieldwork on Daoist ritual if you’re hoping to be an overnight TikTok sensation. Like Flann O’Brian, I write largely

without regard to expense or the feelings of the public.

Still, I sometimes find it perplexing when one post gets a lot of readers while another related one goes down like a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.

For instance, Shamans in the two Koreas went modestly viral, whereas readers were underwhelmed when I reposted my roundup of essays on Spirit mediums in China. Would that be because the word “shaman” is clickbait—or is it that North Korea seems more exotic than the PRC?

My lengthy reflections on the new British Museum exhibition China’s hidden century have been well received, with many instances of the wealth of material on the late Qing that can be gained from fieldwork among local rural traditions. Just as fascinating is the life of Nadine Hwang—her high-flying early life in Beijing and Paris, then meeting her partner Nelly Mousset-Vos in the hell of Ravensbrück, and living together in Caracas after their release.

To my chagrin, rather few readers seem to share my enthusiasm for either WAM or pop music—both Beethoven’s Op.109 sonata and Mr Sandman are utterly captivating!

Similarly under-subscribed are my posts on tennis (e.g. Cocomania, A glorious playlist for Emma and Leylah, and the wacky linguistic fantasy Ogonek and Til), along with the genius of Ronnie O’Sullivan on the baize. Hey-ho.

And Love, Deutschmarks, and death is just as fascinating a film as Jazz in Turkey. Thankfully my film about the Li family Daoists, the original raison-d-être of this whole wacky pot-pourri, continues to find viewers.

Just saying, like… I’ll just keep on rabbiting on about things that inspire me.

Siblings: life in the GDR

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Reimann mural

With my experience of China, I’ve long been curious about people’s lives under state socialism behind the Iron Curtain, particularly in the GDR (links here), and the potential for expressing alternative viewpoints under such regimes.

In China political and artistic dissent had already been severely punished in the Communist Base Area at Yan’an from the 1930s, and during the Maoist era after the 1949 “Liberation” the scope for variant stances was highly circumscribed, with only a few bold authors like Ding Ling, Wang Meng, and Liu Binyan daring to publicly query the Party line (see e.g. here); the brief Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956–57 was soon regarded as a trap to expose subversion.

As to the GDR, the new translation by Lucy Jones of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Siblings (Die Geschwister, 1963) has prompted a spate of perceptive reviews. *

New German and English editions of Die Geschwister/Siblings,
the latter with well-chosen cover artwork by Walter Womacka (1925–2010) (full mural here).

Rejecting the “boy-meets-girl-meets-tractor” tenets of socialist realism, Brigitte Reimann (1933–73; Foundation; wiki) was an idealistic yet conflicted writer. Besides her diaries (citations below from this article),

Her most famous novel, Franziska Linkerhand, which Jones describes as “German history fed through the form of a love letter”, was incomplete when she died, but became a bestseller when it was published in 1974. […]

Her books’ unusually open depictions of day-to-day life in the GDR, told through the particular viewpoint of a woman, led to them playing an important role in the country, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s as East German citizens sought to critically examine the rationale behind a land that either cosseted them or locked them in, depending on your viewpoint. In the post-communist era they have also offered an insight for younger generations keen to understand their own mothers’ attitudes towards the socialist state in which they grew up.

Source.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb to Siblings:

For Elisabeth, a young painter, the GDR is her generation’s chance to build a glorious, egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the ever-wider chasm of the Party line; over them loom the twin spectres of opportunity and fear, and the shadow of their defector brother Konrad. In prose as bold as a scarlet paint stroke, Brigitte Reimann battles with the clash of idealism and suppression, familial loyalty, and desire. The result is this ground-breaking classic of post-war East German literature.

As this review observes,

Charting the reality of the everyday in socialist Germany, she details her time spent as a state-sponsored artist at an industrial plant in the new town of Hoyerswerda where she ran writing classes for the workers. Her stints on the factory floor, during which she sucked in the black sooty air which likely contributed to the cancer that ended her life, also informs her gritty descriptions of industrial life and quotidian challenges of a socialist state, from supply chain issues, to the scorn she attracted for wearing lipstick at work.

Like Reimann herself, Elisabeth “strains against the artistic and political orthodoxies of old party comrades who refuse to listen to young people, especially women, with fresh ideas”.

It wasn’t blind confidence we were after. It was trust. My generation had designed new machines, cleared forests and built power plants. We’d drained swamplands and manned border posts. We’d painted pictures and written books. We had a right to be trusted. We had a right to ask questions if something seemed shady, if a verdict was disputable, or an authority questionable.

The shadows of Nazism and the war are sketched only briefly; and when Elisabeth is visited by a “nice young man” from the Stasi, she is startled but unscarred. Her brother Konrad has already defected; visiting him in the Western sector, she feels out of place:

Even though I heard German words, I felt like a stranger in a foreign country. I’d thought: When I went to Prague last year, I felt at home, and no matter where I went, I heard Czech being spoken, but never once, not for a minute, did I feel like a foreigner.

The translation comes with useful endnotes. Among the attributes of this short-lived lost civilisation, Michael Hofmann notes

the distressing ugliness of the official jargon, the Kaderwelsch, a play on the words Kader (a party cadre) and Kauderwelsch, meaning “gobbledygook’”.

Of course, such words had a life before and since the GDR (see Some German mouthfuls).

ReimannHofmann also remarks, rather too sweepingly, that

Elisabeth’s feelings towards seniority—as I think Reimann’s were too—are informed by expectant obedience, a sort of eroticised respect. […] All the men in Siblings seem to be the same man, and the woman seems to be equally drawn to all of them. 

This brief film clip sets the scene.

While soul-searching became common—almost de rigueur—in Germany after the fall of the Wall, it’s impressive that writers such as Reimann could represent such nuance amidst the high tide of state socialism.

For a compelling biography of a GDR family over three generations, do read Maxim Leo’s Red love.

* E.g.
https://www.dw.com/en/cult-east-german-novelist-now-published-in-english/a-64586240https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/siblings-brigitte-reimann-book-review
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/michael-hofmann/no-room-at-the-top
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/04/east-german-feminist-author-gets-english-debut-50-years-after-death
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/11/siblings-by-brigitte-reimann-review-rebel-with-a-cause
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/19/siblings-by-brigitte-reimann-review-a-family-split-in-a-divided-germany

Shamans in the two Koreas

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Mudang old pic
Mudang ritual, early 20th century. Source.

In China after the 1949 “Liberation”, all kinds of religious activities persisted, with difficulty, at local level under Maoism—even during the Cultural Revolution—until they could be observed more openly since the 1980s’ reforms, as shown in numerous posts on this blog. Among the diverse cast of practitioners in local communities are spirit mediums, who constitute an important resource consulted by those seeking to resolve various physical, psychological, and practical afflictions (see this roundup of posts).

Manshin still
From Manshin: ten thousand spirits (see below).

In Korea (where they are mostly women), there’s a range of terms, among which mudang and manshin are commonly heard; in English they are widely, if controversially, known as “shamans” (see the useful discussion in wiki). While their practices in the south are well documented, they have clearly also maintained clandestine activity under the severely impoverished conditions of the DPRK in North Korea—a regime often likened to an ongoing Cultural Revolution. [1]

So I write these notes mainly out of curiosity; for whereas scholars who were previously limited to fieldwork in Taiwan have been able since the 1980s to turn their attention to religious life under state socialism in mainland China (see e.g. The resilience of tradition, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean), no such thaw has occurred in the DPRK, so clues to their activities there, gleaned mainly from defectors, remain highly elusive.

Korea 1903
Two jangseung tutelary deities outside a Korean village, 1903. Source.

After the Korean war, the ecstatic shamanic tradition of the Hwanghae region (now the southwest of the DPRK) was introduced by many shamans taking refuge in the south. It seems important to distinguish the large-scale kut rituals performed by the mudang and the less public divination sessions of jeomjaengi fortune-tellers. An NPR article from 2021 provides some clues to the recent situation: 

In South Korea, shamanistic rituals are visually flashy and involve a lot of sound, whereas in the North, from what I’ve heard, they are very small-scale and quieter. […] Practitioners can be jailed, sent to reeducation and labour camps, or executed for taking part in what’s considered an illegal superstition.

As in China, where religious activity increased in response to periods of extreme deprivation (such as in Hunan), an article on North Korea from 2015 suggests that consulting shamans (or at least the jeomjaengi fortune-tellers) has surged in popularity since the 1990s’ famine. As one defector commented:

North Koreans widely believe in shamanism. Before marriage they check their marital compatibility, when moving houses they check the site of their future home, and before they leave for business people used to ask me whether the journey would be comfortable or not.

Despite severe deterrents, the law may be overlooked at local level (again as in China, e.g. Officials without culture, and One eye open, one eye closed; for Chinese cadres maintaining their local ritual traditions, see e.g. here)—not least because local cadres are themselves among the shamans’ main clients (cf. this article from 2022). In a 2018 report on religious freedom in North Korea, the US State Department reported

an apparent continued increase in shamanistic practices, including in Pyongyang. […] Authorities continued to react by taking measures against the practice of shamanism. […] Defector reports cited an increase in Party members consulting fortune-tellers in order to gauge the best time to defect.

A South Korean scholar consulted for the 2021 article commented:

Because North Korean shamans who hold rituals risk being discovered and arrested, some shamans there simply do fortune-telling, which can still be effective in explaining the reasons for clients’ problems.

The article goes on:

Lee Ye-joo told fortunes in North Korea before defecting to the South in 2006 at age 33. She now lives in Chungnam province, south of Seoul. When she was 12, Lee began studying a book of divination called the Four Pillars of Destiny, based on the Chinese calendar system. She began telling fortunes eight years later. “All people who came to me were officials”, she recalls. Because ordinary North Koreans “don’t even have enough to eat, the only people who seek out fortune-tellers are those with money, like big-name officials. They usually ask when they might lose their job or who their children should marry.” Lee built up her clientele surreptitiously, by word of mouth. She had to be careful not to get caught, she says—but then again, so did her clients. “They were all linked to other officials who introduced me to them”, she says. “So if one of them got me into trouble, I could tell on all the others.” Telling fortunes didn’t pay well, so she turned to trading. She says she bought and smuggled goods out of a special trade zone to sell, often making a perilous trek through the mountains to evade authorities.

In a 2021 article, Andrei Lankov cites some informed studies by South Korean scholars. Selected quotes:

In the late 1950s, the state began to conduct campaigns against “superstitions”—a term that often included more institutionalized forms of religion as well. Since women made up the majority of fortune-tellers’ customers, the Women’s Union carried out most of these actions. […]

There are even reports about shamanistic rituals occasionally being performed in the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s—but a limited number of participants carried out such rites quietly, without music or singing, to avoid discovery. […]

The situation began to change in the early 1990s. Economic crisis and famine seriously damaged the once hyper-efficient surveillance system, and poorly-paid enforcers lost much of their erstwhile zeal. 
Simultaneously, the new world of trade, starvation, opportunities, and dangers made all kinds of superstitions far more popular. Amid capitalist uncertainties, it was too tempting to believe that a skilful shaman would persuade spirits to guide the newly established venture to prosperity. […]

Though sacrificial offerings, called jaesa, remained banned for a few decades, the state partially permitted some graveside rites from 1972. […]

As to geomancy and physiognomy, palm reading and dream interpretation,

North Korean refugees report that during the “Arduous March” famine it became common to consult with kunghap specialists about a would-be spouse.

Just as in China, assaults on custom are often made in the name of anti-extravagance campaigns:

In April 2007, Choseon Yeoseong (Korean Woman) magazine criticised large celebrations for the “four family events” of coming of age, weddings, funerals, and ancestral worship. “This extravagance leads to the waste of grain which was harvested with such great labour, and creates conditions for drunkenness.”

* * *

In South Korea, besides having to adapt to commercial pressures and competition from Christianity (the latter also a significant underground presence in the DPRK), shamans have also experienced periods of state repression. A celebrated figure since the 1980s, when the mudang first came to wider attention and were documented by scholars and the media, is Kim Keum-hwa (1931–2019). [2] The vicissitudes of her life are brilliantly depicted in the splendid Manshin: ten thousand spirits (Park Chan-kyong, 2013), both documentary and biopic, a must-watch (here) even without English subtitles—which are at least provided in this trailer: [3]

Born in Hwanghae province—now part of North Korea, and then under Japanese occupation—Kim was subject to disturbing sinbyeong visions in her youth (such psychic crises commonly indicate that one is “chosen” to become a medium, in China and elsewhere); by the time she was 17, her parents could no longer resist, and her grandmother (who was also a mudang) initiated her with the naerim-gut ritual.

Wanshin screenshot

After the outbreak of the Korean War, [4] Kim Keum-hwa’s “superstitious” practices came under attack from troops of both sides. For this turbulent period, the film (from 23.44) has some intriguing detail, which Simon Mills has kindly summarised:

During the war, Kim recalls seeing someone’s head explode and their guts fly up into the branches of a tree—she still feels disturbed when she thinks of it. One day a man wearing a communist-style cap and trousers said “You! Come out here!” As she came out, he said “So you’re a mudang, eh? Bring out all your things and we’ll burn them!” So she has nothing remaining from that period. At the time it was a case of do or die.

[Recreation] A woman asks Kim: “Could you help us? I hear that you’re a new mudang! Please do a kut just this once for us, to save my son-in-law Mr Park!” Kim replied: “I sense that his fortune is good. Let’s figure out a suitable date for the kut.”

So Kim makes the risky decision to head out to heal Mr Park—a spy from the South. During the ritual, she declares “He’ll get better” but in her head she’s hearing “He’s going to die”—and as she sings, her unconscious thoughts come out. A man points a gun at Kim and says “an unskilful novice just kills people; you should die right now!”, but both the woman who invited her and the afflicted man intervene. Kim comments: “That kind of thing happened all the time—people saying that it was all superstition and illusion… When they accused me, I just said: “My only sin was being born as a mudang…”

Korea Saemaul

Ritual specialist attacked in anti-superstition campaign, South Korea 1972.
Still from Manshin: ten thousand spirits.

Kim Keum-hwa eventually managed to relocate to Seoul, going on to master major rituals from great shamans. She started promoting the artistic features of shamanic rituals to the public, going on to win an award at the National Folk Art Competition in 1974.

But even in South Korea the mudang‘s trade was vulnerable. Coinciding with the Cultural Revolution in China, as part of the Saemaul campaign the authoritarian president Park Chung-hee unleashed a Movement to Overthrow Superstition. As mudang Kim recalled (here):

Anything that hinted at superstition was frowned upon. I was persecuted day and night. I detested that I couldn’t be a normal housewife, raising a family that loves me. I loathed my fate for that. As I encountered one obstacle after another and saw how happy other people were, I was envious. Then I told myself off for coveting things that weren’t mine. My path was clearly in front of me, and I made up my mind to live it the best I could. After 40, I stopped envying the lives of others.

By the 1980s shamanism began to enjoy a vogue, and Kim Keum-hwa received the title of Living National Treasure in recognition of her work in preserving rituals, notably the baeyeonshin-gut fishing-boat blessing. 

The film also shows a ritual for unification that Kim performed in 1998 near the demilitarized zone, during which she became possessed by the spirit of DPRK leader Kim Il-sung, behaving exactly as he did, to everyone’s amazement.

Still in South Korea, several other renowned mudang have perpetuated the northern Hwanghae style (see e.g. this 1988 article, and here on Yi Hae-gyŏng).  Here’s a short film on the younger shaman Seo Gyunguk:

Back in the DPRK [unreleased Beatles track?], under the state ideology of juche “self-reliance”, the intense fervour for the Supreme Leader that is demanded at public demonstrations has led scholars to suggest influences from traditional Korean religions, such as the ecstasy of shamanic ritual. I would need to read up more on this before being convinced, since such politically-induced veneration appears across diverse cultures.

DPRK fervour
Source.

* * *

If grass-roots religious practices in China like those of spirit mediums have become a sub-theme of research alongside the formal institutions of Daoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, it remains impossible to conduct such ethnographic fieldwork in North Korea. Still, it’s clearly not a religious void, even if tantalising clues from defectors suggest that “shamans” there mainly practise surreptitious divination, rather than the grand public rituals of the south. If only we could somehow gain access to internal reports from local Public Security and Cultural bureaus on the continuing need to suppress “superstitious practices” among the people, such as we have for Maoist China (see e.g. under Hunan).

With thanks to Simon Mills.

[1] For the opaque society of the DPRK, note Barbara Demick’s fine book Nothing to envy: ordinary lives in North Korea (2010); and the Inspector O crime novels of James Church are both imaginative and well-informed. For divided Germany after the war, see links here, under the GDR.

[2] The best written account in English that I’ve found of Kim Keum-hwa’s life is this 2009 article; briefer sketches consulted for this post include
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2014/02/27/movies/Shaman-focuses-on-unity-healing/2985599.html
https://www.festival-automne.com/en/edition-2015/kim-kum-hwa-rituel-chamanique-mansudaetak-gut
https://world.kbs.co.kr/service/contents_view.htm?lang=e&menu_cate=culture&id=&board_seq=42955.

[3] In English, Park Chan-kyong also filmed this documentary; for a lengthy ritual sequence, see the second half of this post, and cf. Bowed zithers: Korea and China.

[4] For the story of the goddess Houtu rescuing a Chinese brigade during the Korean war, see The Houshan Daoists, under “Houshan before and after Liberation”—another article that shows the tenacity of religious faith under Maoism. Cf. the deified young soldier shown on the pantheon of a Shanxi medium (here, under “Dongye township”).

Sara Gómez films the revolution

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Gomez
Photo: ICAIC.

In her all-too-brief life, the film-maker Sara Gómez (1942–74) applied a critical ethnographic eye in documenting everyday lives in Cuba after the 1959 revolution.

One of only two black film-makers in ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), and the institute’s first (in her lifetime, Cuba’s only) woman director, she was “concerned with representing the Afro-Cuban community, women’s issues, and the treatment of the marginalized sectors of society” (black people and women, the poor, religious, and young)—highlighting social injustice, as well as racial and gender discrimination. *

Cierta
From De cierta maniera.

Most of her oeuvre consists of short films, such as her debut Iré a Santiago (1964)—visually innovative despite some almost touristy images, its voiceover as yet unchallenging but eschewing the clichéd travelogue style later parodied by Monty Python—note the funeral from 4.07, and Carnival from 11.53:

The social agenda (both the regime’s and her own) develops in Una isla para Miguel (1968):

In her final, full-length, masterpiece De cierta maniera (One way or another, 1974) Gómez incorporates a fictional love story within a documentary style to shed light on tensions in the revolution, using real people playing themselves alongside professional actors. While the style of the criticism session that opens the film may recall China under Maoism, her message is far more probing than in Chinese films of that era. Here it is:

As Alonso Aguilar comments,

Melodramatic outbursts of emotion are followed by an erratic camera flowing freely inside crumbling edifices. Sociological musings fade in favour of heartfelt musical renditions.  Transitions are rarely seamless, clashing with every canon possible (even the revolutionary ones), but precisely because of such frontal disregard, Goméz’s cinema feels liberated. Only answering to the concerns of the souls framed on screen, every moment is used to challenge official narratives and position the urgency of the work still to be done.

Note also the vignette on the Abakuá religious fraternity (14.35–18.23)—here Gómez’s analysis concurs with socialist orthodoxy:

This cultural manifestation epitomises the social aspirations, norms, and values of male chauvinism in Cuban society. We believe that its traditional, secret, exclusive nature sets it against progress and prevents it from assimilating the values of modern life. Therefore, in the present stage it generates marginality, promoting a code of parallel social relations that is the antithesis of social integration.

Discuss—for a range of more nuanced approaches to ritual, refer to Catherine Bell…

With Gómez’s black middle-class background (see her 1966 short Guanabacoa: crónica de mi familia), her musical training was classical—but she was animated by the Afro-Cuban rhythms of the streets, lovingly documented in the fine Y… tenemos sabor (1967): **

The procession from 22.27 even features a shawm! ***

Here’s the illuminating documentary Sara Gomez, an Afro-Cuban filmmaker (Alessandra Müller, 2004):

* * *

More recently, note the films on Cuba in the Growing into music series. Akin to Goméz’s stress on marginalized groups, for the Maoist decades in China Guo Yuhua documents “the sufferers”—ironically, the peasant majority, again including women. For musicians’ “licence to deviate from behavioural norms”, click here. ****

Gomez 1
Sara Goméz dancing the cha-cha-chá, from Agnes Varda’s Salut les Cubains (1963).

* Making Gómez a fully-paid-up member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati—and quite right too.

** More piffling linguistic pedantry: the three dots should indeed follow the opening word Y, although many citations put them before it. No less pedantically, I note that the 2004 documentary seems to lack the accent on Gómez’s surname. Yes, I should get a life.

*** On YouTube the coda appears to be a promo for Nicolás Guillén Landrián‘s 1963 short En un barrio viejo, another intriguing film.

**** This isn’t the place for an analysis of suitable venues for a revolution (cf. Bill Bryson), but I recall a tour of France with an early music group playing worthy recreations of Qing-dynasty court music, where we ended up in the same hotel as a young early music group from Cuba, playing recreations of early Cuban music in the same festival. While our group were all buried in our arid, ponderous early music conservatoire shtick, the Cubans exuded sensuous physicality from every pore, laughing, grooving, alive. With All Due Respect, I realised I was doing the wrong gig—like the musos’ recurring dream. For the denial of the body, cf. Madonna and McClary.

Satirising Chinese war movies through divine intervention

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If the heroic war movie is no longer so ubiquitous on British TV, in mainland China the War of Resistance against Japan and the early strivings of the Communist Party remain perennial, unavoidable themes of big-budget TV series.

The “Anti-Japanese oratorio” (kangri shenju 看日神剧, subject of an interesting article on Chinese Free Wiki—shenju literally meaning “holy drama”) is a satirical internet term for wartime dramas that incorporate tropes from imperial culture such as martial arts, romance, and miracle tales. Instances from the wiki entry include using a rifle to shoot down a plane, tearing the enemy in half with one’s bare hands, and kicking away incoming grenades. Such tropes recall the supposed invulnerability of the righteous—as in the 1900 Boxer uprising, another popular topic in Chinese film. An early instance of the genre was the 1989 movie Rennai mochao 人奶魔巢 (watch here). CCP ideologues have criticised such dramas as vulgar.

Recently on Twitter Yang Han relayed a short scene from WeChat, showing the divine intervention of Thunder Lord and Lightning Mother (leigong dianmu 雷公电母) from the clouds on behalf of the heroic Communist troops—a deus ex machina device, we might say. But Yang’s comment “I don’t know how this anti-Japanese drama passed the political censors? Communist Party members are clearly atheists” was premature. It transpires to be an ingenious spoof, * part of a mini-genre, with clips such as this.

And in this one it’s none other than the Buddha who intervenes—rebuking the Japanese for their barbarity as they sought to create a Buddhist empire. Indeed, villagers prayed to their temple gods for protection from the Japanese, as in north Shanxi; there too, household Daoist Li Qing recalled:

Our ritual business didn’t suffer during the occupation—the troops, themselves devout, even made donations when they came across us doing Thanking the Earth rituals! 

Similarly, in Gaoluo south of Beijing,

Japanese troops entered the village on 3rd moon 15th just as the ritual association was leading the annual ritual for the goddess Houtu in the ritual tent. But the invaders merely entered the tent respectfully and kowtowed before the ritual paintings (my Plucking the Winds, p.92).

What Party ideologues oppose in those spoof clips is not the vulgarisation of religion but the offence to wartime Communist heroes. Still, the regime’s relation with religion has never been simple. When pressure from central ideology has allowed, grassroots cadres have long showed a certain laissez-faire. Despite periodic campaigns, ritual life persisted through the 1950s (see e.g. my work on Gaoluo, the Li family Daoists, and under Local ritual).

Ritual painting, N. Qiaotou https://stephenjones.blog/houshan-daoists/

Left, Houtu painting, N. Qiaotou, Hebei; right, detail of pantheon, Wutai county, Shanxi.

And stories of divine intervention during times of war are common in the local folk cultures where the PLA recruited its cannon-fodder. In Hebei we heard accounts of how the female deity Houtu rescued a Chinese brigade during the Korean War; and in a Shanxi village, spirit mediums showed us a handsome ritual pantheon featuring a deified PLA soldier. Indeed, if those online clips came from real movies, they might speak to audiences who have heard such tales from their grandparents. Temples often have images venerating Mao and other national leaders (e.g. in Gansu).

But more often, religious groups mobilised to resist the social disruption of CCP campaigns. Throughout the high tide of Maoism in the 1950s and 60s, local sects rose up “under the cloak of religion” (as Party propaganda has it) in protest against coercive collectivisation, seeking divine protection just as they had done during the Japanese occupation. In Tibet too, as the Cultural Revolution caused extreme social and psychological breakdown, a divinely-inspired revolt against the Party broke out in Nyemo, with warrior-heroes again rashly claiming immunity from bullets. In Tibet since the 1980s’ reforms, the monasteries have been a focus for resistance to Chinese policies (see e.g. Eat the Buddha). And scholars have noted the irony of the atheist CCP claiming authority over the reincarnation of high Lamas.

Whether or not it’s reflected in Chinese media, the religious fabric is an enduring theme of social life (see e.g. C.K. Yang, Adam Yuet Chau, and Ian Johnson).

* After all, no-one would believe you if you told them Boris Johnson was a real politician.

“Making a mistake” in Foreign

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Blue kite stillFrom Blue kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993).

With “mistakes” (closely followed by denials—notably Brexit) having become routine under this evil Tory regime, I’m reminded that I’ve always been fond of the Italian sbaglio (verb sbagliare), with the appealingly economical negative prefix s- creating an expressive diphthong. Admittedly in this case a positive version baglio/bagliare is elusive, but it reminds me of other words equivalent to English dis-, such as

  • svantaggio disadvantage
  • sfiducia mistrust
  • scontento discontent
  • sfigato loser
  • scaricare unburden
  • sfiorire wither
  • disprezzo “disdain” (as in Moravia’s novel)
  • sprezzatura “studied nonchalance”
  • staccato detached
  • sforzando “with excessive force”—Beethoven’s speciality.

Like I’d know… A suitable aperitivo here is the negroni sbagliato (cf. the Lumumba and cubalibre).

Returning to “mistakes”: in British politics, “misjudgements” that have appalling social and economic consequences can now be casually brushed aside with a patrician air of disdain. In China,  however (as throughout the socialist bloc), “making a mistake” (fan cuowu 犯错误), a catch-all for political, sexual, and indeed clerical misdemeanours, is now used humorously—despite (or because of) its Maoist heritage, with the disastrous personal and familial consequences that could ensue from innocent infringements against the fluctuating political orthodoxy of the day, or entirely innocuous casual remarks—cf. Goulash deviationism, China: commemorating trauma, and movies such as Blue kite and Living. In documents from the Maoist era the term is a sparse hint of such faux pas, as under The Houshan Daoists, requiring us to read between the lines (see my review of the Anthology of the folk music of the Chinese peoples).

When the iron bird flies

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*Another instalment in my education on the history of modern Tibet*

Iron bird cover

The independent scholar Jianglin Li—evidently no longer based in China—has a useful website War on Tibet, working with Matthew Akester. I’ve been reading her book

  • When the iron bird flies: China’s secret war in Tibet
    (Chinese original, Taiwan 2012; English translation by Stacy Mosher of the revised version, 2022, 550 pages).

After her 2010 book Tibet in agony: Lhasa 1959 (English version 2016), When the iron bird flies describes the brutal military conflict in Tibetan regions from 1956 to 1962, which has long remained a closely guarded secret. It supplements chapters in Tsering Shakya, The dragon in the land of snows (1999) (see his review of Li’s book) and vols 3 and 4 of Melvyn Goldstein’s magnum opus A history of modern Tibet (2013, 2019), as well as recent volumes like Conflicting memories.

The main focus of When the iron bird flies is the regions of Kham and Amdo (for some sources on the latter, click here), whose chiefdoms had always been resistant to external political power. Li’s account is based both on Tibetan accounts and classified Chinese documents within the PRC, as well as interviews with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal.

map
Traditional Tibet, comprised of the three provinces of Kham, Ü-Tsang, and Amdo,
in current Chinese administrative divisions. Source: Marvin Cao.

For several years after occupying minority regions the Communists moved slowly; but the trigger for the convulsions of the late 1950s was “democratic reform”—their euphemism for coercive land reform and expropriations. It was launched over several stages in different provinces: in Yunnan in 1955, Sichuan in 1956, Gansu and Qinghai in 1958, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in 1959. Revolts broke out widely as the reforms were being imposed. Li introduces the system that soon became routine: work teams, struggle sessions, the fixing of class statuses, taxation, confiscation of grain and guns, assaults on monasteries. Even Tibetan activists groomed to the Communist cause were shocked to see the disastrous effects of reform when they returned to their localities.

The “first shot in the Khampa armed rebellion” came at Sertar county in Garzê. In response the Sichuan Party bosses only escalated the situation.

By the end of March 1956, eighteen of Garzê Prefecture’s twenty counties and forty-five of its seventy-seven townships had experienced full-scale or localised insurrections involving a total of 16,000 people and more than 8,000 firearms. During this time, fourteen land reform work teams came under attack, and ten county seats were besieged or encircled. More than 200 land reform cadres were killed, and the PLA suffered more than 300 casualties.

