Ji'an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China

Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd i 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM China Studies

Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies University of Oxford

Editors Glen Dudbridge Frank Pieke

VOLUME 13

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd ii 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China

By Anne Gerritsen

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd iii 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM On the cover : Fragment of a Song dynasty inscription in the Jishui County Museum, Jiangxi province. Photograph by author. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 1570-1344 ISBN 978 90 04 15603 6

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gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd iv 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM To my parents

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List of Maps ...... ix A Note on Translations and the Use of Chinese Characters ... xi Acknowledgements ...... xiii List of Abbreviations ...... xv

Chapter One Introduction ...... 1

Chapter Two Sacred Landscape in Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou ...... 21

Chapter Three Literati and Community ...... 47

Chapter Four Imagining Local Belonging in Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou ...... 65

Chapter Five Other Ways of Being Local in Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou ...... 99

Chapter Six Local Temples in Early Ming: The Central View ...... 113

Chapter Seven Late Ming Ji’an: A New Sacred Landscape? ...... 153

Chapter Eight Temples and Literati Communities in Late Ming Ji’an ...... 177

Chapter Nine Other Ways of Being Local in Ming Ji’an ...... 201

Appendix ...... 231 Bibliography ...... 235 Index ...... 247

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd vii 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd viii 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. Provinces of Ming China ...... 2 Map 2. Southern Song prefectures of Jiangxi ...... 3 Map 3. Southern Song Jizhou and its counties ...... 10 Map 4. Southern Song sites ...... 24 Map 5. Counties in Ming Ji’an prefecture ...... 115 Map 6. Ming prefectures of Jiangxi ...... 154 Map 7. Xu Xiake in Ji’an ...... 158

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd ix 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd x 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND THE USE OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

The religious buildings that gure in the pages that follow are dif cult to classify. I have, on the whole, relied on the typology used in the local gazetteers for the area, although that typology does not capture the often richly varied nature of the actual religious practices that might have taken place at such sites. Generally, I have rendered miao 廟 as ‘shrine’, si 寺 as ‘temple’ or ‘monastery’, guan 觀 as ‘abbey’ or ‘Dao- ist monastery’, an 庵 as ‘chapel’ and yuan 院 as ‘cloister’, but these should not be taken as indicating categorical distinctions. Temples for the god of walls and moats (chenghuang 城隍) have been rendered either as ‘Temple for the god of walls and moats’ or ‘Chenghuang temple’. Chinese characters have been provided for all transliterated Chinese terms, place names, and personal names where they are rst mentioned. Please see the bibliography for the Chinese characters in titles and authors quoted in the footnotes and for the translations of titles in other languages.

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd xi 2/6/2007 6:56:53 PM gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd xii 2/6/2007 6:56:54 PM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over the years, I have accumulated many debts, and I am grateful to have this opportunity to acknowledge my gratitude. My teacher at Harvard University, Professor Peter Bol, has not only been supportive and insightful at many crucial junctures in my academic development, but also provided the initial inspiration for this project when he rst taught his graduate seminar on Jinhua in 1993–1994. The dissertation that nally emerged from that initial inspiration bene ted greatly from his guidance, and that of Professors Philip Kuhn and Robert Hymes. Barend ter Haar, Wilt Idema, and Harriet Zurndorfer deserve thanks for the inspiration their teaching provided when I was an undergraduate at the Sinologisch Instituut in Leiden, and for their ongoing support. I am grateful for the help I have received over the years from the library staff in the Harvard-Yenching Library, the library of the Sinolo- gisch Instituut in Leiden, the Cambridge University Library, the Bod- leian Library in Oxford, the Shanghai Library, the Jiangxi Provincial Library, and Jiangxi Normal University Library. On my rst trip to Jiangxi, my travels were generously supported by a Packard Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Kenneth Dean put me in touch with Professor Liang Hongsheng 梁洪生 of Jiangxi Normal University. Liang Hong- sheng, Gao Liren 高立人, and Wu Wei 吴薇 travelled with me in Ji’an in April 2000 and opened my eyes to the importance of ‘ eldwork’. In 2002 and 2005, my research in Ji’an was funded by grants from the British Academy, and in 2006 by the Universities’ China Committee in London. I am grateful above all to Liang Hongsheng for making my travels in Ji’an not only possible, but so worthwhile. He introduced me to the county museum directors in Ji’an, who in turn accompanied us to the many hidden treasures under their care. I am grateful especially to the Jishui museum director, Li Xilang 李希朗, and to the many ‘local’ men and women who welcomed me to their villages and almost made me feel I ‘belonged’. Peter Bol, Paul Ropp and W.P. Gerritsen read earlier versions of the manuscript in its entirety, and their comments have been extremely helpful. Fokke Gerritsen offered crucial help with producing the maps included here. The maps of Jiangxi and Ji’an were initially generated using the China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS,

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Version: 3.0), and I am grateful to Merrick Lex Berman for his assistance. My thanks also to Patricia Radder and Albert Hoffstädt at Brill, and to the anonymous reader. Irene Anderson and Peter King both read several chapters, and offered extremely useful suggestions for their reshaping and clari cation, for which I am very grateful. I thank Bernard Capp and Margot Finn, who ploughed through the entire manuscript, and saved me from many infelicities. Many others have read parts of this work, listened to and offered comments on talks, or have contributed in ways they may not even have been aware of, and I am grateful to them all. The responsibility for all remaining errors lies, of course, entirely with me. For academic encouragement, moral support, and friendship along the way, I am grateful to Red Chan, Chen Hsi-yuan, Chu Ping-tzu, Tony DeBlasi, Peter Ditmanson, Rob Foster, Kenneth Hammond, Maria Jaschok, Rana Mitter, Chloë Starr, and many others. Since 2001, the History Department at Warwick University has provided me with a stimulating and supportive environment. My thanks especially to my colleagues Maxine Berg, Bernard Capp, Rebecca Earle, Margot Finn, Sarah Hodges, Colin Jones, and Carolyn Steedman. My family deserves more thanks than anyone else: my parents for their unstinting generosity and support over the years, Christopher for his love and companionship, and Matthijs and Bella for reminding me of what really matters in life.

gerritsen_f1_prelims.indd xiv 2/6/2007 6:56:54 PM LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BLZ Liu Yi 劉繹 (1797–1878), comp. Bailuzhou shuyuan zhi 白鷺洲書院志 (Gazetteer of Bailuzhou Academy). (1871, reprint, Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu, 1995). DMB Luther Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds. Dic- tionary of Ming Biography 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). JAFZ Ji’an fuzhi (Prefectural gazetteer of Ji’an). QYZL Xiaofeng Daran 笑峰大然 (1589–1659), comp. Qingyuan zhilüe 青原志略 (Gazetteer of Qingyuan). (1669, reprint, Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin, 1998) XXJ Liu Chenweng 劉辰翁 (1232–1297). Xuxi ji 須溪集 (Literary collection of Liu Chenweng). Wenyuange siku quanshu, vol. 1186 (Taibei: Shangwu, 1983–86). XXKYJ Xu Hongzu 徐弘祖 (1586–1641). Xu Xiake youji 徐霞客遊記 (Travel record of Xu Xiake). (Late Ming, reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1980), 3 vols. XZWJ Ouyang Shoudao 歐陽守道 (1208–1273). Xunzhai wenji 巽齋文集 (Literary collection of Ouyang Shoudao). Wenyuange siku quanshu, vol. 1183 (Taibei: Shangwu, 1983–86).

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

When Wu Sidao 烏斯道, the newly appointed magistrate of Yongxin 永新 county, Ji’an 吉安 prefecture, in south-western Jiangxi (see Maps 1 and 2), was viewing the important sites in the county, he noted a stain on the oor of the county school. Upon closer inspection, the stain was the dark colour of dried blood and the shape of a woman. In answer to Wu’s queries, a local gentleman explained that this stain was formed by the blood of Lady Tan 譚. When the Mongol forces had pushed southwards and annexed this area in the late thirteenth century, most of the members of the Tan family had been murdered. Lady Tan had taken refuge in the county school, clutching her child. In her attempt to resist the soldiers’ attempt to rape her, she and the child in her arms had been killed. Her blood had stained the stone oor, and despite repeated attempts to wash the oor, the stain remained as a symbol of her valiant attempt to protect her chastity. In her honour, the community had built a shrine to commemorate Lady Tan. Wu Sidao was then led to the location of the shrine, and, noticing its decayed state, decided it was his duty as magistrate to restore the site. Thus far my description follows the events as Magistrate Wu Sidao, a man from Cixi 慈奚 in Zhejiang who served as magistrate in Yongxin between 1376 and 1380, noted them down shortly afterwards.1 In another version of these events, Wu Sidao’s restoration was not the end of the affair. This second, longer, ctionalized version was written by a man from Ji’an named Li Zhen 李禎 (1376–1452).2 In Li Zhen’s account, Wu Sidao’s son Wu Xi 烏熙 composed a piece of lute music not long after he had heard about Lady Tan. As he played the piece on his lute, he suddenly became aware of a girl who identi ed herself as Lady Tan’s servant. The girl explained that she, like Lady Tan

1 Wu Sidao, ‘Tan jiefu citang ji’, in Chong Tianzi, ed., Xiangyan congshu (1909), 1657–1658. The text is also included in Wu Sidao, Chuncaozhai ji, 1.12b–14a, and in Yongxin xianzhi (1874), 5.22a–23a. 2 For his biography, see Luther Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 805–807. Hereafter DMB.

gerritsen_f2_1-20.indd 1 2/5/2007 9:47:29 AM 2 chapter one Map 1. Provinces ofMap 1. Provinces Ming China

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Map 2. Southern Song prefectures of Jiangxi. Map based on China Historical GIS, Version 3.0 (April 2005)

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herself, had become an immortal, and had come to Wu Xi to express her dissatisfaction with the way in which the statues of her mistress and herself were displayed in Yongxin. In the conversation between the magistrate’s son and Lady Tan’s servant, it transpired that Lady Tan had composed a sequence of twenty poems expressing her thoughts and feelings about the home where she had grown up. Wu Xi was deeply impressed, and promised to take on the rearrangement of the statues, placing the servant next to her mistress in a more prominent position, and making regular offerings to the two.3 These two versions of a local tale contain all the elements that feature in this book: stories set in Southern Song (1127–1270) and Yuan dynasty (1264–1368) Jiangxi province, Jizhou 吉州, to be more precise, or Ji’an, as it was called during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); local landscapes dotted with shrines and temples; and members of the scholarly elite, or ‘literati’, who wrote about the sites in the local landscape, seeking to assign meaning to those sites. The changes in literati writings about sites in the Jizhou/Ji’an landscape during the Song-Yuan-Ming transition form the subject of this book.

Literati identities

The men who gure in this account—Magistrate Wu Sidao, his son Wu Xi, the author Li Zhen, and even the local gentleman who initially introduced Wu to the shrine—were all educated men. I refer to the members of the scholarly elite throughout this book as ‘literati’ or ‘gentlemen’, although their social and political status uctuated over time. To understand who these men were, we need to explore their identities. How did they see themselves? How did they represent themselves? Did Li Zhen, who hailed from Luling 廬陵 county in Ji’an prefecture, but served largely in other places, see himself as a Luling or a Ji’an man? Or did he see himself as an itinerant servant of the imperial bureaucracy? And what about Wu Sidao, who served as magistrate in Yongxin for three years? Did he identify mostly with his hometown in Zhejiang, or did he have some sense of belonging in the Yongxin community? When

3 The story is included in a collection of short stories entitled ‘More Stories Written while Trimming the Wick’ ( Jiandeng yuhua). See Li Zhen, Jiandeng xinhua (wai er zhong) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 147–162. The collection was completed in 1419 or 1420.

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Wu Sidao visited the sites of Yongxin for the rst time, he was clearly an outsider, and when the local gentleman told him the story of Lady Tan’s bloodstain and took him to see her shrine, Wu was merely an observer. He then vowed to restore this temple, and had a text carved in stone for the shrine. Why? What was Wu Sidao hoping to achieve? How did he see himself in relation to this worship? Did he wish to be part of a ‘community of believers’, or did he wish to transform the practice from the outside? Such questions force us to re ect upon the role of scholar-of cials in the localities where they were posted and on the sense of belonging the literati had in the communities where they lived. Questions of belonging and exclusion are central to the identity of the literati, and their identity is a major concern in this book. This inscription by Wu Sidao about the bloodstain of Lady Tan, as well as the many other temple inscriptions—texts composed to commemorate the history of a religious site or a speci c event in its history, carved in stone and placed inside or in front of the temple—that form the main body of sources for this study, enable us to explore such issues of locality, identity, community, and belonging.

Temples and shrines

The shrine built to commemorate Lady Tan, the statues of the two women in the story, and their status as immortals, raise a related set of questions about the signi cance of such sites within local society. A shrine for a chaste woman would not normally be considered a ‘sacred’ site, and Wu Sidao’s temple inscription rmly places the shrine among the secular sites of moral instruction in the area. Li Zhen’s account, however, adds a different dimension. In his version of the events surrounding the shrine, the women have become immortals, and are the subject of several exchanges between deities. Does Li Zhen allow us here to see a glimpse of his personal belief in a complex and hierarchically structured pantheon of deities? Or is he telling a tale in a narrative tradition that draws on the genre of religious tales, which may or may not represent popular belief ? Many of the materials discussed in this book allow little insight into the literati world of religious belief. Nevertheless, this book takes ‘belief ’ seriously, and explores issues of belief in sources that have on the whole been interpreted in an overly functionalist fashion as expressions of cultural capital and vehicles of personal advancement. It examines temples, shrines, monasteries and

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sacred sites as complex spaces of interaction, where human beings explore their own identities and their place in the visible and invisible worlds that surround them.

Periodization

The story of Lady Tan also raises the issue of periodization. The account introduces a woman of the late Southern Song dynasty who lived through the Mongol-Yuan conquest. It is set during the early part of the Ming dynasty and was further commented upon in the late Ming. As such, these materials encompass the entire chronological span of this book, beginning with the Southern Song around 1100, and ending with the late Ming, in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The existence of such materials, which straddle several dynasties and bring to the fore actors who look back to previous eras and worry about the times ahead of them, itself provides justi cation for covering a time span of roughly ve centuries. Important continuities run through these centuries, and only become manifest when we look at the period as a whole and at the ways in which patterns of local identity and belonging uctuated throughout this period. The ve centuries from Southern Song to late Ming are signi cant for several reasons. As Richard von Glahn and Paul Jakov Smith argue in The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History, the transitional period from Southern Song to Ming is framed by periods of intense change.4 It is preceded by what Mark Elvin has termed the ‘medieval economic revolution’, with its well-known transformations in farming, modes of transportation, economic and urban structures, and science and tech- nology.5 Although there were local variations, the fast and multifaceted

4 Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003). Paul Smith argues that we should see the Song-Yuan-Ming transition as a discrete historical unit. See Paul Smith, ‘Introduction: Problematizing the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition’, in Smith and von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition, 1–34. 5 See Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), 113–199. His work built on the seminal work by Japanese scholars. Many others have written about the Tang-Song transformations, among them Robert Hartwell, ‘Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750–1550’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (1982): 102–59; and Nait Konan, whose work has been made available in translation by Joshua Fogel. See Joshua Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan, 1866–1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1984).

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growth of the Tang (618–907) and Song dynasties gradually came to an end with the establishment of the southern capital in Hangzhou after 1127, or, some would argue, with the brutal Mongol invasion that led to the establishment of the Yuan dynasty in 1271.6 The Song- Yuan-Ming transition was succeeded by a ‘second economic revolution’, which took place during the late Ming and Qing dynasties.7 This second period of transformation is often seen as the precursor of China’s own modernity. From the vantage point of the twentieth century, the social, economic and cultural changes of the late Ming seemed to offer fertile ground for the beginnings of modern development. What happened in the period from Southern Song to late Ming, in the centuries that lie between these two epochs of rapid transformations, has until now received far less attention. Scholars of pre-twentieth-century Chinese history tend to fall into two groups: those who see the transformations of the late Ming and early Qing period as the narrative starting-point of modern China; and those who strive to demonstrate that the social and economic transformations of the late Ming-early Qing were mere embellishments and expansions of changes that had their origins in the Tang-Song period. The period between these two transformations was, until the appearance of The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition, only championed by a relatively small group of scholars of the Mongol-Yuan dynasty. Because of the paucity of documentation, it remains unclear to what extent the growth and development of the Tang-Song actually came to a halt. In some areas the brutal Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century in the north, and the civil wars and millenarian uprisings that preceded the establishment of the Ming dynasty of the fourteenth century in the south, clearly played important roles. But growth did not slow down everywhere. The studies in The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition amply demonstrate why the period deserves attention, but they also underline the need for studies that highlight local variation. This book seeks not only to ll that gap

6 Those who see the fall of the Northern Song as the end-point of the Tang-Song transformations include, for example, Hartwell, ‘Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China’; Robert P. Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu- Chou, Chiang-Hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and James Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1988). 7 William Rowe, ‘Approaches to Modern Chinese Social History’, in Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 236–96.

