Newly-Discovered Manuscripts of a Northern-Chinese Horse King Temple Association

_full_journalsubtitle: International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie _full_abbrevjournaltitle: TPAO _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5322 (online version) _full_issue: 1-2 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): Meir Shahar _full_alt_articletitle_deel (kopregel rechts, hier invullen): Newly-Discovered Manuscripts _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 T’OUNG PAO Newly-Discovered Manuscripts T’oung Pao 105 (2019) 183-228 www.brill.com/tpao 183 Newly-Discovered Manuscripts of a Northern-Chinese Horse King Temple Association Meir Shahar Tel Aviv University In 2001, my friend Ye Derong 葉德榮 (A-de 阿德) purchased at the Bei- jing Panjiayuan 潘家園 antique market a set of manuscripts that hailed from Shanxi province. Labeled “Horse King Association” (Mawang she 馬王社) (figure 1), the five hand-written notebooks originated in a village shrine dedicated to the tutelary deity of horses, donkeys, and mules. The manuscripts record the workings of the Horse King temple – its activities, revenues, and expenditures – from 1852 to 1956, after which the writing ceases in mid-page. Written materials from rural north China are rare. To the best of my knowledge the records of temple associations such as those discovered by Ye Derong have never been studied. In this essay I rely upon them to reconstruct the workings of a late imperial Shanxi village. The temple association was “the bedrock of rural social structure in north China,”1 and the newly-discovered Horse King temple manuscripts chronicle its activities in extraordinary detail. Compiled by the villagers themselves, the Horse King notebooks provide us with unique access into the values and methods by which the rural community operated. In other words, the newly-discovered manuscripts help us understand how the villagers managed their public affairs and how late imperial Chinese villages gov- erned themselves. The Horse King manuscripts reveal the inseparability of religion, social organization, and cultural production in a Chinese village. The Horse King association was a rural social organization that was based in 1) As David Holm observes in his “The Death of Tiaoxi (the ‘Leaping Play’): Ritual Theatre in the Northwest of China,” Modern Asian Studies 37 (2003): 868-69. ©T’oung Koninklijke Pao 105 Brill (2019) NV, Leiden, 183-228 2019 DOI: 10.1163/15685322-10512P05 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 11:41:16PM via free access 184 Meir Shahar Figure 1: Cover of one of the newly-discovered notebooks. The bottom left reads “Records of the Horse King Association.” The top right reads: “Rotating shifts account book.” The date corresponds to 10 November 1872. a religious establishment. The association managed the local cult of the Horse King (Mawang 馬王), mounting plays in honor of the equine god. As such the Horse King association sponsored the theatrical performances that were the principal manifestation of village culture. Thus, the manuscripts shed light on the society, religion, and culture of rural north China. Combining textual research with fieldwork, this essay mines the manuscripts for those three interrelated aspects of the traditional village. The manuscripts Ye Derong purchased bore no place name (knowing where they lived, the villagers had no reason to mention it). We will fol- low below the detective work that led to the discovery of the southern Shanxi village where they originated. Arriving at the dilapidated remains T’oung Pao 105 (2019) 183-228 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 11:41:16PM via free access Newly-Discovered Manuscripts 185 of the Horse King temple we were able to contextualize, supplement, and enrich the information gleaned from the dry association notebooks. We interviewed villagers who reminisced about the cult of the equine god; we were introduced (in an adjacent market town) to a local scholar who authored a detailed modern history of the region;2 and, most im- portantly, we unearthed at the temple a nineteenth-century stele that, corroborating the association notebooks, supplemented them with a wealth of information on other organs of rural government (such as the village council, xiangyue 鄉約). In this respect, this essay is a methodo- logical exercise in the writing of microhistory that draws upon two texts: the Horse King manuscripts (which were purchased in Beijing) and the stele inscription (which was excavated in the village of their source). The newly-discovered texts bring to the fore a forgotten religious cult and its ecological background. Tutelary deity of horses, donkeys, and mules, the Horse King was among the most widely worshiped divinities of rural north China. Following the gradual disappearance of his equine protégés, his present-day cult is not nearly as popular as it used to be. The Horse King manuscripts anchor the god’s traditional veneration in the agrarian economy. They reveal that the villagers were expected to make