Reform was not invariably met by resistance:

In Middle Village and Lower Village in Ngawa’s Trokyab county, land reform was completed in about three months without conflict. But when the work team proceeded under order to Upper Village to launch land reform, it came under attack, and almost all of the thirty land reform work team members were killed.

But heavy taxation and grain confiscations led to food shortages.

Resistance by the Hor Drango (Shouling) monastery in Drango county was suppressed in March 1956. After Communist troops “annihilated more than 700 people,” “the Shouling temple’s eighty-member council sent representatives to the county’s Work Committee to deliver a written assurance that they would not resist taxation again”. This indicates that taxation was the direct reason for the Drango monks’ resistance.

As both Chinese and Tibetan sources show, with many of the most influential monks and laypeople having been recruited to official positions in the CCP system, resistance came mainly from the lower middle classes, including farmers, herders, monks, and traders. Li studies the class composition of areas, with tralpa (who leased land and cultivated their own crops) and gepa (who cultivated land or worked as servants for landowners, headmen, or monasteries):

The vast majority of peasants in these regions cultivated their own fields. Tralpa were not necessarily poor, and families with surplus labourers could engage in trade or hire themselves out. As a result, when the Tibetan regions were divided into class categories, the landlords, rich peasants, and middle peasants were mainly tralpa, whom the CCP classified as “serfs.”

As in Han Chinese regions, class classification was arbitrary and variable by locality. With land that had previously been communally owned now becoming state property,

a district designating 10 to 20% of its people as “landlords and rich peasants” meant that a relatively large portion of the middle stratum had their assets confiscated; this caused many of them to join in uprisings. [….]

 Every stage of the land reform process in Kham, from its preparations to its implementation, demonstrated the arrogance and high-handedness of the CCP regime, as well as the ignorance and brutality of its cadres.

Numerous problems in the “redistribution” of resources were intractable. Resistance to land reform was inevitable. In response the Party requested military reinforcements while mobilising Tibetans into the army—who, hastily trained, suffered the heaviest casualties. The first battle, over nine days in March 1956, was in Lithang in southwest Garzê (cf. this post).

Lithang 1957.1

Lithang 1957.2

In a series of battles, both sides suffered heavy casualties. Determined to crush all resistance, on 29th March the air force dispatched two Tupolev Tu-4 aircrafts (a gift from Stalin to Mao) to strafe and bomb the monastery. Next day the PLA made their final assault.

This battle being the PLA’s first major military operation in the Tibetan region, its shock wave was felt by both the Chinese and the Tibetans. Tibetans were shocked by the “iron bird,” a powerful modern weapon they had never before seen or heard of, while the Chinese commanders were surprised by the willpower of the Tibetan resistance. In the following years, Tibetan willpower and Chinese modern weaponry would clash over and over again.

Lithang1957.3

Southwest of Lithang, the people of Chatreng were also fiercely independent. Again, the early years of Chinese occupation were relatively mild, but in mid-February 1956,

Chatreng’s two main monasteries received a document from the work team. As Tibetans recall it, the document included seven points:

1) Lamas and monks have to be eliminated; 2) monasteries and their contents have to be eliminated; 3) worship and ritual are prohibited; 4) the wealthy and eminent members of the community have to be eliminated; 5) all land will be appropriated by the state; 6) all property will be appropriated by the state; 7) everyone has to obey the Liberation Army and serve them. If you do not agree to this, we will bomb you from the air and send troops on the ground and wipe you out. […]

The Tibetan leaders of Chatreng secretly held a meeting to discuss the document and then sent a messenger to deliver a strongly worded reply:

You officers, district heads, and soldiers are here in our land without the slightest justification, and have no business imposing these seven points, which are completely unacceptable. You had better leave immediately, otherwise we have also made our war preparations, and there is no doubt that we will fight.

From 20th March county government bases were besieged by the local Tibetans. When the surrounded Chinese finally managed to send word to Zhou Enlai, reinforcements were dispatched. On 2nd April bombers were again deployed, destroying large areas of Sampeling monastery and killing over two hundred monks and laypeople. Three monasteries in the region were bombed over nearly a month. Chatreng was destroyed.

Among the land reform work teams were many Tibetan activists trained by the Chinese. In Nyarong (yet another region long resistant to external power), 185 out of 257 members were Tibetan. The rebellion there began in February 1956, as land reform teams came under attack, with insurrections breaking out in 78% of rural townships. Again, PLA reinforcements were sent. Coercive reforms continued throughout the year.

In Ngawa prefecture, Sichuan province (focus of Barbara Demick’s Eat the Buddha), uprisings broke out from March 1956, again prompting Chinese military intervention. As elsewhere, “goodwill troupes” occasionally sought (vainly and cynically) to mollify a furious population even while persisting in reforms.

The following chapters turn to what became the TAR, where reforms were delayed, with a useful survey of the early years under occupation. But by 1956 news of the violence in Kham was causing great alarm in Lhasa among the Tibetan leadership and public. Li describes the intense diplomatic intrigue in 1956–57 surrounding the Dalai Lama’s visit to India, involving Zhou Enlai, Nehru, and the USA—as Zhou emptily promised the Dalai Lama that there would be no reforms for six years. The Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa on 1st April to find the situation increasingly tense. Meanwhile the CIA-trained Chushi Gangdruk (“Four Rivers and Six Ranges”) volunteer army prepared to resist Chinese occupation.

The “socialist transformation” continued, with forced collectivization around Golok Prefecture in 1958, as the Great Leap Backward (my apt term) caused untold suffering right across China. By August,

resistance among the Qinghai Tibetans had spread to five autonomous prefectures, 24 counties, 240 tribes, and 307 monasteries, involving more than 90,000 people. The Chinese government sent in five army divisions and 30 regiments of various kinds, plus 25 companies of armed police and local militia, for a total armed force of more than 50,000, including air force, artillery, infantry, cavalry, armoured troops, and others. […]

In Chikdril County, 1,050 people, nearly 10% of its total population, were arrested within three years. More than half of these captives died in prison over the next five years, and some were in jail until the early 1980s. Of the hundreds of herdsmen arrested from the Khangsar clan, only about twenty of them ever made it home again.

At least 9,262 people were arrested in Golok Prefecture, the vast majority of them males in the prime of life; in some places the proportion of young men to young women was one to ten.

As the military campaign shifted north from Sichuan and Yunnan to Qinghai and Gansu, Li documents the horrific “Yellow River massacre” at what later became Khosin Township (Yulgen county) on 1st June 1958—as ever, carefully assessing the conflicting sources.

After a Chinese convoy was ambushed in Yulshul, rebellions broke out at monasteries, with bombers again deployed. Over a third of the population of Yulshul died in these years. Many survivors were imprisoned in labour reform camps, where they died or suffered for long years. With food shortages worsening, in May 1958 the PLA murdered monks at the Drakar Drelzong monastery in Tsikorthang, Tsolho Prefecture; in September there was a bloodbath at Drongthil Gulch. A second wave of assaults took place from June to September 1959.

As the Chinese military administration was convulsed by Rectification and Anti-rightist campaigns, Tibetan resistance to reform was widespread—though what Chinese sources portray as rebellion (thus creating a pretext for massacres) was sometimes a mere exodus of herders fleeing collectivization. Refugees were described as “bandits” if they were killed, or “liberated masses” if they were captured. Resistance continued in 1959, met by massive troop deployments, with further major battles.

In 1958 a major arrest and denunciation rally took place at Kumbum monastery in Rusar county, Qinghai. The monastery then has 1,615 monks—remarkable in itself, we might suppose. Tibetan Buddhist life had been relatively unscathed through the early years of occupation; but now the CCP initiated a secret “religious reform movement”, in which Buddhist activity was specifically targeted, notably the monasteries. A document from the period noted the scale of the issue:

more than 5,000 monasteries of various sizes, and 450,000 religious personnel, among which there are more than 3,000 lamaist temples and 250,000 lamas in Tibet; 20,000 lamas in Mongolia and Xinjiang; and a total of 2,000–3,000 lama temples and more than 170,000 lamas in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and other provinces.

Apart from ideology, the monasteries possessed substantial assets, in land and precious material artefacts—Li gives regional instances of the assets confiscated, metal statues and religious implements. Labrang monastery (in Gansu), with its 4,000 monks, was surrounded in April 1958; after “reform” began in June, over 1,600 people there were arrested, imprisoned, or executed. Many monasteries were now destroyed. In Qinghai province,

223 monasteries in the pastoral areas have been disbanded, 51.98% of the total, and 17,685 religious personnel have returned to secular life, composing 36.56% of the total. Among these, 97.5% of the monasteries in Huangnan prefecture have been disbanded, and 55.1% of religious personnel have returned to secular life; adding in those arrested or sent to group training brings it to around 95% of the total. In Hainan prefecture, 91.8% of the monasteries have been disbanded, and 87.9% of religious personnel have returned to secular life. In Haibei and Haixi prefectures, more than 80% of the monasteries have been disbanded, and more than 70% of the religious personnel have returned to secular life. The emergence of these new scenarios shows that religion is on the brink of total collapse.

The Anti-rightist campaign gave another pretext to denounce religious figures. As a Qinghai document declared:

After a large number of religious monasteries have been destroyed and a large number of religious personnel have returned to secular life, all localities must rapidly launch religious systemic reform work in the monasteries that have been purposely retained. […] The monasteries that remain must be controlled by progressive elements and must be completely controlled under the party’s leadership.

Another Party document explained:

In order to look after the religious beliefs of the masses, block rumours and provocations by counterrevolutionaries inside and outside of China, and facilitate the centralised management of lamas who have not returned to secular life, preserving some temples is essential. As to the appropriate number to retain, this should be according to the influence of the temple and the views of the masses. Rank the temples; in principle it is undesirable to retain too few. […] In terms of retaining temples, it is advantageous at present to retain more rather than less.

By the beginning of 1959, the vast majority of monasteries in Amdo and Kham had been closed down, occupied, or destroyed. I note that whereas in post-reform China the Cultural Revolution makes a scapegoat for a far more protracted range of abuses, in the vast heartland of the Han Chinese, the Communists began destroying temples from the early 1950s—in some areas as soon as they took power, even before the national “Liberation”. I’m also reminded that food shortages there predated the 1959–61 famine by several years, following collectivization. Yet Tibetan religious faith was not extinguished: it went underground.

Sera
Struggle meeting against monk officials in Sera monastery.

Lhasa
Struggle meeting against a Tibetan government official in Lhasa.

Lhasa was “the last hope”, where activists and ordinary people from Kham sought refuge in ever larger numbers. Li surveys the fateful events leading to the Dalai Lama’s escape to India—described in greater detail elsewhere, including her own earlier book. But as resistance continued, fierce battles took place in Lhoka, Namtso, and Mitikha. 1960 saw further campaigns. She looks in more detail at the covert activities of the CIA Tibet Task Force. The extended resistance in Chamdo from 1959 to 1962 was yet again ruthlessly suppressed with annihilation campaigns and aerial bombing.

Finally Li attempts to collate the conflicting statistics over the whole region—deaths in conflict, arrests, Chinese troop numbers, confiscated assets, and so on. Just the figures suggesting population decrease are staggering.

From 1956 to 1962, the iron horse galloped wildly across the plateau. Wherever its iron heels trod, the flames of war were ignited, monasteries collapsed, scriptures were burned, people were killed, and leaders fled into exile. The political system, economy, military, culture, and society of the Tibetan people were completely destroyed.

And again she reminds us of the tragic personal experiences buried beneath such statistics.

In an Afterword, Li considers the “rehabilitation” of the early 1980s, further evidence of the grievous losses of the secret war. She notes the Panchen Lama’s 1962 petition; and she hints at the further wave of destruction that was to follow with the Cultural Revolution, observing the ironic fates of some of the worst central and regional Chinese masterminds of the holocaust, purged and humiliated.

* * *

So much for the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet”—the succession of atrocities reminds one of the genocide of Native America, or the wartime devastation of the Bloodlands. While we should take into account the grievous wounds inflicted by Maoism in the Han Chinese heartland through the period, this doesn’t diminish the horror of the Tibetan case.

After the individual memoirs that I reviewed recently (here and here), the broader canvas and more dispassionate tone of this volume are no less affecting; Tibetan and Chinese documents are interwoven with personal stories, some recounted by ageing exiles in India. Whereas in the 1950s the Chinese presence in Tibet was novel and tenuous, by the 1970s, following the violence of the Cultural Revolution there, it became a fait accompli, with the suppression of public memory seeking to bury the story of the appalling brutality of the late 1950s. But the imprint of the period clearly remains deep in people’s hearts, making a backdrop to the sporadic unrest that continues to erupt around Amdo, Kham, and the TAR.

For those studying expressive culture, all this makes an important reminder that the much-vaunted “singing and dancing of minority peoples” could hardly be maintained during such a traumatic period of social disruption. Yet, remarkably, after the downfall of Maoism in the 1980s, people pieced together the fragments of cultural life with alacrity, while adapting to new social changes (see e.g. Some folk ritual performers).

A Tibetan life: the winding road

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*Part of my education on modern Tibet*

Shawo

translated by Hannibal Taubes in the promising new journal of Tibetan studies Waxing Moon, makes a significant addition to our understanding of Tibetan people’s lives.

It’s the “auto-narrative” [1] of Shawo Tsering (1932–2015), a high-ranking regional leader from the Tu (Monguor) minority in the Repkong (Chinese Tongren) district of Qinghai province—part of the greater region of Amdo, an increasingly prominent focus of Tibetan studies (cf. Conflicting memories; for further leads, see under Labrang 1; see also When the iron bird flies). Written in Chinese, it was edited by local historian Zhao Qingyang and published in 2010.

Benno Weiner provides an Introduction, noting ways in which authoritarian states manage memory and history, and the various forms of “unofficial memory” circulating just below the surface of state historiography (cf. my China: memory, music, society). He unpacks the agendas of the series of local “cultural and historical materials” (wenshi ziliao, where Shawo Tsering’s account was published) that thrived irregularly in the PRC (cf. Paul Katz on Wenzhou).

The translator’s own introduction is lucid. Tibetans who have fled into exile have written numerous accounts of the iniquities of Chinese rule, but while publication is far more strictly controlled within the PRC, as Hannibal observes,

Students in a class on Chinese or Tibetan history should be exposed to the forms of moral-historical discourse produced by the CPC for and about itself, and have an understanding of how those Chinese, Tibetans, and others who serve the PRC justify themselves as ethical actors. For better or for worse, people like Shawo Tsering made China and Tibet what they are today, and they will shape these nations’ futures; their experiences are correspondingly important. Students should be schooled in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” necessary to read such texts, including the ways that subtle forms of criticism and dissent are coded within the “public transcript” of authoritarian states. In point of fact, Shawo Tsering himself explicitly warns us to read his own words critically. Of a speech he was forced to make in 1978, he comments: “In fact human affairs are always like this. You can’t say what you want to say, and you must say what you don’t want to say—this is what’s called ‘words that violate the heart’ (Ch. wei xin zhi yan).”

Despite Shawo Tsering’s frank account of the Maoist cataclysms between 1958 and 1978, “the fundamental legitimacy of PRC rule on the Tibetan plateau is never questioned”. Still, scholars of the PRC are used to reading between the lines (see my review of the Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples, and under Yang Yinliu). Shawo Tsering’s account of his life from the 1930s to the 1990s subtly challenges “some of the fundamental discursive pillars upon which the post-Mao narrative of Amdo’s incorporation into China rests”.

Hannibal provides most useful summaries before each chapter.

Chapter 1, “A childhood of many difficulties”, covers the period from the early 20th century to the 1949 Communist victory in China, with complex power relationships. Major figures include the controversial Muslim leader Ma Bufang, and the Tibetan monk, reformist educator, and modernist politician Sherap Gyatso.

In Chapter 2, “Setting out on the revolutionary road”, Shawo Tsering recalls the early years of Chinese occupation until 1958, when he became a prominent cadre under the new regime, serving as a “crucial linguistic and cultural bridge to the complex societies of Tongren”. He married with a grand ceremony, headed educational work in the county, and became vice-director of the prefectural Bureau of Culture and Public Health.

As Hannibal writes,

Shawo Tsering’s narrative journey towards “liberation” climaxes in his 1956 interview with premier Zhou Enlai, a scene that perfectly encapsulates the mixture of cult of personality, religious fervor, patronising cultural essentialism, Marxist developmentalism, resource-colonialism, and rhetorical CPC assumption of the imperial mantle that characterises the Chinese Communists and their relationship with Tibet.

Nevertheless, Shawo Tsering’s account is not entirely sycophantic. As is typical in such PRC publications, he refers to negative or politically sensitive events obliquely, and criticises state actions by praising people or policies that he feels resolved such problems.

Chapter 3 relates his bitter experiences of the “leftist storm” between 1958 and the end of the Cultural Revolution. As monasteries were closed, revolts broke out and labour camps were filled; Shawo Tsering’s assessment “is given force by the fact that, while imprisoned himself, he was given the task of reading out the verdicts and sentences”. Amidst heavy loss of life, the Great Leap Forward led to severe famine. He recalls that during his imprisonment from 1958 to 1962,

my family had experienced unimaginable change. In 1959, my three sons all contracted infectious measles. They were not able to see a doctor. One after another they were carried away by the god of death. In 1960 a natural disaster occurred. There was no grain harvest. During the hardships of that time, my mother, wife, and little brother all left this world. Another younger brother had only been able to escape starvation because he was studying at the prefectural teachers’ college. My little sister recalled to me the scene of my mother’s death: When my mother died, my sister was laying in her arms, but how my mother died, how her body was carried away, these things my sister was unable to remember. After my mother’s death, my sister had become an orphan, begging for food every day at the doors of village houses.When I heard how each member of my family had cruelly perished, when I saw the scene of cold desolation before me, all of my spirit collapsed. It was as if I’d suddenly lost consciousness, and become a man made from wood. I spent over a month at home. Many people from the village came to see me, telling me how my family had died, as well as who else in the village had passed away, so and so, and so and so, and on and on.

Further campaigns culminated in the mass hysteria of the early Cultural Revolution, whose vicissitudes he also recalls in detail.

Chapter 4 describes Shawo Tsering’s later career, from being rehabilitated in 1979 to his retirement in 1995. Charged, “quite simply”, with the rebuilding of Amdo, he became “an indispensable figure in restoring some legitimacy” to the Party’s attempts at post-Mao good governance. As the monasteries began to re-open, he hosted the 1980 visit of the Panchen Lama, and confronted practical problems. He led a Tibetan opera troupe on a tour of the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

In Chapter 5 he reflects on his life after retirement, and outlines the fortunes of his family. Again, Hannibal provides useful context. 

By its final pages, the book has revealed itself as an extended plea to a Sinophone audience not to allow the catastrophes of Mao’s reign to happen again—in this moment, the composite narrator Shawo Tsering speaks with a moral and historical authority that is both Tu, Tibetan, and Chinese.

Two years before the account was published in 2010, new protests had erupted in Lhasa and throughout the Tibetan plateau. Tibetan-language education had already begun to be replaced by Chinese. Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the climate has deteriorated drastically. As Hannibal concludes,

The Tibetan regions generally have seen growing surveillance, militarization, media censorship, and arrest and intimidation of activists. It is unlikely that Shawo Tsering’s frank discussion of his experiences between 1958 and 1978 would be published in the PRC today.

With his detailed footnotes, Hannibal’s translation contains a useful glossary and bibliography. It’s a fascinating story that requires us to abandon simplistic views of Tibet’s modern history.

[1] I note that the Chinese zishu (“auto-narrative”) often has an element of “confession” from the Maoist era—cf. Kang Zhengguo.

China: One Second

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One second poster

I’m probably not alone in harking back to the early films of Zhang Yimou, rather neglecting his ouevre since then. While he later turned to glossy big-budget blockbusters, he still made more affecting films like Not one less (1999), The road home (1999), and Coming home (2014).

I admired his recent film

Set in the sand dunes of the barren northwest during the later years of the Cultural Revolution, it was filmed in Dunhuang (for Li Ruijun’s movies set in Gansu, see Fly with the crane and Return to dust). Click here for a roundup of posts on Gansu.

One second scene

Described as Zhang’s “personal love-letter to cinema”, One second has thus been likened to Cinema paradiso, but while both are set against the backdrop of a repressive regime, Zhang’s film is more permeated by pain. The main character is a fugitive from a state labour camp, desperate to catch a tiny glimpse of his long-lost daughter in a newsreel. His quest is hindered and helped by a young orphan urchin girl and “Mr Movie”, the projectionist responsible for the mobile cinema touring the desert towns; after the rather farcical mood of the opening sequence, their changing relationships become quite affecting. Most poetic are scenes of the villagers mobilised to clean and restore the damaged celluloid—a metaphor both for individual striving and for the herculean yet largely futile mass projects of Maoism.

Like Return to dust, the film has also fallen foul of the censors, despite international acclaim. Sensitivities perhaps concerned the Uyghur issue, as well as renewed caution about exposing the indignities of the Cultural Revolution. However the film has been re-edited, it looks to navigate political anxieties rather cleverly—the ending, as hope dawns with the collapse of Maoism, is almost saccharine. But as Cath Clarke observes in her review,

With all the tinkering and tweaks, what censors haven’t been able to expunge is the torment and suffering on the face of Zhang Yi’s political prisoner; this is a deeply felt film, grief and pain go to the bone.

I got to watch it on Mubi. Here’s a trailer:

Lhasa: streets with memories

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*Part of my extensive series on Tibet*

Lhasa cover

Having revisited Keila Diehl’s study of the soundscapes of Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, I’ve also learned from re-reading an imaginative evocation of the focus of their longing:

  • Robert Barnett, Lhasa: streets with memories (2006).

Just as Lhasa can’t stand for the whole of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), the latter doesn’t represent the whole of “Greater Tibet”, with the majority of Tibetan people within the PRC living in the extensive regions of Amdo and Kham to the north and east, comprising large areas of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces. Along with fine scholars such as Tsering Shakya and Melvyn Goldstein, Robbie has documented the modern history of Tibet in detail—the 1950 invasion, the 1959 uprising, the Cultural Revolution; the early 1980s’ reforms, protests from 1987, the tightened security from 1993 as Chinese (both migrant workers and tourists) began to flood the city, and renewed unrest since 2008.

The book is a sophisticated and personal affective history of a city, revolving around memory (cf. more recent volumes edited by Robbie, Forbidden memory and Conflicting memories). He eschews simplistic stereotypes: both nostalgia for an “unspoilt” mystical paradise before the 1950 invasion, and horror at the garish modern architecture that bludgeons dwellers with the inescapable Chinese presence. The main text, interspersed with notes on his visits to the city, is quite succinct, with substantial endnotes not cued in the main text but offered as further reading—it’s a blessing that one’s reading is uninterrupted by in-text references.

He opens the Preface with some broad context:

Returning to London after some years away, I am struck by the way each street evokes specific memories and sometimes poignant feelings. I sit on the upper deck of the No.55 bus and look over the iron railings and the walls that shield Gray’s Inn Fields. I see the windows of an office once occupied by a leading politician, and the blue plaque that marks the house in Doughty Street where Dickens lived…

Some of these associations mark moments that are significant only to me, while others might be relevant to a larger community. Some derive their potency from something I have read or heard, a film I have seen, or scraps of conversation that I cannot quite recall. They are triggered by the sight of memorable buildings and places that I pass.

Cities can be illegible to foreign visitors; as Robbie excavates the multiple stories of Lhasa, he finds that

some of the elements that I will find will turn out in time to be my own invention, or to be irrelevant to the web of associations most valued by the inhabitants or even damaging to their interests.

In the following Note on history, he traces inhabitants’ reserve about speaking with foreign visitors back to the British military expedition led by Younghusband in 1903–4. This was followed in 1910 by another invasion, this time from the East, as a Chinese military force occupied Lhasa; but the 13th Dalai Lama soon declared his country fully independent. Robbie gives a lucid, nuanced account of the debates over the status of Tibet, ably rebutting Chinese claims.

Lhasa 1904Plan of Lhasa, 1904, by L.A. Waddell. Source.

Chapter 1, “The unitary view”, critiques the rosy views of pre-occupation Lhasa by both outside observers and refugees—the “easygoing and carefree life” of religious festivals, picnics, and parties. Such accounts from exile represent

not naïveté or a desire to mislead, but a natural flattening of memory, an understandable form of evocation by people forced to abandon their homeland, and a counter to overstated, opposing claims by those who had usurped their positions and ridiculed their legacy.

Robbie reveals a more complex picture—not only theft and monkish misbehaviour, but incidents like the 1912 sacking of Tengyeling monastery, the blinding of Lungshar in the 1930s, and the prison death of the former regent Retring. Complementing such accounts is Jamyang Norbu’s article on the “dark underbelly” of Lhasa before the 1950 invasion.

A contrasting kind of one-dimensionality that mirrors nostalgic exile accounts is the typical Chinese view of the Tibetans as “enthusiastic and open-minded and good at singing and dancing”. The latter is a trusty cliché, dutifully parroted (even by a young Chinese musicologist trying to do fieldwork in Lhasa in 1956—though he wasn’t so naïve as to dispense with a revolver).

Besides, pre-1950 Lhasa was politically diverse, modernising, with an international presence. As early as 1904 Younghusband had been offered Huntley & Palmers biscuits in the Lhasa Yamen by amban commissioners—perhaps the inspiration for Jamyang Norbu’s vignette in The mandala of Sherlock Holmes.

Such reflections are juxtaposed with Robbie’s notes on the trauma of his first visit in 1987, which coincided with a major demonstration against Chinese repression—first of a series of protests over the following years. He also uses these notes to suggest the partiality of his own impressions.

Chapter 2, “Foreign visitors, oscillations, and extremes”, continues the story of early portrayals of Lhasa. The golden roofs of the temples and the splendour of the Potala are staples in the accounts of visitors that yet accompany a contrasting image of dirt, both physical and moral. Not just Chinese but many Western observers too found the images of Tibetan Buddhism to reveal “bigotry, cruelty, and slavery”. Such visitors were at once entranced and repelled. Among the latter were Christian missionaries; Robbie cites a leaflet from as late as 1990:

Is there no light that cuts through the demonic darkness in Tibet, a nation long steeped in demonism and Tibetan Buddhism called Lamaism? … Satan has enslaved the people to a lifetime pre-occupation with right words and works. “Om mani padme hum” and other phrases are chanted repeatedly to false gods.

Such views can easily “mutate into engines of persecution”. I might add that while being a missionary would seem to be a serious handicap when seeking to understand a non-Christian culture, it has been noted that some of them have shown a remarkably enlightened view, favouring description rather than prescription.

Lhasa 1950s
Lhasa, late 1950s.

Meanwhile Robbie continues to unpack the Chinese attempt to rewrite history in Tibet. Most Chinese statistics and descriptions now use 1980 as the date

to mark the beginning of Chinese modernization in Tibet, much as if China had not been in control for the previous thirty years. […] Had the previous decades not been excised from the Chinese calculations, the overall achievement in Tibet, at least, might have seemed marginal.

Chapter 3 considers topography as a window on the Tibetans’ own moral world-view, with illustrations from early history, including the place of Buddhism. While they always conceived Lhasa as Ü, the “centre” of a square, later they depicted themselves as belonging to the northern, barren region—a different concept from the vain Chinese claim of occupying the “central kingdom”. Robbie gives a cogent account of debates over the “civilising” influence of the 7th-century Chinese princess Wencheng.

Chapter 4 looks at the spiritual geography of Lhasa, including the Potala, the Jokhang temple, the Barkor, and the Norbulingka. He notes that tranquility was not a fitting attribute to describe the city or its teeming monasteries; the Barkor was not only a pilgrimage site but a thriving market. The layout of the city was shaped not [only] by its religious edifices, but by the market squares and aristocratic mansions.

As elsewhere, there was no sense of contradiction between commerce and religion: for both Tibetans and foreign visitors,

the excitement of Lhasa was as much about shopping as about prayer—

until the Chinese occupation, when commerce and supplies abruptly disappeared.

It is one of the great tragicomic ironies of the Chinese presence that since the new transition point of 1980, Beijing’s main claim to legitimacy in Tibet has been the fact that it has brought consumer commodities to Tibet; until the Chinese arrived, the shops had been full of them.

Chapter 5 considers the 1980s’ reforms, when the Chinese began initiating grandiose construction projects—hotels, hospitals, squares, danwei work units, long broad thoroughfares. As the city expanded hugely, formerly isolated settlements on the outskirts became part of an unbroken urban sprawl. Around the Barkor some noble mansions remained intact, but many old houses had been so neglected for decades that demolition seemed inevitable. New buildings before the late 1980s were “large, symmetrical, and regular, […] statements of the solidity and purposiveness of the new regime”.

À propos foreign rulers making a statement by reshaping the streets of another nation’s capital, Robbie offers an aside on the Hanoverian project in Edinburgh,

the capital of a mountain territory with a strong and traditional religious culture scorned by the new rulers; it had also been annexed, through a claimed but disputed legal process, by a neighbouring state. In both cases the new rulers belonged to an aspirant dynasty that had foreign, protestant, progressivist, and puritanical ideas. Both dynasties were capable of immense feats of organisation, rapid technological advancement, and inordinate cruelty.