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by focusing on a single area, but also to demonstrate, on the basis of the evidence of that single area, that the Song-Yuan-Ming period is not characterized by continuity alone. In the area of relations between the state and the local elites, Smith suggests that on the whole, the state was ‘passive’ and the elites largely ‘autonomous’, although he concedes that there is no real consensus on the issue even among the contribu- tors to the volume.8 This study, in contrast, suggests that Song and Yuan Jizhou literati related to their local community and to the central state in different ways from both early Ming and late Ming Ji’an men. Emphasizing the general continuities of the Song-Yuan-Ming period as a whole should not prevent us from taking note of the important changes that took place at the local level. Another important reason for studying the transitional period from Southern Song to late Ming is the current lack of understanding of the ways in which the many transformations of the Tang-Song transition were transmitted to the next period of rapid change that took place in the late Ming. One of these Tang-Song transformations occurred in the eld of religion.9 Valerie Hansen was the rst to point to what she called the growth of ‘secular’ religion, a term she used to signify religion unmediated by the clergy. Von Glahn prefers to use the term ‘vernacularization’ for this process of increasing access to the spiritual realm for ordinary lay people. Robert Hymes, who distinguishes several models in Chinese religion, refers to it as the ‘personal model’, in which ordinary people have unmediated access to the gods.10 Edward Davis’ work also touches upon the transformation of religious practices during the Song, although he discusses the ways in which Buddhist and Daoist practices themselves changed during this period, rather than focusing on changes in communities of believers.11 The work of Hansen, von Glahn and Davis, among others, has done a great deal to elucidate the

8 Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Smith and von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transi- tion, 19–20. 9 The transformation of religion during this period is the subject of a collection of articles edited by Patricia Ebrey and Peter Gregory, entitled Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993). 10 Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Richard von Glahn, The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 12; Robert P. Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 4–5. 11 Edward L. Davis, Society and the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).

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Song transformation of religious practice, but much less has thus far been written about the next stage of the story. How did these changes fare during the Yuan and Ming dynasties? What had happened when the next period of rapid growth and development set in towards the end of the Ming? Although this book is not about religious change per se, but rather about the role of religious practice in shaping local identity and community, these questions constitute the background of my narrative. It will show how the involvement of one group of lay worshippers and believers in religious practices, and their manipulation of those practices, continued to change over the following centuries.

The local

The events in Li Zhen’s story all took place in Yongxin, one of the nine counties of Ji’an prefecture. Ji prefecture ( Jizhou), as it was called during the Song and Yuan dynasties, or Ji’an prefecture as it was known from the Ming onward, forms the focus of this study of locality and belonging (see Map 3). Today’s Ji’an region ( Ji’an diqu 吉安地區) is in western Jiangxi province, sharing borders with Hubei and Hunan provinces in the west. One main arterial river, the Gan 贛, ows northward through the middle of Ji’an, connecting its most fertile counties. It was along the Gan that northerners rst trekked south during the Five Dynasties period (907–960).12 Although Ji was located at a substantial distance from the imperial capital(s), it was nonetheless a centre of cultural and intellectual gravity until the sixteenth century. Ji’an prefecture produced over one thousand successful metropolitan degree holders ( jinshi 進士) during the Ming dynasty alone, more than any other Ming prefecture.13 The in uence of Ji’an men at the imperial court waxed and waned, and their attitudes towards their native Ji’an changed accordingly. Ji’an’s intrinsic interest alone, however, only partially justi es the study of one locality if the aim is to further our broader understanding of Chinese social history. What can an enhanced understanding of

12 See the study by Aoyama Sadao on the rise of elites in Jiangxi from the Five Dynasties period onwards. Aoyama Sadao, ‘Godai-S ni okeru K sei no shink kanry ’, in Wada Hakase Kanreki Kinen T y sho Rons (Tokyo: K dansha, 1951), 19–38. 13 The prefectural gazetteer for Ji’an of 1875 lists a total of 1,001 jinshi graduates during the Ming. See Ji’an fuzhi, Zhongguo fangzhi congshu (1875, reprint, Taibei: Chengwen, 1989). Hereafter JAFZ (1875). Ho Ping-ti lists a total of 1,020. Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 247–8.

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one prefecture contribute to our understanding of the whole? I do not wish to argue that the story of Ji’an that will emerge in the following pages can be read as the story of all of China. Nevertheless, I suggest that the study of one small part of China through time can do more than merely add another small piece to the puzzle that the history of a vast country like China presents to us.14 I suggest that it can reveal something of value about the ‘national’ context.15 First, and most obviously, I argue this because in practice it is impossible to study a single locality in isolation, especially when that locality is an administrative unit. The seminal work by the anthropologist William Skinner has pointed out the economic irrelevance of administrative units.16 His work shows that the integrated economic units into which he divides China, the so-called ‘macro-regions’, take little account of the boundaries of administrative units. For the members of the elite who

14 This is not to deny, of course, that local studies in Chinese history that aim to add to this puzzle are hugely valuable. This issue is raised by Michael Marmé in his review of Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of Hui-chou Prefecture, 800–1800 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989). Marmé argues for the importance of local studies, suggesting that ‘the empire scarcely existed above and apart from the numerous communities of which it was composed’. See Marmé, ‘Review of Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53.1 (1993): 248. Exemplary studies of local history that add signi cantly to our understanding of Chinese history by providing an insight into one smaller part of the whole include, for example, Hugh R. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the Third to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Hilary Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-ch’eng county, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); William Rowe, Hankow: Con ict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1987); Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottos: Expansion, Settlement and Civilization of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1987); Shiba Yoshinobu, ‘Ningpo and its Hinterland’, in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 391–439. According to Hugh Clark, the impulse for local history came from Japanese sinology. Clark, Com- munity, Trade, and Networks, 4–6. 15 I use the term ‘national’ merely to refer to the larger territorial unit that fell under the control of the Chinese emperor. I do not wish to suggest, of course, that China at the time had the characteristics of the modern nation state. 16 G. William Skinner, ‘The Structure of Chinese History’, Journal of Asian Stud- ies 44.2 (1985): 271–292. As Martin Heijdra points out, to use Skinner’s system of ‘macro-regions’ for historical analysis of periods before the late Ming is ‘anachronistic in many ways’. See Martin Heijdra, ‘The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China During the Ming’, in Denis Twitchett and Frederick Mote, eds., The Cambridge History of China, volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 418.

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appear in this study, however, the administrative units within which their households were registered had some signi cance, although, as this study aims to show, not a consistent meaning. That is not to say that those administrative units existed in isolation; connections between the locality and the wider territorial circles surrounding it also existed outside of the economic level. The individuals whose literary writings are analyzed here rarely spent the whole of their lives in only one place. Some held positions in the capital, others served in provincial posts throughout the realm, and yet others interacted indirectly with the national by refusing to take up posts in the central government. The interdependence of local and regional or national identities also existed at the other end of the scale; peasants who worked the land or harvested wood from the hills, for example, engaged in small-scale trade that, certainly from the Song dynasty onwards, went well beyond the borders of their individual and immediate communities.17 Temple cults or tales about deities of course also spread across boundaries, and cannot be understood fully without reference to the surrounding communities and regions. This study of the local, thus, tries to understand the ways in which place is given meaning by its inhabitants without losing sight of the wider context within which that place is constructed. Second, and perhaps more signi cantly, I argue that men writing about the local throughout the period under discussion here, were almost always at the same time exploring issues that went well beyond their immediate locality. The point is not new. Peter Bol, for example, suggests that periods of strong nation-building, such as the era of the New Policies during the Northern Song and the social experiments of the rst emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang 朱元章 (r. 1368–1398), are often followed by a ‘localist turn’, when literati manifest themselves mostly as local gentlemen. He argues, furthermore, that during such a ‘localist turn’, local scholars continue to engage with issues at the national level. Being an active local scholar could be constructed as a way of acting on the national scene.18 Taking up these issues, I argue

17 The point is made, for example, by Giovanni Levi in his discussion, entitled ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 93–113. 18 Peter K. Bol, ‘The ‘Localist Turn’ and ‘Local Identity’ in Later Imperial China’, Late Imperial China 24.2 (2003): 1–50. See also Beverly Bossler, Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279) (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1998); and Peter K. Bol, ‘Neo-Confucianism and Local Society’, in Smith and von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition, 241–83.

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that at times local literati were indeed concerned with what happened at the national level, and wrote about local temples with a view to addressing issues well beyond the Ji’an borders. I argue, however, that this was by no means the case at all times, and we should be extremely cautious in reading the local as a microcosm of the national, or in assuming that only the national mattered to the men who feature in the story of Ji’an prefecture. This book is concerned with the local as a constructed space that was constantly de ned and rede ned within its local, regional, and national context. It is the uctuations and tensions within that process of giving the locality meaning that are of critical importance in this study. There is a third, closely related sense in which I would suggest a study of a single locality can further our understanding of the complexity and diversity of the wider context. The term ‘locality’ raises important questions about the meanings of territory, community, identity, and belonging. What exactly did the inhabitants of Ji’an understand as their locality? Was it the immediate village where they were raised, or was locality understood to be based on kinship, and shaped by the lineage in which they were born? Was ‘their’ locality as big as a county or a prefecture? Did literati identify themselves as inhabitants of a region, or of China as a whole? From the outset, of course, literati answers to such questions were never constant, but de ned and rede ned depending on the stage of their lives and the particular circumstances within which their answers were formulated. Rather than seeking a homogeneous answer, this book seeks to explore the different, con icting and overlapping answers given to such questions.

Landscape

Two of the chapters that follow give a description of the Ji’an landscape: rst in Southern Song Jizhou, second in late Ming Ji’an. These two chapters aim to do more than provide a view of the visual aspects of the scenery; they aim to represent the landscape as ‘process’, as a constructed cultural space in the experience and imagination of its literati inhabitants. Such an approach is inspired by recent work by anthropologists such as the social anthropologist Eric Hirsch, who has argued for the importance of seeing landscape as a process—by which he means the constant interaction and negotiation between the place of everyday social life and the imagined or idealized space that

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represents ‘us the way we might be’.19 Hirsch’s approach is helpful in the historical context. If we brie y return to the story sketched above, we might imagine the landscape of Wu Sidao’s Yongxin as a negotiated space that contains elements both of the actual place, where he nds the dilapidated shrine for Lady Tan, as well as of the idealized space, where he establishes a restored shrine for Lady Tan with a new inscription. The idea of landscape allows us, then, to explore not only what Wu Sidao perceived to be his environment, but also what he imagined the ideal environment to be like. It also allows us to see the tension between those two perceptions, and the ways in which Wu Sidao operated as agent within that landscape. The idea of landscape also has crucial implications for concepts like locality and belonging. Nadia Lovell, a social anthropologist and editor of a volume entitled Locality and Belonging, explores the ways in which the concepts of locality and belonging interact and relate to each other.20 For her, landscape and locality are closely linked; many of the essays in the volume look at the ways in which the landscape shapes ‘local understandings of belonging to place’.21 Belonging to place is also closely linked to memory; Lovell de nes belonging as ‘a way of remembering and constructing a collective memory of place’.22 The landscape accumulates meaning over time as it becomes inscribed with personal and collective memories. Such understandings of belonging and communal identity are also familiar from Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’.23 Arjun Appadurai, the University of Chicago-based anthropologist, has investigated the meaning of locality in the context of an increasingly globalized and hence ‘delocalized’ world.24 For Appadurai, the most interesting aspect of locality occurs at its margins, where belonging is under threat or at risk, or rede ned through rituals of passage. He draws on the ritual aspect of the local, where the local is de ned and rede ned through

19 Eric Hirsch, ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Between Place and Space (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 22. 20 Nadia Lovell, ed., Locality and Belonging (London: Routledge, 1998). 21 Nadia Lovell, ‘Introduction’, in Lovell, ed., Locality and Belonging, 10. 22 David Parkin, ‘Foreword’, in Lovell, ed., Locality and Belonging, ix. 23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. edn. 1991). 24 Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Production of Locality’, in Richard Fardon, ed., Counter- works: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995), 204.

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performance, to demonstrate the fragility of the concept of locality. While Appadurai primarily discusses the ‘production of locality’ in a contemporary urban context, his approach is helpful in the historical context too.25 Rather than seeing locality as a static concept, or as an external factor that impinges on the experience of the local ‘subjects’, I understand ‘locality’ as a dynamic concept, which only takes meaning in the construction of its inhabitants. This book explores notions of locality and belonging, asking how the inhabitants of Ji’an understood their place in the local landscape and their belonging to it, and how notions of locality and belonging were modi ed over time. The main testing ground for notions of locality and belonging in this study is the temple. Temples, in their multitudinous forms, have always been, and still are, a constant presence in the Chinese landscape. We can safely assume that all the Ji’an inhabitants who are discussed in this book were aware of that presence. Whether it was a twelfth-century poet, a fourteenth-century failed student or a sixteenth-century magistrate, each of them would have walked past a dilapidated or newly renovated temple in his home town, spotted a remote monastery on a mountain, or noticed large gatherings around a local shrine. Rather than asking about the meaning of these sites purely as sacred spaces or as elements of religious culture, this study asks about the ways in which temples played a part in notions of locality and belonging. I see temples as lieux de mémoire, in Pierre Nora’s term: signi cant elements in the continuous symbolic construction of a locality.26 Temples, in this approach, gure in the stories about the area; the memories, myths, and histories of temples are, I argue, constitutive elements of the locality. To what extent did, say, a poet, or a student, or a retired of cial see temples, or a speci c temple, as a central, constitutive element of his own local community? In trying to understand the various ways in which the literati protagonists of this story represented themselves as ‘local’, I ask speci cally about the ways in which temples featured in that representation.

25 Appadurai, ‘The Production of Locality’. 26 For a concise statement of his work, see Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ Representations 26 (1989): 7–24.

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Sources

The bulk of the sources used to answer these questions originate in local gazetteers. Ji’an gazetteers do not form a particularly impressive collection: only the odd Ming gazetteer survives, and most of the extant Qing gazetteers are compiled relatively late in the dynasty.27 Nevertheless, without their maps, listings of temples, their biographies and tables of of cials, and their anthologies of inscriptions and other locally produced materials, this book could not have been written.28 Most important among the gazetteer materials are the so-called ‘temple inscriptions’ ( ji ).29 Temple inscriptions, also referred to as temple records, were usually commissioned from a local literatus. His brief would be to commemorate the history of a local temple or monastery, to preserve historical details about its building and restoration dates, and to impress visitors to such religious sites with the names of prominent donors and supporters.30 The text was usually carved on a large stone, and erected near the entrance of the temple. Not infrequently, such a temple inscription was requested before the restorations were completed, so that the text and the attached prestige of its author could be used as part of the fund-raising efforts. Such texts provide a certain amount of valuable factual information about temples, sacred sites, and the deities worshipped there. More important for our purposes here, however, they can begin to reveal the complex process of the construction of meanings assigned to such temples in a speci cally local context. Alongside the temple inscriptions and other documents included in

27 The Wanli edition of the prefectural gazetteer is extant: [Wanli ] Ji’an fuzhi, included in Riben cang Zhongguo hanjian difangzhi congkan. Yongfeng county has an extant gazetteer from 1544, included in the Jianyige series. 28 Peter Bol, in his study of the rise of local history as a genre and a eld of scholarly interest, argues that local gazetteers began to be written in large numbers in Song China. His work demonstrates the immense value of later gazetteers for the study of Song and Yuan local history. Peter Bol, ‘The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61.1 (2001): 37–76. 29 See also Hansen, Changing Gods and Valerie Hansen, ‘Inscriptions: Historical Sources for the Song’, Bulletin of Sung Yuan Studies 19 (1987): 17–25. On the interpretation of temple inscriptions and their context, see Paul Katz, ‘Temple Inscriptions and the Study of Taoist Cults: A Case Study of Inscriptions at the Palace of Eternal Joy’, Taoist Resources 7.1 (1997): 1–22. 30 The more complete editions of local gazetteers usually have a section on temples and shrines, in which large sections or entire texts of inscriptions are included. Unfor- tunately, gazetteers rarely reproduce lists of donors.