contributions to the temple in accordance with the number of equines in their possession. We will see below that the Horse King association was entitled to survey the community and punish those who sought to evade taxation: villagers who hid draft animals, misreporting their numbers, were duly fined for their transgression. The manuscripts outline the association’s income and expenses in minute detail – down to every cup of tea and noodle plate. The fasti- diousness of the financial accounts opens a window into the material culture of the village. It enables us to see what the villagers ate and drank, which modest furnishings adorned their humble shrine, and how they celebrated festive events. Furthermore, the exhaustive accounts attest to the paramount value of transparency in the management of village affairs: it was imperative to show community members exactly how much money was levied from them, and precisely how it was spent. Financial accountability was joined by another communal norm: 2) See Gucheng zhen zhi 古城鎮志, ed. Liu Wujing 劉武經 et al. (Zhengzhou: Huanghe shuili chubanshe, 2011). T’oung Pao 105 (2019) 183-228 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 11:41:16PM via free access 186 Meir Shahar collective decision-making. Whether or not they were unanimously agreed upon, the policies of the Horse King association are invariably presented as such. “Everyone was happy with this decision,” is the re- frain that runs through the minutes of the association meetings. Evi- dently, it was tremendously important to reach – or at least give the impression of having reached – a village-wide consensus. In the early 1930s, Sydney Gamble and his Chinese associates con- ducted extensive surveys of the economy and social organization of villages in four northern Chinese provinces: Hebei, Henan, Shandong, and Shanxi. Gamble concluded that, within the very same region, “no two villages were alike,” differing in everything from size and finances to pat- terns of leadership and social organization. At the same time, he also noted similarities that applied to the overwhelming majority of villages across regional boundaries, most notably their autonomy. By and large, early twentieth-century (and presumably in earlier times as well) northern Chinese villages managed their own affairs independently of government intervention.3 The self-governing ability of village organizations might be partially attributed to the principles of transparency and collective decision-making that are apparent in the Horse King manuscripts. The example of the Shanxi village identified and discussed below might therefore be instructive across provincial boundaries, even though other aspects of its social, religious, and cultural life might have been quintessential or local. For example, the great frequency of theatrical performances in it was typical of Shanxi province, even though plays in honor of the gods were regularly performed across north China. The structure of the essay follows the process of my investigation. I begin with a description of the Horse King manuscripts that Ye Derong generously shared with me.4 I tell the story of our joint search for their origins and the discovery of the stele inscription that corroborated and supplemented them. Then follows a topical analysis of the village ad- ministrative organs, the centrality of theater in rural life, and the Horse King’s flourishing late imperial cult. I address the question of village lit- eracy and tell the sad story of the temple’s twentieth-century demise. 3) Sidney D. Gamble, North China Villages: Social, Political, and Economic Activities Before 1933 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), 1. 4) Himself busy with other research projects, Ye Derong allowed me to take photos of the manuscripts in order that I transcribe, study, and publish them. T’oung Pao 105 (2019) 183-228 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 11:41:16PM via free access Newly-Discovered Manuscripts 187 The conclusion attempts to wrap up the insights that might be gained from this case study of rural temple documents. The Village The members of the Horse King association knew where they lived. There was no reason for them to name their native place, which they referred to as “our village” (ben cun 本村). They write, for example, “there are so many horses, donkeys, and mules in our village.” From which of the thousands of northern Chinese villages did our manuscripts hail? I will briefly sketch the trials and errors that accompanied our search since they may be methodologically instructive. Ye Derong purchased the five notebooks of the Horse King association in one batch together with forty others, which all measured 8.85 by 10.23 inches and were wrapped with an identical blue cover. The latter were land-registration notebooks, and they bore a place name: Beizhang li 北張里 (Beizhang parish), Jiangzhou prefecture 絳州府 (currently known as Xinjiang 新絳 county), in southwestern Shanxi province (see map 1).

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