In 1995 a new set of construction projects for Lhasa was unveiled, among which the most grandiose was the vast military parade ground of the New Potala Palace Square—nicknamed Kalachakra Square by the locals in subtle homage to the exiled Dalai Lama.

I reflect that just as in Beijing, it seems absurd that one can now be nostalgic for the old architecture not only of the 1950s, but even of the 1980s.

Chapter 6 continues the story with the vogue for geometric structures in glass and chrome, replacing the former concrete. Until then,

building primarily in cement offered the advantage that fewer trees would need to be cut down in Tibet. This rationale was largely theoretical, because the Tibetan forests were anyway then being cleared to supply the market for timber in inland China.

From 1992, as petty commerce was encouraged, box-shaped, one-room shops proliferated in central Lhasa. Karaoke bars also became highly popular. In 1996 the official Party newspaper in Tibet published a letter from an unnamed reader:

Comrade Editor,
On a recent stroll through the streets of Lhasa, this writer discovered that the shop signs of several stores, restaurants, and karaoke dance halls showed extremely poor taste. Their display is strongly coloured by feudal superstitions, low and vulgar, of mean style, with some even making indiscriminate use of foreign names…

By 1997, while the city covered an area seventeen times that of 1950, the Tibetan quarter was shrinking fast. With the rise of (largely Chinese) tourism, some efforts were made to create new buildings that blended with the Jokhang in style, if only cosmetically.

Late in the 20th century the Tibetan quarter of Lhasa was thus a confusion of religiosity, decaying mansions, feverish construction, half-planned amenities, and demolition sites as it faced the onward rush of rapid modernization.

Lhasa 96

Chapter 7 takes us into the 21st century. At last, private houses were built in a hybrid Tibetan style. As wages of government employees rose, partly in compensation for restrictions on their behaviour and to mollify them for the influx of Chinese workers, some built new Simsha homes on the outskirts: “a new style of Tibetan housing, living, and class division had finally emerged”. Parks too, rendered soulless under Maoism, became Tibetanized. Still, casual visitors were unlikely to notice such changes amidst the hypermarkets and giant housing developments.

Western journalists and writers like myself found that our stories of five or ten years earlier had to be rewritten. Like our predecessors who had come with the British invasion a century before, we arrived prepared to write about the iniquities of the system and departed somewhat in awe of its achievements. This time the achievements were economic rather than spiritual, the system was Chinese rather than Tibetan, and the change was effected by major alterations in local policies more than by the exigencies of foreign outlook or temperament. Those who had created narratives after 1987 that focused on dissent, protest, and their suppression by the state found themselves wandering down streets where there were fewer police visible and far less crime than in the cities from which they had come. Those streets were now lined with arcades, malls, and shops advertising the same cornucopia of endlessly available commodity goods we were accustomed from our own histories to see as the goal of social progress.

Some writers even began to tone down their criticisms of the regime. While “the modern mechanisms of discreet control still abounded”, open demonstrations had ceased—for now.

Robbie also notes the “Tibet chic” craze among the Chinese middle classes, with a new respect for Tibetan Buddhism, seeking spiritual enlightenment in a way not unlike that long pursued by Western pilgrims. This craze was not matched by greater state tolerance, as monasteries were controlled even more strictly.

Meanwhile Robbie was changing too; by now he was Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University, spending summers in Lhasa as a visiting teacher at the university there; as he became accustomed to modernization, it lost the ability to shock him. He finds his vision becoming blurred:

As my life in Lhasa filled with the momentary excitements and quotidian disappointments of work, relationships, food, and sleep, the streets I had studied became ways to get to a meeting or a meal, and buildings whose history I had once dreamed of understanding became permeable exteriors of which only the contents mattered: they became unnoticed extensions of the people I knew and the ways in which they lived, talked, and slept. Any clarity of vision that I had once thought I had on arrival became obscured, and the lines that Italo Calvino had said were written in the corners of city streets and the gratings of windows became invisible. They could not be deciphered. They were no longer available as the distinct elements that the foreign writer wishes for, to control, describe, and play with according to his or her dreams.

As to interactions with Lhasa dwellers, as he has already noted, where the line lies that Tibetans cannot safely cross in conversations with others

is a matter of contention, and it changes from time to time, according to political conditions, the temperament of certain leaders, individual interpretations, and, most dangerously, erroneous calculation of risk.

Visitors may not know when they have caused harm. He and his students

mainly inferred the rules that limited us through a vague sense of recent history or from collective fears. These last were more effective than explicit prohibitions.

In Chapter 8 he talks with a Chinese friend who confides, in a rare moment of candour:

“I do not like what we have done to this city. We have not treated these Tibetans as well as they deserve. The buildings are too low. What this place needs is tower blocks like we have in Chengdu.”

And he visits a student in his class, a stern-faced Chinese cadre who was part-owner of a high-class nightclub. Locals would describe her as gya ma bod, neither Chinese nor Tibetan, a mestizo. Her Tibetan mother, born to a poor rural family, had become a leading official.

The half-goat, half-sheep grazes both the pastureland and the mountainsides; she doesn’t run away to sea. The pure-breed lives only in the imagination, and finally migrates in search of dreams; the hybrid buys shares in nightclubs, reads books in foreign languages, and adapts. The one enchants, the other discards outward charms. With her the future lies.

In the brief concluding Chapter 9 Robbie recaps the diverse architectural styles and the world-views they represent, reminding us of earlier historical themes.

Within the walled and unwalled compounds of the city formed by these streets and buildings live people the archaeology of whose lives can scarcely be read from their exteriors, and whose present surroundings may speak nothing of their histories and desires.

While interrogating silent buildings may seem a poor substitute for meaningful interaction with people, Robbie stresses the dangers of claiming “knowledge” of such a culture, and gives revealing notes on necessarily guarded encounters with Tibetan (and Chinese) Lhasa dwellers. He has led the way in detailing the indignities and abuses from which Tibetans continue to suffer under Chinese rule, but here they are hinted at rather than spelled out. In similar vein, the book is illustrated with line drawings—again, of buildings rather than people; and again, whereas one might suppose that photos would have reminded us better that Lhasa is a Real Place (for remarkable photos from the Cultural Revolution there, note Woeser’s book on the topic), instead the drawings underline Robbie’s focus on the elusive, fuzzy nature of memory.

Since the book was published in 2006, the relative standoff that had prevailed in Lhasa and further afield at the turn of the new century has again been shattered by yet another cycle of protest and repression (for Robbie’s analysis of the 2008 protests, see e.g. here). Surveillance has become ever more high-tech, with police cameras and checkpoints prominent.

Alongside documentation that is rarely so qualified by doubts about subjectivity, Lhasa: streets with memories is a most welcome study. For updates, see e.g. posts (in Chinese) by Tsering Woeser (blog; Twitter), such as this (translated) from 2013.

It is most important to keep the travails of the Tibetans in the public eye alongside those of the Uyghurs.

The Queen Mother of the West in Taiwan

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Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week for an audience with President Tsai Ing-wen was both bold and costly. As she tweeted,

America’s solidarity with the 23 million people of Taiwan is more important today than ever, as the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy.

But at such a highly sensitive moment in world affairs, her trip has inflamed relations with the PRC, prompting much ominous sabre-rattling from them; and according to many China-watchers, and indeed the US government, it was ill-advised. So far not only has the PRC regime escalated the war of words, but it is retaliating seriously by launching live-fire military drills.

Pelosi’s visit was illustrated by this striking image that has been making the rounds on social media:

Pelosi

The transliteration Nanxi Peiluoxi 南西 佩洛西 is felicitous (cf. Shuaike 帥克 for Švejk). Her Italian parents migrated west (xi 西), and her mother came from the south (nan 南); more to the point, in the image above the final xi character has been elided into the popular deity Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 西王母). * It illustrates the, um, nexus between sacred and secular power that one finds so often in Chinese religion, both before and since the 1949 “Liberation” (such as the ritual associations of Hebei; see e.g. my Plucking the winds). And on opulent processions in both Taiwan and Fujian across the strait, such god images are borne aloft on palanquins to re-assert territorial boundaries.

Mazu
Mazu. Source.

Still, by contrast with Pelosi’s excursion, pilgrimages for the seafarers’ goddess Mazu 媽祖 have been a major factor since the 1980s in the political, economic, and cultural rapprochement of people on both sides of the strait (see e.g. here).

President Tsai also awarded Pelosi the civilian Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon (Qingyun xunzhang 卿雲勳章)—another ritual title (cf. deities such as Houtu, enfeoffed as Chengtian xiaofa Houtu huangdi 承天效法后土皇帝). Perhaps Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi’s Italian-American background further enhances the ritual connection, recalling the Madonna pilgrimage (another niangniang female deity) of Italian Harlem.

And as to Pelosi and Catholicism, click here for a discussion of an extraordinary image from the Chinese embassy in France, depicting the Virgin Mary (Pelosi) as a baby-stealing witch. 

For Pelosi’s “long history of opposing Beijing”, including her 1991 visit to Tiananmen to commemorate the victims of the 1989 demonstrations, click here.

Pelosi Tiananmen

Meanwhile, as rabid nationalist Hu Xijin of the Chinese Global Times denounced Pelosi’s visit, Chinese netizens have fabricated an unlikely fantasy love affair between them:

Pelosi Hu

Just as unlikely, “back in the USA”, for once, Fox News and Mitch McConnell—normally Pelosi’s harshest critics—are full of praise for her initiative.

* * *

Around the time of Obama’s visit to China in 2009, “Obamao” T-shirts (“serve the people”) were sold in Beijing before being banned:

ObamaoSource.

While the T-shirts made a popular kitsch image in Beijing, adroitly combining enthusiasm for a foreign icon with misplaced nostalgia for Mao, in the USA they were soon in demand among Obama’s opponents, who fatuously compared his health-care reform with the Holocaust.

The world is a complicated place (You Heard It Here First).

I suppose most people read it simply as “Nanxi Peiluoxi wangmu niangniang” rather than “Nanxi Peiluo Xiwangmu niangniang”, but it’s a nice ambiguity—cf. the classic story of the hilarious misconstruing of a report on Prince Sihanouk’s visit to China!

Li Shiyu on folk religion in Philadelphia

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來而不往非禮也

LSY cover

We impertinent laowai are used to descending on a Chinese community to interpret its customs, but it’s less common to find Chinese ethnographies of religious life in Western societies.

Li Shiyu 李世瑜 (1922–2010) was a leading authority on Chinese sectarian religion and its “precious scrolls” (baojuan 寶卷). Alongside his historical research, he was concerned to document religious life in current society—although it was hard to broach the latter in China after the 1949 revolution. In his work on the precious scrolls, I have also been impressed by his attention to performance practice (see under The Houtu scroll). When I met him in the early 1990s he was still going strong, and still doing fieldwork.

Li Shiyu 1993
Li Shiyu with his wife, 1993. My photo.

Grootaers heying

Li Shiyu undertook his early field training in rural north China in 1947–48, on the eve of the Communist revolution, assisting his teacher, the Belgian Catholic missionary Willem Grootaers, in documenting village temples around the regions of Wanquan, Xuanhua, and Datong. [1] Whereas Grootaers was mainly concerned with listing the material evidence of “cultic units”, Li went further in describing sectarian activity. His resulting thesis Xianzai Huabei mimi zongjiao 现在华北秘密宗教 [Secret religions in China today], was published promptly in 1948, focusing on four sects including the Way of Yellow Heaven (also active in north Shanxi in counties such as Yanggao and Tianzhen, and later documented by scholars such as Cao Xinyu and Liang Jingzhi).

After the 1949 “Liberation” Li’s research was highly circumscribed (like that of countless other scholars such as Wang Shixiang), though he managed to continue his study of the precious scrolls, publishing a major catalogue in 1961. It was only after the liberalisations of the late 1970s following the collapse of the commune system that was he able to resume his work in earnest.

And in that early reform era, from 1984 to 1986 he also spent eighteen months as a Luce Scholar at Pennsylvania University. Hannibal Taubes (always ready to supply a stimulating lead: e.g. here, and here) alerts me to a chapter in Li Shiyu’s memoirs (Li Shiyu huiyilu 李世瑜回憶錄 [2011], pp.296–311) in which he attempted to apply the kind of field methods that he had acquired under Grootaers (described in pp.267–70) to the “folk religions” of the USA, with vignettes of the diverse Christian life of urban Philadelphia.

LSY opening

In his last six months there Li Shiyu made an ethnographic survey of church activity in the university district—an area of twenty streets and some 8,000 inhabitants. The 160 churches there might be large or small, with some shared by more than one denomination; seventeen were established Catholic and Protestant churches, while the others belonged to over seventy different groups that had mostly been formed since World War Two, some of them just small “house churches”.

LSY and deputy mayorWith the Mayor of Philadelphia.

My eyebrows were raised to read of Li Shiyu’s first port of call: in search of statistics, he began by consulting the very people he would never dream of going anywhere near in China—the Police Chiefs 公安局局长 (!) of the district and city. In China, local police archives (see Liu Shigu’s chapter for Fieldwork in modern Chinese history) would make most instructive sources on religious activity for the whole era of Maoist campaigns, but attempting access would be rash. Indeed, to Li Shiyu’s lasting anguish, his 1948 thesis had been used by the Public Security Bureau to suppress the very sectarian groups he had respectfully documented.

Anyway, when the Philadelphia police chiefs were unable to help, the City Council introduced him to the Mayor, who asked, “Why do you wanna know? You been sent by your government? Are you gonna give your report to them when you go back?”. [2] Li Shiyu replied that he was just doing academic research, nothing to do with the government—just as we might have to explain in China (cf. Nigel Barley in Cameroon, cited at the end of my post on The brief of ethnography).

In answer to Li Shiyu’s query whether churches needed to register when they opened, the Mayor explained how “freedom of religious belief” worked in the States; all people had to do was to find a property, ideally one bequeathed in someone’s will, tax-free and rent-free. He went on, “Some pastors are pitiable—unable to find a site, they have to rent one temporarily, paid by donations from the congregation or from their subsidiary occupation. Spreading the teachings is a good thing, it’s good for society, there’s no need to register with the police—so I dunno how many churches there are in Philly.”

Next Li Shiyu visited the Westminster Theological Seminary. But as one has to do in China, he soon gave up on officialdom, “going down” to the churches themselves, one by one. As he notes, in an unstable, even dangerous, American society, parents sought to prevent their children getting into trouble by introducing them to the spiritual power of the church (rather like the elders of Hebei ritual associations, as recalled by many villagers such as Cai An). Li absorbed himself in the intensity of sermons and choirs, getting to know congregation members. But rather than observing the mainstream churches, his experience in China doubtless prompted him to seek out some of the more less orthodox, charismatic groups—some of which forbade marriage or the owning of property.

To imbue us with the holy spirit, here’s a musical interlude from 1976 (which will get you in the mood for Aretha’s ecstatic Amazing Grace):

Li Shiyu’s survey makes fascinating reading in Chinese, bearing in mind his particular concerns, suggesting parallels with religious life in China. A case in point is the first, and most remarkable, of his nineteen vignettes, “The Holy Mother descends from the mountain” (Shengmu xiashan 圣母下山).

I doubt if Li Shiyu quite knew what he was getting into [3] when he stayed for ten days in a hostel on 36th Street, whose basement was the meeting place of the International Peace Mission. The mission was founded by the controversial African-American preacher Father Divine—here’s a short documentary:

After his death in 1965 the organisation was led by his white wife Edna Rose Ritchings, known as “Sweet Angel”, “Mother Divine”.

Mother DivineMother Divine signs her book for Li Shiyu.

In March 1986 Li Shiyu witnessed Mother Divine’s annual “descent from the mountain” (the “mountain” of her estate at Woodmont in the suburbs), and even made a speech as guest of honour at the banquet. But he can’t have been privy to Father Divine’s turbulent story or the Peace Mission’s intrigues. From 1971 Mother Divine was engaged in a dispute with cult leader Jim Jones, until he fled to Guyana in 1978 and instigated his followers to commit a horrific mass suicide there (subject of several documentaries, e.g. here)—alas, just the kind of cult that the Chinese state seizes on as a pretext to suppress peaceful gatherings of believers.

Li Shiyu goes on to introduce the Miracle Temple of Christ; he takes part in a “qigong” healing session, and a service involving “wild kissing”; he is struck by the silence of prayer at a Quaker (Kuike! 魁克) meeting (evidently “unprogrammed worship“), discovers Sister Tina’s lucrative psychic fortune-telling business, and observes a rather stressful immersive baptism. In an experiment that only the most intrepid fieldworker will care to contemplate, he confuses a couple of what sounds like Jehovah’s Witnesses by showing a genuine interest in their teachings, asking them etic questions like why there were so many denominations in Philadelphia, and their economic circumstances. And he describes the only occasion in visiting over a hundred churches when he was met by a hostile reception.

While Li Shiyu was in the States, Robert Orsi’s study of the Madonna cult in New York’s Italian Harlem was published, a book that would have impressed him.

* * *

Of course, Chinese scholars have long sought to understand “Western culture”; one might even see it as the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life since at least the May Fourth era (for science, philosophy, fiction, music, and so on)—I think, for example, of Fou Ts’ong’s father Fu Lei. Though Western culture didn’t reside solely in advanced technology or reified masterpieces of high art, it was rare for Chinese scholars to have the curiosity (or means) to contemplate the ethnography of living Western societies.

Even making the transition from rural to urban ethnography is rather rare, let alone shifting one’s sights from rural China to urban America. Just as Western fieldworkers in China build on a considerable body of research by local scholars, within the USA such charismatic traditions attract much study. And like Western scholars making an initial survey in China, during Li Shiyu’s time in Philadelphia he could hardly engage with the complexities involved in documenting religious life, or address issues such as race, gender, poverty, migration, and social change.

Still, he clearly found the encounter most fruitful and suggestive. For Chinese readers, potentially, such studies might suggest that “superstitious” practices were not unique to a “backward” China, that they have their own social logic. Li Shiyu’s non-judgmental, etic viewpoint is refreshing.

Though he gives Christian Science an easy ride, when interviewed by a representative he encapsulates a significant issue: asked, “Why do you want to come to the States to study our folk religion?”, Li Shiyu replies feistily, “That’s a question I’d ask your scholars—why do you come to China to study our folk religion?!”, citing the Chinese proverb Lai er bu wang fei li ye 來而不往非禮也 “Not to reciprocate is against etiquette”. Click here for the more elaborate interview in The Christian Science Monitor. 

Despite his somewhat testy initial encounter with the Mayor, Li Shiyu clearly relished the ease of doing fieldwork in the States, without the fear of consequences that bedevilled research under Maoism in China. His sojourn in Philly must have made a welcome relief before he plunged back into the fray of fieldwork in China, as academic pursuits there became more free—if never free enough.

[1] See the detailed critique on the site of Hannibal Taubes, in four parts starting here; for bibliography, see n.1 in my article on The cult of Elder Hu.

[2] The Mayor was apparently Wilson Goode—who might well have been feeling sensitive since he was under the shadow of an investigation into the police’s botched attempt the previous year to clear the building occupied by the radical anarcho-primitivist cult MOVE, when a police helicopter had dropped a bomb that led to a fire destroying four city blocks, killing eleven (including five children) and leaving 240 people homeless (documentary here). Goode himself later went on to become a minister of religion.

[3] Rather as I had no idea in 1989 when I first witnessed the New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo that the village had been the scene of a major massacre in the 1900 Boxer uprising, and that the Catholics there had later been evangelised by Bishop Martina, who was accused of plotting to blow up the Communist leadership at the 1949 victory celebrations in Tiananmen: click here.

The headscarf, emblem of the Chinese revolution

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Images from 1968 (left) and 1980 (right); see here.

In north China the white cloth that male peasants tie around their heads became an emblem of the revolution. The custom long predated the 1949 Liberation, but was another casualty of the collapse of the commune system in the late 1970s.

While the headgear was common throughout the north Chinese countryside, it is often associated with Shaanbei, revolutionary base from the 1930s. In this 1981 group photo from Yulin, only a couple of shawm players were wearing them (see Walking shrill), outnumbered by the peaked caps which were a more modern image of the revolution:

1981 photo

In the hill village of Yangjiagou, here’s the shawm player Chang Bingyou (1916–98), father of our friend Older Brother:

Chang Daye

Though fashion moved slowly in the countryside, by the time I visited Shaanbei in 1999 headscarves were already rare. Here’s the Yangjiagou band at a funeral in 1999:

YJG band

So it was purely in a spirit of nostalgia that we took this photo with Older Brother and Chouxiao in 1999:

YJG trio

But some older people in the region were still wearing the headscarf—here’s a band from Linxian (across the river in Shanxi) at the Baiyunshan temple fair in 2001:

BYS shawm band

Here’s Guo Yuhua with the last Yangjiagou villager still wearing it in 2005:

GYH chat with last headscarfed man

In the countryside south of Beijing, headscarves were also rare in Gaoluo by the 1990s. The wonderful He Yi was virtually the only villager who still wore one:

In the depth of winter villagers often wore protective earflaps:

GL wentan

Vocal liturgists perform for funeral, South Gaoluo 1995.

In Gaoluo even I resorted to headgear, affecting an English proletarian flat ’at.

See also Funerary headgear.

* * *

Meanwhile, a world away from the Chinese revolution:

JEG

English Baroque Soloists rehearsal: see Barbed comments.

The fine line between irony and Looking a Complete Twat is lost on the repugnant Minister for the 18th Century, “eternally trapped in the ridiculous fancy-dress outfit that he once wore for a laugh at a school party” (oh, I said that):

RM

And speaking of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson, here’s an instance of his characteristic gravitas:

BJ hat

Irony was also in full flow during the recent Opening of Parliament, with a crown worth billions of pounds, delivered in a gilded carriage, on display during a speech that neatly sidestepped the cost-of-living crisis (government advice: “Why not try earning more money?”):

Crown

As to clothing, one might note that men are not only free to choose for themselves, but that they are also kind enough to decide on behalf of women.

“Well folks, I guess that’s just about it for tonight!“

Cultural Revolution jokes

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CR jokes cover

While there’s an abundance of collections of satirical stories from around the Soviet bloc (see Hammer and tickle, with further links), I’ve noted the general neglect of the rich seam of subversive Chinese jokes debunking the Maoist decades, and indeed the following reform era. Serving as an outlet to defuse genuine distress, they constitute a major resource for understanding the “sentiments of the people” (minqing 民情).

In a substantial recent post on David Cowhig‘s useful website, he rounds up some fine Chinese sites for modern political jokes—notably this and this. He classifies them under headings such as Gang of Four jokes, dialect jokes, sex jokes, extreme political rituals, and historical revisionism. * Among David’s links are a site for Jiang Zemin and Li Peng stories, with more on the latter here (roughly translated here)—for some choice Li Peng stories on my own blog, click here, here, and here.

Admittedly, some of the stories are for the specialist and are hard to translate effectively, hinging on arcane Chinese puns. This one is worth bringing out when adopting the popular slogan jinburuxi 今不如昔 “things ain’t what they used to be” (as does Li Manshan at the end of my portrait film, from 1.19.20):

One evening the production team held a general meeting, and according to the instructions of the county committee and the commune, the old production-team leader expected the members to severely criticise the reactionary fallacy that “the present [jin] is not as good as the past [xi]”. But all evening no-one spoke up, because everyone felt that the present was indeed not as good as the past, so what was there to criticise? The old team leader had no choice but to prompt everyone: “How can the present be worse than the past? How much does gold [jin] cost a catty? How much does tin [xi] cost a catty?” So commune members came out with their criticism: “What a load of bollocks—of course gold is more expensive than tin!”

生产队晚上召开大会，老队长根据县委和公社的指示，要社员们狠狠批判“今不如昔”的反动谬论。可是开了大半夜，没有一个人发言，因为大家都觉得的确是今不如昔嘛，怎么批判？老队长没有办法，只好启发大家说：“怎么会今不如昔呢！金子多少钱一斤？锡多少钱一斤？”社员们一听，纷纷批判：“真是胡说八道，金子肯定比锡贵嘛！”

This related anecdote also links up with Tian Qing’s wonderful story:

There used to be a famous restaurant called Da Sanyuan in Changdi, Guangzhou. During the Cultural Revolution, it was ordered to change its name to Jin sheng xi 今胜昔 [The Present Beats the Past]. When Hong Kong or overseas compatriots came back to Guangzhou, reading from right to left in the traditional manner, they read the name as “The Past Beats the Present” (昔胜今). So they didn’t know whether they should enter the restaurant.

从前广州市长堤有一间众人皆知的著名酒家 “大三元”，文革中被勒令改名为“今胜昔”。而香港或是海外侨胞回广州时，都按旧时从右到左读法，便把 “今胜昔” 读成 “昔胜今”。搞得他们不知道进去好还是不进去好。

Two stories on blind obedience:

During the Cultural Revolution, there were often mass criticism meetings. One day someone’s father was dragged up on stage and criticised. At the end of the meeting, he was asked to shout slogans to make a clean break with his father and draw a clear line between the two of them. He rushed to the front of the stage and shouted with his arms held high:
“Down with my father! Down with my father!”
At this point the crowd joined in, jumping up and raising their hands, yelling :
“Down with my father! Down with my father!”

And

The work unit held a meeting to criticise Lin Biao and Confucius. A tenor and a soprano got on stage to lead the audience in chanting slogans:
(leader) “Down with Lin Biao!”
(crowd) “Down with Lin Biao!”
(leader) “Down with Confucius!”
(crowd) “Down with Confucius!”
(leader) “Harshly criticise ourselves and restore propriety!”
(Crowd) “Harshly criticise ourselves and restore propriety!”
After the slogans, there was a brief moment of silence before the leaders spoke. Just then, old Zhang from the communications office rushed out backstage and shouted to the leaders seated on the podium:
“Phone call for Director Wang!”
So the whole crowd followed him by chanting:
“Phone call for Director Wang!”

Just like “Yes! We’re all individuals!” in The life of Brian:

* More generally, in The joys of indexing (a zany read, not least for introducing the Lexicon of musical invective) I outlined some of the main themes among my “Chinese jokes” tag in the sidebar:

Sihanouk

Stories of Prince Sihanouk visiting China, an intriguing sub-genre.

Ray Man, pioneer of Chinese musicking in London

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with a homage to Cantonese music and jazz in Soho

RM 2022 for blog

Ray Man at home, 2022.

The splendid Ray Man (文賢慶, b.1937) has been a pillar of the Chinese music scene in the UK since he arrived from Hong Kong in 1956. It’s been many years since we met up, but it was delightful to visit him again recently at his house in Chalk Farm, listening as he recalled the old days with his quirky sense of humour. His story illustrates profound social and musical changes in the UK, Hong Kong, and mainland China. [1]

Ray’s early life in Hong Kong
Ray was brought up in rural San Tin in the New Territories, just south of Shenzhen (then still a sleepy little town!). The Wen lineage was the dominant clan there. Ray’s early memories are of hiding from the Japanese troops after they invaded Hong Kong in 1941. His father was a seaman who went on to trade rice in Singapore; imprisoned by the Japanese, he was only released when his father-in-law (who had long emigrated to New York) paid a huge ransom. But he lost his business, and after the war it was some time before he could return home; he was now suffering from TB.

HK Fan He
“Work and play”, from the iconic albums of Fan He.

In San Tin living conditions were poor. After the surrender of the Japanese, Ray moved with his mother to Kowloon in 1946, helping her with a little homemade catering enterprise, delivering congee and snacks.

HK Cantonese opera 1950s
Hong Kong club, 1950s. Source.

At the age of 9, while reading a cartoon book in a stairwell, Ray was entranced by hearing a blind busker playing a plaintive melody on yewu [yehu] 椰胡 coconut fiddle. He began frequenting the bustling area around Temple street, [2] where a variety of entertainments could be heard, such as the naamyam ballads sung by teahouse bards. Ray had absorbed Cantonese opera from infancy, perching on his mother’s back at New Year in the village; his older brother was a great fan, so now Ray too went along to clubs to relish the drama. He borrowed a violin (evocatively transcribed as 梵鈴), by then a popular member of the Cantonese ensemble, and picked up yehu and gaohu fiddles, as well as various plucked lutes.

Ray finds his feet in the UK
Following the British Nationality Act of 1948, waves of immigrants arrived in the UK from the Pearl River Delta—mostly male, and single, working in Chinese restaurants (wiki: here and here).

Through his old seafaring connections, Ray’s father, in frail health, reached London in 1955. In late 1956 Ray himself borrowed the princely sum of £165 for his own passage to the UK, boarding a ship with only his violin, Chinese yewu, and banjo; after forty-five days at sea he was less than pleased to find himself having to disembark in Marseilles (cf. Nearly an Italian holiday). Eventually he made his way on to London, finding the new Chinese community in Soho, which, as restaurant work supplanted seafaring, had recently replaced their original base of Limehouse—potent material for the racist fantasy embodied by Fu Manchu (see e.g. here, and here).

Limehouse 1911
Limehouse, 1911.

Musicians from China had performed in 19th-century London, but I haven’t found early evidence of musical life among its small settled Chinese community. In Soho Ray soon observed the gambling habits of Chinatown and acquainted himself with the Chinese Workers’ Association. There he took out his violin to play a little piece of Cantonese music to the old folks sitting around. When they all stopped what they were doing, he too broke off, thinking “I play something wrong?”. Far from it: “Hey, why you stop? Keep going—never hear something like that before!”