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gazetteers, I have used a wide range of materials, including the literary collections (wenji ) of the authors of Ji’an temple inscriptions, collections of anecdotes and literary tales, of cial documents, guidebooks to the area, travel diaries and religious tracts. It is only by placing the temple inscriptions in the context of these other materials that the ways in which temples were given meaning in the local context are fully manifest. The breadth of materials used, however, does not disguise the narrow social base within which they were created: they were composed and consumed, on the whole, by members of the elite. Scholars like Valerie Hansen, Richard von Glahn and Edward Davis have drawn on literary tales in combination with temple inscriptions to provide insights into the experiences of a much wider social group. Valerie Hansen used miracle tales from Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener (Yijianzhi ) and temple inscriptions for her study of religious change ‘from the perspective of the common people’.31 Richard von Glahn, in his most recent study of the god Wutong, shows how a wide range of sources, including vernacular ction and anecdotes, can be used to study ‘collective popular mentality’.32 Edward Davis is more critical: he condemns the ‘gentry model’—the idea that the gentry mediated in a variety of ways between state and society—as unhelpful and unrevealing of the nature of Chinese society.33 While taking on board the insights about the nature of society and its relationship with the invisible world that these works provide, I suggest that we still have more to learn about the role of the elites in local society. To dwell only on literati condemnations of a variety of local religious practices is to ignore the literati as complex individuals with their own social and spiritual needs. This book seeks to show how literati experienced the local religious practices in their neighbourhoods, and how their super cial condemnations obscure underlying desires to belong within their local communities, and to be of signi cance within them.

31 Hansen, Changing Gods, x. The term ‘common people’ in the context of Record of the Listener (Yijianzhi ) should probably be understood to include a wide variety of non- literati men and women in a range of professions and roles, but most likely excludes the farming community, who would have made up by far the largest percentage of the ‘common people’. I am grateful to Barend ter Haar for pointing this out to me. 32 von Glahn, The Sinister Way, 17. See also Richard von Glahn, ‘The Enchantment of Wealth: The God Wutong in the Social History of Jiangnan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51.2 (1991): 654–655. 33 Davis, Society and the Supernatural, 203.

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The chapters that follow begin with a description of the landscape of thirteenth-century Jizhou. This description paints a picture of a threatening environment upon which the people of Jizhou strove to impose some control. The landscape of Jizhou, I suggest, can be read as a record of these attempts to assert control over a frightening and largely unknown environment. By telling stories about communications between the humans that inhabited the landscape and the invisible forces that shaped it, the landscape is to some extent ‘tamed’. The landscape becomes inscribed with this record, and takes the shape not just of stories and tales, but also of shrines and temples scattered in the environment. The sacred landscape of Song and Yuan Jizhou that becomes visible in this chapter is not static, but re ects the dynamic interaction between the invisible forces and human beings. ‘Literati’ and ‘community’ are two concepts that lie at the heart of this discussion. Chapter Three dwells in greater depth on them, and on one of the more signi cant sites of community construction: local temples. Chapter Four looks speci cally at temples within the landscape, and the ways in which the literati used these temples to create not only a known place in the landscape, but also a place where they belonged, a community. During the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, this chapter argues, local temples served as important focal points for literati access to social organization. Southern Song and Yuan temple inscriptions reveal literati authors who are interested in what takes place within and around the temple, and who wish to be involved in the temple’s activities. In attempting to identify themselves with the temple, they inscribe both the temple and the locality with a literati identity. In literati writings of the Southern Song and Yuan, the temple appears as a signi cant element in the construction of locality and belonging. Despite the widespread destruction in Ji’an that accompanied the Yuan invasion in the late thirteenth century, and the outbreaks of further violence during the early part of the fourteenth century, the evidence from Ji’an suggests that the locals did not signi cantly change their understanding of their locality or their sense of belonging within it, and that the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties can be regarded as one continuous period.34

34 This con rms, of course, arguments made by others some time ago. Robert Hymes’ work, for example, already elucidated the strong continuities at the local level in Fuzhou prefecture in Jiangxi. See Robert P. Hymes, ‘Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy in Sung and Yuan Fu-chou’, in Patricia Buckley Ebrey and James L. Watson, eds., Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 95–136.

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Chapter Five brie y explores the alternatives. Rather than arguing that temples and shrines were the only source of localist activity, I suggest that temples formed one of several focal points for local literati that also include genealogical compilations, schools and academies. The early Ming did, however, bring widespread disruption and signi cant change, although perhaps not in the way in which that change has sometimes been represented in the narrative of Chinese premodern history. Rather than seeing the establishment of Ming rule as the beginning of a new era, with Zhu Yuanzhang providing the blueprint for social organization from the early Ming to the waning days of the empire, Chapter Six argues that we should see the end of the Yuan and the early Ming dynasties as a relatively short period of severe disruption. The sense of locality changed signi cantly during this period; early Ming literati from Ji’an trained their eyes upon the capital, and although locality did not lose its meaning, I propose in this chapter that its meaning was transformed during this era of centralist policies. The overview of the period as a whole is signi cant here, because the discussion of trends starting in the Southern Song and encompassing the Ming as a whole brings into focus a wider trend. By the mid to late Ming era, Ji’an literati had returned from the capital, and picked up their old localist themes once again. I discuss the sacred landscape of late Ming Ji’an in Chapter Seven. The contrast with the Song-Yuan landscape is striking: rather than seeing the landscape as a threatening backdrop for often futile attempts to co-opt gods and spirits into providing safety and protection from that environment, the late Ming inhabitants of Ji’an situate themselves in a landscape that is largely familiar and to a far greater extent under their control. The travel record of Xu Xiake 徐霞客 (1587–1641), who traversed the Ji’an landscape in 1636, illustrates the contrast.35 The Song and Yuan landscape was thinly inscribed with a record of human interaction with the invisible but overwhelmingly powerful forces that shaped it. The landscape of Xu Xiake’s Ji’an was shaped by the accumulated evidence of human habitation. Wherever he went, people had gone before him and left their records. A close reading of temple inscriptions from the late Ming in Chapter Eight reveals the differences from their Song and Yuan equivalents. Late Ming authors do not seem to imagine the temple at the heart of local

35 Xu Hongzu, Xu Xiake youji (Late Ming, reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1980), 3 vols. Hereafter XXKYJ.

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communities, and neither do they imagine activist roles for themselves in these local temple communities. Instead, they use the temple inscriptions to discuss issues of concern to a translocal audience. Chapter Nine takes up the question of localism in late Ming Ji’an. If Song and Yuan literati used writings about local temples to boost their sense of belonging locally, why did literati no longer do this in the late Ming? Why did they no longer feel compelled to in uence the activities around the local temple? And, perhaps more importantly, if they no longer felt the temple could offer them a viable way of being local, then what did? The discussion suggests that the explanation lies, as it does so often, in a combination of factors. Perhaps most obvious is what I would call ‘the philosophical turn’. The enthusiasm for Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 (1472–1529) thought, by no means limited to the so-called Jiangyou 江右 group of thinkers in Ji’an, brought local activism and local institutions back to literati attention. Temples became sub- sumed under the heading of local spaces, to be used for local activities and local meetings of the like-minded. Temples were included in a local activist realm. Less obvious perhaps, but no less signi cant, is the shift of literati attention to ancestral halls and spaces invested with meaning on the basis of kinship. I argue that the transformation to lineage society was not complete until the late Ming, and that only by the late Ming had literati begun to view the lineage and the ancestral hall as their focal point for local belonging. This concluding chapter restates the main themes of the book, arguing that the literati construction of locality changed from one based on local temples to one in which the building blocks became a variety of other community institutions, including local schools, community covenants, and the lineage.

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SACRED LANDSCAPE IN SOUTHERN SONG AND YUAN JIZHOU

The geographical focus of this book is on a part of Jiangxi province, one of the provinces of south-central China. In the north the Yangzi River forms its boundary; towards the south, east, and west, the province is hemmed in by mountain ranges. From these surrounding mountains several rivers spring forth that ow towards the Yangzi River in the north and drain in Lake Poyang 鄱陽, now the largest freshwater lake in China. Lake Poyang functions as an important over ow basin for the Yangzi River, and changes considerably in size during the course of the year depending on the levels of the river. The Gan, one of the largest tributary rivers of the Yangzi River and the province’s central river system, served as its most important transport system. It originates in the south of the province and ows northwards for over 751 kilometres (see Map 2). Jiangxi’s lower mountains and hills as well as its river basins provide fertile arable land (over 65% of the province), much of which is given to paddy elds. The area’s sub-tropical climate and abundant surface water, combined with almost a full year’s growing season make the area ideal for rice cultivation, and most places annually produce two crops of rice. Other crops include tea, sugarcane, sweet potato, citrus fruit and brous plants (ramie and cotton). The mountains and hills were originally covered with evergreen and broad-leaf vegetation, when timber and pine resin were important products of the region, but more recently erosion has caused serious problems and the timber production has sharply declined. Because of the fertility of the land, the mild climate, and the convenient transportation routes, Jiangxi became an economic and cultural centre during the Song dynasty, producing powerful merchants, in u- ential statesmen and famous scholars. In Song dynasty Jiangxi, roughly the same amount of land was already cultivated as during the Ming and Qing dynasties.1 Jiangxi’s tea, silk, paper, mandarin oranges and sh were distributed along the rivers of the realm, as was Jiangxi’s pottery,

1 Xu Huailin, Jiangxi shigao (Nanchang: Jiangxi gaoxiao chubanshe, 1998), 263.

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which included the ne porcelain from the kilns of Jizhou at Yonghe 永和 near Luling.2 The population of Jiangxi increased signi cantly during the course of the Song, and Jiangxi produced 5,400 jinshi degree holders during the Northern and Southern Song dynasties.3 During the Yuan dynasty, Jiangxi was established as a provincial branch-secretariat, which supervised 13 circuits, subdivided into prefectures and counties. The area continued to prosper, with a newly developing cotton industry, silver mining, and a technically and artisti- cally advanced production of porcelain in Jingdezhen 景德鎮. (By this time, Jizhou’s kilns at Yonghe had begun to fall into disuse.) At the end of the Yuan dynasty, repeated rebellions led to heavy ghting and plundering soldiers in icted great damage throughout Jiangxi. The devastation was to some extent offset, one might argue, by the bene t of close ties between Jiangxi’s scholarly elite and the founder of the Ming dynasty. During the rst decades of the Ming dynasty, Jiangxi, and in particular the prefecture by then known as Ji’an, enjoyed a favoured status in the eyes of the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, and rebuilding took place throughout the province. During the course of the Ming, Jiangxi continued to produce a rice surplus, and much of the rice consumed in the rapidly developing Jiangnan region came from Jiangxi and neighbouring Hubei and Hunan.

The region of Jizhou

The region of Ji that forms the focus of this book is located in south- western Jiangxi and has the advantage of combining wooded mountains with a central fertile plain on both sides of the Gan. The counties connected by the Gan are referred to as the Ji-Tai 吉泰 Basin, historically producing a vast surplus of rice. Jizhou was founded as a separate administrative unit in 590 during the Sui dynasty (581–618). It was named after Jishui 吉水, a central town along the Gan, and included the territory of Luling, which had a history dating back to the Qin

2 Xu, Jiangxi shigao, 299–300. For a study of Yonghe and its kilns, see Gao Liren, Jizhou Yonghe yao (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2000). For a recent study of Jingdezhen and the pottery it sent around the world, see Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History 9.2 (1998): 141–187. 3 While in the rst decade of the twelfth century, Jiangxi’s population formed less than ten percent of China’s total population, in the early thirteenth century, Jiangxi accounted for 17.5% of the country’s total. See Xu, Jiangxi shigao, 294.

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dynasty.4 Because of the area’s economic growth and high agricultural output, the prefecture expanded during the Song dynasty, and com- prised eight counties: Luling, Jishui, Anfu 安福, Taihe 泰和, Longquan 龍泉, Yongxin, Yongfeng 永豐, and Wan’an 萬安 (see Map 3). In 1277, Ji became a circuit (lu); in 1295 the name changed to Ji’an circuit, and from 1362 the area was known as Ji’an prefecture ( fu).5 Over two-thirds of Jizhou is mountainous and the highest mountains have peaks of almost 2000 metres. The main mountain ranges enclose a fertile basin, the oodplain of the Gan, stretching from Taihe in the south to the border with Linjiang 臨江 in the north (see Map 4). The Wugong Mountains 武功山 in the north-west and the Jinggang Mountains 井岡山 in the east of Jizhou are among the most famous mountain ranges of China. The Gan runs the length of Ji’an prefecture, connecting Ganzhou prefecture further south with Lake Poyang in the north. It has been intensively used for travel and transport since the Tang dynasty (618–907), providing the main waterway of the prefecture, owing through Wan’an, Taihe, Luling and Jishui counties. The main road through Jizhou in the Song dynasty ran from Ganzhou in the south towards Linchuan in Fuzhou 撫州 and Long- xing (now Nanchang) in the north-east. It connected Wan’an in the far south with Yongfeng in the north-east, running past Taihe, Luling and Jishui. Anfu was on the road to Yuanzhou 袁州 in the north-west, Yongxin on the road to Jinghu (later known as Huguang) in the west. Longquan, on the other hand, was not connected at all by major roads.6 Song dynasty Jizhou was largely agricultural, with the fertile lands in the central basin most intensely cultivated. There was a considerable tea leaf production, and a small-scale silk industry. Song Jizhou was known not only for its material but also its intellectual output. Between the Tang and Qing dynasties, the prefecture produced well over 2,300 jinshi, amounting to 22% of the Jiangxi total, 15 of whom were ranked rst in their examination cohort, and it had a long-standing reputation for fostering Confucian scholarship. After the Song it was famous throughout the realm for having produced sons

4 The municipality called Ji’an today was called Luling until 1914. 5 During the Song dynasty, the distance from Jizhou’s central northern border to its southern border measured a distance of about 160 km, and about 200 km from west to east. Today, Ji’an region (diqu) covers 27,659 km2. Ji’an diqu wenwu yanjiusuo, Ji’an fengwu ( Jiangxi: Ji’an diqu wenwu yanjiusuo chubanshe, 1987), 3. 6 For maps of these roads, see Zhang Tianyou, Jiangxi gonglu shi (Beijing: Renmin jiaotong chubanshe, 1989), 13.

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Map 4. Southern Song sites. Map based on China Historical GIS, Version 3.0 (April 2005)

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like the learned Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), the high minister Hu Quan 胡銓 (1102–1180), and the heroic martyr of the anti-Mongol resistance Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 (1236–1283). Other famous men include statesman and writer Zhou Bida 周必大 (1126–1204), the poet Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (1127–1207), lyricist Liu Chenweng 劉辰翁 (1232–1297), the editor of the Yongle encyclopaedia (Yongle dadian 永樂大典) Xie Jin 解縉 (1369–1415), the minister Yang Shiqi 楊士奇 (1364–1444), and the scholars Zhou Chen 周忱 (1381–1453), Liu Dingzhi 劉定之 (1409–1469), and Luo Hongxian 羅洪先 (1504–1564). A Yuan dynasty observer believed Jizhou to be culturally the most signi cant prefecture in Jiangxi, and Luling the most outstanding county in Ji’an.7 I will explore the writings of these famous men, as well as writings by far less eminent men, in the following chapters.