Here’s a solo by the celebrated Hong Kong violinist Yin Zizhong 尹自重 (1903–85), from the heyday of Cantonese music:

1956 club for blog
The “London Co-operative Workers’ Association Music Group”, late 1956;
Ray (holding violin) is fourth from right.

Just a few days after arriving in London, Ray was recruited to an ersatz group to be shown on BBC TV, portraying a sanitised image of the London Chinese community—all spruced up in smart suits and ties, a far cry from the drudgery of their real lives. Ray was the youngest, and as he recalls with a chuckle, though apparently the only one in the photo not playing, he was the only real musician in the band—“they no play anything at all!”. When they told him the group was going to appear on television (which indeed was still in its infancy), he asked, “What’s that?!”

As Chinese and Indian restaurants began to provide jaded British palates with a welcome relief from their drab post-war diet, Ray took work where he could find it, mainly as waiter and cook around the north of England—Hull, Manchester, and York; he remembers Bradford as particularly poor.

Back in Hong Kong he had enjoyed the sound of the saxophone in the Cantonese opera ensemble. While working in the first Chinese restaurant in Belfast he paid £165 for his first sax, taking part in jazz bands. He was startled to have to fork out £920 for his second one, paying it off by HP instalments.

After learning to drive in Newcastle in 1957, in Soho Ray spent some time as a driving instructor: “That’s right, I was the first driving instructor—in history!”, he chortles; “All my students were gamblers and gangsters!”. But he managed to avoid being ensnared by the Triad mafia.

Meanwhile Ray’s father was still suffering from the effects of TB, and Ray spent a stressful time finding treatment for him on the impressive new NHS—which enabled him to live until 1998.

A fast learner, Ray was hard-working, easy-going, and popular. Quite soon he had aspirations to become his own boss. By now his mother was living with her father in New York; they encouraged Ray to come and join them there, and he was tempted—not least by the prospect of learning to play jazz on the sax. That would have been a different story altogether (“That would have been a different story”). Instead, his jazz idols came to Soho.

The 1960s: swinging London
By now the Soho jazz scene was beginning to take off. In 1959 Ronnie Scott opened his club in the basement of 39 Gerard street.

Ronnie Scott

Ronnie Scott’s, original venue. Source.

From 1962 Ronnie’s began hosting jazzmen from the USA, working round the ban on overseas musicians. Just up the road was Ray’s restaurant—which itself soon served as an after-hours nightclub for jazzers still on a high, needing to keep jamming after they staggered out of Ronnie’s at 3am. There Ray loved hearing great artists like his idol Ben Webster—here he is with Ronnie in A night in Tunisia (1965, as part of BBC2’s Jazz 625 series):

BTW, Ben Webster took the first solo in Billie Holiday‘s astounding 1957 TV appearance, the all-time most moving jazz video (click here—part of my extensive jazz series)!!!

Billie
Billie entranced by Ben Webster’s playing.

Ray was captivated by the new sound, so very different from the slick commercial pop music of the day. Himself a migrant from a poor rural background, he identified with the way that black people gave voice to their hard life, infused by the blues, “singing from the heart” (as later did Liu Sola, from her very different background). Later, during my time with the band, Ray was bemused and amused by the raised eyebrows of patrons when the splendid Black British percussionist Reggie took part.

Ronnie with KirksOriginal caption (source):
Mrs Edith Kirk smiles at Ronnie Scott as he holds a glass of wine and stands alongside
Rahsaan Roland Kirk, outside Ronnie Scotts’ [sic!] Jazz Club,
39 Gerrard Street, London circa 1963.

Recalling the blind street musicians of his youth in Hong Kong, another jazzer whom Ray much admired was the blind sax player Roland Kirk. Here he is at Ronnie’s in 1964:

Doubtless those early sessions also gave Ray his lasting taste for the “jazz cigarette”. At the same time, he is well aware that trying to make a living from making music is a fraught and insecure life. While unable to transcend mundane concerns (like Henry James!), he is devoted to the amateur ideal of Chinese music, aspiring to the simple life with a kind of detachment that now reminds me of my Daoist master Li Manshan.

One day at the club Ray received a visit from a cheery plainclothes sergeant from Holborn CID. “We’ve been watching you for the last six months, Ray. My partner’s crazy about your place. Enjoy it! Just slip us a hundred quid now and then, there’s a good fellow…”

Opening the shop
By 1967, as the jazz scene was catering to rather more salubrious patrons, Ronnie’s had moved to its present venue in Frith street (for a recent visit, click here). Ray lost a lot of money in 1969 with his older brother on an ambitious project to organise “the first professionally-organised, full-length Cantonese opera in London”, but they now managed to set up a takeaway together. In 1972 Ray took on a little restaurant at a prime location in Covent Garden just across from Chinatown, on the corner of Earlham street. He began by selling instruments from a corner of the restaurant, with a display in the window looking onto Shaftesbury avenue. Soon this promised to become a business on its own.

RM shop
Ray’s shop, 1982.

Another guest at Ronnie’s was the versatile jazzman Yusuf Lateef—here he is live in 1966:

Yusuf Lateef’s music often featured oriental instruments such as shawms, flutes, and bells (e.g. Eastern sounds, 1961), and later he used to augment his collection at Ray’s shop. It was he who introduced John Coltrane to Inayat Khan’s book on Sufi music which a mystically-inclined fellow violinist in the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave me in 1978—just around the time I was playing in Ray’s band! 

Our paths converge
On Sunday afternoons Ray got a band together to rehearse for occasional appearances at Chinese community events. The musicians were then still largely second-generation immigrants or recent arrivals from Hong Kong, some just passing through.

While Ray was gradually accommodating a more “pan-Chinese” style, his own culture was rooted in Cantonese opera and instrumental pieces. In Hong Kong and Guangzhou, the youthful genre of “Cantonese music” had been remarkably innovative through the Republican period, incorporating jazz-tinged violin, guitar, sax, and zany xylophone (cf. Shanghai jazz). Click here for a playlist with nine LPs of the great Lü Wencheng 呂文成 with his band, issued between 1957 and 1967. There’s more to Cantonese music than meets the ear—here’s a fine traditional rendition of Shuangsheng hen 雙聲恨 (“Double voicing of bitterness”), based on the plangent yi-fan mode (with brief excursions into more cheerful scales), with a trio led by Yin Zizhong, c1930: [3]

In 1972, as the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were subsiding, I began studying ancient Chinese at Cambridge under Denis Twitchett, often visiting Laurence Picken there to learn about Tang music—at a time when Chinese music seemed to reside solely between the pages of history books, and the survival of any traditional cultures in mainland China was a matter of guesswork. In those days, blinkered by my classical training, I had little idea of either jazz or folk (cf. What is serious music?!). While my listening tastes in Asian music were for Indian raga, visiting Ray’s shop gave me my first inklings of how a living Chinese musical tradition might sound.

By now I had begun picking up the erhu fiddle. On my visits to Soho and Chinatown, besides finding books on Zen and Daoism at Watkins in Cecil court, I would browse in the recently-opened Guanghwa bookshop. Among the Chinese books there, alongside collections of model operas, revolutionary songs, and the occasional pamphlet on imperial culture (mostly fulminating against Confucius), I found a tutorial for the erhu and a couple of collected scores of modern solos. That was how I first acquainted myself with cipher notation—but I would learn more through emulating the nuance of Ray’s playing.

RM band c1979
With Ray Man’s band for Chinese New Year at Imperial College, early 1980s
(the music-stands revealing our novice status!).
Ray in the middle on plucked lute, me second left on erhu.

After graduating in 1976 I settled in London, working in orchestras under maestros like Boulez and Rozhdestvensky while continuing to help Laurence Picken on his Music from the Tang court project. It was through taking part in Ray’s Sunday sessions that I got used to playing the erhu in ensemble. All this was long before I first began visiting China in 1986, coming to realise the huge variety of regional cultures and joining in sessions at silk-and-bamboo clubs in Shanghai.

Ray’s shop was “like a bazaar”, as The Asia magazine described it. There he began offering tuition on a range of instruments. In 1975 he married Manyee, who had recently arrived from Hong Kong; they went on to have three children. Ray must have had a certain flair for business, but soon he could let Manyee take on the daily business of running the shop while he sat sage-like in the basement studio, surrounded by his instruments and the fug of herbal substances, his eyes always sparkling. A true aficionado, his English has remained engagingly impressionistic, as has his Mandarin. I guess I imagined him as a kind of musical Lee Chong.

Since the 1980s
The early Chinese communities around the UK had largely been Cantonese-speaking immigrants; even in the 1980s mainland Chinese voices were still rarely to be heard on the streets (for fictional treatments of Chinese lives in London, click here).

The insular dominance of the Cantonese community in the UK might have lasted longer had it not been for the death of Mao, the overthrow of the Gang of Four, and the ensuing dismantling of the commune system, which paved the way for the spectacular emergence of mainland China after decades of isolation, reverberating widely. Soon, as people arrived from all over China to study or do business, Mandarin was commonly heard on the streets of London. Gradually, as restaurant workers moved out to the suburbs, along with the wider transformation of Soho, the Cantonese focus of Ray’s band was diluted.

Back in the homeland too, amidst radical social change—both in postwar Hong Kong and in mainland China (following both the 1949 Communist takeover and the 1980s’ liberalisations)—“Cantonese music” lost much of its energy, becoming stultified in polished renditions on the concert platform. [4]

As “world music” became A Thing, Ray’s Soho shop continued broadening to stock a wide array of instruments from around the globe, and stars from the pop and film music scenes (George Harrison, Elton John, Björk, Noel Gallagher…) began visiting in search of exotic sounds.

RM Chalk Farm shopThe shop in Chalk Farm.

In 1999 the shop relocated to Chalk Farm, opposite Camden market, catering to the growing market in ethnic instruments; but in 2020 it was forced to close by the pandemic.

Whereas the Bhavan centre makes a well-supported focus for Indian expressive culture in west London, with fine visiting musicians teaching and performing a range of genres, London lacks a comparable venue for Chinese music. Numerous community associations have been formed; New Year brings out a parade of pan-Chinese lion and dragon dancing around Chinatown; Cheng Yu maintains a forum for the literati world of qin and pipa, and the “pan-Chinese” style that had evolved out of silk-and-bamboo. But Ray’s dream of a London Chinese music centre has remained unfulfilled. Similar initiatives in Chinese musicking have been held in the communities of Liverpool and Manchester, again broadening out from their original Cantonese base. If only south Fujian immigrants (a significant component of the later UK Chinese demographic) had a community maintaining the venerable amateur art of nanyin, for instance; but for such regional traditions we can only look to China itself.

From 1986, when I finally began exploring China, my fieldwork soon came to focus mainly on ritual life in poor northern villages, leading me to Gaoluo and the Li family Daoists. But it was Ray who first opened up that world to me, and I still feel grateful for my early exposure to Cantonese music with him—rather as he seems to have continued recreating the dream of his early musical inspirations in Hong Kong.

With many thanks to Ray and Manyee

[1] In addition to chatting with Ray and his wife Manyee, I’ve consulted various early press cuttings, notably an article in The Asia magazine (29th August 1982).

[2] For the transformation of Temple street in later decades, see e.g. this 2011 documentary.

[3] Chapter 15 of my 1995 book Folk music of China has a basic survey, along with various genres in Guangdong province; the Shuangsheng hen recording (transcribed on p.360) is #15 of the CD with the 1998 paperback edition, or #8 of disc 2 of my 2-CD set China: folk instrumental traditions. Many thanks to Yuan Jingfang, who introduced me to a range of genres at the Central Conservatoire, Beijing, in 1987.

[4] See also The folk-conservatoire gulf. For the changing times of Hong Kong musicking, note the research of scholars such as Bell Yung (including Cantonese opera: performance as creative process, ch.4) and Yu Siu-wah 余少華. Opera played a prominent role for early Cantonese immigrant communities in north America (cf. sites linked under A Daoist temple in California; see also here); and click here for Cantonese music societies in Vancouver since the 1930s.

A domestic couplet

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home duilian

While most domestic couplets pasted at the gateway of ordinary families are somewhat trite, this one caught my eye, at a peasant gateway in a north Shanxi village:

聖言興旺是正道
世事衰微盡蒼桑

For the Word of the Sage to flourish is the Proper Way
For worldly affairs to decline evinces chronic vicissitudes

This may seem to reflect an enduring pre-Liberation faith—the Word of the Sage apparently referring to a Christian worldview (“the Word of God”). But it’s combined with phrases adapted from a poem of Chairman Mao:

人间正道是苍桑
The Proper Way among humans is inconstant

—appealing, whether fortuitously or ingeniously, to political correctness. Shame I didn’t have a chance to chat with the host.

For a Buddhist meditation on impermanence in the vocal liturgy of the Li family Daoists, click here.

Free: coming of age at the end of history

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Things were one way, and then they were another. I was someone, then I became someone else.

Ypi cover

With my knowledge of Albania largely limited to the improbable combination of Norman Wisdom, Mother Teresa, the mesmerising polyphony of the Tosk and Lab peoples (here and here), and rituals of the Bektashi order, I’ve been fascinated to read

Covering Ypi’s early years before she left Albania to study in Rome, it makes a fine addition to memoirs on the climate of duplicity in people’s lives behind the Iron Curtain and their ongoing tribulations, such as Vesna Goldsworthy (Serbia), Katya Kassabova (Bulgaria), Maxim Leo (GDR), Orlando Figes (USSR); and of course it’s reminiscent of the circumspection and fear that Chinese people experienced under Maoism.

EnverBorn in 1979 in the port of Durrës just west of Tirana, Lea was prudently brought up to revere Uncle Enver and Stalin—despite the complicated “biographies” of her family, which she only began to understand later.

Biographies were carefully separated into good and bad, better or worse, clean or stained, relevant or irrelevant, transparent or confusing, suspicious or trustworthy, those that needed to be remembered and those that needed to be forgotten.

When Uncle Enver died in 1985, her parents dutifully protested their love for the Party, making Lea promise that she would never tell anyone otherwise.

Pioneers

At school she avidly became a Pioneer. Her father affectionately called her brigatista—equivalent, as she gathered, to “troublemaker”.

Gazing at foreign children on holiday at the beach, Lea reflects:

We knew that it was difficult for us to travel abroad because we were surrounded by enemies. Moreover, our holidays were subsidised by the Party. Perhaps one day the Party would be powerful enough to have defeated all our enemies, and would pay for everyone to travel abroad too. In any case, we were already in the best place. They had nothing. We knew we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most: real freedom. […]

The tourists

were interested in everything: the Roman amphitheatre, the Venetian tower, the harbour, the old city walls, the tobacco factory, the rubber-making factory, the schools, the Party headquarters, the dry-cleaning shops, the piles of rubbish awaiting collection, the queues, the street rats, the weddings, the funerals, the things that happened, the things that did not happen, the things that may or may not have happened. Tourists held Nikon cameras, intent on capturing our past greatness and our present misery, or our present greatness and the misery of our past, depending on their point of view. […]

Ypi young

Years later, she discovered that the tourists were of two kinds. The realists, mostly from Scandinavia, belonged to fringe Marxist-Leninist groups, admiring “the clarity of our slogans, the order of our factories, the purity of our children, the discipline of the horses who pulled our carriages, and the conviction of the peasants who travelled in them”. The dreamers, bored with Bali, Mexico, and Moscow, were in search of the ultimate exotic adventure; they came to discover “a truth they had already agreed upon”.

Ypi grandparents

Lea was much influenced by her cultured, French-speaking, Ottoman-born grandmother. Her parents find relief from Albanian TV by complicated manoeuvres on the roof to receive foreign stations by satellite.

My family accepted that some rules were more important than others and that some promises would become obsolete with time. In this they were no different from other people, the rest of society, or even the state. Part of the challenge of growing up was finding out which rules faded over time, which were trumped by other more important obligations, and which ones remained inflexible.

She ponders the rules of grocery shopping and the loopholes of queueing. And she mends a rift between her family and their neighbours over a Coca Cola can.

At the time, these were an extremely rare sight. Even rarer was the knowledge of their function. They were markers of social status: if people happened to own a can, they could show it off by exhibiting it in their living rooms, usually on an embroidered tablecloth over the television or the radio, often right next to the photo of Enver Hoxha.

At school Lea eventually solves the mystery of Coca Cola:

“I think it’s a drink”, I almost whispered, as if I were revealing a secret. “Those cans you sometimes see on top of people’s shelves, they’re to hold drinks.”

* * *

In December 1990, as news of the collapse of socialism belatedly reached Albania, she stared incredulously at the TV screen.

The same human beings who had been marching to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism took to the streets to demand its end. The representatives of the people declared that the only things they had ever known under socialism were not freedom and democracy but tyranny and coercion.

Hearing the cries of “Freedom, democracy!” Lea supposed the “hooligans” were shouting out of fear, out of uncertainty, “to explain that this was what they did not want to lose, rather than what they wanted”.

Finally she understands the discreet euphemisms her family had been using.

They said that my country had been an open-air prison for almost half a century. That the universities which had haunted my family were, yes, educational institutions, but of a peculiar kind. That when my family spoke of the graduation of relatives, what they really meant was their recent release from prison. That completing a degree was coded language for completing a sentence. That the initials of university towns stood for the initials of various prison and deportation sites.

Lea finally begins to understand her family’s biographies. Meanwhile at school, at first their teacher exhorts them to reject both the revisionist East and the imperialist West. But counter-protests in memory of Enver Hoxha were short-lived, and the terms dictatorship, proletariat, and bourgeoisie disappeared from people’s vocabulary, replaced only by an elusive “freedom”.

As the old Party managed to win the first elections, protests, looting, and violence spread widely. The new remedy was to be the shock therapy of market reforms.

Lea’s parents receive a visit from a former Party member turned Opposition candidate, asking them to lend him a pair of grey socks. He soon became a charismatic politician and highly successful businessman:

We rarely saw him again, and even when we did, it was only from a distance, as he slammed the door of his dark, shiny Mercedes Benz, surrounded by mighty bodyguards. It would have been imprudent, as well as implausible, to get closer and accuse him of wrongfully appropriating my father’s socks.

In 1991 Lea made her first trip outside Albania, joining her grandmother on a visit to Athens and Salonika in a futile attempt to reclaim the family’s former properties. A passage like this doesn’t read merely as poverty voyeurism but evokes genuine culture shock:

I made a list of all the new things I had discovered for the first time, and meticulously recorded them: the first time I felt air conditioning on the palm of my hands; the first time I tasted bananas; the first time I saw traffic lights; the first time I wore jeans; the first time I did not need to queue to enter a shop; the first time I encountered border control; the first time I saw queues made of cars instead of humans; the first time I sat down on a toilet instead of squatting; the first time I saw people following dogs on a leash instead of stray dogs following people; the first time I was given actual chewing-gum rather than just the wrapper; the first time I saw buildings made of different shops and shop-windows bursting with toys; the first time I saw crosses on graves; the first time I stared at walls covered by adverts rather than anti-imperialist slogans […]

But she wanted to go home, to feel safe. Meanwhile back home everyone seemed to be trying to leave—including her schoolfriend Elona, who managed to get to Italy, aged just 13, where she ended up as a street beggar. Elona’s grandfather told Lea how he had gone in search for her by getting on board the Vlora, a ship built to take 3,000 passengers and now crammed with nearly 20,000, before he was deported back with most of the others.

Still, mass emigration continued apace.

Her mother joined the opposition Democratic Party and became a leader in the national women’s association, delivering polished, unscripted speeches to large rallies, “as if she had written them in her head many years ago, as if she had rehearsed every day of her life the sentences that she would later utter”. She received a visit from a delegation of French women, who didn’t find her vision of female emancipation entirely compatible with their own.

When Lea briefly joined a mosque, her benign father, recently unemployed, joked “Did you pray for me to find a job?”

“It won’t help”, I replied. You need to change the font on your CV. You need to switch from Times New Roman to Garamond.”

(I doubt if at the time anyone anywhere was much aware of the joys of choosing arty fonts, but I’m happy to allow for poetic license.) Anyway, her father soon became director of the biggest port in the country, finding himself having to deliver “structural reforms”, laying off workers that he cared about.

Lea had previously been content with her “freedom”; but as she became a teenager, with decades of socialist education being overturned, she became withdrawn, losing her voice for a time. The clubs of her youth, for poetry, theatre, singing, maths, natural science, music, and chess, had ceased to exist.

A few pubs and clubs had started to open. Most of them belonged to people-smugglers, drug-dealers, or sex traffickers. These were all mentioned as normal occupations, in the same way one would have explained in the past that so-and-so was a cooperative worker, a factory employee, a bus driver, or a hospital nurse.

From Islam she turned to Buddhism for a while, and volunteered for the Red Cross at the local orphanage.

There was no politics left, only policy. And the purpose of policy was to prepare the state for the new era of freedom, and to make people feel as if they belonged to “the rest of Europe”.

During those years, “the rest of Europe” was more than a campaign slogan. It stood for a specific way of life, one which was imitated more often than understood, and absorbed more often than justified. Europe was like a long tunnel with an entrance illuminated by bright lights and flashing signs, and with a dark interior, invisible at first. When the journey started, it didn’t occur to anyone to ask where the tunnel ended, whether the light would fail, and what there was on the other side. It didn’t occur to anyone to bring torches, or to draw maps, or to ask whether anyone ever makes it out of the tunnel, or if there is only one exit or several, and if everybody goes out the same way. Instead, we just marched on, and hoped the tunnel would remain bright, assuming we worked hard enough, and waited long enough, just as we used to wait in socialist queues—without minding that time had passed, without losing hope.

As the new buzzwords “civil society” and “corruption” circulated, people were duped by disastrous pyramid schemes in which more than half of the population, including Lea’s family, lost their savings. This led to the civil war of 1997, which she records starkly by reproducing her diary from January to April, written amidst the sound of gunfire, explosions, and screaming.

It’s like a whole country committing suicide. Just when it looked like things were getting better it all went downhill. Now that we are all falling from a precipice, there’s no way back. It’s so much worse than 1990. At least there was hope in democracy then. Now there is nothing, just a curse.

The strife led to a new mass exodus. By now Lea’s mother had already managed to get to Italy, where she eventually found menial work. After Lea’s farcical graduation from school, beset by doubts she too found her way to Italy, studying philosophy in Rome.

I waved goodbye to my father and grandmother on the shore and travelled to Italy on a boat that sailed over thousands of drowned bodies, bodies that had once carried souls more hopeful than mine, but who met fates less fortunate. I never returned.

* * *

As for others in the socialist bloc, people could neither feel positive about their new circumstances nor nostalgic for the socialist past. Such memoirs are not merely quaint, but evoke an ongoing psychological conflict both for those who experienced the period and for outsiders.

Lea Ypi now teaches political theory at the LSE. As told in the Guardian,

She is wry, now, about the empty shelves and educational chaos of post-Brexit, pandemic Britain. After years of being lectured about the supposed failures of where she comes from, “there is a special pleasure in it, because the tables are reversed for once”.

Still, she is critical of the “holy” left in the West.

My mother finds it difficult to understand why I teach and research Marx, why I write about the dictatorship of the proletariat. […] Mostly, she keeps her criticisms to herself. Only once did she draw attention to a cousin’s remarks that my grandfather did not spend fifteen years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. We both laughed awkwardly, then paused and changed the topic. […] I wanted to clarify, but didn’t know where to start. I thought that it would take a book to answer.

This is that book.

And very fine it is too.

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

The zheng zither in Shandong

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The elite, rarefied qin zither enjoyed an unlikely Golden Age during the first fifteen years of Maoism, as I show in my series of vignettes. Though it was largely self-contained in its ivory tower, in the 1950s the new energy at the Music Research Institute in Beijing to study all kinds of traditional music combined with the official populist ethos to encourage occasional exchanges—such as this illustrious gathering with masters of the zheng 筝 zither at the house of Yang Dajun:

Zhao Yuzhai at MRI

Qin and zheng exchange, mid-1950s (see e.g. here). From left,
back row: Zhao Yuzhai, Yang Dajun, Gao Zicheng, [unidentified], Cao Zheng, Wu Jinglue;
front row: Wang Jinru, Cao Dongfu (playing), Luo Jiuxiang, Zha Fuxi.

Of the zheng players there, Zhao Yuzhai and Gao Zicheng came from Shandong, Cao Zheng and Cao Dongfu from adjacent Henan; Luo Jiuxiang represented the Hakka style of east Guangdong, far south; Wang Jinru was based in Beijing.

Unlike the seven-string qin, the strings of the zheng have individual bridges. Though just as ancient as the qin, it has much more in common with local folk music; while some prominent advocates like Cao Zheng made more exalted claims for its grounding in ancient cosmology, it still feels like a poor cousin of the qin. Its regional distribution is patchy, but Zhao Yuzhai was part of a thriving zheng scene in southwest Shandong, based (as often) on the local ensemble that accompanied vocal performance; the musicians were itinerant and semi-occupational.

My sparse early clues to folk musicking in Shandong (Folk music of China, p. 209) have been much augmented by the publication of the Shandong volumes of the Anthology (see my review “Reading between the lines: reflections on the massive Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples”), in this case particularly for instrumental music (Zhongguo minjian qiyuequ, Shandong juan 中国民间器乐曲, 山东卷, 1994).

Throughout the Anthology, ensemble repertoire always far eclipses solo pieces; like other volumes for north China (e.g. Liaoning), the coverage of Shandong is dominated by the shawm-band repertoire (cf. “Reading between the lines”, pp.317–18), to which the first 1,269 of 1,958 pages are devoted. Solo pieces for the zheng occupy pp.1515–1620 (among online surveys of the Shandong zheng, see e.g. here).

Zhao Yuzhai 赵玉斋 (1923–99) [1] came from the Heze region of southwest Shandong, also renowned for its shawm bands. He was a disciple of the great blind musician Wang Dianyu 王殿玉 (1899–1964).

Wang Dianyu 1943

The Dong Lu yayue she 东鲁雅乐社, led by Wang Dianyu, 1943.
Right to left Chen Baozeng 陈宝曾, Gao Zicheng 高自成, Zheng Xipei 郑西培,
Wang Dianyu 王殿玉, Han Fengtian 韩风田, Zhao Yuzhai 赵玉斋, Tan Yonghe 谭永和.

The core string ensemble is for zheng, yangqin dulcimer, pipa, and ruyigou fiddle. Their repertoire is based on the Peng baban 碰八板 form—baban variants are common in various coastal chamber genres from Shanghai down to Guangzhou, if not nearly so widespread as scholarly attention may lead us to suppose. The Shandong style has much in common with the adjacent province of Henan, where zheng masters like Cao Dongfu 曹东扶 (1898–1970) were much admired. (Click here for bowed zithers in Shandong and Henan.)

In the cause of forging a new style of “national music”, through the 1950s many folk masters were enlisted to the new conservatoires and state troupes. Solo instruments like the zheng were more easily incorporated into the conservatoire system than ensembles that relied on folk ceremonial; players took readily to adapting their repertoire for the new demands of the new ethos. [2] In 1955 Zhao Yuzhai was recruited to the Shenyang conservatoire (where one of his colleagues was the qin player Ling Qizhen—see Musicking at the Qing court 1, n.3). The traditional zheng had 16 (or fewer) strings; in 1957, responding to the call to “improve” Chinese instruments, Zhao Yuzhai created an enlarged 21-string version. Meanwhile the lofty qin also found a place in the conservatoires; but while players took part in the major shift from silk to metal strings, they remained largely unscathed by “development”.

n 1955 Zhao Yuzhai was exposed to the rigours of rural collectivisation when a troupe from the conservatoire was sent on a tour of rural south Liaoning to “experience life” (tiyan shenghuo 体验生活), as the glib slogan went (cf. Daoist Li Qing’s stint in the Datong troupe). This resulted in his florid composition “Celebrating a bumper year” (Qing fengnian 庆丰年)—irony not supplied:

By 1958 even qin master Zha Fuxi was reduced to composing a piece in praise of the Great Leap Backward. for whose hyperbole click here.

In 1956 Zhao Yuzhai was part of a troupe performing at the Prague Spring festival, and in October he toured north Europe; his career continued to thrive until 1963. I can never get used to the blatant lacunae for the years of Maoism that are so universal in PRC biographies (cf. Craig Clunas’s remarks); like countless others, Zhao Yuzhai was assaulted at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, condemned to labour camp until his release in 1978.

Zhao Yuzhai was one of three zheng players, along with Gao Zicheng and Luo Jiuxiang, who appeared in illustrious company on the 2-CD set of archive recordings from the Music Research institute. In 2000 a CD was devoted to his playing. He appears on film in “Autumn moon over Han palace” (Hangong qiuyue 汉宫秋月):

and “Four folds of brocade” (Siduan jin 四段锦):

Among other celebrated Shandong zheng masters were Han Tinggui 韩庭贵 (1929–2016) and Gao Zicheng 高自成 (1918–2010). Like Zhao Yuzhai, Gao Zicheng found a long-term position away from his Shandong home, teaching at the Xi’an conservatoire from 1957 (for the Shaanxi zheng style, see here)—here’s a short documentary in Chinese:

Apart from such masters who were selected for national celebrity, it may be hard to find ethnographic material on how folk chamber ensembles in rural Shandong adapted to successive social transformations—first to collectivisation, and then to the 1980s’ revival of tradition, soon challenged by the tide of capitalism and pop culture. Cf. Bards of Henan.