Landmarks in the thirteenth-century scenery

Before we turn to the writings of these Jizhou scholars, it will be useful to have a better sense of the natural environment that surrounded them and the rest of the Jizhou population. Records of Great Sites (Yudi jisheng), an introduction to the best scenic spots of the Southern Song realm compiled by Wang Xiangzhi in 1227, devotes one chapter to each prefecture. In the chapter on Jizhou, we nd the following passage: Cloud Peak. Fifteen kilometres south-east of Longquan county seat. People often go there to pray for rain. When clouds appear at the mountain top, rain will come down. . . . Sage Ridge. Ten kilometres south of Yongfeng county seat. It is more than ve kilometres high. Tradition has it that during the Five Dynasties period, one night several tens of deities roamed around its top. When day came, and people had a look, they found an earthen wall encircling [the top of the mountain]. . . . Wu Mountain. Fifteen kilometres west of Taihe county seat. Once Lady Wu concocted immortality pills here. Here are also the stone dwellings of the two immortals Tao 陶 and Pi 皮. Stone Men. Twenty- ve kilometres north-west of Jishui county seat. The peaks of Southern Mountain all have three stone men. They all stand rm and tall, upright like humans. They can call up clouds and bring rain, and the locals therefore call them ‘Immortal Masters of Stone’ (shi

7 Jie Xisi, ‘Yi Luling xian zhi ji’, in Jie Xisi, Jie Xisi quan ji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1985).

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ren xian shi 石人仙師). This is where people who pray for rain in times of drought come. . . . Maple God. Fifty kilometres west of Anfu county seat. Its wood is shaped like a person, with a face and eyes. In dry years they cover [the tree] with mud, and then the rains often come. . . . Gold Mountain. In the north-west of Longquan, 500 metres from the county seat. Its Longxing Temple has a pagoda. The geomancers named the county ‘Longquan’ because the two crooked peaks of Gold and Silver Mountain look like the horns of a dragon. The two pagodas were named ‘Two Brushes’. . . .8 Gold River. The [Liu] Song [420–479] Yongchu shanchuan ji 永初山川記 says: ‘In the city of Luling there is a well. The water has two colours: partly green and partly yellow. The yellow is like ash. When you use it to make gruel, it also turns gold-coloured and is very fragrant.’9 Wang Xiangzhi’s thirteenth-century tourist guide endeavours to give a general introduction to the scenic sites of the realm. It is not his explicit intention to list sites of religious signi cance. The passage makes clear, nevertheless, that the sites considered worthy of entry in a guidebook to the region are often sites that have tales of miraculous events associated with them. While some mountains, ridges or caves are listed without any speci c details, for the vast majority of the noteworthy geographical features in Records of Great Sites, tales such as these are included. The mountain site, stone gures and the tree god, mentioned in the brief passage translated above, were all used for rain prayers. The passage also includes an earthen wall built by gods, the site of a woman’s transcendence to immortality and the dwelling of two other immortals, geographical formations in the shape of a dragon that are signi cant in landscape geomancy, and a multi-coloured well. I will show below that such characteristics—prayers for rain, dragons, gods, immortals—formed important elements of the sacred landscape that

8 According to the 1842 edition of the Ji’an prefectural gazetteer, the building of a pagoda on the top of Gold Mountain had begun in 1099, but was destroyed in the early decades of the twelfth century. New pagodas were built on Gold and Silver Mountain by Luling magistrate Fan Deqin in 1174. JAFZ (1842), 10.10b. 9 Wang Xiangzhi, Records of Great Sites (Yudi jisheng) (1227, reprint, Yangzhou: Jiangsu guangling guji keyinshe, 1991), 31.5b–6a. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. The Yongchu shanchuanji by Liu Chengzhi 劉澂之 (Southern Qi) is no longer extant. Fragments have been reproduced in Wang Mo, ed., Han Tang dili shuchao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 171–173. The quote by Wang Xiangzhi was not included, which suggests the text was lost some time after 1227. See also James Hargett, ‘Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers and Their Place in the History of Difangzhi Writing’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56.2 (1996): 408.

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surrounded Jizhou’s thirteenth-century inhabitants. Before attempting to create an overview of sacred landscape, we will look in some detail at each of these characteristics.

The forces that shape the natural landscape

The natural landscape, as we have seen in the translated passage from Wang Xiangzhi’s Records of Great Sites, is lled with such wonders as multi-coloured wells, immortals, gods and sites for rain prayers. It would seem that the natural landscape cannot be separated from the miraculous events that happen within it. I would even go further and argue that in the written records of thirteenth-century experiences through which we see these characteristics, the natural landscape is in fact a manifestation of the higher forces that shape the realm and life and death within it. Take Cloud Peak, for example. Apart from its location, we learn that ‘[p]eople often go there to pray for rain. When clouds appear at the mountain top, rain will come down.’ The mountain becomes, in that description, much more than merely an elevation in the landscape. The signi cance of the mountain is inseparable from the signi cance of the rain it provides. A successful harvest means the survival and prosperity of large groups of people; a failed harvest through drought is devastating for equally large numbers. Rain means the difference between success and failure, wealth and poverty, life and death. The mountain, as the site where those decisions originate, holds the power to make those decisions. The Stone Men of the same passage, perhaps perceived by some as mere pieces of rock, are signi cant because ‘they can call up clouds and bring rain’. As the geomancers who determined that the county’s name should be Longquan (‘Dragon source’) recognized, the landscape and the forces that shape the landscape are inextricably linked. The two mountains that rise up in the Longquan scenery in the shape of the horns of a dragon invest that entire landscape with the signi cance of the dragon. The features that stand out in the landscape—its caves, rivers, and peaks—are the physical manifestations of powers that operate on a higher level than human beings. Such powers ensure, for example, that Stone Well in Yongfeng never dries out, even in the greatest drought.10

10 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.6b.

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These sites in the landscape are notable for another reason: they are also the sites where some kind of interaction between humans and the forces of the higher realm have taken place in the past or might be possible in the future. We can read the description of the thirteenth- century landscape as a record of such interactions between humans and the forces of the invisible world. The wall of earth around the top of Sage Ridge in Yongfeng, for example, is there as a result of the presence of gods; Phoenix Mountain in Jishui is named after a miraculous creature once seen here: the multi-coloured phoenix once ew away from the cascading waterfall on this mountain.11 Spiral Shell Mountain (Luozi Shan 螺子山) was given its name by a sherman who was once caught in a storm here: Suddenly [the sherman] noticed a divine shell (shen luo 神螺) with many bright colours. The sherman put it inside his cloak. As he reached the south-side of North Hill and waded through the river, he lost the shell. Hence the name of the mountain.12 The passage tells us very little. It does not clarify whether the sherman was rescued from the storm by the shell, or whether there had been other powers at work. The passage leaves little doubt, however, that the shell with its many bright colours held special powers. Once it was lost in the river, it became part of the mountain. Once the mountain had gained its name, that mountain also gained the possibility of further communication with the forces in the invisible realm. Some places were invested with special value because they were the site of the ascension of an immortal. The landscape was marked throughout with references to immortals. Almost every county in Jizhou boasted the erstwhile presence of an immortal. Wu Mountain in western Taihe was named after Old Lady Wu, who had searched for longevity pills here, and Prince Mountain was named after Prince Yao who had climbed onto the back of a phoenix in eastern Taihe on his way to the realm of immortals. Jishui boasted an altar for the seven hermits who became immortals here during the Tang dynasty, Immortal Wu transcended to heaven in Yongfeng county and Cao Ao 曹翱 did likewise in Anfu.13 The caves, peaks and mountains where they had transcended their earthly existence remained associated with these beings, who had

11 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.7b. 12 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.11a. 13 Wang, Records of Great Sites, juan 31 throughout.

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left behind the trials and tribulations of this realm, even when these names were the only remaining traces of their stories. The famous Jin dynasty Daoist Master Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–363) was responsible for the name of a peak in Anfu (Immortal Ge Peak) and a cave in Long- quan (Immortal Ge Cave).14 Longquan residents maintained that Ge Hong had concocted immortality pills here, while the Anfu residents insisted this had happened in Anfu. Even though there was no further evidence for Ge Hong’s presence here, both locations were held to be numinous, and became sites for extensive Daoist religious practices, as will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.15 The extent to which Ge Hong’s one-time presence in Jizhou can be corroborated is probably irrelevant; his name and the stories associated with him may well have been enough to bestow numinosity on the site. The presence of three other immortals can be traced in more detail: the lords Fuqiu 浮丘, Wang 王 and Guo 郭, known as the Three Huagai Immortals (Huagai san zhenjun 華蓋三真君), became the subject of quite extensive worship in Southern Song Jizhou. Wang Xiangzhi’s geography of the realm lists two sites for Jizhou where the Three Immortals were worshipped; and Zhang Yuanshu 章元樞, Daoist author of a sacred geography listing all the sites associated with the Three Immortals, lists almost twenty sites in Jizhou.16 They are in Yongfeng, the county immediately bordering Chongren 崇仁 county in Fuzhou prefecture where Huagai worship originated, and in Jishui, Taihe and

14 Ge Hong (283–363) was a famous Daoist thinker, practitioner, and medical specialist. For a discussion of the exact dates of Ge Hong, see Nathan Sivin, ‘On the Pao P’u Tzu Nei P’ien and the Life of Ko Hung (283–343)’ Isis 60 (1969): 388–91. For an in-depth study of his life and writings, see Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: a Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 15 At Gexian Peak in Anfu there was an altar named after Ge Hong. See Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.9b. See also the inscription by Zhao Yike, ‘Ge xian tan ji’, Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.7a–8a. At Gexian Cave a Daoist complex was built during the Song. At both sites there continued to be sightings of extraordinary things: ames as if gold was being melted on top of Anfu’s Gexian Peak, and the sound of pounding herbs in Gexian Cave in Longquan. See Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.9b. 16 Zhang Yuanshu, an early thirteenth-century author, wrote a work entitled Huagai shan shishi, a title translated by Robert Hymes as Verities of Huagai Mountain, and included in the Ming compilation entitled Huagaishan Fuqiu Wang Guo san zhenjun shishi (Verities of the Three Perfected Lords) that forms the main source for Hymes, Way and Byway. Judith Boltz suggests Huagai shan shishi was compiled by Zhang Yuanshu in 1185. Judith Boltz, A Survey of Taoist Literature, Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, 1987), 80.

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Luling, along the river that connects Jizhou and Fuzhou.17 The cult of the Three Immortals, popular and widespread among Jizhou’s thirteenth-century elite and commoner population, will be discussed further below. For now, what matters is that any traces of immortals in the landscape marked those sites as special and numinous. The landscape as a whole was at the same time a manifestation of the greater powers that shaped both the landscape itself and the lives of the local population. Sites that stood out particularly were those where some kind of interaction or communication or negotiation with those greater forces had taken place or might take place in the future. Such interaction, I shall argue below, forms a signi cant part of what I will call here the ‘sacred landscape’ of thirteenth-century Jizhou. The landscape that surrounded the residents of Jizhou, or more precisely, the representation of that landscape as it was visualized by thirteenth- century literate observers, can be read as a record of the religious world of Jizhou residents. Below I will discuss several more descriptions of the thirteenth-century landscape of Jizhou. Rather than reading them as static representations, I propose to read them, as Hirsch suggests, as processes containing elements of everyday social life as well as idealizations of those spaces. Descriptions of the landscape contain constant references to encounters with the higher forces that had shaped it, for they were part of the daily social life of all thirteenth-century inhabitants, but the process of describing the landscape also allowed residents to imagine that they were to some extent in control of it. In describing the landscape, the forces that had shaped it were, at least to a degree, tamed.

Taming the landscape through description

At West Dragon Mountain, to take one such description, in the mountainous west of Longquan county, a high wind would sometimes blow away the stones near its peak and create gaps and holes in the ground. The story, told locally, was that a strange mendicant monk once travelled near West Dragon Mountain. When a hard-hearted woman rejected his request for some food, he wrapped himself in his coat, climbed the

17 They are listed in chapter three of Shen Tingrui, Huagaishan Fuqiu Wang Guo san zhenjun shishi, in Daozang (Zhengtong edition, reprint, Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1986–88), 18.55–60.

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mountain, and beat the peak with his stick, causing a freezing wind, known thereafter as the ‘West Dragon Wind’, to blow out of these holes. Much later some woodchoppers covered the holes with stones and earth, but the wind continued to come out in great waves in the pool at the foot of the mountain.18 West Dragon Mountain clearly was an inhospitable place, and a freezing wind blowing off the mountain could no doubt do serious damage to people, livestock, and crops. The monk, insulted by the lack of charity he had been shown, called on the greater forces that inhabited the landscape, in this case perhaps the dragon that gave its name to the mountain, or the deity of the mountain itself, to wreak revenge. Even if not all people would have had the monk’s powers of communication with that higher force, the story would remind them of its presence, and the ability of some people amongst them to marshal such forces. The story of West Dragon Mountain is a story of human inferiority and weakness in the face of those greater forces. Other tales suggest the possibility of asserting some human control over such forces. See, for example, the story told about Round Pool in Jishui. The high mountains surrounding the deep pool meant that one could only get beyond it by boat; it was not until much later that a road was carved out of the mountain side. The story told locally was that a man with special religious skills, a ‘religious specialist’ ( fangshi 方士) had once battled in these waters with a ood dragon ( jiaolong 蛟龍). When the religious specialist emerged victorious after three days, he erected an iron pil- lar on the top of the mountain as part of the pledge he had made to the gods. Ever since, the whirlpools in spring and early summer had ceased to bring harm.19 The natural surroundings posed a threat here: the deep pool formed a dangerous obstacle for passing traf c, and the rapids and oods caused by the increase in volume during the melting season regularly wreaked havoc. But the monument on the mountain top and its associated story of a human being emerging victorious over the dragon may well have served to instil a sense of at least the potential of human control over such powerful forces.

18 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.11b. 19 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.7a.

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Dragons

Dragons appear in both these stories, in the rst as part of the mountain’s name, in the second as the inhabitant of the pool. In both, the dragon is the underlying cause of the harm suffered by local people. The rst story does not state this as explicitly as the second, but when the disgruntled monk beats West Dragon Mountain with his stick and a freezing wind begins to blow out of the inner mountain, is it not likely that this wind originates with the dragon that gave the mountain its name? The names of features in the Jizhou scenery suggest that in former times dragons were thought to have ruled much of the landscape. There was Dragon Islet in southern Taihe and Coiled Dragon Mountain in northern Taihe, Returning Dragon Cave in the far south of Yongfeng, and Transforming Dragon Pond in Longquan, and many more.20 By the thirteenth century, however, that stage had been left far behind, or so the 1227 geographical study Records of Great Sites would like to have its readers believe. So Pearl Peak in Longquan was named thus because ‘it was said’ (xiang chuan 相傳) that two dragons used to play with pearls on top of the mountain.21 At Stone Spring in the far south of Yongfeng there was a wide stone chamber with a pool, immeasur- ably deep and six to ten metres wide, of which ‘the old people said that a dragon lived in it’.22 The references to the transmission of such tales, especially when the elderly are associated with that transmission, serve to establish a critical distance between current insights and past misapprehensions. The suggestion is created that at present, i.e. at the time of compiling the Records of Great Sites, a belief in the omnipresence of dragons was no longer shared by the author and audience of the text. A close look at contemporary tales that include dragons, however, suggests that the break between current thinking and earlier beliefs was nowhere near as complete. Such tales reveal, instead, a continuous battle for control over the forces of the natural landscape. In a tale collected in Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener (Yijianzhi ), for

20 The Records of Great Sites also lists ‘Dragon Reservoir’ in Anfu, ‘Stone Dragon Cliff’ in Longquan, ‘Dragon Awakes Abbey’ in Jizhou, ‘Dragon Glory Mountain’ and ‘Dragon Gate River’ in Yongfeng, ‘Dragon Head Mountain’ in Wan’an, and ‘Dragon Beard Mountain’ in Luling. See Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.12a. 21 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.6a. 22 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.6b.

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example, we catch a glimpse of that battle.23 Here is the story, entitled ‘The Jizhou Camphor Tree’ ( Jizhou zhangmu 吉州樟木), translated in full: In front of the military provisions storehouse in Jizhou stood a large camphor tree, more than three metres in diameter, and with a circumfer- ence of six to ten metres. It sheltered and shaded those underneath it, where daylight was invisible. Inside [the tree] was a deep cavity. The tree’s side-branches were big enough to be used for bridges and roof beams. According to the locals it was two to three hundred years old. In the sixth month of the second year of Qiandao [i.e. 1166], erce rain and thunderbolts struck and broke off one branch. Many thought the tree was the hiding place of a dragon, and some thought it was the nest of an evil snake. When the rain stopped, a re was roaring inside the cavity, a re that did not stop until evening. They poured water on it, but the ames only intensi ed and were about to spread to the storehouse. When Magistrate Ge Lixiang 葛立象 saw this, he immediately ordered [the people] to move all valuables [from the military storehouse] to a different place. He gathered several tens of soldiers and carpenters, to work together on chopping down [the tree]. They worked feverishly through the night, and nally the tree fell down. Someone said: ‘If a branch grows from the tree’s side, then, in accordance with a geomancer’s prophecy, that branch will bene t the great families of Yichun 宜春 county [in neighbouring Yuanzhou prefecture].24 Those families must each year cross the border and make an offering. When they did not come for the third consecutive year, someone from Yuanzhou said those families [from Yichun] had already fallen on hard times.’ If this is so, then this tree came to its end because it had a predetermined lifespan [that came to its end]. Some, however, have different explanations.25 The tree was clearly a signi cant landmark in Jizhou, and had been there for a long time. The belief that a dragon or evil snake used the tree as its lair obviously did not prevent the use of its wood for

23 I have used Hong Mai, Record of the Listener (Yijianzhi ), and its anonymously authored sequel, Sequel Record of the Listener [Based on] New Hearsay from the Lakes and Seas (Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi ). The translation of the title comes from Barend ter Haar, ‘Newly Recovered Anecdotes from Hong Mai’s (1123–1202) Yijianzhi’, Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies (1993): 23. This anonymous collection of anecdotes dates from after 1302, and has been published together with another shorter sequel to Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener, entitled Sequel Record of the Listener (Xu yijianzhi ) by Yuan Haowen (1190–1257) in a 1986 Zhonghua shuju edition. See Xu yijianzhi Huhai xinwen yijianxuzhi (Yuan dyn., reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986). 24 Yuanzhou is the prefecture located to the north-west of Jizhou. 25 Yijianzhi, sanyi 7.1358.

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construction purposes. When a storm signi cantly damaged the tree, however, fears over what powers might have been disturbed overcame more utilitarian attitudes towards it. Such fears were con rmed when the ames only intensi ed when doused in water and began to pose a threat to the storehouse. To control the ames and the forces that caused them, the authority of the magistrate and a labour force of several tens of men were needed. The huge force needed to fell the tree must have left the door open, at the very least, to the suspicion that harm- ing the tree, and robbing the dragon of its lair, could have dangerous consequences. The nal sentences of the story provide further support for this view. According to the prophecy of an otherwise unidenti ed individual, the tree’s side branch would bring bene t to the great families of a neighbouring county in Yuanzhou. The destruction of the side branch in the storm, linked to the abandonment of their offerings, coincides with the downfall of the families themselves. If the side branch represents Yichun in Yuanzhou, then surely the tree itself is in some ways symbolic of Jizhou. The felling of the tree might well be seen as the end of its predetermined lifespan, but, as the nal phrase states, some have different explanations, and no single view is universally accepted. Some may well have seen the felling of the tree and the destruction of the dragon’s lair as posing a serious potential threat to Jizhou. In the same way that the con ict between these two competing interpretations remains, the battle between the authority of the magistrate and his men and the powers of the dragon, which remains ominously invisible in the tale, is also unresolved.26 The story does not tell whether in later years Jizhou was plagued by further res or other disasters. The unresolved nature of these two con icts also suggests that belief in the power of dragons was not as neatly part of the past as Records of Great Sites would have us believe. Rather, it suggests that the landscape continued to be shaped by the presence of dragons and other ominous forces.

26 For a discussion of narratives of con ict between the realm of the spirits (shen) and of cials ( guan), see Judith Magee Boltz, ‘Not by the Seal of Of ce Alone: New Weapons in Battles with the Supernatural’, in Ebrey and Gregory, eds., Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China (1993), 241–305.

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‘Inscribing’ the landscape

An ordinary inhabitant of thirteenth-century Jizhou would have found himself or herself surrounded by an often dangerous and threatening landscape. The forces that shaped the physical landscape were inseparable from the forces that shaped the course of one’s life and death. The fearsome qualities of the landscape have an immediacy in these stories, and in Eric Hirsch’s approach to landscape, this threatening landscape was clearly in the actual foreground.27 Finding and safeguarding one’s place within that landscape was crucial for all involved. I propose to read the records of human activities within the landscape as attempts to bring together the inhospitable reality of the landscape in the foreground and the idealized vision of this same landscape in the background. In that idealized vision, some negotiation has taken place between human beings and the forces that shape the physical landscape. The written records that describe the thirteenth-century landscape suggest that at speci c sites these negotiations between human beings and the greater forces had yielded success. Texts like Records of Great Sites tell stories of successful negotiations where monks can call up winds and the forces that live in trees can be tamed by magistrates. The texts seek to create, I argue, a sense of safety in the environment. It remains, however, a thin layer of control, barely disguising the fearsomeness of the natural environment. Wherever negotiations with the greater forces that shape the landscape yielded success, the story of that success became part of the landscape; the tale that told its account ‘inscribed’ the landscape, and, I would argue, began to tame it. Consider, for example, this tale about a sandbank in the River Wang. The river originated in the Chenhui Mountains and then owed into the River Lu. Where the two rivers met was a reservoir known as Dragon Reservoir. A geographical source notes that if you transport timbers, they will sink in Dragon Reservoir.28 The story goes that [a certain] Sun Hao was chopping wood to build a house. The wood oated downstream, to the reservoir. There the wood sank, so they had to use a rope to try and pull it up, but a great storm arose. In later years, whenever there was a drought, they got people to pull on the wood, and wind and rain would

27 Hirsch, ‘Landscape’. 28 The text states ‘Yu di zhi’ 舆地志, which could be a reference to a now lost geographical compendium, or to a part of a local gazetteer.

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[always] follow. In the sixteenth year of Yuanjia [i.e. 439 bce] the wood suddenly oated up to the surface. It was about two metres thick, and half of it was still submerged in water. It became hard and then formed a sandbank.29 The sandbank in the river had thus become ‘inscribed’ by this tale: it originated as a piece of submerged wood, the signi cance of which lies in the fact that while it remained submerged, pulling at it would always yield rain. With the telling of the story, the landscape became marked. It was no longer merely a sandbank in the river, but became a place known for its record of human success over the forces of nature. As we saw in the dragon tales, it is that record and the retelling of the record, that created a sense of security. By telling the stories, human beings negotiated for themselves a secure space within the landscape. Looking at the landscape, we should be able to see this record of negotiations, even when such successful negotiation was of only short duration. A wise monk from Xili 西裡 in Anfu county had extraordinary geomancy skills. The monk had taken his vows at Shuinan Cloister 水南院 near his home. When he was still a novice, he once basked in the sun in front of the temple gates, when he suddenly became aware that the stone turtles at the foot of the stele often had silk and grass on their shells. The monk said: ‘If you do not perform a miracle [for me], then you can be sure I will have you put on a charcoal re to be smelted down.’ That night [the monk] dreamed that the turtle told him: ‘The big river that ows below the monastery is very deep. The Dragon King lives there, and I have some minor duties in the Water Kingdom (Shuifu 水府). I should be able to go to the desk of the Dragon King, and bor- row the Classic of Moving Dragons (Hanlong jing 撼龍經) and the Ruler for Moving Dragons (Hanlong chi 撼龍尺) to give to you. You can then quickly copy these, before I return them. Please spare me.’ The next day, indeed he obtained the Classic and the Ruler from under the stone turtle, and because of this [the monk] could move mountains and revolve water under the earth like a god. From the moment he made geomancy his speciality, the [area’s] numbers of examination candidates and of cials increased, and he was asked to bury the ancestors of scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants. Not once did he not respond to whatever they requested.30

29 Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.7b. 30 ‘Da seng zang di’, in Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi, qianji 2.84.

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The power over the landscape that this monk acquired as a result of his threat clearly also brought him great social powers. The story does not tell of the dragon’s wrath or the repercussions for the thieving turtle, but that threat hovers in the background of the story. There is nothing permanent or reliable about the powers of the monk. The monk succeeds here by threatening the turtle, and although the Dragon King suffers the humiliation of having his books copied, ultimately the powers of control over the landscape revert to him. In the short term, however, the story tells a tale of seeking and gaining control over the landscape. The image of the physical environment that emerges from these inscriptions is closely linked to the records in the landscape of coping with the threats that the environment poses.

The human record on the landscape

Tales associated with the natural features of the Jizhou landscape inscribed them and thereby made them less threatening. One could equally argue that the building of temples, shrines, and monasteries ‘inscribed’ the landscape. These buildings helped to make the place less dangerous, and offered reassurance to the local inhabitants. Like the tales associated with natural sites, temples and shrines, also, provided a record of successful interactions and negotiations between humans and the greater forces that shaped the realm. By the time of the Southern Song, the eight counties of Jizhou all had well-developed urban developments in the form of county seats. Within the towns there were temples and shrines, as there were too in the suburbs outside the city walls and further away in the remote countryside. From the Qing dynasty prefectural and county gazetteers, and from thirteenth-century geographical sources such as Records of Great Sites and Zhu Mu’s Topography for Visit- ing Scenic Sites (Fangyu shenglan), we can reconstruct a record of about 85 temples in the Jizhou region during the Southern Song. Of course the historical record extant today can only hint at the actual number of temples and shrines, which was almost certainly much higher. It is nevertheless informative. It tells us, for example, about some of the most prestigious establishments in the Jizhou landscape. There was Benjue 本覺 Temple, located next to the famous kilns at Yonghe, ten kilometres south of Luling and further upstream along the Gan. During the Song there were 24 kilns in operation here, the largest of which still shape the scenery today. Benjue

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Temple stood next to the kilns, its nine-storey pagoda still standing today, towering over the surrounding area. Jishui also boasted many temples; most widely known perhaps was Chongyuan 崇元 Monastery, which the famous immortal Lü Dongbin was said to have visited, leaving an inscription at Chongyuan’s Xuelang 雪浪 Pavilion.31 Chongyuan was built originally during the Jin dynasty, when the magistrate of Jingyang 旌陽 drove away the snakes here by smelting iron.32 Taihe was known for two magni cent temples in the Southern Song: Daming 大明 and Nanta 南塔.33 Yongfeng was famous for Bao’en 報恩 Temple, located to the west of the county capital. The most famous of the prestigious temple complexes in Jizhou, however, may well have been Jingju 淨居 Monastery, located on the eastern side of the Gan, just over seven kilometres to the south-east of the town of Luling in the Qingyuan 青原 Mountains. The oldest records indicate that a monastery named Anyin 安陰 was built here in these rolling hills in 709. Over the years it fell into disrepair and was rebuilt several times, but throughout the centuries and until today it has remained a signi cant site for Buddhist worship. When the famous scholar Zhou Bida visited Jingju Monastery in 1163, he wrote this in his ‘Notes on Travelling the Jizhou Mountains’ ( Jizhou zhushan youji 吉州諸山遊記): We travelled to Jingju Monastery in the Qingyuan Mountains, which is the place of worship of the Seventh Patriarch Xingsi 行思.34 One crosses the river at the market town of Yonghe and travels for about three kilometres, surrounded by a range of hills. Only when one draws near the monastery does one see the tiled dwellings and the slightly run- down temple. A pagoda stands at the top of the mountain, with steps to climb up to it. To the left of the pagoda there are three wells, named Zhuoyang 卓鍚, Hubao and Leizhen 雷震. Carved in the side of the wells are two poems written by Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 and dedicated to Yan Zhenqing 顏真卿 in 1083.35 After we had eaten we went south to

31 On Lü Dongbin, see Paul Katz, Images of the Immortal: The Cult of Lü Dongbin at the Palace of Eternal Joy (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 32 Listed in Zhu Mu, Fangyu shenglan (reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1986), 20.10a and Wang, Records of Great Sites, 31.13a. 33 Zhu, Fangyu shenglan, 20.10a. 34 Xingsi (?–740) was a famous Chan-Buddhist master, who hailed from Jizhou and taught at Jingju Monastery. 35 Yan Zhenqing (709–785) was a great calligrapher and scholar, who served for a time in Jizhou and visited the Seventh Patriarch in the Qingyuan Mountains. The great Jizhou poet Huang Tingjian (1045–1105) served in Taihe from 1080 to 1082 and wrote these poems.

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Fishing Platform, which faces the highest mountain and below it borders on a clear stream. It has such a tranquil atmosphere, one could withdraw here [and become a hermit]. The stream is shallow but continuous, with tributaries that spring up by the temple.36 The passage tells us a lot about the kind of place this was. When Zhou Bida visited, the temple itself had obviously fallen into disrepair, as Zhou describes it only as ‘run-down’ ( pozhai 迫窄) and makes no mention of being introduced to the monks or their abbot. Nor does he mention the various smaller Chan-Buddhist cloisters scattered in the Qingyuan Mountains that were all linked to the Jingju temple complex.37 What was of interest to Zhou was the link with those who were here before him: the Tang Buddhist Master Xingsi, the calligrapher Yan Zhenqing, and Northern Song poet Huang Tingjian. It was the traces of these men, all members of the highest cultural elite, which led him there. His enjoyment of this calm and scenic site was secondary. In later years other famous men left their mark at Jingju Monastery, such as the government of cial Hu Quan in the twelfth century, and the lyricist Liu Chenweng and loyalist Wen Tianxiang in the thirteenth.38 These prominent gures went on public visits to Jingju Monastery, and the records of their visits became known to many generations of scholars and poets. Famous sites like these formed prominent landmarks, though perhaps more so in the imagined landscape than in the physical landscape. They were known throughout the realm for their entries in national geographical collections such as Records of Great Sites and Topography for Visiting Scenic Sites, and for the poems and travelogues written about them by scholars with national and regional reputations. To all intents and purposes, these were the religious establishments of the high secular and religious elite. The signi cance of the involvement of literati in such prestigious religious establishments will be discussed in further detail in later chapters. In literati consciousness, the landscape of Jizhou was shaped not just by its natural attributes but also by the buildings

36 Zhou Bida, ‘Jizhou zhushan youji’, in Xiaofeng Daran, comp., Qingyuan zhilüe (1669, reprint, Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1998), 135–6. Hereafter QYZL. 37 The Qing dynasty prefectural gazetteer includes a quote from the now lost Lulingzhi, written by the same Zhou Bida: ‘Wuyin an, Baiyun an, Jiuban an. Although these places are sometimes called chapel (an), and sometimes hall ( yuan), they are all Chan-Buddhist. They are all located near the Jingju temple complex, and are all connected to it. They are located in the mountainous border between Luling and Jishui.’ JAFZ (1875), 59.b–60a. 38 Their writings are all included in QYZL.

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in the natural setting and the literary record associated with them. Even if the landscape in the foreground was less than perfect (the run-down temple), the literati eye saw a site inscribed by famous literati.

Temples and shrines in the landscape

For the local residents, however, such prominent sites were probably not the most signi cant landmarks. Although it is probable that parts of the Jingju complex were accessible to ordinary visitors, their religious needs would have been catered for by an entirely different kind of sacred site. Of the 85 Southern Song temples that have left a mark in the historical record, 23 temples are only known to us by name. These are the temples listed in geographical descriptions, for example, where no further details are provided about their history or recent circumstances, or the temples that appear in sources like Zhou Bida’s recollection of a journey home to Luling. Zhou names the temples he stayed at during this journey, and sometimes refers to the abbot or monks he met there, but tells us nothing else about the history or circumstances of the temple. All we know of such temples today is that the high literati of the day were aware of them. Of the other 62 temples, we know they were either newly built or restored extensively during the period between 1127 and 1274. Let us look, by way of example, at the record of temple-building activities during the ten years of the Xianchun reign-period (1265–1274) of Emperor Duzong of the Southern Song. First, in 1265, Jiyun 集雲 Cloister in the Wugong Mountains in western Anfu was restored.39 In the same year, new temples were built in Luling (Beixing 北興 Temple), Taihe (Xilong 西龍 Temple), and Yongfeng (Baolin 寶林 Cloister).40 A second new temple was built in Yongfeng the next year, Qiping Cloister, and in the same year a new Daoist abbey was established in Longquan: Ziyang Abbey 紫陽觀.41 In Luling, a shrine for the Tang calligrapher Yan Zhenqing was built in 1268, although one might argue that this was not a religious establishment in the meaning of that word used in this book. A further seven temples were built or restored during the decade of the Xianchun reign-period, although we have no informa-

39 JAFZ (1842), 10.8b–9a. 40 Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.19b; Taihe xianzhi (1879), 30.10a; JAFZ (1875), 9.51a. 41 JAFZ (1875), 9.48a and 10.23a–b.