Meanwhile in a separate milieu, the concert platform made a more natural progression for the zheng than for the qin. Hitherto largely the preserve of men, since the 1980s’ reform era the zheng (like other stringed instruments in the conservatoire) has been dominated by female soloists. At the same time, concert performances for the qin on stage have come to enjoy a higher profile than the “refined gatherings” where its soul resides; but in the end, the qin still occupies its own world, at a tangent from the conservatoire.

 

[1] For Chinese sources on Zhao Yuzhai, see e.g.
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%B5%B5%E7%8E%89%E6%96%8B/5776019
https://www.sohu.com/a/386245358_684953
https://www.factpedia.org/index.php?title=%E8%B5%B5%E7%8E%89%E6%96%8B&variant=zh
http://info.guqu.net/guzhenwenxue/29411.html
http://www.yueqiziliao.com/guzheng/202047250.html
https://www.yueqiquan.com/a39423.html

[2] In English, see e.g. Han Mei, The emergence of the Chinese zheng: traditional context, contemporary evolution, and cultural identity (2013); Sun Zhuo, The Chinese zheng zither: contemporary transformations (2015). 

Wild Swans revisited

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Wild Swans cover

When Jung Chang’s Wild swans: three daughters of China was first published in 1991 (quite soon after the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations), curiosity in the West about people’s lives under Maoism ensured it huge popular success. This was soon followed by a tide of condescension from sinologists and China-watchers, understandably envious at the eclipse of their own more careful, measured research on the period. Still, rather few of them seem to have aired their reservations publicly (see e.g. Lin Chun, and Harriet Evans, “Hot-house history”, in TLS 1992).

While the way that Jung Chang (pinyin: Zhang Rong) enmeshes the personal and the political is a strength, her general slant may read like simplistic Commie-bashing, lacking in empathy—treating the development of the regime as alien (cf. Dikötter, “The tragedy of Liberation”).

It was hardly new to expose the iniquities of the Maoist system, and they do indeed need to be exposed. But surely they deserved a wide audience outside academia—not just the famine and the Cultural Revolution, but the whole catalogue of abuses before and after the 1949 “Liberation”. And personal accounts make a fine way of communicating such stories.

I found the chapters on the Great Leap Backward and the famine particularly revealing. At a time when the detailed scholarship on the latter was only just taking off, when such details were still not common knowledge, Jung Chang’s readings of the political tides are mostly sound. While she portrays her father, a high-ranking cadre in Chengdu, as a righteous official, and she herself was largely cocooned from the extreme sufferings of the time, she evokes the plight of the desperate peasants and political machinations among the leadership, combining her own memories with her later understandings.

I had little idea that famine was raging all around me. One day on my way to school, as I was eating a small steamed roll, someone rushed up and snatched it from my hands. As I was recovering from the shock, I caught a glimpse of a very thin, dark back in shorts and bare feet, running down the mud alley with his hand to his mouth, devouring the roll. When I told my parents what had happened, my father’s eyes were terribly sad. He stroked my head and said, “You are lucky. Other children like you are starving.” […]

These people with edema were mostly peasants. Starvation was much worse in the countryside because there were no guaranteed rations. Government policy was to provide food for the cities first, and commune officials were having to seize grain from the peasants by force. In many areas, peasants who tried to hide food were arrested, or beaten and tortured. Commune officials who were reluctant to take food from the hungry peasants were themselves dismissed, and some were physically maltreated. As a result, the peasants who had actually grown the food died in the millions all over China.

The way Jung Chang relates her early memories reveal the texture of daily life amidst upheavals—my doubts about how much a six-year-old can recall of their youth are largely assuaged by the author’s in-depth conversations with her mother. Indeed, much of the success of Wild swans was in its focus on three generations of women. It was “joined by a clutch of cygnets” (in Julia Lovell’s phrase) in similar vein, such as Anchee Min (Red azalea), Gao Anhua (To the edge of the sky), and Mu Aiping (The Vermilion Gate).

I first read Wild swans as part of my general education on the Maoist era, as I was striving to build up a picture of the modern history of the village of Gaoluo just south of Beijing—a very different world. Meanwhile the rural picture was being amplified by scholarly works like those of Chan, Madsen, and Unger on Chen village and Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden on Wugong. Such studies inspired me seek ever greater detail from my friends in Gaoluo about their experiences, year by year, month by month—which bore fruit in my own book Plucking the winds, and later in my work on the Li family Daoists.

Now that I come to re-read Wild swans in the light of all my fieldwork, I still find myself impressed by Jung Chang’s attention to both the personal stories of her family and the wider picture. I’m sorry some academics can’t see the merits of this.

With her husband Jon Halliday, Jung Chang followed up Wild swans with Mao: the unknown story (2005)—which sinologists didn’t refrain from criticising (e.g. Gregor Benton and Lin Chun, eds, Was Mao really a monster?, and Andrew Nathan in the LRB, complete with spat).

For later revelations on the Maoist era, see e.g. Guo Yuhua on a Shaanbei village; the documentaries of China: commemorating trauma, and Kang Zhengguo’s Confessions: an innocent life in Communist China. See also Maoism tag.

The qin zither under Maoism: five vignettes

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This is how I opened my series on the qin zither scene in Beijing under Maoism:

I’m still seeking in vain to atone for my reservations about the dominance of the elite qin zither in Chinese music studies, where it’s “as if the whole varied spectrum of European musics were represented mainly by the clavichord”. The qin has always been the tip of the iceberg—its players were, and are, far outnumbered by folk-singers, shawm bands, and spirit mediums, for instance.

However, this doesn’t make the rarefied world of the qin any less notable. By contrast with the ocean of folk traditions, its whole long history is extensively documented. And between the ancient sages and the modern scene, a remarkable flowering of the qin took place over the fifteen years following the 1949 “Liberation” (for the period in wider society, see here)—another illustration of the resilience of traditional culture in the PRC.

The scene was still largely amateur, with aficionados of qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting (qinqishuhua 琴棋書畫) taking part in “refined gatherings”. The stories of some of the leading characters are interwoven with those of the Music Research Institute, the Beijing Qin Research Association, the 1956 national project (with its definitive recordings), and political movements. This is a monument to an aesthetic world that since the 1980s’ reform era has been eclipsed by glossy conservatoire professionalism.

Always trying to move beyond disembodied sound-objects, I seek to evoke the place of musicking in the lives of qin players through the first fifteen years after Liberation, punctuated and eventually engulfed by campaigns—click on the links below for essays on

  • Guan Pinghu (1897–1967): an otherworldly figure, revered not least for his dapu recreations of early tablatures, an activity that thrived in the 1950s
  • Wang Di (1923–2005), Guan Pinghu’s devoted disciple, making a bridge both to the reform era and to
  • Zha Fuxi (1895–1976): his role in the 1949 Uprising of the Two Airlines, his remarkable 1956 survey with its numinous recordings—and NB this qin-erhu duet from 1962
  • Pu Xuezhai (1893–1966), descendant of the Manchu imperial clan: more classic recordings, and his disappearance in 1966
  • Yue Ying (1904–74): an affluent youth, motherhood, and her moving 1972 recordings—perhaps the only audible remains of the qin in the PRC for the whole period from 1963 to 1978.

Women constituted a significant minority among qin players, as illustrated in the posts on Wang Di and Yue Ying, as well as Yuan Quanyou. The story of Yue Ying makes a poignant coda to the series.

Yue Ying 1972

See also qin tag. For a stellar gathering of masters of qin and zheng zithers, click here.

Liu Sola, voice of alternative China

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Ever since the 1980s, Liu Sola (刘索拉, b.1955) has remained an invigorating alternative voice in both Chinese music and literature.

The main websites are here (with this fine survey of her ouevre, cited below) and here.

Sola and motherSola is one of three children of Liu Jingfan, younger brother of Liu Zhidan (1903–36), a guerrilla hero in Shaanbei whose career as Red Army commander was cut short by the arrival of Mao Zedong’s Long March forces. After the story of Liu Zhidan’s fate was exposed in a historical novel by Sola’s mother Li Jiantong, in 1962 Mao not only banned the book (declaring “Using novels to engage in anti-Party activities is a great invention”), but had all those involved in its publication ruthlessly persecuted (see David Holm, “The strange case of Liu Zhidan”, 1992, and chapter 5 of Ian Johnson’s book Sparks). Even after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Li Jiantong continued to struggle against censorship as she compiled sequels.

Sola CCM 1978 for blog
Composition students at the Central Conservatoire, 1978.
Left to right: Liu Sola, Ai Liqun, Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Sun Yi, Zhang Lida, Zhang Xiaofu.
More images in this short documentary.

In 1977–78, as the Central Conservatoire in Beijing reopened after the death of Mao and the overthrow of the Gang of Four, Sola—already seriously cool—gained admission to the composition department, along with bright young students like Qu Xiaosong, Tan Dun, Guo Wenjing, and Ye Xiaogang. Having only recently been liberated from punishing stints of rural labour as “sent-down youth”, their studies were punctuated by fieldtrips to collect folk-song in the remote countryside of south China—an experience that now felt more revelatory (cf. Fieldworkers, Chinese and foreign).

Sola popAfter graduating, partly in rebellion against the establishment that contemporary Western Art Music seemed to represent, Sola chose to become a pop musician, giving concerts and composing for film soundtracks, TV, and theatre. At the same time she made a great impression with her 1985 novellas Ni biewu xuanze 你别无选择 (You have no choice), Lantian lühai 蓝天绿海 (Blue sky green sea), and Xunzhao gewang 寻找歌王 (In search of the king of singers). Her voice was

irreverent and honest, blasé and innocent, light and serious, negative and positive all at once; a voice marked by a characteristic humour that manages to be dark and yet not cynical.

By now she was the life and soul of a lively artistic scene in Beijing.

London and New York
In 1987 the US News Agency invited Sola on a visit to the States—where, igniting her early interest in blues, the “King of Singers” turned out to be Junior Wells. In 1988 she came to live in London, “a challenging and precarious time”, furthering her studies without the celebrity status of her time in Beijing.

Sola Vini
With Vini Reilly, 1988.

Working with British musicians like Justin Adams, Clive Bell, and the Durutti Column, she tasted WOMAD, performing with Mari Boine, though dissatisfied with the exotic pigeonholing of “world music”.

In summer 1989—as she witnessed the horrifying events of Tiananmen from afar—Sola deepened her devotion to blues on a trip working with musicians in Memphis (Memphis diary, 1993). Her experience of blues is a major theme of the wide-ranging, richly illustrated collection of conversations Xingzoude Liu Suola 行走的刘索拉 (Liu Suola on the move, 2001). Meanwhile she composed for Zuni Theatre in Hong Kong, and for Chiang Ching’s dance drama June snow.

Sola Chaos

Among writings from her London period is Hundun jia ligelong 混沌加哩格楞 (Chaos and all that, 1991), a novel that “both acknowledges cultural diversity and provides a darkly comic critique of it”. I’m also very fond of her paintings, like this from June 1990 (signed “Chegong”, Sola’s name in traditional Chinese gongche notation!):

Sola painting

After taking part in the Iowa Writers’ Program in 1992, Sola moved to New York in 1993. Immersing herself in the avant-garde scene there, she relished collaborations with musicians like Bill Laswell, Fernando Saunders, and Ornette Coleman, enjoying a freedom that had been elusive in London. This bore fruit in her wonderful 1995 album Blues in the East.

Sola Blues CD

In her following New York albums such as China collage (1996) she took a rather different path. She later reinvented her exhilarating song Festival as A chicken at the country fair:

In this period she also wrote Da Jijiade xiao gushi 大继家的小故事 (Little tales of the great Ji family, 2000), perhaps her finest novel (translated into Italian and French, still not available in English), a historical fantasy based on the tribulations of her family—“part Virgil, part Monty Python”.

Back in the PRC
After fifteen years abroad, by 2003 the cultural scene in China seemed promising, far from the mood when Sola had left in 1988. Still, she

cannot be associated with the many haigui’s or “sea-faring turtles” who return after working or studying abroad to flaunt their “international credentials”. Nor is working in China with Chinese music a form of cultural nationalism; such nationalism is especially easy to profess at a moment when Chinese music will sound less marginal now that China has become a dominant world power. Rather […] her work in China undertakes the almost Sisyphean task of overcoming clichéd ideas of Chinese music and the use of such clichés for propaganda.

In 2005 she appeared in Ning Ying’s film Wuqiongdong (Perpetual motion, 2005), for which she also wrote the music. Notable compositions include two chamber operas, both international collaborations. Fantasy of the Red Queen (Jingmeng 惊梦, 2006) is “a woman’s tragedy about the power of illusion and the illusion of power”, told through through the devilish persona of Jiang Qing. It draws on Berg, Schoenberg, the qin zither, Beijing opera, Kunqu, revolutionary and folk opera, and 1930s’ Shanghai pop, with snatches of jazz, tango, and hip hop. Here’s an excerpt:

The afterlife of Li Jiantong (Zizai hun 自在魂, 2009) is a deeply personal drama in which Sola receives a visitation from her mother, who takes her on a journey to the spirit world to meet her late father. Using a complex compositional scheme, Sola makes use of the kuqiang “weeping melody” style of Chinese opera, with a baroque group led by Paul Hillier among the accompanying ensemble.

Sola operaFrom The afterlife of Li Jiantong.

Always relishing live performance, she went on to form the Liu Sola and Friends ensemble with select Chinese musicians, building on her grounding in jazz to overcome conservatoire and ideological training. And she has continued to publish, with the essay collection Kouhong ji 口红集 (Lipstick talk, 2009) and the novel Milian zhou 迷恋咒 (Lost in fascination, 2011); a new novel is on the way.

Here’s a short CCTV documentary:

* * *

Amidst the ever-changing scene in China (see e.g. New musics in Beijing, and Rock it, mom), Liu Sola’s constantly innovative mix of music, fiction, and drama is utterly distinctive; her musical and literary works, both early and later, have a cult following. She remains vivacious and young at heart, always exploring.

The qin zither under Maoism, 5: Yue Ying

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*For a roundup of the whole series, click here!*

In my introduction to Wang Di, I mentioned the changing gender profile of Chinese musicians and scholars through the 20th century. Among the female qin players in Beijing who weathered the transition from the Republican era to Maoism was Yue Ying 乐瑛 (1904–74).

The most useful material is an article by Guo Peng 国鹏, compiler of the most comprehensive anthology of classic qin recordings, Juexiang 绝响; for more on Yue Ying, see also Chinese wiki.

YY young

Yue Ying practising the qin in her youth.
Photos here from Guo Peng’s article.

Yue Ying came from an affluent family, the only daughter of the boss of the famous Tongren tang 同仁堂 pharmacy in Beijing. From young she studied painting, calligraphy, and Kunqu; she enjoyed playing pipa (against the wishes of her father, who considered it too low-class!) but came to concentrate on the qin, taking lessons (like Pu Xuezhai) from Jia Kuofeng 贾阔峰.

YY pipa

After a Western-style wedding in 1928 she went on to bear seven children, but managed to practise the qin at home between her motherly duties.

YY wedding

Adapting to the 1949 “Liberation”, from 1954 Yue Ying joined the Beijing Guqin Research Association, with the encouragement of Yuan Quanyou’s husband Wang Shixiang. She was one of several women studying with Guan Pinghu, including Wang Di, Shen You, and Yuan Quanyou.

female qin players

Female qin players.
From right: Yue Ying’s younger stepsister Yue Xiangyan, [unidentified], Wang Di, Yue Ying.
Do let me know if you can identify any of the others!

Repairing qin

The important task of repairing qin:
left to right Pu Xuezhai, Wang Di, Wang Mengshu, Zha Fuxi, Yue Ying, Yue Xiangyan.

Around 1958, amidst a frenzy of campaigns, Yue Ying took part in the association’s performance for the leaders in Zhongnanhai. As we saw, she invited Guan Pinghu to stay at her courtyard home during the “three years of hardship”. But worse was to come.

Recordings
Yue Ying remained active until the eve of the Cultural Revolution. But in 1966 her house was ransacked by a group of Red Guards, who took away her precious antiques and a dozen fine old instruments. Her children only managed to rescue a few family photographs from the rubble.

YY late

Yue Ying, 1971.

Whereas a few qin scholars, including Zha Fuxi, were permitted to continue their research behind closed doors once the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were brought to an end, by 1972 Yue Ying had moved out of the old family home; besides being in poor health, she no longer had an instrument, and had been unable to play for several years.

Yue Ying 1972

But that year, as political tensions seemed to be easing somewhat, her daughter Guo Shunlong managed to buy a precious antique qin for 45 yuan (!!!); getting hold of a set of strings and a recording machine, she recorded her ailing mother playing four pieces—perhaps the only extant recordings of qin (or any other traditional music) in the PRC for the whole period roughly from 1963 to 1978. Yue Ying’s rendition that day of Pingsha luoyan (cf. Guan Pinghu’s version) can be heard here; we can also admire her earlier version from the happier times of 1956.

On CD 6 of the classic 1950s’ recordings, Yue Ying is heard in four pieces:

Canghai score

Opening of Yue Ying’s rendition of Canghai longyin as transcribed by Wang Di
(Guqin quji vol.1, pp. 211–15).

  • Liezi Rides the Wind (Liezi yufeng 列子御風, further material for my promotional campaign to boost the image of Liezi, n.1 here):

Yue Ying died of heart failure from lung disease in December 1974, before she could witness the revival of tradition. Her story makes a poignant coda to this series on the Beijing qin scene under Maoism.

The qin zither under Maoism, 4: Pu Xuezhai

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On 30th August 1966, as agitated young Red Guards milled around on the streets of Beijing, a short, elderly gentleman, his wispy beard now shorn off, went for a walk with his daughter. He was never seen again.

Continuing my series on the qin zither scene in Beijing under Maoism (roundup here), I’ve been considering the life of Pu Xuezhai 溥雪斋 (1893–1966). Note this eloquent personal tribute by the great Wang Shixiang. [1]

A descendant of the Aixin Gioro Manchu imperial clan (cf. Aixin Gioro Yuhuan), Pu Xuezhai was a great-grandson of the Qing emperor Daoguang, and cousin of the “last emperor” Pu Yi. He exemplified the literati versatility of qin, chess, calligraphy, and painting (qinqishuhua 琴棋書畫). Before the 1949 “Liberation” he made his main living from painting (see e.g. here), teaching at Fu Jen University from 1942. He studied the qin with Jia Kuofeng 贾闊峰, successor to Huang Mianzhi 黃勉之.

MRI 1954The golden age of the MRI, 1954:
right to left Guan Pinghu, Yang Yinliu, Pu Xuezhai, Zha Fuxi, Li Yuanqing.

While leading MRI scholars like Yang Yinliu and Zha Fuxi, just at ease in a Western suit or a Mao jacket, adapted more comfortably to the role that the new regime demanded of them, Pu Xuezhai, like Guan Pinghu, represented the imperial culture of yore, living by sufferance under the socialist system. Still, the new leadership valued him, and he was able to thrive. In 1952 he was employed at the Beijing Hall of Cultural History, holding several posts in the new cultural administration, gaining the approval of Zhou Enlai. Meanwhile he joined the qin scholars at the Music Research Institute, and was a core member of the Beijing Qin Research Association during its heyday. Wang Shixiang recalls gatherings of amateurs where he would exclaim “Du 独!”, an antecedent of ku 酷, “cool”!

ZFX PXZ
Duet with Zha Fuxi, 1958.

While many qin masters also played the pipa, Pu Xuezhai liked to play the repertoire of the Manchu-Mongol elite on sanxian plucked lute—do click on that link for a precious audio recording.

Recordings
On CD 5 of the numinous “old eight discs” from the 1950s Pu Xuezhai is heard in three pieces:

  • Peaceful Evening Prelude (Liangxiao yin 良宵引):

  • Seabirds: Forgetting Ulterior Motives (Oulu wangji 鷗鷺忘機):

(cf. the wonderful duet with Zha Fuxi on qin and Jiang Fengzhi on erhu).

  • The Incantation of Pu’an (Pu’an zhou 普安咒)—much recorded in versions for both qin and pipa, though it is most widespread as an item of vocal liturgy among folk ritual groups, notably among the Hebei ritual associations:

  • A fourth piece attributed to him on the CD, Three Variations on Plum Blossom (Meihua sannong 梅花三弄), seems rather to be played by Wu Jinglue—but we can hear it played in duet by Pu Xuezhai on xiao end-blown flute with Zha Fuxi on qin:

which is part of a YouTube playlist for Pu Xuezhai (apart from the first track by Wu Jinglue):

Disc 8 of the 74-CD collection Juexiang (2016) further includes three versions of Meihua sannong, as well as Jiu kuang.

The end
In 1963 the Party leadership invited Pu Xuezhai to Zhongnanhai to celebrate his 70th birthday. But while such representatives of the “Four Olds” had weathered successive campaigns, the tide was already turning fatefully, rendering them vulnerable—particularly members of the old imperial clan. Pu Xuezhai soon became another casualty of the Cultural Revolution (the most detailed account of his last days is here).

PXZ 1960sPu Xuezhai, early 1960s.

In 1966, witnessing the humiliation of his colleagues, he was already traumatised by raids and struggle sessions, when Red Guards cut off his beard. The last person known to have seen him alive was his old qin-playing friend Guan Zhonghang.

His disappearance caused no comment. Just trying to survive, people had too much to worry about themselves. As with so many other senseless casualties of Maoism, his loss could only be lamented at a memorial service after the end of the Cultural Revolution.

[1] Other articles include
http://www.yuncunzhai.com/article/257845.jhtml
http://m.zwbk.org/lemma/227007
http://www.qinxuecn.org/ArticleDetail.aspx?Id=2141&classId=38https://torguqin.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/death-of-pei-tiexia/

The qin zither under Maoism, 3: Zha Fuxi

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Zha Fuxi

Zha Fuxi in 1974 or 1975, shortly before his death.

For this third post in my series on qin zither players in Beijing under Maoism, I’ve been learning more about the great Zha Fuxi 查阜西 (also known as Zha Yiping 查夷平, 1895–1976). A forthcoming article in Zhang Zhentao’s own series on the Beijing qin scene will doubtless provide valuable insights, but I’ll go ahead and offer my own preliminary thoughts, conscious that I may need to revise them in due course.

After the Communist revolution of 1949, amidst radical social change, a constellation of master musicians and scholars gathered at the Music Research Institute (MRI) in Beijing in an extraordinary flowering of research. Under the wise leadership of Yang Yinliu, working closely with his cousin Cao Anhe, scholars began documenting the riches of regional folk musical cultures all over China. And at the same time a distinguished group of qin players and scholars flourished—including Guan Pinghu, Pu Xuezhai, Wang Mengshu, Yuan Quanyou, Xu Jian, and Wang Di; nearby at the Central Conservatoire was Wu Jinglue.

At the forefront of this stellar group was Zha Fuxi. His own articles are collected in Zha Fuxi qinxue wencui 查阜西琴学文萃 (1995; 815 pages). On John Thompson’s website, a major resource for all aspects of the qin, his exposition of Zha Fuxi’s work (starting here) makes a valuable guide (for a basic outline, see Chinese wiki). 

Early life
What I barely realised until I read an article by Xie Xiaoming was Zha Fuxi’s youthful political activism—he joined the Communist Party as early as 1924. While he is lauded within musical circles, it’s almost as if accounts of his life gloss over this aspect of his life, which one might expect to feature quite prominently.

A native of Hunan in south China, Zha Fuxi began learning the qin in 1908. But by contrast with the other-worldly Guan Pinghu, he was fully engaged with the social trends of his youth. From 1913, in the lawless times after the fall of empire, he attended middle school in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi, becoming interested in new democratic revolutionary trends, and taking part in student movements.

After studying briefly at Peking University in 1920, Zha Fuxi was drawn back south, spending periods in Changsha, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Guangzhou while pursuing his (patriotic) interest in aviation. He joined the Communist Party in 1924 at a time when it were still collaborating with the Nationalists, but after the Mari mutiny in 1927 he was briefly imprisoned. Making his way from Hankou to Shanghai, he continued to rise through the aviation ranks.

Meanwhile he was still studying the qin. A disciple of the Hunan qin master Peng Qingshou, in Shanghai he befriended Shen Caonong, with whom he co-founded the Jin Yu qinshe 今虞琴社 society in 1936. After the Japanese invasion in 1937 Zha Fuxi and many colleagues relocated to Chongqing; he took part in activities opposing the occupation. By 1943 he was Deputy Manager of the Central Air Transport Company.

ZFX USA

Zha Fuxi spent much of 1945 and 1946 in the USA, meeting the qin community there, giving lectures, seeking early tablatures, and making recordings—some of which have been reissued on CD and online, such as Yuge, Xiao Xiang shuiyun, and Oulu wangji.

From August to November 1949, in the Uprising of the Two Airlines (subject of several documentaries, e.g. here), following Chiang Kai-shek’s demand that all commercial airplanes should be flown to Hong Kong to facilitate their transfer to Taiwan, Zhou Enlai enjoined senior airline officials—including Zha Fuxi—to refuse the order. 

Liberation
Anxious about the imminent Communist victory, many mainlanders were indeed fleeing to Taiwan, and in Zha Fuxi’s own sphere many more would have been keen to do so. Zha Fuxi spent little time in the new-look airline company before transferring to the MRI to devote himself to qin studies. I can’t quite decipher the elements in this move: perhaps his artistic leanings came to the fore under the new regime as his career progress in aviation was frustrated.

Few of his fellow qin players at the MRI can have felt much sympathy with the socialist system, even if they had to toe the line. Unlike some of the older generation, Zha Fuxi and Yang Yinliu were comfortable wearing both Western suits and Mao jackets; yet they too remained loyal to the traditional world of literati culture that now seemed threatened by Party ideology. Indeed, given the tenuous position of such an elite genre as the qin under the new populist regime, Zha Fuxi’s early support for the Party, his involvement in the airline uprising, and the connection with Zhou Enlai, must have helped protect him (and by extension, the qin) over the following years.

After Liberation, Zha Fuxi’s MRI colleagues plunged into fieldwork on regional folk genres. The culture of the “exploited labouring masses” might seem a topic that the new regime would welcome; but in practice, with such traditions embedded in local ritual life, scholars found themselves walking a tightrope of “feudal superstition”. Xie Xiaoming’s article, perhaps embroidering somewhat, also stresses Zha Fuxi’s immersion in folk music during his early years in Hunan.

In Beijing, one of his early projects in 1952–53, with Yang Yinliu, was to be influential. They visited the former monks of the Zhihua temple to document the shengguan ensemble music that accompanied their rituals. Zha Fuxi’s letter to them shows his distress at their reduced circumstances, and his exhortations turn out to based on genuine proletarian sympathies.

Meanwhile the MRI scholars also persisted in paying attention to elite genres—both historical sources and living literati traditions like the qin. And traditional “refined gatherings” of qin aficionados continued, even thrived. Meanwhile under Party guidance, public performance on stage was a price that the leading qin players of the time had to pay, trading intimacy for exposure; from 1954 to 1955 Zha Fuxi was part of an ensemble giving performances in ten major cities (see under Guan Pinghu).

The 1956 fieldwork project
Zha Fuxi was well aware that there was far more to the qin than Beijing and Shanghai. Already well-travelled, from early in 1954 he had conceived an ambitious project to document qin players all over China. This came to fruition in 1956, when Zha Fuxi formed a team with the younger MRI students Xu Jian (b.1922) and Wang Di (b.1923) (“guqin special cadres”, as his report quaintly describes them), travelling to over twenty cities over a hundred days from April to July to document the playing, instruments, and tablatures of eighty-six qin players. They also visited libraries and museums in search of instruments and early documents.

As Zhang Zhentao observes in his article on Wang Di, this was the first thorough fieldwork in China on urban ethnomusicology—admittedly focused on one small segment of the population, rather than surveying urban cultural life generally (cf. Archive Chinese recordings).

ZFX 1956
Zha Fuxi, with Wang Di and Xu Jian, interviewing a Daoist priest, Chengdu 1956.
Source: Zha Fuxi qinxue wencui.
A cryptic caption: “Interview on Daoist ritual on behalf of Cao Anhe”. Cao Anhe had done fieldwork in Sichuan before Liberation; I presume she accompanied Yang Yinliu on his visit to Qingchengshan in 1942 (Yang Yinliu [jinian ji], pp.88–93). Perhaps this was the very priest whom Yang Yinliu had visited, or perhaps Cao Anhe simply asked Zha Fuxi to document Daoist ritual while he was there. Daoist and Buddhist clerics commonly played the qin, but we don’t know if this priest was among them.

Zha Fuxi’s report, written in 1957, deploys the obligatory style of the time, with some quaintly bureaucratic, statistical language (cf. “reading between the lines” in my review of the monumental Anthology).

Zha Fuxi had already expressed his sympathy with the plight of the former monks from the Zhihua temple. Now that he had official support for the qin project (the following quotes are from John Thompson’s rough translation, with my minimal revisions),

Before setting out, the Arts Bureau had told me the government was concerned about circumstances regarding the livelihood, cultivation, and health of any old, impoverished, or sick qin players, and wanted a report of our understanding. As to the people whose qin playing was being recorded, the Musicians’ Association had instructed me that even before paying them any fees, I should actively give them financial assistance.

He goes on:

The Chinese Music Research Institute instructed us that our visits should record such materials as documents and artefacts for the qin and ancient music, and establish the necessary communications and research relations with qin players and lovers of ancient music. Thus the subject of our work became not only the recording of qin pieces …

While the ethos of the qin was still based on the amateur ideal, Zha Fuxi notes a small minority of seven “professional” players, including Guan Pinghu and Wu Jinglue. On the variable technical standards of the players recorded, he comments:

In order to understand the location of the problem, one must make a connection between the situation of qin players’ self-cultivation and their living conditions. Examining our fieldnotes on the eighty-six qin players whose playing was recorded, one can understand that most of them had neglected the qin for twenty to thirty years, and after Liberation they had not picked it up again until they received encouragement from the general and specific national policies on culture and the arts [Discuss…]. Many of them didn’t even begin to practise until after the Musicians’ Association charged me last year to go and invite them to make recordings, and thus one inevitably finds defects such as faulty intonation, rusty finger techniques, and disjointed rhythms. This is the result of a decline in national culture brought about by the social environment of the past several decades [that sentence revised by SJ].

There had indeed been a certain hiatus in activity during the troubled times after the Japanese invasion in 1937 and the following civil war. But whether consciously or not, in such passages Zha Fuxi adopts a very common sleight-of-hand in Maoist historiography, that Chinese culture has been languishing throughout the Republican era, only to be rescued by the enlightened Party—a view easily refuted by all the evidence (e.g. ritual groups in Shanghai, Xi’an, and so on—as in Stewart Lee’s taxi driver, “You can prove anything with facts“). The great loss began after the 1949 “Liberation”—one on which the 1956 project now inadvertently shone a light.

For all its patriotic clichés, this passage also contains a sincere core:

A young music worker in Xi’an, after hearing these three types of recordings of ours, said to me that in the past she had always considered national music to be inferior to Western music, and could not imagine that the motherland had such great and expansive pieces for plucked strings; when adapted into national instrumental music style this could become a distinctive symphonic music. She said that not only had she now gained interest in Chinese music and built up her faith in it, but it had further aroused her love for the motherland!

That same summer Yang Yinliu led a team on an extensive survey of folk and ritual music around Hunan.

The recordings
For Zha Fuxi’s national project, apart from the selected tracks eventually included on the celebrated 8-disc set, note also the complete recordings issued since 2016 (here and here). This playlist contains a selection of 35 pieces from the set, opening with three played by Zha Fuxi himself:

Zha’s own playing is the theme of the 3-CD collection Zha Fuxi qinxue yishu 查阜西琴学學藝術 (ROI, 2016)—again, note John Thompson’s discussion (for the publication of the recordings, see also this interview with his son). This collection on YouTube has a selection:

Apart from instrumental pieces, qin songs made a rich field for Zha Fuxi (for his own research on the topic, click here; cf. the work of Wang Di).

  • On this track Zha Fuxi sings and plays Thrice Parting for Yangguan (Yangguan sandie 陽關三疊):

(Near the end of my tribute to Yang Yinliu, do also listen to his moving arrangement of this piece as a Protestant hymn!)

  • For the qin song Sigh for Antiquity (Kaigu yin 慨古吟), click here;
  • and for a sung version of Evening Song of the Drunken Fisherman (Yuqiao wenda 漁樵問答), here.

From 1958
The 1956 fieldwork project provided further material for Zha Fuxi’s magnum opus Cunjian guqin qupu jilan 存见古琴曲谱辑览 (1958, with 1,011 pages by my reckoning!) on qin tablatures and the history of the repertoire. [1] And in 1963 he produced the first volume of the Qinqu jicheng 琴曲集成, which after resuming in 1981 became the definitive 30-volume anthology of early qin tablatures.

From January to May 1958, on the eve of the Great Leap Backward, Zha Fuxi played qin solos on tour with the China Song and Dance Ensemble in the Soviet Union and Japan. On returning he spent the next three months taking part in rectification campaigns of the Qin Association and Political Association. Once the Leap began in August, new pieces for qin and ensemble were dutifully composed—an ephemeral innovation. Zha Fuxi wrote Dayuejin gesheng zhen shanhe 大跃进歌声震山河 in praise of the Leap (among many new pieces on the theme of bountiful harvests, such as Zhao Yuzhai‘s 1955 “Celebrating a bumper year” for the zheng zither); Guan Pinghu and Wang Di arranged The East is Red. In December the Qin Association featured this new repertoire on TV.

Apart from such necessary kowtows to authority, I’m unclear how the Beijing qin community weathered the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Leap, along with the severe food shortages that ensued; they toed the line while keeping their anxieties to themselves.

BJ qin 1959 to use
Qin masters gather at a Beijing teahouse, 1959
—with no hint of the severe social crisis of the period.
At front: Zha Fuxi with Yao Bingyan;
behind, Wang Di (with braids), Chen Changlin, and a beardless Wu Zhaoji.

By 1962, during the brief lull between campaigns, Zha Fuxi recorded a numinous duet with Jiang Fengzhi on erhu fiddle.

My own qin teacher Li Xiangting (b.1940), then a rising star of the younger generation and a pupil of Zha Fuxi and Wu Jinglue, notes the gathering official suspicion of the qin from 1963. Still, the Beijing qin community still kept active until 1964, with Zha Fuxi regularly hosting gatherings. For a moving evocation of stressful conditions over the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, I again recommend Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1993 film The blue kite.

The Four Cleanups and the Cultural Revolution
I can find little material on Zha Fuxi’s life after the 1963 Four Cleanups campaigns and the violent eruption of society in the Cultural Revolution. Many of his colleagues suffered grievously from the assaults of revolutionaries, with qin players an inevitable target of young Red Guards.

Zha Fuxi seems to have been paraded by the Red Guards as the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966; but even after the worst violence subsided, by 1969 most of the MRI staff were sent down to the 7th May Cadre School farm in Tuanbowa (Jinghai, Tianjin municipality) for labour reform.

I doubt if Zha Fuxi’s connection with Zhou Enlai now helped protect him to any significant extent; [2] but from at least 1973, behind closed doors, as campaigns continued to rumble, a select group of qin scholars managed to resume their research, after almost a decade of silence, with the discreet protection of the Ministry of Culture—under the unlikely patronage of the leftist Yu Huiyong, promoter of the revolutionary model operas.

And in other (literal) fields too, the regime required some of the leading MRI scholars to research the ancient instruments now being revealed at archeological sites. In 1971 Yang Yinliu was recalled to Beijing from rustic exile to document the new excavations from Hubei for the Palace Museum. In 1972 he was sent to Changsha with Li Yuanqing and Li Chunyi to study the Mawangdui site, whereafter he was officially allowed to return to Beijing. Throughout this period Yang continued working on his Draft history of ancient Chinese music. Huang Xiangpeng (b.1927), another outstanding scholar of early Chinese music, was only released from rural labour in 1975.

After the revival of traditional culture that followed the death of Mao and the downfall of the Gang of Four, both Yang Yinliu and Huang Xiangpeng resumed their work keenly, though their health had deteriorated seriously. Yang died in 1984; and Huang was fully involved in the flowering of research until he died in 1997.

“Life and death are a matter of fate“. During the Cultural Revolution, distinguished masters had been driven to suicide throughout the cultural world. Of Zha Fuxi’s qin colleagues, Pu Xuezhai disappeared mysteriously in 1966, and Guan Pinghu died in 1967; others were lastingly traumatised. Zha Fuxi survived until 1976—before he could rejoice in the revival, when senior qin players such as Wu Jinglue in Beijing, Zhang Ziqian in Shanghai, and Wu Zhaoji in Suzhou emerged to renewed acclaim.

As with the whole literati class, Zha Fuxi’s accommodation with Maoism was complex. Meanwhile he compiled an extraordinary corpus of material on the history and living practice of the qin, enriched by precious recordings—a monument to an aesthetic world that has been marginalised by the glossy conservatoire professionalism of the scene since the reform era.

 

[1] Incidentally, in n.11 here, John Thompson mentions Qi Yan Hui, “apparently a 20th-century adaptation for guqin of a melody that until 1937 only existed in the oral tradition of other instruments”. I wonder if this suggests a link with the version common in the suites of shengguan ritual ensembles (see e.g. under Xiongxian).

[2] Pace Xie Xiaoming, Zha Fuxi can’t have become Deputy Chair of the Chinese Musicians’ Association in 1969, when such institutions were paralysed—John Thompson’s date of 1962 (perhaps from Xu Jian’s history of the qin) is more plausible.

The qin zither under Maoism, 2: Wang Di

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GPH WD

Wang Di checking her transcription of Guan Pinghu’s Guangling san.

In this little series on the qin zither in Beijing under Maoism, I have introduced Guan Pinghu and Zha Fuxi. Wang Di makes a kind of bridge between those two great masters, as well as between them and the reform era since the 1980s.

Gender
In great contrast with the current scene, before the 1980s both music scholars and conservatoire performers were largely male (for the wider gender profile in Chinese musicking, see here).

As solo instrumental performers, women have come to dominate in the conservatoires since the 1990s; but in the 1950s the celebrated performers were male, with few exceptions (notably Min Huifen on erhu: e.g. the CD set of archive recordings). Even the pipa lute and zheng zither, now mainly the preserve of women, were known largely through the playing of men.

However, women have long constituted a substantial minority among qin players (see here). In modern times, they were notable in the Republican era. After the 1949 “Liberation”, Wang Di 王迪 (1923–2005) was among several female students gathering around Guan Pinghu at the Music Research Institute (MRI) in Beijing, including Yuan Quanyou, Shen You, Yue Ying and her sister Yue Xiangyan. They all came from strong literati backgrounds. And for an iconic figure in the Hong Kong qin scene, see Bell Yung, “Tsar Teh-yun at age 100: a life of qin music, poetry, and calligraphy”, in Helen Rees (ed.), Lives in Chinese music (2009).

Wang Di’s early life
Less promoted than some of her contemporaries, Wang Di is best known as the devoted disciple of Guan Pinghu. A companion with Zhang Zhentao’s article on the latter is his

  • “Daihuo jiaotong yun ben bei: qinjia Wang Di xiansheng” 带火焦桐韵本悲——琴家王迪先生 Mingjia 名家 49 (2013) (here, or here).

Born in Beijing in 1923, Wang Di sought out Guan Pinghu soon after hearing him on the wireless when she was 13, becoming his pupil. His living conditions were poor; she fed him when he came to her house for lessons, and helped support him.

Wang Di took part in the activities of the Beiping Qin Study Society from 1947. That year she briefly studied chemistry at the Université Franco-Chinoise in Beijing, “resolving to become a Chinese Madame Curie”, as Zhang Zhentao puts it. But illness soon made her forsake chemistry for the qin, studying from 1948 at the Guoli Beiping yishu zhuanke xuexiao 国立北平艺术专科学校, precursor of the Central Conservatoire, where she was kept on after graduating in 1953.

After Liberation
Having introduced Guan Pinghu to the MRI scholars in 1951, Wang Di was soon to serve as his assistant there. By contrast with Zha Fuxi, well-connected aviation executive, until the 1950s Guan Pinghu’s circumstances were lowly, and he now found himself with a regular salary, paid to do the work he loved.

All this was far from the peasant life now being extolled by the new regime. Alongside the groundbreaking fieldwork on regional folk traditions, somehow the MRI created a spacious ivory tower where research on elite genres (not only the qin, but early history) could be avidly pursued.

After the Beijing Guqin Research Association (Beijing guqin yanjiuhui 北京古琴研究会, see Cheng Yu’s article) was formed in 1954, a siheyuan courtyard-style dwelling in Xinghua hutong near Houhai lake made a regular home for its activities.

BJ qinhui

Pu Xuezhai, Zheng Minzhong, Wang Di, and Xu Jian
listening to Wang Mengshu playing the qin in the association’s courtyard, 1961.
Note the varied attire…
Source.

One aspect of the work of senior masters like Guan Pinghu was the process of dapu, recreating early qin tablatures; this soon became “fixed” in dingpu transcriptions of Wang Di and others, aided by recording.

In 1956 Zha Fuxi enlisted his young students Wang Di and Xu Jian to join him for an iconic survey of qin players in cities throughout China (see under Zha Fuxi). Whereas Zha Fuxi was already well travelled, this was Wang Di’s first opportunity to meet masters from all over the country.

On their return, the First National Music Week was held in Beijing, a prestigious event. Guan Pinghu and Wang Di were among the guests received by Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai at Zhongnanhai; Zhou even invited Wang Di to dance.

Through this period the association made minor concessions to the political agenda of “reform”, composing some new pieces. Most of these were transient, with the important exception of metal strings replacing silk.

Wang Di had planted a pumpkin in the association’s courtyard, which managed to grow to impressive proportions. In 1960, as food shortages were hitting hard, onlookers watched her with envy as she took it home. As Zhang Zhentao observes, women’s frugal domestic tasks like growing vegetables and needlework took on significance for the qin community; Wang Di could now relate this to the sorrows expressed in ancient melodies. In my post on Guan Pinghu I’ve described Wang Di’s successive changes of abode from the late 1950s.

A foreign pupil
After the 1949 revolution, the few Europeans studying music in China were mainly diplomats. Robert van Gulik had studied the qin profoundly before Liberation, whereafter he continued his work from afar; Věna Hrdličková researched narrative-singing in the early 1950s.

LundqvistCecilia Lindqvist studying with Wang Di, 1961. Source.

In 1961, just as society was recovering briefly from the hardships of the Great Leap Backward, Cecilia Lindqvist (林西莉, b.1932) (wiki, and Chinese version; silkqin; see also here and here) came to Beijing with her husband, cultural attaché at the Swedish embassy, and went on to become a renowned Swedish sinologist. She began studying the qin with Wang Di early in 1961. Lindqvist’s 2006 book (succinctly titled Qin; Chinese translation 2009) includes sections on her studies with Wang Di and the Beijing Guqin Research Association.

When she returned to Sweden in 1962, the association presented her with a Ming-dynasty qin (!!!) and recordings of the master players (heard on the CD with her book).

After Wang Di died in 2005, in 2010 her daughter Deng Hong 邓红 toured Sweden, making a 2-CD set of her own recordings, with notes by Lindqvist.

The Cultural Revolution
Remarkably, research on the qin managed to persist behind closed doors through the Cultural Revolution.

But by 1969 Wang Di, along with most of her colleagues at the MRI, was sent down to the May 7th Cadre School (Wuqi ganxiao 五七干校) at Tuanbowa in Jinghai, south of Tianjin (among several online accounts of conditions there, see e.g. here).

Zhang Zhentao evokes Wang Di’s life at Tuanbowa. Men and women performed the same tasks, like driving, tilling the fields, chopping firewood, mixing cement, and so on. During house-building, it was quite an art to toss adobe bricks up to the worker on the scaffolding above: the person standing below had to aim towards the receiver’s head, so that they could catch it; if they aimed for the hands, it might fall short. Wang Di excelled at this skill, and after returning to barracks she demonstrated it to her daughter, though it would soon become redundant for urban dwellers.

After the reforms
With the revival of tradition that followed the overthrow of the Gang of Four, some qin masters soon began making a reputation on the concert stage. But Wang Di remained unassuming, keeping away from the public eye; still working quietly at the MRI, she was content to continue representing the heritage of Guan Pinghu.

Following Zha Fuxi, Wang Di also became an authority on the dying art of qin songs. She began publishing her long-term research on the genre as early as 1982 (see here).

GPH CDs

From 1991 she made a few visits abroad; and from 2003 she became involved in the Intangible Cultural Heritage project on the qin. But closest to her heart was preparing the CD set of recordings of Guan Pinghu.

In this series I’m focusing on a tiny literati elite that suffered terribly under Maoism. At the same time, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the peasantry who comprised the vast majority of the population endured even worse tribulations, despite the exalted new status that ideology now bestowed upon them.

Women in Tibet, 2

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Ajakhaba 1944

The status of women in old and new Tibet is an increasingly popular topic, with studies headed by Janet Gyatso and Hanna Havnevik (eds.), Women in Tibet, including Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy’s chapter on women in expressive culture (outlined here), Charlene Makley on nuns (cf. her book The violence of liberation), and Robbie Barnett on women in contemporary politics.

Jamyang Norbu has long been a challenging voice in the Tibetan exile community (see The Lhasa ripper, The enchanting world of Tibetan opera, and The mandala of Sherlock Holmes). I also appreciate his

a “rambling essay is based on a rambling talk” that he gave to Tibetan students in Delhi on 1st April (sic) 2019.

I made a hash of my talk. A 20-hour flight, jet lag, and an injudicious self-prescribed nostrum [excellent expression—Ed.], didn’t help. But the hundred or so curious, outspoken, eager-to-know students just brushed aside my incoherence, and bombarded me with arguments and questions—even on issues considered terrifyingly taboo in our subservient exile society. I had a great time.

Indeed, the article makes a refreshing complement to more arcane academic studies. His typically virtuosic discussion mainly concerns old Tibet, with notes on the Maoist era. He opens by noting that, by contrast with other Asian societies,

in numerous accounts of visitors and travellers to pre-1950 Tibet one comes across positive and even laudatory comments on the role of women in Tibetan society.

He cites the work of Yudru Tsomo (Sichuan University) on the traditional role of women in business and trade. Socially too,

not only did the lady of the house receive guests and socialise with them, it was in fact required of women to dine and drink with male guests and take part in the conversation.

Gould 1939

He notes that

Such social freedoms were not only the preserve of the aristocracy but widespread in all classes. In Lhasa, women drank and made merry publicly during the summer and autumn picnic seasons. […]

Once as a schoolboy in Darjeeling, I passed by a large group of Tibetan women on the Chowrastha road. They had gone for a Sangsol (incense offering) ceremony at the Observatory Hill, or Gangchen as Tibetans called it, the site of the oldest Buddhist temple in the district.  They were returning home, arm-in arm, singing songs, strolling down the main Chowrastha and Nehru Road where all the posh stores were located. They were dressed in their best silks and jewelry and all happily drunk, oblivious of the amused stares of passers-by. Some sheepish looking Tibetan men and servants accompanied them.

He also discusses social freedom and equality, and legal issues such as property rights and divorce. As he observes,

Financial independence gave Tibetan women the freedom to ignore or disregard male (particularly priestly) condemnation of their lifestyles, in particular the use of Western cosmetics that were in vogue from the 1930s.

He cites Alexandra David-Neel (1934), who observed that women

had achieved a de facto equality despite law and scripture unfavourable to them, this by virtue of innate independence and physical stamina…Tibetan women had mastered a harsh environment and gained sway over their men. Tibetan women were clever and brave and therefore valued by their husbands. It also helped that a large portion of the retail trade was in women’s hands.

Even after the Chinese invasion,

In the mid-1950s, when motor-biking became the rage in the Holy City, one of the first and most glamorous of bikers was the celebrated Lhasa beauty, the younger Lady Lhalu Sonam Deki, who roared around the holy city on a black BSA 500.

Women in religious life
He is careful not to portray Tibet as some kind of feminist paradise.

Women had no major role in the great religious institutions, particularly in the Gelukpa monastic universities, and also in the clerical power structure of the Tibetan government. There were important female incarnations as Samding Dorje Phagmo and also some important nunneries, but these were admittedly minor compared to the scale and importance of the male priestly institutions.

Still, as shown in several chapters of Women in Tibet, women played an important and recognised role in spiritual practice and teaching, Jamyang Norbu adduces early figures like the dakani Yeshe Tsogyal, the 11th-century Tantric practitioner Machik Labdron, the Samding Dorje Phagmo lineage (see the work of Hildegard Diemberger), and the Nyingma teacher Shukseb Jetsunma Chönyi Zangmo (1852–1953). As he notes, female spiritual teachers play a prominent role in Tibetan opera.

Women in politics and nation building
Again, while women played no role in the formal official, political, and military life of old Tibet, they were involved in national political life from early times—such as Semarkar, sister of Emperor Songtsen Gampo (547?–649), and Trimalo Triteng, consort of emperor Manglon Mangtsen, the grandson of Songtsen Gampo. Here Jamyang Norbu refers us to the work of Helga Uebach, which again features in Women in Tibet.

In modern times, the Lhasa aristocrat Yeshi Dolma became queen of Sikkim in 1882.

Women in war and revolution
Women played a significant role in the resistance against the Chinese. In the 1930s Gyari Cheme Dolma rose up against the Sichuan warlord/governor Liu Wenhui.

During the 1956 Uprisings in Eastern Tibet we know of at least two women, Ani Pachen Lemdatsang of Gonjo and Gyari Dorje Yudon of Nyarong, who personally lead their male tribal warriors in violent insurrections against the PLA.

The “female warriors” Galingshar Chöla and Gurteng Kunsang were principal figures in the Women’s March on 12th March 1959 against the escalation of Chinese repression. Jamyang Norbu cites a joint statement by two eyewitnesses in 1961:

On October 21, 1959, a 60-year old nun Galingshar Anila was taken around the Barkhor in Lhasa. The Chinese ordered the people to beat her but no one would do so. Then the Chinese gathered some thieves and beggars, gave them some money and had them beat her at her house… She died on the 31st of the same month.

Gurteng Kunsang was imprisoned, but remained defiant; she was executed along with fifteen other prisoners in 1970.

The story of Trinley Chödrön’s role in the 1969 Nyemo uprising is documented by Melvyn Goldstein. And recently, women as well as men have self-immolated in protest at Chinese rule.

Immolations

Women in old Tibet certainly had more freedoms and rights than their counterparts in India, China, and the rest of Asia, and perhaps even more than in Victorian England. Of course it would be wrong to claim that women in Tibet were equal to men in the full contemporary sense—an equality that in spite of tremendous gains over the years, women in present-day democracies still strenuously contend they have not fully realised.

Well, as tends to be my way, this summary is superfluous—you can read the article!

The qin zither under Maoism, 1: Guan Pinghu

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*For a roundup of the whole series, click here!*

Guan Pinghu

Guan Pinghu, 1954.

I’m still seeking in vain to atone for my reservations about the dominance of the elite qin zither in Chinese music studies, where it’s “as if the whole varied spectrum of European musics were represented mainly by the clavichord”. The qin has always been the tip of the iceberg—its players were, and are, far outnumbered by folk-singers, shawm bands, and spirit mediums, for instance.

However, this doesn’t make the rarefied world of the qin any less notable. By contrast with the ocean of folk traditions, its whole long history is extensively documented. And between the ancient sages and the modern scene, a remarkable flowering of the qin took place over the fifteen years following the 1949 “Liberation” (for the period in wider society, see here)—another illustration of the resilience of traditional culture in the PRC.

So in this first post in a mini-series focusing on the Beijing scene, I look further into the life and work of the great Guan Pinghu 管平湖 (1897–1967). John Thompson’s page on his exhaustive site is based on the CD set Guan Pinghu guqin quji 管平湖古琴曲集, well annotated and handsomely illustrated—I have only the original 2-CD set (1995), but Thompson refers to the expanded 4-CD edition (2016). See also e.g. here.

Besides the rich material of Wang Di 王迪 on her master (see here), the great Wang Shixiang also wrote a fine tribute to Guan Pinghu. And my long-term fieldwork companion Zhang Zhentao 张振涛 is not just a diligent chronicler of folk genres, but has also written eloquently about the qin. His articles

  • “Xian’gen: Guan Pinghu yu Zhongguo yinyue yanjiusuo” 弦根: 管平湖与中国音乐研究所, Zhongguo yinyuexue 2016.3 (serialised online in three parts)
  • “Daihuo jiaotong yun ben bei: qinjia Wang Di xiansheng” 带火焦桐韵本悲——琴家王迪先生, Mingjia 名家 49 (2013),
  • as well as a forthcoming essay on Zha Fuxi,

are both detailed and stylish, reflecting on the changing times in the qin world and society at large. The stories of these great players overlap, as they will in my series.

* * *

In the aesthetic of the imperial literati, “qin, chess, calligraphy and painting” (qinqishuhua 琴棋書畫) went hand in hand. Guan Pinghu followed in the footsteps of his father Guan Nianci 管念慈 (d.1909), a renowned painter who also played qin; he was in the retinue of the Guangxu emperor.

GPH paintings

Paintings by Guan Pinghu. Source.

Guan Pinghu rose to prominence among the stellar qin zither masters who gathered in Beijing before and after the 1949 “Liberation”.  From 1912 he took part in the Jiuyi qinshe 九嶷琴社 qin society founded by Yang Zongji 楊宗稷 (Yang Shibai 楊時百, 1865–1933). In 1938 he formed the Fengsheng qinshe 風聲琴社, and in 1947 the Beiping qinxueshe 北平琴學社, whose core members included Zhang Boju, Pu Xuezhai, Yang Boyuan, Wang Mengshu, Wang Shixiang, Guan Zhonghang, Zheng Minzhong, Yue Ying, and Wang Di.

Through the 1940s, apart from teaching qin at several institutes, Guan Pinghu spent time teaching painting at the Beiping jinghua meishu zhuanke xuexiao 北平京華美術專科學校, a forerunner of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was among the artists consulted by a team from the academy in 1955–56 for their survey of ritual painting in Beijing.

Still, Guan Pinghu’s ethos was remote from the image of the “exploiting classes”. Oblivious of worldly cares (a theme on which Zhang Zhentao’s article is especially eloquent), he was quite at odds with the new values of both the Republican and Communist eras. His family life was inauspicious: he was apparently separated from his wife, and of his four children three died in the early 1950s, while the fourth was a wastrel. As Wang Di recalled, by the late 1940s he was living alone in a bare little apartment, scraping by on a modest income from selling his paintings and teaching his few disciples. Among these, his female pupils Wang Di, Shen You 沈幼, and Yue Ying 乐瑛—all from affluent families—took responsibility for looking after him, utterly consumed as he was by the world of qin.

After Liberation
In those early days the Music Research Institute (MRI) was part of the Central Conservatoire, then still based in Tianjin. In April 1951 Wang Di took Guan Pinghu on the train there to take part in a recording session of several qin masters on the initiative of Zha Fuxi and Yang Yinliu. Wang Di told them of his difficult circumstances; indeed, seeing his dishevelled clothing the concierge was reluctant to let him in, taking him for a beggar.

So when Guan Pinghu was recruited to the MRI the following year, he attained a much-needed security, receiving a handsome monthly salary of 177 yuan. He was given a little room that served as study and bedroom, allowing him to immerse himself in the qin along with a distinguished group of senior music scholars around Yang Yinliu, whose sense of mission he shared.

In 1953 Wang Di became his assistant. The following year they moved to Beijing with the MRI, first to a building known as the “ten rooms” (shijianfang 十间房) and then to Xinyuanli in Dongzhimenwai, which remained the MRI home until the 1990s.

GPH WD

Wang Di checking her transcription of Guan Pinghu’s
realisation of Guangling san.

We should pause to admire the remarkable energy of Yang Yinliu and his team in those early years: alongside his ongoing historical research, in addition to his 1950 return to his old home Wuxi, in north China he did seminal fieldwork on the “songs-for winds” band of Ziwei village in Hebei, the Zhihua temple in Beijing, ritual groups of Xi’an, and narrative singing, while continuing his research on Daoist ritual in Wuxi. In 1953 others at the MRI embarked on a project on folk-song in north Shanxi.

On the basis of the Beiping qinxueshe, the Beijing Guqin Research Association (Beijing guqin yanjiuhui 北京古琴研究会) was founded in 1954 (see Cheng Yu’s article); the Ministry of Culture took over a siheyuan courtyard dwelling in Xinghua hutong, near Houhai lake, to serve as the association’s tranquil base.

Guan Pinghu and Wang Shixiang shared a taste not only for antique furniture but for the rich street culture of birds and flowers in old Beijing; Wang writes eloquently of how Guan Pinghu spent money he could ill afford to rescue an injured grasshopper, likening its chirp to the lowest open string on his Tang-dynasty qin…

While the soul of the qin still resided in the “refined gatherings” (yaji 雅集) of aficionados, the qin now also began to be heard on the concert platform. From October 1954 to January 1955 Guan Pinghu and Zha Fuxi, with erhu player Jiang Fengzhi and pipa player Li Tingsong, gave prestigious performances in ten major cities, before vast audiences.

Despite the unpromising conditions of the unfolding of collectivisation, socialist dogma was still not so rigid as to outlaw the former literati class. Yang Yinliu and his team were just as concerned to document elite culture. Meanwhile vocal genres remained active, such as narrative-singing and opera—still lively folk scenes apart from the new state troupes.

Dapu and transcription
While many qin players were quite content with quite a small repertoire handed down from master to pupil (cf. north Indian raga), such as Geese Landing on the Sandbank (Pingsha luoyan), some of the leading masters were keen on the process of dapu 打譜, seeking to recreate pieces from early scores that had long fallen out of common practice. Guan Pinghu was at the forefront of this movement, along with the Shanghai qin master Yao Bingyan (see Bell Yung, Celestial airs of antiquity, and here).

PSLY 1

Opening of Wang Di’s transcription of Pingsha luoyan as played by Guan Pinghu, Guqin quji vol.1 (1982).