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tion about the exact years in which this happened. Four of these were in Taihe: Jianfu Temple, Yi’an Cloister, and Liangquan were all newly built, and Juetang Temple was given an of cial plaque to commemorate recent events at the temple.42 The three others were cloisters in Longquan that were restored during this period: Guanyin, Huacheng and Xingfu.43 As stated earlier, the references to fourteen building and restoration projects probably bear little relation to the actual numbers of new temples and shrines erected and restored during this period; there will have been very many more. Nevertheless, the record shows that building activity was constant during this period, as was investment in the religious life of the counties. Apart from the temples that were centres of religious activity within the eld of consciousness of the literati, there were vast numbers of temples and shrines for ordinary worshippers. Such temples and shrines came in all kinds and sizes, where demons and deities were worshipped in a bewildering range of fashions. Some temples in the thirteenth-century landscape were used for worship of a deity with a regional following. The cult of a local spirit known as Kang Wang 康王, for example, spread throughout thirteenth-century Jizhou. There was a Kang Wang temple in Jishui, built between 1227 and 1250. Yang Zhangru 楊長孺, son of a famous Jizhou poet, wrote about this temple in the early thirteenth century. ‘Worship for this god has spread to Jiang, Huai, Min and Zhe, where he is both manifest and ef cacious, while the numbers of worshippers never cease.’44 This would suggest that the cult of Kang Wang had spread throughout the seven most populated circuits of Southern Song China. Another scholar, Ouyang Shoudao 歐陽守道 (1208–1273), wrote in 1248 about another Kang Wang temple, located nearer to Luling. ‘The counties of Luling [i.e. Jizhou] all have branch temples for [Kang] Wang; scholars and commoners from far and near congregate here regularly.’45 The Kang Wang temples these two scholars knew about were probably large and well-established cultic centres, for otherwise it is unlikely they would have deigned to write about them. Their critique of the behaviour of the worshippers, which I have discussed more fully elsewhere, suggests that Kang Wang

42 Respectively, these can be found on JAFZ (1875), 9.15b; Taihe xianzhi (1879), 30.14b and 30.9a; and JAFZ (1875), 9.15a. 43 JAFZ (1875), 9.46a–47a. 44 Yang Zhangru, ‘Kang Wang miao ji’, Jishui xianzhi (1875), 12.23b. 45 Ouyang Shoudao, ‘Lingyou miaoji’, XZWJ, 16.2b.

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was widely worshipped as a demonic force who could spread plagues, but could also be placated and operate as a local protector.46 It would seem likely, although no evidence remains to prove this, that the great majority of the temples where Kang Wang was worshipped were small and impermanent. By the time of the rst extant gazetteers for the Jizhou area, at least two hundred years after the erection of these temples, all records of the existence of smaller Kang Wang temples had disappeared, although newer Kang Wang temples had been built, and the cult still exists in the region today.47 Another cult popular throughout the region in the thirteenth century was the cult of the Three Huagai Immortals, brie y mentioned above. As Robert Hymes’ magisterial study of the Three Immortals describes, the cult started in late Northern Song Fuzhou in Jiangxi, and spread throughout the region, and into Jizhou during the Southern Song.48 Several Jizhou men noted the existence of Huagai temples in the area, including Liu Chenweng and his son Liu Jiangsun 劉將孫, Feng Yiweng 馮翼翁, and Jie Xisi 揭傒斯. Their texts suggest that such worship was widespread. Liu Chenweng observed in 1275 that ‘nowadays so many people talk of Huagai’; his son Liu Jiangsun noted that ‘the Jiangxi mountains are tall, and at the tallest places people often worship Huagai’.49 Feng Yiweng and Jie Xisi both wrote their inscriptions for Huagai temples in Jizhou in the 1330s, and both noted how many worshippers these temples attracted.50 Temples associated with cults like these will have formed regular markers in the landscape of thirteenth-century Jizhou and after, and may well have been part of a unifying ‘local identity’ for the worshippers in the area. Next to such sites of worship for regional cults, there were the many individual shrines and altars built on an ad-hoc basis for an immortal or spirit. From the descriptions that appear in miracle tales set in Jizhou included in the Sequel Record of the Listener collection, such small

46 Anne Gerritsen, ‘From Demon to Deity: Kang Wang in Thirteenth-Century Jizhou and Beyond’, T’oung Pao International Journal of Chinese Studies 90.1–3 (2004): 4–35. 47 For a brief discussion of temples for Kang Wang extant today, see Anne Ger- ritsen, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Cult in the Villages of Ji’an (Jiangxi), or ‘Fieldwork for Historians’’, Journal of Song Yuan Studies 33 (2003): 181–185. 48 See Hymes, Way and Byway. 49 Liu Jiangsun, ‘Jishui Yuhuaguan ji’, Yangwuzhai ji, 17.8b–10b. 50 Feng Yiweng, ‘Jiahui guan ji’, in Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.34b–35b; Jie Xisi, ‘Tian- hua wanshou gong bei’, in Jie Xisi quanji, 371–2.

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shrines were ubiquitous. One such tale, for example, conveyed the special signi cance of the bamboo shoots that grow here, linking it to the obviously ourishing worship of Lady Wei 魏 in Luling: When Lady Wei became an immortal, there was an old woman from the village who repeatedly offered her tea, and the Lady was moved by her dedication. She pulled out her hairpin, pushed it into the earth near the fence, and said: ‘Every year at the end of the fourth month, bamboo shoots will sprout here, and you will be able to feed your family with it.’ The next year, bamboo shoots sprouted here. They tasted sweet, but they had no roots. The people of the area called them ‘Shoots that ll our needs’ (tianbusun 填補筍) and they still grow here today.51 The story inscribed the landscape by explaining the origins of a speci c local crop. The natural environment was less threatening here, although the reference to feeding the family suggests a marginal existence. The space was marked and given meaning through the connection between human and immortal. Another tale told of the religious beliefs of people living in the oodplain of the Gan: In the region of the two rivers Ji and Gan, there is an area called Zaokou 造口 and there about twenty to thirty families lived. They all lived in elevated buildings to protect themselves from water catastrophes. In the fth month of the dingmao year of Xianchun [i.e. 1267], the water of the Gan rose to land level, and the water was over three metres deep. After the level had fallen back, it suddenly rose again by fteen metres, immersing the roof beams of the houses. Many people anxiously looked at it, and then they saw, oating on the water’s surface, a black ox, carrying a large red snake on its back. It sat very still among the waves and did not move. The people thought this was the transformation of a dragon, blocking the water so it could not drain away. Each person made promises to the gods, but the ox still did not disappear. Then there was an old man, who had a piece of white silk, with a section of the Diamond Sutra ( Jin’gang jing 金剛經) wrapped inside it. With force he threw it into the water, ten to fteen centimetres away from the ox. The ox turned his head to look at it, dived down, and the water followed him down quickly. The people were all saved from drowning. This is how powerful the force of the sutra was in getting rid of evil.52

51 ‘Cha zan sheng sun’, Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi, houji 1.134. 52 ‘Jiao wei fo jing’, Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi, houji 2.196.

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The story could be read as the story of a battle between a local demonic cult, appearing here in the manifestation of a red snake on the back of a black ox on the one hand, and the power of the Buddhist establishment on the other. The Buddhist establishment comes out on top in this version, but the story does not preclude the interpretation that apart from the old man, presumably a lay Buddhist, as he is not referred to as a monk, the locals were ardent followers of the local cult, and held it responsible for the ood. The religious con ict that may lie at the heart of this tale is less relevant here than the battle for survival between humans and the forces of nature. The story told of human survival, and marked the landscape as a signi cant site because of that human survival, without losing sight of the dangers that continued to surround humans. The temples and monasteries that dotted the Jizhou landscape served a variety of purposes, and people frequented temples for all kinds of reasons.53 People went to temples to make requests and ask for help, to give thanks for what they had received or in response to a pledge, and to nd out what the future would hold. As Hymes’ study makes clear, at times such communications were direct and based on a personal relationship between worshipper and the subject of worship, at other times the communication was ‘mediated’, and relied on the intervention of a religious specialist. That specialist may be af liated with the Buddhist establishment or initiated into the Daoist religious orders, but he or she may just as likely have been a village-based sorcerer or someone known locally for healing techniques. Often such encounters between worshipper and worshipped, or between worshipper and religious specialist, occurred in a dedicated building, which could be as small as a desk with a makeshift roof or as extensive as a temple complex like Jingju. Such buildings, in their in nite varieties, formed their own pattern on the landscape. Not a permanent pattern, as the state of temples was in constant ux, and new ones were built seemingly as fast as older ones fell down or fell into disuse, but a pattern no less, and one that could offer a considerable amount of reassurance to the locals when faced with an otherwise hostile and threatening natural environment.

53 See, for example the story about a certain Dong Liangshi 董良史, who had completed the palace examinations in 1132, and visited a Daoist temple to nd out what his ranking in the results would be (Yijianzhi, jiazhi 10.83–4), or the story about an impoverished couple that went to Xianju Cloister 仙居道堂 to nd a cure for their dangerously ill only child (Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi, houji 1.144–5).

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Conclusion

How, then, can we see the landscape of Song and Yuan Jizhou as a constructed cultural space in the experience and imagination of its inhabitants? If we return brie y to Eric Hirsch’s division between ‘foreground actuality’ and ‘background potentiality’, a tension between foreground and background, or between actuality and potentiality becomes manifest. For the inhabitants of Song and Yuan Jizhou, the landscape was to a large extent shaped by the powerful forces of nature that dominated their lives: inhospitable mountains with their steep cliffs and deep crevices, severe weather conditions that brought devastating winds and rain, and fast- owing rivers with their rapids and invisible rocks that complicated transportation and brought oods. People lived in an environment that was often threatening, unknown and unknow- able. In the background was an imagined world, an idealized space, where humans successfully coped with the dangers, where dragons had been tamed and where gods and immortals protected human beings from the threatening environment. The landscape of Song and Yuan Jizhou, as it emerges from the written record, reveals a process of negotiation between the threatening and unknown environment and the idealization of that space. The threatening forces that shaped the landscape and thereby the lives of its inhabitants might have seemed overwhelmingly powerful were it not for the manifold manifestations of the protective powers of gods and immortals in the landscape. Sites of successful interaction between humans and gods, where the sinister had been tamed and the protective had been victorious, were remembered as signi cant sites in the landscape. The record of human contacts with the invisible world, and the evidence of the negotiations between the dangerous forces of nature and the forces that tamed them were all part of the landscape. Landscape, in other words, was not a static environment, but a constantly changing process that looked differently depending on the individual experience. The tales told about the landscape, the temples built within the surroundings, and the stories associated with those temples were all part of a human record that inscribed and gave meaning to the landscape. It is the human record that tells of the taming of the greater and often invisible forces that conveyed a sense of safety in an otherwise inhospitable and fearsome environment. The sources from the thirteenth century clearly reveal this to be a constant dynamic process. The literati who assigned meaning to the

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sites in the landscape were personally and actively involved in the process. The landscape was being continuously inscribed, rather than plumbed and fully known. I shall argue below that this process created opportunities for belonging locally. I see it as one of the ways in which the literati gave meaning to the local and made it ‘their’ local. Through their writings about spaces and sacred sites, the literati could write themselves into the landscape, and created a sense of belonging within it. In Chapter Four I will look more closely at this process of exploring and inscribing the landscape, to see what ‘belonging locally’ means, but rst comes a brief discussion of the two concepts that lie at the heart of this discussion: the literati and the community.

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LITERATI AND COMMUNITY

In 1124, a certain Jizhou man named Xiao Xuchen 蕭序辰 accepted a post in one of the counties in his native Jizhou. Not long after his arrival, he submitted a report to the Jizhou authorities about the miraculous powers of a local god. This is how he described the bureaucratic process that followed: I sent a report to the prefectural authorities about the awesome record of this deity. The prefectural authorities investigated the matter and then prepared their own report, which they submitted to the Fiscal Commission (caosi 漕司). The Fiscal Commission investigated [the matter] again, and passed [their report] to the imperial court [at the capital]. In the second month of the seventh year [i.e. 1125] a plaque [with the words] ‘Zhao ji’ 昭濟 was bestowed by imperial edict.1 Obtaining an imperial plaque for this temple involved three separately compiled reports and complex bureaucratic procedures at four different levels of the civil administration. When the procedures had been successfully completed, Xiao Xuchen composed a text, to be carved in stone and placed in the temple. This kind of text, a ‘temple inscription’ ( ji ), of which countless numbers have been preserved in literary collections and local gazetteers, forms one of the main sources for this study. Using such literati writings about local religious institutions as a way of exploring the meanings of locality and belonging needs some justi cation. After all, what purpose could this detailed description of bureaucratic procedure serve other than to demonstrate the author’s own endorsement of the procedures involved in obtaining imperial sanction for local religious practice? We will never know to what extent the procedures described in this instance, which involved submitting reports as well as checking the accuracy of the submitted details, were really followed.2 Inscrip- tions make frequent enough reference to such procedures, however, to suggest that literati often viewed local temples as offering administrative

1 Xiao Xuchen, ‘Zeng Zhaoji miao e ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.10a. 2 Hansen, Changing Gods, 91–95.

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opportunities. Inscriptions allowed them to demonstrate to an imagined audience at the central capital their ability to implement central com- mands locally, and execute instructions with regard to the promotion of orthodox, and the proscription of illicit, temples. A desire for the correct implementation of state orthodoxy and a disdain for aberrant local practice are hailed as universally shared sentiments among the Chinese elites throughout time and space.3 Despite such readings of inscriptions, this book argues that literati authors saw temples as much more than that. During the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, I suggest, literati saw temples as one of the foremost spaces of community construction. In fact, as the next chapter will go on to show, Jizhou literati were on the whole more interested in writing about religious spaces in the landscape than about local educational institutions or about local kinship groups and lineages. They wrote extensively about the various religious institutions in Jizhou, and, in doing so, they not only inscribed the landscape and attempted to control the invisible forces within that landscape, but also sought to shape the local communities and their places within them.

Literati identities

Who, then, were these ‘literati’, and how should we de ne the ‘communities’ they wished to shape? Rather than trying to understand the communal identity of the entire population of Jizhou/Ji’an, this book only deals with an extremely small part of the population. The main group of actors who appear here were literate men, referred to here as ‘literati’ (shi 士), who had usually received at least part of their education in a Confucian context. We can be reasonably con dent that these men had in common an exposure to texts broadly collected under the rubric of ru 儒, Confucianism.4 The vast majority of them will also, at one stage or another, have experienced the civil service examinations path, whether they chose to abandon the course almost immediately or followed it right through to the top. For most of them,

3 Katz, Images of the Immortal, chapter 3, especially 98–99; Terry F. Kleeman, ‘The Expansion of the Wen-ch’ang Cult’, in Ebrey and Gregory, eds., Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China (1993), 45–73, especially 46. 4 To be more precise, from the Southern Song, they shared knowledge of the writings of Song moral philosophers. On the relationship between Neo-Confucians and local society, see Bol, ‘Neo-Confucianism and Local Society’.