The repertoires of qin players had always been transmitted within particular regional styles. Notation plays a very minor role in most Chinese genres—none at all in some. But for highly literate qin players, tablature is an essential part of the learning process. Throughout history, right until the 1950s, players relied on direct transmission from master to pupil, aided by the tablature, which made an ambivalent record: over-prescribed in terms of pitches and fingerings, it allowed for considerable latitude in rhythmic interpretation.

GLS qinpu

GLS WD scoreOpening of Guangling san: Shenqi mipu (1425) and Wang Di’s transcription.

But in the 1950s, along with the circulation of recordings, the process of “fixing” the performance with composite transcriptions in Western stave notation and the symbols of traditional tablature began leading to a certain standardisation. This applied even to the newly recreated dapu pieces, some of which now entered the repertoire. The 1956 fieldwork of Guan Pinghu’s MRI colleague Zha Fuxi both revealed the great regional variations in repertoire and set a standard for establishing a “national” canon. It is rather hard to think back to the 1950s, when qin players had a very different mental image of their repertoire.

qin hui 1956

Members of the Beijing Guqin Research Association
on a trip to the Yiheyuan, 1956.
Front row, from left: Wang Zhensheng, Yang Qianqi, Guan Zhonghang;
middle row, Yang Yinliu, Pu Xuezhai, Cao Anhe, Guan Pinghu;
back row: Luo Zhenyu, Zha Fuxi, Wang Mengshu.
From Yang Yinliu (jinian ji) 楊陰瀏 (紀念集) (1992).

From 1956
In the summer of 1956, while collectivisation was causing hardship and desperation in the countryside, Yang Yinliu led another field survey in Hunan (here and here). Meanwhile Zha Fuxi led a remarkable project to document qin players over the whole country (more to follow in a later post in the series!).

Urban society was still relatively unscathed. But the Anti-Rightist campaign (1957–59), along with the Great Leap Backward and the famine (from 1958), caused great suffering. While I’ve found few instances of Beijing qin players being rusticated during this period, Guan Pinghu’s close friend Wang Shixiang was branded a “rightist” in 1957, bearing the stigma for twenty-one years. And soon after starting his study of the qin at the Shanghai Conservatoire in 1958, Lin Youren was sent down to rural Anhui and Henan for periods to support the desperate peasants.

Wang Di was ever devoted to taking care of Guan Pinghu in both his artistic life and material needs. In 1957, when the MRI prompted her husband to take leave of sickness, Wang Di had moved out of the institute (then still in the “ten rooms”) with her family. At first they lived at the spacious old family home of Yue Ying in Huazhi hutong, near the base of the Beijing Guqin Research Association. Yue Ying (to whom I’ll devote a separate post) was another female disciple of Guan Pinghu, and she invited him to live there too, as the Great Leap Backward was unfolding. Though the cities were protected from the severe famine in the countryside, Beijing dwellers suffered from food shortages; well-connected Zha Fuxi had baskets of eggs delivered to Yue Ying.

Still, Guan Pinghu’s new prestige was confirmed by an invitation to perform at Zhongnanhai for Chairman Mao, Zhu De, and Chen Yi.

In the early 60s Wang Di’s family moved to the bustling trading and entertainment quarter of Dashalar just south of Tiananmen (on which, note Harriet Evans, Beijing from below). But the redevelopment of the celebrated Rongbaozhai studio forced reluctant inhabitants to move to the Hepingli district further north; since Wang Di’s Dashilan apartment was safe from the developers, she agreed with one such family to let them live there while she moved into their own new dwelling in Hepingli. There she took care of Guan Pinghu. They were like a family—her two daughters called him Grandpa Guan (Guan yeye 管爷爷).

GPH and students

Guan Pinghu with his students, 1957:
(left to right) front row Xu Jian, Guan Pinghu, Zheng Minzhong;
back row Wang Di, Shen You, Yuan Quanyou.

Here we might also appreciate the fictional treatment of family travails through these years in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1993 film The blue kite.

New campaigns
Traditional culture was able to revive during a brief lull in the early 60s, spurring further energy in fieldwork and publication. But then the Four Cleanups campaign from 1963 presaged the agonies of the Cultural Revolution.

Apart from all the struggle sessions, murders, and suicides when the Cultural Revolution erupted, Guan Pinghu was among many who met their deaths at the time as an indirect cause of the rampages of the Red Guards. Pu Xuezhai, who also embodied the elite values of qin and painting, disappeared mysteriously in 1966.

Even qin masters hitherto in good standing with the regime like Zha Fuxi and Wu Jinglue were assaulted. Guan Pinghu was terrified as he witnessed the public humiliation of his peers. Long partial to erguotou liquor, he now sought refuge in the bottle, lying disoriented on the bank of the old city moat. Afflicted by liver cirrhosis, his health declined severely.

When he died on the 28th March 1967 he can hardly have imagined an end to all the destructive campaigns. Yet by the 1980s folk and literati genres were thriving again, and Guan Pinghu became a legendary figure, his pupil Wang Di masterminding the CD set that was finally published in 1995.

Recordings
There’s a precious film clip here of Guan Pinghu playing Liushui in late 1956, with Wang Di looking on. In 1977, on the recommendation of Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung, his Liushui was to be immortalised by being sent into orbit with the US spaceship Voyager 2.

GPH CDs

The classic resource is the ROI CD set. Guan Pinghu is also well represented on YouTube. Here’s the most celebrated of the ancient pieces that he recreated from Ming-dynasty tablatures, Guangling san—whose subject (to refine the image of the qin as tranquil contemplation!) is the righteous assassination of an evil ruler (among much discussion, note silkqin, and another article by Wang Shixiang):

Thrice Drunk in Yueyang (Yueyang sanzui 岳陽三醉) is inspired by the classical theme of inebriation (now the subject of a separate post!):

For Guan Pinghu’s version of Pingsha luoyan, see here.

* * *

Unlikely as it may sound, the first fifteen years after Liberation were a Golden Age for musicological research. As to the qin, it’s not exactly that it enjoyed a renaissance: regional societies had thrived through the Republican era. But given the new ideology after Liberation, the intensity of research and gatherings under Maoism was remarkable.

We may now feel nostalgic for the old world of “qin, chess, calligraphy and painting”; but it was still embodied in the iconic masters who were active under Maoism. Like household Daoist Li Manshan (jinfei xibi 今非昔比, at the end of my portrait film, from 1.19.20), my nostalgia is not so much for distant imperial grandeur as for the 1950s.

And while countless lives, and precious old instruments, were destroyed in the 1960s, it’s remarkable how many managed to survive to lead the revival since the 1980s’ reforms (cf. The resilience of tradition).

Today, despite a broadening of the appeal of the qin deriving partly from the internet, the refined cultural backgrounds of former generations have largely been marginalised by the narrow conservatoire specialisation of younger students (see e.g. Bell Yung, cited here). Music is never just music.

Shaanbei: spirit mediums

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*For a roundup of posts under the mediums tag, click here!*

Lingguan miao 99

The Lingguan temple, Yangjiagou, Shaanbei 1999. My photo.

In a post on gender in Chinese religious life I suggested a bold, nay revolutionary, idea:

I wonder how long it might take for us to totally reverse our perspectives on “doing religion” in China—privileging oral, largely non-literate practices and relegating elite discourse (including the whole vast repository of early canonical texts) and temple-dwelling clerics to a subsidiary place?!

A recent article,

  • Adam Yuet Chau and Liu Jianshu, “Spirit mediumism in Shaanbei, northcentral China”, in Caroline Blyth (ed.), Spirit possession and communication in religious and cultural contexts (2020),

supplements research on both spirit mediums and Shaanbei-ology, building on Chau’s previous work.

In many regions women comprise the majority of most mediums, but in Shaanbei they are mainly men; their tutelary deities may be either male or female. The Shaanbei mediums (generally known as “horse lads” matong 马童—horse imagery is often heard) belong to two main categories, wushen 巫神 (“medium deity”) and shenguan 神官 (“divine official”). The wushen are possessed by “proper gods”, often wielding a three-pronged sword; the shenguan are vehicles for “low-level” deities, and often use a heavy drum of wrought iron and goatskin, suggesting a link with Mongolian shamanism just north.

Among many problems for which mediums are consulted, they are mainly consulted for “wayward illnesses” (xiebing 邪病)—as well as for protecting children, a circumstance that Chau and Liu illustrate with a vignette about a family consulting a wushen for help curing the eye ailment of their young son.

Mediums often initiate the building of temples for their tutelary deities; séances are held both in domestic settings and in the temple.

Seance

Evening séance at the home of a medium (possessed by the Ancient Buddha 古佛).
His wife (on the left) serves as the attendant, burning incense and paper money and preparing ritual implements. The medium has in his hands a cleaver and a dough-kneading rod; he also uses the three-pronged sword for exorcism. Shaanbei, 2016. Photo: Adam Chau.

The authors describe a kind of managed spirit possession:

The initial choice by the deity to possess a person is not willed or predictable, but once the person agrees to serve as the medium of the deity, subsequent possession episodes are all managed; the deity is invited to “come down” and possess the medium for planned séances, such as during a general consultation session or at the bequest of a particular client/worshipper.

The chapter also discusses the process of “medium succession”:

Becoming a medium is not a matter of personal desire. Only the deity can choose who will serve as his or her medium. Sometimes a person suffers from a serious and inexplicable illness (the kind that cannot be diagnosed or treated by the hospitals) [cf. Henan], and a deity might ask him or her to be the spirit medium in exchange for getting cured of the illness (in other words, the person is fulfilling a vow once they are cured). Sometimes a person is chosen by the deity because of karmic connections between the two. Even though serving the deity as a medium is seen as an honour for the person and the whole family, most people would rather not have such an honour because the medium is perceived to suffer a lot, especially the frequent exhaustion resulting from séances. Sometimes the deity decides that one family will have two or three generations of mediums serving him, in which case one of the male descendants will “take up the baton” when the older medium retires, in which case there is no need for a fresh search for a successor medium.

Palanquin

A divination palanquin carried by four men. A worshipper, kneeling, consults the Sanguandadi outside the temple hall. Standing in front of the palanquin, behind the worshipper, is the temple cult leader, who addresses the deity with questions. Shaanbei, 2016. Photo: Adam Chau.

When the previous incumbent becomes too weak or dies, a ritual consultation is held, led by the temple cult leader with the aid of a divination palanquin (as in rain rituals).

An individual chosen by the deity to be a medium may sometimes try to decline the privilege. During the Maoist period, [the deity] Sanguandadi chose a [villager] to be his medium, but this person pleaded to Sanguandadi to let someone else do the job. He was working for the government and was afraid of any conflict between his work and his medium duties due to the government’s attitude towards all “superstitious” practices. Sanguandadi let him off the hook and eventually chose another person. But normally, it is very difficult to refuse “the calling.” Although high social status is not an official prerequisite for becoming a medium, there are times when the community refuses to accept the deity’s choice of medium by virtue of the person’s questionable repute or some other factors. In these cases, the deity’s choice can be challenged, such as by insisting on further confirmations of the choice by divination. Sometimes the person chosen can be so obsessed with the idea of becoming a medium, or the potential profit to be gained from this role, that he will defend his newly-acquired status against any challenges.

During the 1960s and 70s only a few courageous spirit mediums and yinyang masters practiced their trade clandestinely. Whether they had to be jailed and re-educated depended on the relationship he (usually he) had with local officials. One medium claimed that, while nine out of ten “practitioners of superstition” had to go to jail, he did not because he had cured the relatives of many of the top officials so they protected him. Also, very poor (thus of good class background) yinyang masters and mediums were not bothered too much by the campaigns. Chau also outlines the ability of mediums and their patrons to circumvent state control.

This kind of study was already suggested in the 1970s by David Jordan for the self-mortifying tang-ki mediums in Taiwan.

In another article, yet unpublished, Chau and Liu explore the theme of the attendants who serve the mediums’ deities, providing notes on a temple complex in Hengshan county and a local family of mediums, as well as a 1962 rain procession during the brief lull between campaigns.

As they describe (spoiler alert…), the role of attendant is largely voluntary. He will be a pious devotee of the temple association, quite active in helping with all its affairs. Serving as attendant is a rather onerous task: being around the temple so much, and sometimes traveling away from the village, the chores of his own family will often be left unattended; he should be brave enough to work with both the deity and the medium, as well as to confront evil powers; and he should be comfortable communicating with people. Normally he will be at least semi-literate, since an important task is to take down all the instructions from the medium during the séance. The attendant serves as intermediary between the medium and the client, translating the utterances of the deity, and acting on the medium’s instructions.

Echoing his remarks in Religion in China: ties that bind, Chau observes:

Some scholars and readers will look upon the religious practices discussed in this chapter as “magic,” “sorcery,” or “superstition,” not quite belonging to the category of “religion.” However, this kind of distinction between “proper religion” and “primitive magic” is a product of epistemological biases that privilege particular “modalities of doing religion” and hinders greatly a broad-based understanding of religious life in any society. Such a bias grants more dignity and legitimacy to religious traditions that are believed to be “higher” on an imagined evolutionary trajectory of religions, denigrating those that are supposedly less institutionalised, less systematic, more “ritualistic,” therefore “primitive” and “lower” (if not barbaric and repulsive). This is a well-known Protestant triumphalist prejudice that unfortunately still pervades most understandings of religion. Discarding this prejudice is essential for any sympathetic yet objective understanding of religious life.

China: memory, music, society

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GLF

The Great Leap. Source: China Daily!

This year’s CHIME conference (details here), with the broad theme of “Chinese music and memory”, is to be held remotely from Prague in two instalments on 1st–3rd and 8th–10th September.

Among the contributors—from both within and outside China—some will address notation (generally an over-subscribed topic) and early history (a rather safe theme, although currently being subjected to the ideology of the PRC). Also featured are folk-song, the qin zither (another niche scene rarely considered in the light of the social traumas of Maoism), the music of the Cultural Revolution, and the inescapable Intangible Cultural Heritage. More promising are Zhu Chuyi’s “ ‘Mother, I am sorry I was born a girl’: sonic, somatic, and traumatic memories in Tujia bridal laments”, and Liu Chang’s “Dakou cassettes, scar literature, and the memory of a traumatic past” (the latter proposal no longer appearing).

Here I’d like to broaden the topic in ways that may appear to be outside the remit of the conference, gathering together several of my blog posts. But we might start with a reminder of aperçus by two weighty pundits:

Music! Music! Is it nothing but the sound of bells and drums?—Confucius

There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics—Mao Zedong

Soundscape is never autonomous: it’s a window on society (see posts under Society and soundscape). Yet by comparison with countries where regime change has enabled necessary commemoration of painful episodes (see e.g. Sachsenhausen), within China acknowledgement and public scrutiny of the crimes of Maoism are notably absent. For references to some fine work, see Cultural Revolutions, including Jing Jun’s The temple of memories and Erik Mueggler’s The age of wild ghosts; among much discussion (at least outside China), two works on remembering and forgetting the traumatic past are reviewed here. Note also Ian Johnson’s important book Sparks, on the underground historians standing up for memory against the state control of history. For the dissimulation and duplicity inculcated in the USSR, see e.g. The whisperers.

grave

Hilltop burial, Shaanbei 1999. My photo.

A major theme in people’s lives is suffering—as highlighted by Guo Yuhua in her fine ethnography of a poor Shaanbei hill village Shoukurende jiangshu 受苦人的講述 [Narratives of the sufferers], where she managed to elicit the peasants’ own painful memories of the whole Maoist era.

Particularly harrowing cases are the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Great Leap Backward, and the concurrent famines. The horrors of the Jiabiangou labour camp in Gansu have been exposed in long documentaries, Wang Bing’s Dead Souls and Ai Xiaoming’s Jiabiangou elegy.

My film Notes from the yellow earth (DVD with Ritual and music of north China, vol.2: Shaanbei) contains a lengthy sequence (§B) from a similar funeral—filmed in a village with its own traumatic memories. One might hear the playing of such shawm bands as merely “mournful”—indeed, that’s why younger urban dwellers are reluctant to hear them, associating the sound with death. And of course the style and repertoire of these bands took shape long before Maoism, based on earlier historical suffering. But we can only hear “early music” with our own modern ears.

Within the context of Dead souls the bleakness of the soundscape really hits home, suggesting how very visceral is the way that the style evokes the trauma of ruined lives and painful memory—slow, with wailing timbre and the “blue” scale of jiadiao, the two shawms in stark unison occasionally splintering into octave heterophony. Wang Bing’s scene should be compulsory viewing for anyone still struggling (despite my best efforts) to comprehend the relevance of shawm bands. Similarly, since I often note the importance of Daoist ritual in Gansu, its labour camps might form one aspect of our accounts of ritual life there.

The people shown in these documentaries are just those who anyone doing research in China will encounter—whether working on social or cultural life. This is just the kind of memory that the rosy patriotic nostalgia and reifications of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project are designed to erase.

Like the German and Russian “soul”, suffering in China isn’t timeless: it is embodied in the lives and deaths of real people in real time. People dying since I began fieldwork in the 1980s all had traumatic histories; at the grave their memories, and those of their families, are covered over merely in dry earth, ritual specialists only performing a token exorcism that doesn’t obviate the need for a deeper accommodation with the past.

Unfolding along with the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Great Leap was the great famine; under the famine tag, I’ve grouped the main posts here, noting Wu Wenguang’s remarkable Memory Project, as well as Ukraine and Kazakhstan (see also under Life behind the Iron Curtain).

Ritual studies too are often perceived as a society-free zone, retreating into early history without reference to modern tribulations. As I showed in my post Ritual studies mildly censored, anxiety over documenting the Maoist past continues. As we submitted a translation of Appendix 1 of my Daoist priests of the Li family to a Chinese publisher, one sentence proved tricky:

… religious practice since 1949—whether savagely repressed or tacitly maintained—still appears to be a sensitive issue.

Precisely by modifying it they proved my point—by feeling it’d be rash to admit that it was a sensitive issue, they revealingly confirmed that it was!

Gaoluo 1989

New Year’s rituals, Gaoluo 1989.

Thus south of Beijing in the ritual association of Gaoluo village by the 1990s, it was easy to air publicly the vocal liturgy and instrumental melodies that young recruits like Cai An had learned on the eve of the Great Leap, and during the brief revival between the famine and the Four Cleanups; but traumatic memories of the campaigns themselves remained unvoiced.

Cui JianEven for the period since the 1980s’ reforms there is plenty of folk memory for the Party-State to repress (see e.g. Tiananmen: bullets and opium). Long March veteran Wang Zhen’s classic retort to Cui Jian was inadvertently drôle: “What do you mean, you’ve got nothing to your name? You’ve got the Communist Party haven’t you?” The nuances of the indie scene are explored by Jeroen de Kloet. And in my series on Coronavirus in China, a song by a blind bard made a medium to express support for whistleblower Li Wenliang (cf. the satirical songs of Zhang Gasong).

Left: Tibetan monks laying down their arms, 1959.
Right: Rahilä Dawut.

Tibet makes another flagrant case of coercive amnesia; in this roundup of posts, note e.g. Forbidden memory, Conflicting memories, Eat the Buddha, and How *not* to describe 1950s’ Tibet. Song often helps articulate the sense of loss and grievance. In 2009 the popular Amdo singer Tashi Dondhup was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment after distributing songs critical of the occupation—notably 1958–2008, evoking two terrifying periods:

And documenting the past and present of Xinjiang is ever more severely out of bounds (from the Uyghur tag, see e.g. Uyghur culture in crisis, and Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam).

Arguments for maintaining the stability of the state, avoiding “chaos”, are paltry compared to the duty to commemorate, to learn from history—for Europe, UK, the USA, all around the world. Elsewhere too we find belated recognition of the sufferings of Indigenous peoples around the world, and the legacy of colonialism and genocide.

All this may remind us how important it is to seek beyond sanitised representations of “Chinese music”, or indeed of Daoist ritual, both in China and abroad. However distressing, the stories of suffering—though ever more out of bounds within the PRC—need to be told. Cf. Aleppo: music and trauma.

Anyway, FWIW, these are the kinds of thorny issues that come to my mind as I consult the CHIME conference website—do consider taking part!

Eat the Buddha

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Eat the Buddha cover

  • Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: life, death, and resistance in a Tibetan town (2020).

While academic studies of modern Tibetan history and culture have blossomed since the 1980s (see roundup here), the dense language of scholarly publications is often compounded by their prohibitive prices. So there is ample room for an accessible, affordable volume like this to reach a wider audience beyond academia. *

Demick researched her book Nothing to envy: real lives in North Korea (2010) while she was serving as Bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times in Seoul. Based on seven years of conversations, mostly with defectors to the south, as well as nine trips to North Korea from 2001 to 2008 and secretly-filmed video footage, the book is a rare window onto a closed society whose traumas and secrets remain hard to reveal.

By 2007 Demick was covering the PRC, where journalists also face ever greater challenges. From her base in Beijing, she began investigating the lives of Tibetans in the Ngaba region of north Sichuan, which was to become “the undisputed world capital of self-immolation”.

Besides the “Tibetan Autonomous Region” (TAR), the majority of Tibetan people within the PRC live in the extensive regions of Amdo and Kham to the north and east (comprising large areas of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces), on which much recent scholarship has focused (see Recent posts on Tibet).

Ngawa map

Source: Conflicting memories.

Ngaba is a prefecture in northwestern Sichuan, adjoining Golog prefecture, quite remote from Lhasa to the west. Demick puts in context the whole history leading up to the Chinese invasion and since, with vivid personal stories illustrating the successive cataclysms.

Part One begins with locals’ first traumatic encounter with Communist troops in the 1930s—the book’s title, referring to votive offerings eaten by famished Red Army troops on the early stages of the Long March, is borrowed from Li Jianglin and Matthew Akester (note When the iron bird flies). Demick goes on to outline the early years of the Chinese invasion after 1950, when the king of the Mei kingdom pragmatically accommodated with the new Communist overlords.

Demick 3

This is the back-story to the devastating assaults from 1958, told through the eyes of Gonpo (b.1950), the last Mei princess. After being evicted from their palace, she was relocated to the provincial capital Chengdu along with her mother and sister; her father, the former king, joined them after a year, traumatised after being held in solitary confinement. But the young Gonpo took readily to being sinicised, and was sent on to a prestigious high school in Beijing.

Demick 54

In the summer of 1966 she returned to Chengdu for a holiday with her family, but as the Cultural Revolution broke out she was soon summoned back to Beijing. Having shown willing in previous campaigns (indeed, she supported Chairman Mao avidly), Gonpo was now vulnerable. In 1967 she learned that her parents had died in suspicious circumstances. As she became a target of struggle sessions, a contingent of Red Guards from Ngaba demanded that she should be taken home for further punishment, but instead she was exiled to remote Xinjiang, labouring on a military-run complex in Qinggil (Qinghe) county near the Soviet border. Most of the population sent there were Han Chinese—including her kindly future husband Xiao Tu. They took part in the farm’s propaganda troupe, singing songs in praise of the Party’s “liberation” of Tibet. As higher education began to function again, Gonpo tried in vain to gain admission to colleges in Beijing and Shanghai.

When the couple got permission to take a holiday in 1975, Gonpo took Xiao Tu back to her old home in Ngaba, now unrecognisable; but despite her anxieties, the locals fêted her as a former princess. When they returned to Qinggil they held a simple wedding ceremony. On the death of Chairman Mao later in 1976, their main concern was that Xiao Tu would be able to avoid trouble by maintaining the dodgy loudspeakers broadcasting the funeral. As Demick notes, by the time she was writing Qinggil was the site of a “re-education camp”, inaccessible to outsiders.

We read the story of Delek (b.1949), who came from Meruma village just east of the prefectural capital, where people remained loyal to their former royal patrons. Since his family had suffered grievously as the Chinese enforced their power, he might seem an unlikely recruit to the Red Guards. Yet to many Tibetans the Cultural Revolution presented a welcome opportunity to challenge authority, and by 1968 Delek joined a branch of the Red Guards in Ngaba loyal to the Red City faction in Chengdu, supposing that they could now right the wrongs of the hated commune system and restore religious freedom. But as rebellion spread, the PLA were sent in.

Although this uprising was ultimately a failure, for six months the Tibetans had raised their own livestock, worshipped freely in the monasteries, chanted prayers, and conducted rituals. The monks had worn their robes. It had given Tibetans a taste of freedom, the memory of which could not so easily be extinguished.

In Part Two Demick describes the “interregnum” from the end of the Cultural Revolution to 1989.

By the time of Mao’s death in 1976, Ngaba was a ghost town, sullen and silent. A quarter century of Communist rule had destroyed far more than it had created. What remained consisted mainly of squat mud hovels in dun tones barely distinguishable from the ground underfoot. […] Dust and mud choked the streets. Gutters on either side served as open sewers and toilets.

With the monasteries demolished, there was little to alleviate the drabness or delight the eye. The market nurtured by the king that had made Ngaba worth a detour for traders was long gone.

Demick evokes the resurgence of market enterprise through the story of Norbu (b.1952), who was to become a leading entrepreneur in Ngaba. As a child he had been reduced to begging for the family by the Chinese “democratic reforms”, and later turned to the black market. By 1974 he was making regular trips by bus to Chengdu to buy goods that he could sell back in Ngaba. As the commune system crumbled, the range of merchandise increased. In partnership with his Chinese wife he opened a tea shop and a supermarket.

With the monasteries still closed, some monks also turned to business, with their higher level of literacy. The monasteries re-opened gradually from 1980. Of the roughly 1,700 monks at Ngaba’s main monastery Kirti, only around 300 were still alive; some were traumatised after years in prison. As in Chinese regions, many of those helping to rebuild the temples were former activists who had taken part in destroying them.

New buildings began appearing in the county town—dominated by the institutions of the Chinese state. Tibetans were keen to buy motorbikes, and the trade in caterpillar fungus made a lucrative boost to their income. Ngaba traders travelled not only to the booming southeastern Chinese cities but to Lhasa and the border with Nepal.

The Han Chinese population of Ngaba was growing too; as the Tibetan plateau became a promising place to make money, the state encouraged migration with Develop the West campaigns. Tibetans were soon outnumbered by Chinese in Amdo, and were disadvantaged in many spheres.

Still, Tibetan education was reviving (cf. the lama Mugé Samtan, whose initiative began in Ngaba as early as 1980—see Nicole Willock’s chapter in Conflicting memories, pp.501–502). Tsegyam (b.1964) was a young teacher at the Ngaba Middle School, which opened in 1983. He had been given a Tibetan education by (former) Kirti monks, and became fluent in Chinese, spending a period studying in Chengdu. During the wider cultural revival in the PRC he wrote poetry and essays for literary magazines. At the Middle School he cautiously added Tibetan culture into the curriculum.

Tsegyam’s eyes were opened by reading a copy of the Dalai Lama’s memoir My land and my people, brought back by a friend from a trip to India. As awareness of the Tibetan government in exile grew, major protests took place in Lhasa in 1987. Though there was a strong military presence in Ngaba, Tsegyam echoed the mood by pasting up posters in support of Free Tibet and the Dalai Lama. By 1989, as protests throughout the PRC gathered and were crushed, he was under interrogation; sentenced to another year in prison in 1990, on his release he was unemployed and unemployable.

We catch up with Gonpo. In 1981 she and her husband were permitted to leave Xinjiang with their two children, settling in Xiao Tu’s old home Nanjing. One of countless people whose past backgrounds were now forgotten, Gonpo did well as a primary school teacher. While she kept a small portrait of the Dalai Lama at home, she could pass for a Chinese—by now she could barely recall Tibetan.

Still, she received a visit from a high-ranking Tibetan official on a tour of Nanjing, who had her promoted to posts in the Party; though mainly ceremonial, her new status conferred benefits such as a comfortable apartment.

In 1984 Gonpo managed to arrange belated funeral rites for her parents at Kirti monastery. In Beijing she gained an audience with the Panchen Lama, also recently rehabilitated (see e.g. under Labrang 1); he encouraged her to study Tibetan culture in India, and with his help she set off there with her daughter in 1988 during a thaw in Sino-Indian relations. She intended to return to Nanjing in due course, but the crisis of 1989 ensured that she would now find herself living in exile in Dharamsala.

Part Three takes the story on to 2013, as tensions grew again. As urban China basked in McDonalds and Walmart, rural Tibetans still lacked basic amenities.

In Meruma, Dongtuk was born to a disabled single mother who overcame poverty. In her house was a shrine to her uncle, a tulku reincarnate lama.

What little that children knew about recent history was gleaned from their families.

To the extent that they were taught anything about Tibet in the 20th century, it was about how the Communist Party had liberated Tibet from serfdom. Their parents tended not to talk about it. Maybe they didn’t know about it themselves. Or they feared these stories of collective trauma might arouse anti-Chinese sentiments that could get the children in trouble later down the road. The surviving elders who knew firsthand—and who often carried the scars on their bodies—disgorged their memories only sparingly. If they hadn’t been half-starved and beaten, if they hadn’t languished in prison doing gruelling work, then they had done things of which they were now ashamed. You were either tormented or a tormentor. Nobody had escaped unscathed.

Dongtuk gladly accepted when his mother suggested that he become a monk at Kirti monastery, which was now expanding grandly. In the company of village friends there, he flourished at the monastery school. But a new policy was stamping down on monastic activism; a new “patriotic education” campaign was launched at Kirti in 1998, radicalising many monks. The school was closed in 2002.