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their literacy was much more than functional. They wrote proli cally and in a variety of genres. Much, if not most, of their writing was public; they intended their texts, even their poems and letters, for public consumption, and they wrote to a greater or lesser extent in response to ideas in the public domain. Their writing is what marked them out as different from other men. While the centrality of writing in their lives provides a unifying characteristic, the emphasis in this book will be on differences. One of the basic assumptions here is that the literati had many different subject positions or identities, which intersected and con icted at varying times. Using a single term for them as a group throughout this book should not obscure the obvious differences between, say, Ji’an men born during the latter days of the Northern Song and those who saw the Ming fall; or between Ji’an literati who served most of their life in the central government, and those who never had much success in public service. The single term should also not make us overlook differences produced by personal characteristics and individual circumstances, or by internal con icts and ambiguities. I am interested in the different, complex and changing ways in which Jizhou/Ji’an literati understood the signi cance of the religious institutions in their localities.

Religious institutions

So what are these ‘religious institutions’? How did temples and shrines play a role in the literati’s conception of ‘belonging’? Usually, scholars of Chinese religion make a distinction between Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and a fourth, more diffuse tradition referred to as ‘popular religion’.5 All four traditions have ‘temples’, although the architectural spectrum is vast, ranging from makeshift altars with temporary roofs to extensive and elaborate linked buildings around spacious courtyards. On architectural principles alone, it would be hard to distinguish between these different religious traditions. Rather than serving a distinct ‘parish’, all temples were open to visitors, and there was never a question of exclusivity of membership to one temple or one tradition alone. There were, of course, some clear differences between these four traditions,

5 Meir Shahar and Robert Weller, ‘Introduction: Gods and Society in China’, in Meir Shahar and Robert Weller, eds., Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), 1.

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most notably in the ways in which they negotiated the relationship between the abstract ‘principles’ or teachings of the ‘church’ and the local manifestation of those principles.6 Temples associated with the Confucian state cult fell under control of the central government or its local representatives in the form of magistrates, while Buddhist, Daoist, and popular temples on the whole did not. The ways in which the state attempted to reach into the physical and social ‘space’ of the local temple varied greatly during the period under discussion here, but on the whole the state had little actual control. In theory, Buddhist monasteries had one or more resident monks, and their activities were more or less regulated by the leaders of the different Buddhist traditions, while Daoist centres received their instructions from the Daoist establishments. In practice, however, the religious activities and the architectural spaces of Buddhist and Daoist temples were similar; and both were strongly in uenced by the temples of the so-called popular tradition. In her study of popular cults, Valerie Hansen has looked at the ways in which popular cults spread during the Southern Song.7 From the outset she excluded from her study what she calls ‘organized religions’, hence Buddhist and Daoist temples. As others have pointed out, the distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘organized’ is extremely dif cult to maintain; frequently a variety of gods are worshipped within one temple.8 It would be virtually meaningless to think of a temple containing a statue of Guanyin as fundamentally different from a temple that does not. Moreover, such a distinction would have seemed meaningless to the literati authors whose views we are exploring here. Of course they noted differences between the various religious establishments they commemorated in writing: some were large, others small; some were frequented by large gatherings of urban residents, others were sited in remote locations and seemed to be the exclusive domain of an isolated monk or caretaker. Some were referred to as guan, translated in this book as ‘abbey’ or ‘Daoist monastery’, others as si, translated as ‘temple’, yet others were miao, ‘shrines’, or an, ‘cloisters’. Literati authors, however,

6 See, for example, the study by Bernard Faure on the relationship between the ‘unlocalized’ aspect of Buddhism, i.e. its doctrine of universal salvation, and its localized aspect, namely its ritual practice. Bernard Faure, ‘Space and Place in Chinese Religious Traditions’, History of Religions 26.4 (1987): 337–356. 7 Hansen, Changing Gods. 8 See, for example, Richard von Glahn, ‘Review of Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276 ’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53.2 (1993): 619.

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wrote about all such establishments, without explicitly noting a qualita- tive difference between them. The issues they found noteworthy were, for example, the fear a deity might inspire, regardless of whether some might have classi ed it as a Buddhist, Daoist, or a popular deity. I am interested here in the ways in which literati found such temples of interest, what they had to say about them and why. I have therefore included all sites where worship of one kind or another took place, apart from those sites that were explicitly associated with Learning of the Way (daoxue). The latter included the shrines for Confucian worthies, and on the whole also the sacred sites of the state cult, such as the altar for the terrestrial and cosmological deities. I have, however, included temples for the god of walls and moats, precisely because their inclusion into the state cult by the rst emperor of the Ming dynasty was a controversial decision that continued to vex the literati community for many decades. The inclusion of such diverse religious institutions and the emphasis on the multiplicity of literati identities could yield a highly fragmented and disintegrated picture. The question I am interested in, however, concerns the possibility of coherence and unity among the literati. If we recognize that literati assume many different guises and subjectivi- ties, largely but not entirely dependent on the particularities of time and space, does that then preclude any coherence or shared identity, or indeed community, among them? Could a temple ever provide a sense of belonging, a sense of shared identity among literati? Could temples conjure up a feeling of coherence or communal unity? I am assuming there was no single understanding of coherence or community, universal among the literati of the area. Rather, I am interested in looking at the various ways in which coherence was generated in literati writings, how and why it was cultivated, the ways in which it disappeared, and the varying and at times con icting and overlapping ways in which communities of literati manifested themselves.

Literati individuals and their social domains

My thinking about the social activities of literati in Ji’an has been in uenced by the sociologist Derek Layder’s writings on social domains. Layder argues that the human actor is of ‘crucial importance’ for understanding social activity. In that sense, Layder’s focus is on the subjective, the personal, and the agency of the individual. It is the perspective of

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the individual I am interested in, and the ways in which the literati of Ji’an created their own picture of the social landscape and their own place within it. But Layder’s theory of social domains, in contrast to those of social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault, does not reject the ‘other side’ outright: There are collective properties of social life that historically emerge to form objective features that provide the wider background context and the immediate settings of activities. These features constitute part of the social organization of society and typically pre-exist and outlast particular individuals’ lifetimes. That is, they are part of the ongoing ensemble of social institutions, cultural traditions and patterns of social relationships that people are compelled to take into account in their daily lives.9 In other words, Layder sees his individual subjective actors in a wider context, which is to some extent objective. This is not to say that ‘context’ forms some kind of Weberian or Marxist structure or system. Rather, Layder suggests that the day-to-day interactions of the individual are not solely shaped by that individual’s choices and desires, but by the social institutions, traditions and patterns of relationships that form the context. Layder’s understanding of the context, the environment in which people act, resonates strongly with Robert Hymes’ recent statement of his understanding of culture.10 Drawing on post-modern anthropologists like Fredrik Barth and Roy D’Andrade, Hymes argues that culture should be seen not as a uni ed, coherent system, but as a repertoire, in constant ux and full of contradictions and variation, on which individual actors draw. Thus, culture consists of a wide range of resources, offering varied and often con icting possibilities. As people act, they consciously or unconsciously draw on this repertoire, which must at the same time set some boundaries to the range of possible actions and choices. In that sense it concurs with Layder’s idea of social domains, where individual action is informed at some level by a reservoir based on personal memory and experience, and on the patterns and institutions that pre-exist and outlive the individual. My discussion of the ways in which members of this diverse group, broadly termed literati, de ned themselves as ‘belonging’ locally will aim to take account of

9 Derek Layder, Modern Social Theory: Key Debates and New Directions (London: UCL Press, 1997), 19–20. 10 Hymes, Way and Byway, 5–7.

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personal and individual factors, but will also consider the repertoire of social institutions, cultural traditions and patterns of social relationships available to each individual.

Elite strategies

A second basic assumption of this book is the constant need for literati to (re-)assert their position in society. It has been established in much of the scholarship on Chinese social history that the social status of the literati was by no means constant.11 While literati may well have been able to manifest themselves as belonging to a cultural elite, this alone hardly provided them with the economic means to support themselves. Posts in the imperial bureaucracy could translate into local elite status, providing different kinds of political and economic power, but such posts were extremely hard to come by, and over time access to them became increasingly competitive, despite the many different routes that could lead to the bureaucracy. From the Song dynasty onwards, when access to education and printed materials dramatically increased, competition for posts in the imperial bureaucracy had also become ercer. While classical sociolo- gists like Max Weber understood ‘traditional’ Chinese society as being determined entirely by the characteristics of its bureaucracy, more recent research has pointed out the diverse nature of the elite. Mem- bership of the elite could be based on established authority in such diverse matters as art, philosophy, ritual or medicine, on landholding, on trade or on military experience. Strategies to maintain membership of the elite were equally varied and by no means limited to success in the examinations.12 Studies by Robert Hartwell and Robert Hymes, among many others, have shown that during and after the Southern Song, regional and local strategies, rather than national ones, became more important for the literati to achieve and maintain elite status.13 Hymes, for example, looked at marital strategies, demonstrating that while Northern Song members of the elite arranged their marriages

11 This also formed the starting point for the discussions gathered in the conference volume edited by Joseph Esherick and Mary Backus Rankin, entitled Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 12 See Esherick and Rankin, eds., Chinese Local Elites, especially 7–9. 13 Hartwell, ‘Demographic, Political, and Social Transformation of China’, and Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen.

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among a national elite, from the Southern Song onward, marriages were arranged from within a regional elite. Strategic marriages were among the resources that could provide access to elite status. Other strategies were intellectual. ‘This Culture of Ours’, the important work by Peter Bol on the intellectual transition from Tang to Song, for example, demonstrates a shift from learning for national examination success to study for the self, where learning became a goal in itself, and a strategy for demonstrating elite status in a regional context.14 Similarly, the many locally based academies that ourished during the Southern Song offered opportunities for demonstrating membership of the cultural elite.15 One of the arguments that run throughout this book is that during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, the local temple should be regarded as one of the sites that facilitated the achievement and maintenance of elite status. Local temples provided the literati with the means to assert a position of authority in local society. The local temple, like the academy or the home of the locally famous teacher, gured—in different fashions throughout the long period under scrutiny here—in literati consciousness as a cultural space in which they could make their mark as members of the local elite. To some extent this argument builds on those of Timothy Brook in the book Praying for Power. He seeks to demonstrate that during the late Ming era, members of the gentry donated funds to Buddhist establishments, with the aim of exchanging this patronage for local power.16 His analysis borrows from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘symbolic capital’.17 Brook suggests that the Ming-Qing gentry built monasteries to ‘exhibit symbolic capital’; taking part in expensive projects like the building of temples was a way of ‘converting purely economic means into more abstract forms of power’.18 As critics of Bourdieu have pointed out, however, his Outline of a Theory of Practice focuses rather more on the ways in which the individual is in uenced and disposed to certain actions by the implicit acceptance and inculcation of cultural norms

14 Peter Bol, ‘This Culture of Ours’: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 15 Linda Walton, Academies and Society in Southern Sung China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 16 Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late- Ming China (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1993). 17 Brook has used Pierre Bourdieu, An Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 18 Brook, Praying for Power, 19.

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and values (what Bourdieu refers to as ‘habitus’), and less on the particularities of each situation, or on the individual and his/her potential for personal agency.19 Brook, for example, to some extent ignores the possibility that literati may at some level be motivated by individual religious sentiments or personal attachments. Other critics of Bourdieu’s theory, and of scholarship in uenced by Bourdieu, have pointed out the invisibility of change over time. Brook’s study, for example, deals with a period of roughly one century. My study, covering a period of more than 500 years, aims to bring out wider trends and changing historical circumstances, showing how changing circumstances and historical particularities create the possibility of different choices and preferences, allowing a more historically de ned story to emerge. Of course, Brook encounters the same problem that all students of religions in China encounter: the literati are largely, and conventionally, silent about their religious sentiments and preferences in the kind of public writings that make up the vast majority of the historical record. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the texts can be read to reveal a certain amount of personal re ection. I seek to take account of both the subjective, particular and personal experiences of the literati of Ji’an, and the cultural norms and values—in Layder’s words, ‘the ongoing ensemble of social institutions, cultural traditions and patterns of social relationships’—that shaped those experiences.

Temples as socially integrative spaces

One of the themes that have emerged in studies of Chinese local society is the centrality of temples, and the religious practices associated with them, to the structure and coherence of local society. To understand the ways in which local societies form coherent units, this work suggests, we need to look at the ways in which temples drew people together, and the ways in which the participants imagined they formed coherent and meaningful social and cultural units. The impetus for this approach of seeing temples as socially integrative institutions comes, at least in part, from anthropologists; eldwork

19 Derek Layder, Understanding Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 157; Layder, Modern Social Theory; Claudia Strauss, ‘Models and Motives’, in Roy G. D’Andrade and Claudia Strauss, eds., Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9.

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by scholars like Stephan Feuchtwang and Steven Sangren in Taiwan revealed this integrative function of temples most clearly.20 The rituals performed at temples, and the celebration of ritual links between temples in processions and festivals, Feuchtwang, Sangren and others have suggested, are symbolic representations of the locality and its relationship with the localities around it. A picture emerges in their work of a hierarchical network of territorial cults; each place, or rather each temple, ts in one way or another into this system of nested hierarchies.21 Local social organization, they insist, revolves around temples with geographically de ned communities, and religious activities are therefore seen as focal points of local communal organization. On the basis of such studies, temples have come to be seen as locally integrative forces and as the symbolic representations of communities.22 Histori- ans like Kristofer Schipper, Kenneth Dean, David Faure and Barend ter Haar have used such anthropological insights to demonstrate that the centrality of temple organizations to local society also existed in pre-twentieth-century China.23 Michael Szonyi’s study of the historical development of the major community rituals performed in Fuzhou

20 See, for example, Stephan Feuchtwang, ‘City Temples in Taipei under Three Regimes’, in Mark Elvin and William Skinner, eds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 263–301. 21 Steven Sangren, History and Magical Power in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 22 Mingming Wang, ‘Place, Administration, and Territorial Cults in Late Imperial China: A Case Study from Southern Fujian’ Late Imperial China 16.1 (1995): 36. Helen Siu, for example, has studied the changing roles of the local elites to the state in a commune in Guangdong. She argues, in a chapter entitled ‘Cultural Tissues’, for a ‘cultural nexus of power’, a concept similar to Duara’s which shows how both peasants and elites ‘used cultural symbols to reinforce the structure of power to which they sub- scribed’. She describes how at the beginning of the twentieth century a range of kinship and community rituals expressed territorial boundaries. The argument of her book is concerned with the changes that took place after 1949 to this cultural nexus, but her evidence does not allow her to see before the twentieth century. Helen Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1989), 77. Sangren’s book, History and Magical Power, discusses a number of factors that play a role in territorial integration, including a hierarchically nested system of local and regional places of worship, but his discussion centres on a juxtaposition of imperial times and current local practice, without further de nition of the imperial times. Sangren, History and Magical Power. Cf. Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900 –1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 23 Stephan Feuchtwang, who was one of the rst to argue for the view of temples as central institutions of local society, has also worked on the Qing and Republican eras. See, for example, Feuchtwang, ‘City Temples in Taipei under Three Regimes.’ Prasenjit Duara’s work also touches on the importance of the temple in local social networks. Duara, Culture, Power, and the State.