Pema (b. c1965) was a supporter of the monastery. After the death of her husband she ran a market stall to support her children, two of whom were monks. She regularly took part in circumambulations at Kirti (cf. Charlene Makley for Labrang, ch.3). She took in a young girl called Dechen, who took to a Chinese education, as well as her niece Lhundup Tso, who was of a more enquiring mind. Pema herself was inclined to be grateful for the limited freedoms they now enjoyed. But she was concerned about a vast new construction project; while she felt more pity than hostility towards the Chinese, she didn’t want any more of them in her town. Infrastructure projects escalated in the buildup to the Olympics—along with surveillance.

Demick 159

Brought up in a nomadic community, Tsepay (b.1977) was not inclined towards dissent. His good looks gained him admission to an official song-and-dance troupe at the glossy resort of Jiuzhaigou, and at first he enjoyed the work. But he came to resent the condescending clichés intrinsic to such displays, and his comments got him into trouble. Leaving the troupe, he began travelling the plateau with cellphone and camera to document the transformation of the landscape.

Despite Chinese censorship, families and monasteries still commonly kept portraits of the Dalai Lama, although people were ready to conceal them if there was a raid. Tsepay listened to recordings of teachings by the Dalai Lama, and became aware of the conflict over the identification of the new Panchen Lama. In 2006, as the Chinese rhetoric against the Dalai Lama became more strident, Tsepay spent a year in prison for distributing Dalai Lama recordings, radicalising him further.

These stories come together in Demick’s account of the 2008 uprising. Serious protests broke out in Lhasa on 10th March on the anniversary of the 1959 uprising that led to the flight of the Dalai Lama. In Ngaba the military police were on full alert, but protests erupted there too on the 16th. Dechen normally found the troops rather dashing, but now the tension was clear. In the middle of a prayer festival at Kirti the young monk Dongtuk saw an older colleague holding up a photo of the Dalai Lama and yelling “Long live His Holiness the Dalai Lama!”. As other monks joined in, they swept out into the streets, confronting the riot police, who responded with tear gas and live ammunition. On their mobiles people began to learn of protests elsewhere in the region, in Labrang, Dzorge, and Rebgong.

Tsepay, on probation, couldn’t resist going into town. There he found the blood-stained body of a young Tibetan woman—probably Pema’s young niece Lhundup Tso. Pema, a curious onlooker, was horrified to learn that she was among those shot dead. Enraged, Tsepay entered the battle. Wounded, he escaped via Chengdu to Shenzhen, where he was pursued by police from Ngaba, but managed to escape again.

Demick 183

With Kirti monastery now under virtual siege, checkpoints, bunkers, and CCTV were installed. Nearly 600 monks were arrested, over a fifth of the monastery’s population. But the campaign to remove all traces of the Dalai Lama only increased the Tibetans’ reverence for him. At last Dongtuk could interpret the sufferings of his elders in terms of the current oppression. He began listening to illegal Amdo songs such as Tashi Dhondup’s 1958–2008 (see also here).

With Pema distraught over the death of her niece, and normal social life suspended, Dechen became the family’s go-between. Her education at Tibetan middle school had become more conventional; in response to campaigns against expressions of Tibetan nationalism, the students waged subtle protests.

Self-immolation
Life began returning to “normal” by the end of 2008, but the 2009 Monlam New Year festival prompted yet another crisis as a young Kirti monk set himself on fire on the main street. Though he survived, 156 Tibetans have since immolated themselves, of whom nearly a third came from Ngaba and nearby.

Dongtuk’s life at Kirti monastery had become tedious. He was a keen basketball fan, and loved watching movies. His mother eventually submitted to his repeated requests for her to muster the funds to allow him to study in India, but his efforts to leave were unsuccessful.

On 16th March 2011 another Kirti monk, a friend of Dongtuk, set himself on fire—this time fatally. Looking for scapegoats, police arrested monks, and locals rallied to protest. The monastery was barricaded again. But over the next months further self-immolations followed.

Ngaba was now sealed off and equipped with all the technology of riot control—with fire extinguishers now added to the police arsenal. When Demick visited the town in 2013 it reminded her of trips to war zones like Baghdad, Sarajevo, and the Gaza Strip.

As the self-immolations brought renewed international publicity to the Tibetan cause, the Dalai Lama and Tibet advocacy groups were in an awkward position.

Dechen, no longer so amenable to the Chinese, was now alienated by her education at school; Pema now began the complex procedures to help her reach India, as it became ever harder for Tibetan to gain travel permits. With Pema travelling as her chaperone, after a four-month journey they eventually made their way to Dham and crossed into Nepal.

Dongtuk too renewed his efforts to leave. He evaded attention by staying on his father’s nomadic pastures, getting to know his half-brother Rinzen Dorjee. And then, via Lhasa, Dham and Kathmandu, Dongtuk too managed to reach Dharamsala. As he resumed his studies at the branch of Kirti monastery there (founded in 1990), he learned of another self-immolation in Meruma—that of Rinjen Dorjee.

In Part Four Demick visits Ngaba refugees in Dharamsala, learning details hard to divulge in the intimidated atmosphere of Ngaba, and updating the story since 2014. (It is indeed possible for scholars to glean insights through extended stays among Tibetans within the PRC, as did Charlene Makley around Labrang, but in presenting their work they tend to be beset by academic concerns. For fine reflections on the differences between conducting research in Lhasa and Dharamsala, see Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, “Easier in exile?“, cited in n.1 here).

The journey to India was always fraught with dangers. Following the initial exodus after 1959, another wave took place in the 1980s. We catch up with Gonpo, who had been in inadvertent exile in Dharamsala with her daughter since 1989. The Dalai Lama, whom she had met in 1956, received her warmly, giving her a post in the exile parliament. But as relations between the Chinese and the Dalai Lama deteriorated, Gonpo was unable to see her husband and her other daughter until 2005. As Demick observed after meeting her in 2014,

Not only does the rift between China and the Tibetans run straight through her family, it runs through her psyche. Gonpo loves China as well as Tibet. She still speaks better Chinese than Tibetan. More than most Han Chinese people I know, she absorbed the lessons of socialism. She eschewed conspicuous displays of wealth and was proud that she had shed her aristocratic roots and was, to use a Chinese Communist slogan, serving the people.

Goonpo was deeply disturbed by the self-immolations in her former home.

Demick x

Demick also met the former Red Guard Delek, who had also managed to reach Dharamsala in 1989, becoming a historian as he documented the tribulations of Ngaba, while serving as caretaker at a school for young refugees.

The young teacher Tsegyam had sneaked across the border into India in 1992, eventually becoming private secretary to the Dalai Lama. And after fleeing Ngaba in 2008, Tsepay was on the run for four years, spending over a year in hiding on Wutaishan before reaching Dharamsala.

Dechen was enthusiastic about her studies at the boarding school run by the exile government; educating herself further by reading Woeser keenly, she was hoping to become a journalist. She took Demick to meet Pema, who despite her relief at escaping the appalling repressions in Ngaba, didn’t feel quite at ease, missing the material comforts of her former home.

Indeed, for many exiles the homeland remains ambivalent; with conditions in India less than ideal, they may be tempted to return to their homeland, despite the inevitable scrutiny to which they will be subjected. From a peak of 118,000 in the mid-1990s, the Tibetan population in India declined to 94,000 in 2009. The Chinese had plugged leaks to the borders, and Tibetans often move on to Western countries.

Demick considers the role of the Dalai Lama and current worries over the succession (for recent news, see e.g. here). The bar has lowered from independence to survival; but if the preservation of Tibetan culture sounds like a modest goal, even this can clearly not be taken for granted.

In her final chapter Demick ponders the limits of freedom. Some Tibetans even thought the Chinese had heeded the lessons of the self-immolations; they had cancelled an unpopular water diversion project, and shelved plans to house Chinese workers; aid projects were coming into effect. Photos of the Dalai Lama reappeared at Kirti. But Chinese migration continues, and Tibetans are still disadvantaged.

It should go without saying: The Tibetans are not some exotic isolated tribe trying to preserve an ancient civilisation against the advance of modernity. They want infrastructure, they want technology, they want higher education. But they also want to keep their language and their freedom of religion. […]

Time and again I heard the same story. Almost everybody was better off financially than they’d been a decade ago, like everybody in China. But Tibetans were still poor—even by the standards of rural China. And they could see that the Chinese newcomers in town had a higher standard of living.

Younger Tibetans might not be deeply religious; they might readily take to a Chinese education as a career path, and be seduced by the trappings of modern material goods. And yet they too have come to resent deeply their chronic submission to the Chinese, connecting it to the scars inherited from their elders, and they continue to fight to maintain their identity.

* * *

Eat the Buddha is based on three trips to Ngaba, as well as interviews with Ngaba people elsewhere, most fruitfully in Dharamsala.

With a few exceptions […], the people in this book left Tibet not for political reasons but to further their education or personal growth.

For the most part, they were regular people who hoped to live normal, happy lives in China’s Tibet without having to make impossible choices between their faith, family, and their country.

As she did for Nothing to envy, Demick provides a useful research guide in a section of endnotes, themed by chapter. Besides her own visits to Ngaba, Chengdu, Lhasa, and Dharamsala, she cites sources such as the War on Tibet site of Li Jianglin and Matthew Akester, the work of scholars such as Tsering Shakya, Robert Barnett, and Melvyn Goldstein (we can now add Conflicting memories, including Bianca Horlemann’s chapter 11 on Golog), as well as human rights groups (cf. my roundup of posts on Tibet). Tsering Woeser has written on self-immolation in Tibet on fire (2016), and in this article. Many of these issues are covered on the excellent High Peaks Pure Earth website.

While the Chinese Party-State’s repression of the Tibetans is taking a rather different form to its barbarity in Xinjiang (see this roundup of posts on Uyghur culture), it’s important to keep the Tibetan case in the public eye. Over seventy years of Chinese indoctrination and brute force have been ineffective; a way out of the impasse remains elusive. Engagingly told through personal stories, Eat the Buddha makes a microcosm of the travails of Tibetans in their sorry encounter with the modern Chinese state, serving for the non-specialist (that’s me) as a digestible introduction to complex issues.

* For some effective popular works on other areas, see Charles King (here and here), Undreamed shores, Watching the English, and The souls of China.

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.

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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.

Can’t get you out of my head

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Curtis title

Do watch the brilliant BBC TV series

Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence—and You

The series, in six parts over some eight hours, is broadly chronological, with an ambitious coverage of major events and recurring themes—failed political revolutions amidst a widespread distrust and resentment of elites; radical movements, and their defeat; pessimism as old power structures remain intact and kleptocracy rages; racial antagonism (with sexism revealed less explicitly); anger, insecurity, and paralysis in the age of individualism, haunted by the malignant scars of the past, lacking a vision for the future, “free but alone”; personal expression, technology, psychology, consumerism, advertising, mass electronic surveillance and algorithms. You know the kind of thing…

While countercultural discontent has long been a much-discussed theme, Curtis’s take is virtuosic. The dystopian vision of his message, juxtaposing cultures, is conveyed as much through the collage of blending images and a sinister, psychedelic soundtrack (including pop and Chinese revolutionary opera) as through graphic newsreel footage, interviews, and his own voiceover.

Funnily enough, among interviews, this—with Diane Morgan (aka Philomena Cunk), no less—is rather good.

I think I get so sucked into the stories that you choose and the people you concentrate on. They’re not boring people. Like Jiang Qing! She could’ve been from Bolton.

As Ms Cunk, herself master of the deadpan delivery, notes:

It’s partly your calm, authoritative voice. I feel like you could be a cult leader. You could tell me that bananas were invented by the Polish secret service and I’d believe you. There’s something hypnotic about it.

Here’s the fine parody of Curtis’s style mentioned in their chat (“In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet”):

Themes
In the USA, bastion of individualism through the Cold War, we are introduced to Richard Hofstadter (tracing suburban anxiety, fear, and hatred right back to the pilgrims), the John Birch Society and the Illuminati conspiracy theory; the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind-control experiments; Black Power, and infiltrators.

In Britain, the loss of empire also gave rise to insecurity and xenophobia. Curtis covers Kenya and the Mau Mau; and the disillusion of new arrivals from the former empire. In the wake of the slave trade, in the USA guilt mutated into fear and anger, along with deep resentments over racism and police violence. Featured are the Yellow Peril, and the KKK; the IRA, and MI6; Blair’s Britain.

In Germany the Red Army Faction (aided by the Stasi) responded to what they saw as the mutation of Nazism—with the far right indeed growing. But revolutionary chic also emerged.

Politicians gave up being our representatives who would challenge the powerful on our behalf, and began to tell us what to do on behalf of the powerful. But we didn’t notice because we were too busy shopping.

Alongside climate change and suburban alienation, Valium (and later OxyContin) submerged people’s disillusion at the false promises offered by material comfort—at first particularly for women. The blurring of reality and illusion is illustrated by The dream of the red chamber. Curtis surveys Nixon, the Vietnam war, his visit to China, and Watergate; ever more volatile money markets; US and British involvement in the Middle East, and oil; 9/11, Iraq, Syria, ISIS; USSR dissidents and prison songs; new despair in Russia after the fall of Communism; oligarchs, corruption; the Balkan wars, and the corrosive allure of nationalism, always connected with the past.

Democracies, subordinate to financial and bureaucratic interests, often seemed to be producing the wrong results (north Africa, the Middle East)—“What if the people are stupid?”. Meanwhile humanitarian aid arose from frustration with politicians, attempting to change the world by bypassing them; but it was vulnerable to being exploited by them, as in Ethiopia.

With technocrats ever more powerful over politicians, and constant global financial crises, a conservative nostalgia for empire re-emerged. Curtis notes the magical vision of Britain’s feudal past that had been created by artists and writers from the late 19th century; passing over socialist currents within the folk music and dance revival, he suggests they were

invented to create a kind of safe dream of the nation that could hide the violence and the horrors. The dream persisted under the surface of the 20th century. But as the fears and uncertainties and the chaos of the last few years rose up, millions of people started to believe that dream. That it was real.

Part 5 ends with a particularly disturbing montage, as How beautiful they are, the lordly ones accompanies images of Isis and Morris dancing.

What had begun a long time ago as a make-believe version of England, created in the deserts of Mesopotamia as the British Empire fell apart, had now turned into a terrifying nightmare.

This has led to the similar urge in the USA and UK to recreate the dream of a lost greatness—Trump and Brexit, the inevitable dénouement that Curtis’s whole project has sought to explain.

Part 6 takes in the rapper Tupac Shakur, son of Afeni, with civil rights an ever unresolved issue; Saudi Arabia, and jihad as a remedy for nihilism; Chaos theory and Complexity theory amidst growing paranoia; the 2008 economic crash and austerity, as resentment against elites grew further; the growing power of global corporations; AI, conspiracy theories, manipulation, “a world beyond freedom and dignity”.

China dolls

In Russia, Curtis shows post-Soviet unrest, with popular protest at corruption and chaos; Putin, Pussy Riot, Navalny. The 1997 British handover of Hong Kong; capitalist consumerism in reform China, Deng Xiaoping and the limits of democratic reform; Tiananmen 1989 and the disturbing figure of Chai Ling; land grabs and corruption, the downfall of Bo Xilai’s attempt to revive collective idealism, popular grievance; mass surveillance—and Xinjiang—under Xi Jinping.

And so to Trump, Bannon, QAnon; Cummings, and Farage—with Covid now compounding inequalities. Politicians have moved from espousing reprehensible visions to having no agendas beyond power itself. With liberalism in retreat, tech companies feed off paranoia.

Characters
Largely eschewing the Usual Suspects, Curtis’s choice of personalities and interviewees is most original, with a wealth of fascinating stories to follow up, making the viewer reach for wiki—including Peter Rachman and Michael X, Ethel Boole and Maya Plisetskaya, Edgar Mittelholzer, John L. Lewis and Harry Caudill representing the miners of Appalachia; Kerry Thornley, Operation Mindfuck, and Lee Harvey Oswald; Daniel Kahneman; the Russian criminals sent (along with Solzhenitsyn) to New York in 1974 who became the Potato Bag Gang, and Eduard Limonov; Horst Mahler, Afeni Shakur.

Jiang Qing and her psychological makeup feature (perhaps too) prominently:

In her operas, Jiang Qing had gone back into China’s past. Her aim had been to rework them, to express a new kind of revolution. But in reality, she had reawakened a dark and poisonous kind of violence that had lurked under the surface of China for hundreds of years. It was driven by a resentment of the rigid hierarchies that the revolution had not really changed. Mao had not given her or anyone else guidance about what to do with the fury that she had summoned up.

Curtis’s vision will doubtless be unwelcome to entrenched elites. So while he gives the revolutionaries a poor review, and rejects being labelled as a leftie, I guess we might settle for a definition based on having an enquiring mind prepared to challenge the status quo—precisely the fear of conservatives.

Despite all the endless pressures, he ends with the possibilities that the election of Biden may offer hope for a return to a former stability, and that people will be able to imagine genuinely new kinds of futures—dependant on their regaining confidence. We may need further encouragement. Some may recall the counter-intuitive optimism of Steven Pinker over the long sweep of human history. Others might suggest that paralysis and nihilism have not conquered all; while Curtis hardly broaches the more modest (but not necessarily less radical) advances of non-violent movements for social justice (cf. Hašek’s ironic “Party for Moderate and Peaceful Progress within the Bounds of the Law”!), progressives don’t necessarily seem doomed by the demons of the past, as young grassroots activists increasingly take up noble causes, holding power to account. 

Anyway, it’s an immensely stimulating series, whether “dazzling”, “terrifying”, or “incoherent”; perhaps Hugo Rifkind’s comment is apposite:

I feel I learnt a lot. I’m just not sure what it was—

which indeed encapsulates the very confusion that Curtis evokes.

Ritual and masked drama in Hunan

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From the nuo drama Da pandong, and the she tanshen ritual.

Adding to the extensive research on ritual in Hunan (note also Yang Yinliu’s 1956 field survey) is a recent case-study of ritual and sacred drama there:

  • Tan Jinhe 譠金鶴 and Tian Yan 田彥, Nanyue shenxi: lishi chuancheng yu yanchu wenben 南嶽神戲: 歷史傳承與演出文本 [Sacred opera of the Southern Peak: historical transmission and performing texts] (2020; 370 pages).

Nanyue shenxi cover

The book, result of a collaboration between household Daoist Tan Jinhe (b.1946) and the able fieldworker Tian Yan (b.1981), describes the range of rituals performed by groups of household Daoists around Hengyang, and the nuoxi 傩戏 masked dramas that are included within them. The ritual specialists, known as shigong 师公, combine Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi) practice with the Hunyuan jiao 混元教 branch of Daoism—which I’ve mainly encountered in its northern sectarian forms (see various pages under Local ritual).

While plenty of “religious” groups (both temple- and household-based) have been recruited to the cause of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), this is a rarely detailed study under its auspices: with its main role as official propaganda rather than academic research, coverage of such local traditions is usually formulaic and brief. But Hunan has an impressive tradition of scholarship: conferences on the topic began as early as 1981, part of a renewed academic interest in ritual drama and Daoist ritual in mainland China that soon led to the influential fieldwork projects masterminded by the great C.K. Wang (see also the films of Jacques Pimpaneau).

Tan Jinhe, leader of the Xianying leitan 显应雷坛 altar, is the fifteenth generation of Daoists in his lineage, based in Shaotian village in the southern suburbs of Nanyue township. Though only 3 when his father died while recovering the body of a local guerilla, he studied under his grandfather; by 1957 he was taking part in rain rituals. But (like his exact contemporary Li Manshan in Shanxi) amidst the privations following the Great Leap Backward, he can only have been active sporadically for a few years before Socialist Education campaigns escalated; recruited to the local propaganda troupe in 1965, through the Cultural Revolution he pursued other trades. He was able to resume ritual practice by 1980, going on to train new generations of Daoists. In 1985 he became head of his village committee, while doing well in correspondence college. He went on to assume several prestigious official positions for Daoism and the arts.

Tan lineage

Two branches of the Tan ritual lineage.

The authors survey the ancestry of other “thunder altar” ritual groups in the area: other branches of the Tan lineage, Yongxing leitan 永兴雷坛 altars led by the Yang and Kang lineages, and the Kaihua leitan 开化雷坛 of the Li family.

The ritual scene since the 1980s’ reforms is described in a useful section. While activity revived strongly upon the revival of the 1980s and 1990s, the authors admit to a certain dilution of faith in ritual among the local clientele by the 21st century. With the spread of hospital treatment, healing rituals were commissioned less often; Tan Jinhe has seldom been invited to perform exorcistic rituals like she tanshen or rangxing zuofu, and other rituals are abbreviated. I’m curiously encouraged to read this admission, since it rarely features in accounts of southern Daoism (contrast my account of a flawed funeral in Shanxi)—even if it may derive partly from the ICH’s “salvage” agenda, portraying itself as a saviour in rescuing genres from decline (see also Glimpses of Hunan).

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Sequence for three-day hexiao ritual.

Seeking maximum information irrespective of recent dilution, the authors list ritual sequences in detail, including jiexiao 接霄, hexiao 和霄, she tanshen 设坛神, rangxing zuofu 禳星作福, and the “graduation” ritual chuantan 传坛. These Daoists don’t perform mortuary rituals.

chuantan sequence

Sequence for three-day chuantan ritual.

The authors describe the deities worshipped in rituals, notably the xiao 霄 goddesses. Here we perhaps need John Lagerwey to tease out themes in the wider inter-regional context (cf. west Fujian).

Long sections provide ritual and dramatic texts in turn. Foremost among the latter is Da pandong 大盘洞. The authors note the connection between the ritual dramas and huagu xi opera (cf. Famine and expressive culture in Hunan). 

Left, artefacts; right, Tan Jinhe demonstrates mudras.

A final section describes ritual costumes, masks, statuettes, and other artefacts, with some transcriptions of the vocal liturgy, which in addition to percussion is supplemented here by shawms and fiddles; and mudras and cosmic steps are described in detail.

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Inviting Water (qingshui 请水), standard opening ritual segment. Photo: Patrice Fava, 2016.

Even better, of course (my usual refrain), would be to see all this on film—youku has only a few unsatisfactory clips. As with many groups, Patrice Fava tells me that Tan Jinhe’s band has recently taken to using amplification—a challenge for both ethnographers and film-makers to confront.

So this study makes yet another valuable addition to the extensive literature on ritual activity in south China.

 

With thanks to Patrice Fava

 

A Daoist altar in west Fujian

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Daoist master Dingling (Guanbao, 1929–2013).

In the immense Daojiao yishi congshu 道教儀式叢書 [Anthology of Daoist ritual] series, the provinces of Jiangxi, Fujian, and Hunan feature prominently (more on Hunan here). While studies of Fujian culture often focus on the south of the province, the Hakka western region is also rich in ritual traditions.

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The distribution of Daoist groups in Shanghang county.

This latest magnum opus in the series is a detailed study of the Lingying tang 靈應堂, one of fifteen groups (“altars” tan 壇 or “halls” tang 堂) of household Daoist ritual specialists in Shanghang county, west Fujian:

Wu Nengchang cover

Born in 1984, Wu Nengchang trained in Xiamen, going on to study in Paris before taking up a post at Fudan university in Shanghai. In French, see his thesis

The main text of this new publication has 336 pages; the following 1,392 pages comprises reproductions of ritual manuals.

In his English introduction to the series, the masterly John Lagerwey highlights some main points, with his unmatched experience of Daoist ritual in south China. He sees Daoist, Buddhist, and exorcistic rituals as a single system. This classification is widely applicable in south China, though not necessarily elsewhere—spirit mediums are important in the north too, but they are not integrated with the liturgical system there. Lagerwey also gives a fine English summary of this volume, again identifying salient themes.

Although the Lingying tang was only founded a century ago, the study is rich in historical evidence. The Lingying Tang inherited the ritual traditions of two older Daoist altars, specializing respectively in Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi) liturgies performed by “Daoist priests” (daoshi 道士) and the exorcistic rituals of “ritual masters” (fashi 法師).

While this volume, like the whole series, stresses early history and ritual texts, Wu provides a useful outline of the Lingying tang Daoists under successive periods in the modern era (pp.69–91). As I did for Yanggao in north Shanxi, Wu surveyed all fifteen of the Daoist altars in Shanghang county before focusing on this group. There his main consultant was Guanbao (Daoist name Dingling, 1929–2013), older son of the founder Chen Lintang (Hongxing, 1894–1959).

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Left, Guanbao (Dingling) in 1944; right, his father Chen Lintang (Hongxing).

After giving fine detail on the Republican period, Wu explores transmission under Maoism. This may play a very minor role in the series, but here I’d like to summarise this section of the chapter, as it illustrates common themes (cf. my work on Gaoluo, and the Li family Daoists, particularly this); indeed, it’s a fundamental context for the liturgical material presented.

Following Land reform, Hongxing’s family were classified as poor peasants. He was given posts in new state troupes for local opera. His son Guanbao at first retrained as a photographer, but then resumed Daoist activity on a small scale until 1956, eventually desisting after twice being criticised by work teams while performing rituals.

When Hongxing died in the winter of 1959, his sons Guanbao and Xibao, with other Daoist colleagues, surreptitiously “did the lanterns” (zuodeng 做燈) for his funeral. That same year they adapted scenes from the zuoxi 做覡 exorcistic ritual for a “cultural programme” at county and district levels.

When the Socialist Education campaign began in 1963 Guanbao buried the altar’s ritual paintings, instruments, and manuals for safekeeping. Though 1965 the work teams found some such artefacts on a raid of his house in 1965, the team chief, declining to consider them as belonging to the tainted “Four olds”, didn’t have them destroyed. However, as the situation became ever more serious, Guanbao fearfully burned ritual images himself.

In 1963 Guanbao had been appointed head of the new Nanyang amateur opera troupe, and worked away from the town after the violent opening of the Cultural Revolution. Recalled in 1976, he won county awards in 1979 for educative cultural items. As tradition, and ritual, were restoring, that year he was put in charge of the revival of the Nanyang puppet troupe, which was soon in considerable demand over a wide area. Jiao offering rituals were now being gingerly revived too.

Around 1983 Guanbao met the son of another renowned Daoist, who showed him some crucial ritual manuals which he copied, making notes on how to perform them. By this time the restoration of Daoist ritual was in full swing (cf. the Li family Daoists in Shanxi).

The group’s sporadic activities under Maoism make the extensive ritual repertoires, texts, and images presented in the book even more remarkable.

And then Wu takes the story on further into the reform era, with detailed descriptions. Guanbao soon found he could make a much better living from performing rituals than from his photography and puppetry—and fees continued to increase. He trained a new generation of young disciples to perform jiao Offering rituals. The two brothers often met demand by leading separate bands.

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Guanbao’s band: annual ritual income from 2003 to 2011.

Again interspersing black-and-white photos, Wu then moves onto his main theme, the ritual repertoire, describing in turn the segments of xi 覡 (read sang in dialect) exorcistic liturgies, Orthodox Unity rituals for jiao Offerings and funerals, and “rites of confinement”.

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Arena for zanghun and other ritual segments.

Always noting wider regional and historical connections, he explores the history of the whole pantheon, including the Three Immortal Masters, earth gods, and female deities such as Queen Mother (Wangmu 王母), the Ladies (Furen 夫人), and Chen Jinggu.

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Ritual paintings by Dingling.

The extensive second part, preceded by detailed catalogues, is an anthology of ritual texts (mainly manuscripts) of the Lingying Tang. Whereas other volumes in the series often contain manuals from the Qing dynasty, most of those presented here look to have been copied by Dingling since the 1980s’ reforms—discussed in more detail in his article “Zhizao keyiben: yi Minxi daotan Lingying tangde duwang keben weili” 制造科仪本:以闽西道坛灵应堂的度亡科本为例, Daojiao xuekan 道教学刊 2018.2, cf. his French thesis, pp.90–107 (for my take on the process for the Li family in Shanxi, see here).

The study concludes with an enticing series of colour photos from Wu’s fieldwork.

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From the yingxian ritual.

* * *

My comments on Daoist ritual studies in Appendix 1 of my Daoist priests of the Li family relate to the dominance of south China in the project, and its salvage-based nature, based on texts rather than performance and social change. I mention these points again here because I would dearly like the monographs in this series to reach a wider audience; yet they are at some remove from the kind of ethnographic fieldwork on local society (including religious behaviour) that has simultaneously become popular (for a sample of coverage for Hunan, see here).

Thus, throughout the series, I’d be interested to learn how ritual practice has changed since the 1940s, along with the changing socio-economic context, such as migration and education. With the Li family in north Shanxi, the basic performing style seems quite constant, but the repertoire has diminished; I also noted changes in the material artefacts deployed, and in the perceptions of their clients.

In line with the brief of the series, the emphasis is on silent text, rather than performance and soundscape; yet these are precisely the means by which such texts are rendered efficacious. A core part of the Daoists’ training, not reflected in ritual manuals, is learning to sing, chant, and recite all the hymns, mantras, and memorials, and how to accompany them on the ritual percussion. Another compelling reason to highlight this soundscape is that it’s the main marker differentiating similar rituals regionally.

So if we can’t experience the sounds and movements of Daoist ritual live, then at least we should be offered edited videos of these traditions; this should be an indispensable part of any funding. If we had access to such films, then all this meticulous textual research would make a valuable complement. That said, the riches of this volume are astounding.