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福州 in Fujian, for example, contends that the community rituals of the Fuzhou area emerged ‘during a period from the mid-Ming to the early Qing’.24 Mingming Wang’s 1995 study explored the connection between administrative space and territorial cults, implying that both constructions of space were ‘inseparable’ during much of the Qing dynasty; Prasenjit Duara discussed the importance of ritual in the integration of early Republican communities.25 Barend ter Haar has insisted on an even earlier existence of such territorially based cults, arguing that ‘the link between cults and social organization has been a constant aspect of premodern society throughout its history’.26 His 1995 study on local society and the organization of cults pieces together evidence from a wide spatial and temporal range to prove that religious activities not only served individual needs but also ‘can be seen as focal points of local communal organization’, stressing that early-modern local society from around 1200 onwards was shaped by temple cults.27 His interest, however, is in the religious aspects of the temple, and deals with the ways in which religious activities were organized and carried out. While the work of these anthropologists and historians informs this study, I take it in a slightly different direction. At times the communities

24 As Szonyi shows, such rituals all developed and changed during the Qing dynasty, a process which Szonyi traces in particular to the spread of lineages. The lineages came to assume a position of leadership and regional management and used the rituals of lineage, village, and village networks to strengthen their position within the community. Equally, the communities and the hierarchies within the communities were strengthened by the activities of the lineage. Michael Szonyi, Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 25 Wang, ‘Place, Administration, and Territorial Cults’, 39. Wang’s interest is in the interchange between imperial control exerted on spatial organization and popular social territorial identities which often contradicted imperial control. The administrative unit discussed by Wang is the pujing 鋪境 (ward or precinct), enforced in Quanzhou (Southern Fujian) from the founding of the Ming onwards, and particularly during the Qing dynasty. Prasenjit Duara suggests that there was a ‘cultural nexus’ along which local society was organized. This cultural nexus, which includes the lineage, local cults, the temple, and rituals, maintained a balance of mutual bene t which facilitated the popular acceptance of state control. Thus, according to Duara, the lineage as well as local religious activities such as temple worship and rituals played important roles in the strengthening of local community. Only when the state broke down this cultural nexus through an intensi cation of ‘state-building exercises’ did the local community lose its cohesion. Duara leaves unanswered the question of when this process started, but his sources date largely from the mid to late Qing dynasty. Duara, Culture, Power, and the State. 26 Barend ter Haar, ‘Local Society and the Organization of Cults in Early Modern China: A Preliminary Study’, Studies in Central & East Asian Religions 8 (1995): 3–4. 27 Ter Haar, ‘Local Society and the Organization of Cults’, 36.

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imagined by the literati were based on the shared religious practices that interest scholars like Feuchtwang, Dean and Ter Haar, but often they were not. Rather than looking at the religious organization behind such territorial divisions, I look at the ways in which the literati tried to claim membership, and to some extent ownership, of the social and cultural communities that surrounded the temple.

The elites and the people

Ter Haar is explicit about whose social organization he is talking about. ‘Cult organizations were by the people and for the people, hence not a matter of great interest to our elite authors.’28 These ‘elite authors’ were, in Ter Haar’s view, clearly not part of ‘the people.’ As it is ‘the people’ Ter Haar is interested in, he has searched through a great variety of materials, and found the evidence to support his view that local cults played an important role in creating local and regional stability in local society, at least from the twelfth century onward. Local society was strengthened, he suggests, by the performance of rituals that gave expression to a sense of community and a shared local identity. Of course concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘identity’ are about inclusion as well as exclusion. In Ter Haar’s view, it would seem, it was the elites that were excluded. When ‘the community’ came together at temple festivals or in ritual celebrations, ‘the people’ expressed their sense of belonging, and ‘the elite’ had no part in that. Local society was structured by the rituals and festivals centred on the local temple, Ter Haar and others argue, but the elites were no part of that local society, and they had no part to play in the expressions of coherence and shared identity linked to local temples. Important as Ter Haar’s work undoubtedly is, it also raises further questions. First, can we really argue that the members of elites were a completely separate group from ‘the people’? Surely we cannot draw a clean line between the two, without any blurred boundaries or overlaps. We know from a great deal of socio-economic research how ckle elite status was, how hard the members of the elite had to work to maintain their status, and how wobbly the ‘ladder of success’ was.29 One might

28 Ter Haar, ‘Local Society and the Organization of Cults’, 4. 29 The reference is of course from Ho Ping-ti’s seminal study The Ladder of Success.

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move up into the region of elite status, but one could equally quickly drop down again, especially during periods of political upheaval and change. The experience of one local community for those at the bottom of the ladder would never be entirely the same as the experience for those at the top. In other words, I think it is unlikely that a clear distinction can be drawn between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, and it may well be more fruitful to imagine the members of local society as being placed along a scale, and moving backwards and forwards along that scale throughout their lifecycles. Secondly, if we argue, as I have done in Chapter One, that concepts such as locality, community, and belonging are constructed, rather than having a basis in a socio-economic reality, then surely it becomes important to nd out how people at both ends of the social scale imagined their locality, and their membership within its community. The elites, the literati, must also have imagined themselves as belonging locally, and as having a place in their imagined local community. It is these elite ideas of community and belonging that I am particularly interested in here.

Conceptualizing the community

What exactly does the term ‘community’ signify? While the idea of the ‘community’ has played an important role in studies of early-modern as well as modern European history, historians of China have often used the term in blissful ignorance of the existence of the theoretical framework used in European historical studies.30 Of course the idea of ‘community’ has played a part in the study of Chinese history; it has given rise to important scholarship that has advanced our understanding of the ideal of community and the practical, organizational aspects of Chinese local communities. As early as the early 1950s, an issue of Far Eastern Quarterly was dedicated to ‘community studies’ in China and Japan. Articles by Morton Fried on China and Richard Beardsley on Japan were introduced by Robert Red eld, who suggests the beginnings of a dialogue between studies in the humanities and the social sciences

30 In studies of the modern world, ‘community’ is often central to the discourse of the nation, especially in studies that build on the important work by Benedict Ander- son. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Hugh Clark’s study, entitled Community, Trade, and Networks, for example, does not even list the term ‘community’ in the index. The term seems to be used as largely synonymous with settlement or residential group. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks, 12–18.

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under way at Chicago. On the whole the studies discussed by Fried and Beardsley are, however, as full of narrative descriptions as the early ‘community studies’ of village life in Europe and America.31 Much of the impetus behind these community studies came from Japanese sinological studies of ky d tai 共同體, a concept usually translated as ‘community’.32 In the view of Japanese scholars, foremost among them Tanigawa Michio, it was the strong vertical bonds within the local ky d tai, between the aristocratic upper echelons and the peasant class below them, that prevented the development of a European- style feudalism in China.33 The implications of this argument for the periodization of Chinese history have received more attention than its implications for understanding social change.34 Apart from the discussion of community in the context of periodization, students of premodern Chinese history have paid a great deal of attention to the institutional aspects of local communities.35 Community institutions such as local academies, the community compact, community granaries, and shrines for local worthies have been studied as signi cant elements in Neo-Confucian philosophy, which in turn played a role in the shift in focus from the state to the local and its institutions.36

31 Colin Bell and Howard Newby, eds., Community Studies: An Introduction to the Sociol- ogy of the Local Community (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 13–15; Robert Red eld, ‘Introduction’, The Far Eastern Quarterly 14.1 (1954): 3–10; Richard K. Beardsley, ‘Com- munity Studies in Japan’, The Far Eastern Quarterly 14.1 (1954): 37–53; Morton Fried, ‘Community Studies in China’, The Far Eastern Quarterly 14.1 (1954): 11–36. 32 For an introduction to the Japanese discussions of the concept of ky d tai (community) in English, see Joshua Fogel, ‘New Directions in Japanese Sinology’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44 (1984): 225–247. A useful study of the character of the medieval aristocracy, which discusses the implications of the Japanese scholarship, is Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, ‘The Scholar-Of cial and his Community: The Character of the Aristocracy in Medieval China’, Early Medieval China 1 (1994): 60–83. 33 Tanigawa Michio, Medieval Chinese Society and the Local ‘Community’, translated by Joshua Fogel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 34 See, for example, the review of this translation by Harriet T. Zurndorfer, ‘Medieval Chinese Society and the Local ‘Community’’, The China Quarterly 111 (1987): 492. 35 Some extremely interesting work has been done more recently on imagined communities in contemporary China. See, for example, Madeline Y. Hsu, ‘Migration and Native Place: Qiaokan and the Imagined Community of Taishan County, Guangdong, 1893–1993’, Journal of Asian Studies 59.2 (2000): 307–331. 36 On the community compact, see Monika Übelhör, ‘The Community Compact (Hsiang-yüeh) of the Sung and Its Educational Signi cance’, in John Chaffee and Wm. Theodore de Bary, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 371–88. See also Kandice Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant in Sixteenth Century Ji’an Prefecture, Jiangxi’, Late Imperial China 17.2 (1996): 1–50. On academies, see John Meskill, Academies in Ming China (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982). On community granaries, see Richard von Glahn, ‘Community and

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Within the context of premodern and early-modern Chinese history, the ‘local community’ has often appeared in an abstract realm, situated somewhere between the state and the family, constructed in political and philosophical thought as the ideal social space within which the local gentleman could act and display his leadership.37 Institutions such as county schools, charitable estates, and voluntary associations such as poetry or philosophy clubs, also identi ed as belonging to the community, have been the subject of studies of a more social and cultural nature.38 Here, too, however, we have grown accustomed to the term community without questioning the concept itself.39 In most of these studies ‘community’ is understood to be a social or territorial association of some sort, perhaps represented by shared institutions and rituals. While scholars of Chinese history occupied themselves with studies that circle around a variety of concepts of community, there is a striking absence of the focused questions that scholars of ‘community studies’ within the context of early-modern Europe ask themselves. The nineteenth-century German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, ‘founding father of the theory of community’, initiated a lively interdisciplinary debate about the nature of society.40 His seminal Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887, argued for a chronological transition from a small-scale, community-based, cohesive, harmonious society

Welfare: Chu Hsi’s Community Granary in Theory and Practice’, in Robert Hymes and Conrad Schirokauer, eds., Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 221–254. 37 Hymes’ study of the thinker Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1192), for example, represents the local community as an ideal realm of action for the local gentleman. His study reveals competing visions of ‘community’ in the writings by Lu Jiuyuan and his rival Zhu Xi. For Zhu Xi, Hymes argues, community is ‘an ordered social and ritual framework transcending kin yet apart from the state’; for Lu, community is based on the principle of kinship. Robert Hymes, ‘Lu Chiu-yüan, Academies, and the Problem of the Local Community’, in Chaffee and de Bary, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, 455. 38 Linda Walton discusses charitable estates as institutions with ‘a signi cant presence in Southern Sung local society’. Linda Walton, ‘Charitable Estates as an Aspect of Statecraft in Southern Sung China’, in Hymes and Schirokauer, eds., Ordering the World, 257. The emphasis in her study is on Neo-Confucian visions of such estates. Walton, ‘Charitable Estates’, 255–279. 39 I have come across several studies where the term ‘community’ is given a prominent place but does not receive any kind of de nition or clari cation at the outset. See, for example, Myron Cohen, ‘Shared Beliefs: Corporations, Community and Religion Among the South Taiwan Hakka During the Ch’ing’, Late Imperial China 14.1 (1993): 1–33; or Randall Dodgen, ‘Salvaging Kaifeng: Natural Calamity and Urban Community in Late Imperial China’, Journal of Urban History 21.6 (1995): 716–740. 40 Bell and Newby, eds., Community Studies, 23.

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with shared property (‘Gemeinschaft’) to a large-scale, contract-based, disintegrated, and individualist society (‘Gesellschaft’).41 Tönnies’ idea of community has been criticized for being too imprecise and amor- phous, and for placing too much emphasis on the harmonious aspects of community, without recognizing the ways in which medieval villages were always being reconstructed and regenerated.42 Others have taken issue with Tönnies’ idea of the disappearance of community bonds with the transition from medieval to early-modern societies, preferring to stress the endurance and resilience of communal bonds and village communities in the early-modern era.43 This debate has meant that ‘community’ as an analytical concept has been repeatedly rede ned. Current work incorporates, for example, the tensions that exist within the concept, recognizing that people belong to different and overlapping communities, move in and out of communities, and are excluded or rejected from certain communities. Communities are no longer seen as static and unchanging but as constantly rede ned and reconstructed units. They develop and change over time, are punctuated by rituals, and can be established, de ned, and rede ned by anyone at any time.44 Myths, memory, and the multiple narratives of history are all part of the complex construction of communities.45 It is precisely this type of construction of community that I am interested in here. I see community as a dynamic process, as an imagined construct, as a vision that existed in the minds of the people of Southern Song, Yuan and Ming Ji’an, rather than as an actual state of being or a social-organizational device. Rather than assuming that

41 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, translated by Charles Loomis. (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1963). 42 The studies in a volume entitled Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World, for example, take issue with the idea that the medieval and renaissance worlds were generally homogeneous and composed of harmonious communities. Nicholas Howe, ed., Visions of Community in the Pre-Modern World (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). See also Christine Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 340–80; C. Dyer, ‘The English Medieval Village Community and its Decline’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 407–29; Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Introduction’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 337–9. 43 Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1560 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996). 44 See, for example, the studies in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 45 For a discussion of the roles of myths, memory and history in the construction of community, see Bo Stråth, ed., Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community (Brus- sels: I.E.-Peter Lang, 2000).

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each temple had a socially and religiously homogeneous and territorially based community attached to it, I seek to investigate the ways in which literati observers of local temples envisioned the communities the temples served, and the ways in which they identi ed themselves with these imagined communities.

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IMAGINING LOCAL BELONGING IN SOUTHERN SONG AND YUAN JIZHOU

In 1256, the abbot of a Buddhist temple on Luo Mountain 螺山, about fteen kilometres to the north-east of the town of Luling, had completed some general repairs to his temple, and was keen to receive wider recognition for his efforts. His chance came when the famous literatus Ouyang Shoudao spent a few days at his temple. The abbot said to Ouyang: This temple, this mountain, and this well are amongst the most scenic places located to the north-east of the [Luling] city walls. Yet, from when it was founded until now, this temple has never had a stele [for a temple inscription]. I would be delighted if you would write an inscription to provide later generations with information.1 Ouyang was happy to oblige, but he also used the opportunity to express his view that such commemorative inscriptions ( ji ) in fact contribute little to the longevity of temples. Inscriptions celebrating the beauty of famous temples and monasteries, he wrote, have owed in great numbers from the brushes of prominent literati, and yet only a fraction of such buildings survived. Small temples at little known sites, however, have stood the test of time in great numbers. And why? Because they stand on sites not worthy of strife. ‘Some temples have numerous inscriptions and eulogies, but they could not prevent [these temples] from falling into oblivion. Others lack inscriptions, and yet their longevity was preserved.’2 The abbot was not deterred by Ouyang’s dim view of the value of an inscription for his temple, clearly hoping his temple would bene t from this association with such a prominent literatus, regardless of the content. The text illustrates the often formulaic nature of such inscriptions. Literati as famous as Ouyang Shoudao must have received hundreds of such requests for inscriptions. The vast numbers of texts preserved in local gazetteers and in the literary collections of famous and not so

1 Ouyang Shoudao, ‘Luoshan Lingquan yuanji’, XZWJ, 17.2a. 2 XZWJ, 17.2b–3a.

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famous literati testify to the doubtless much larger number of temple inscriptions produced throughout the premodern period. They follow a general pattern, often starting with a description of the temple’s natural surroundings, discussing a few highlights of the temple’s known history, and invariably ending with a laudatory account of recent restoration efforts. A nal sentence like the one translated above (‘I would be delighted if you would write an inscription to provide later generations with information’),3 expressing the hope that such an inscription will serve to provide information for later visitors and preserve the names of those who contributed to the restoration for future generations, also form part of the conventions of the genre. There is no space in the blueprint for such inscriptions for any expression of private religious sentiment or personal spiritual involvement with the temple. Ouyang explicitly questions the value of his text for the temple, thereby creating even more distance between his inner thoughts and the formulaic text produced. It might seem perfectly acceptable to dismiss literati writings about local temples for these reasons; such texts reveal nothing of personal religious sentiments, they are often slanted towards the central government, and only served to bestow cultural capital on such establishments.4 Dismissing the whole genre of temple inscriptions for such reasons, however, would be unwise. Surely there are further questions to ask. If the abbot of the temple on Luo Mountain was merely interested in Ouyang Shoudao for the prestige he could lend the establishment, then what did Ouyang gain from that arrangement? What does Ouyang’s text reveal, not explicitly but at least implicitly, about his own view of the local temple, its role in the locality, and his relationship to the temple and its locality? I propose that a close reading of the texts with these questions in mind can reveal something of the personal views of the literati, contrary to the generally held view that such texts exclude all personal experiences and sentiments.5 Texts never exist within a vacuum; literati inscriptions, too, are motivated accounts that contain personal agendas, perspectives and persua- sions. Reading the texts to reveal such personal perspectives can shed

3 XZWJ, 17.2a. 4 Edward Davis, for example, expresses this perspective quite vocally throughout his book. Davis, Society and the Supernatural. 5 See, for example, Kleeman, ‘The Expansion of the Wen-ch’ang Cult’, 46, for a statement of this view.

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light on the world that the literati sought to shape. See, for example, this inscription written in the mid-twelfth century by Anfu jinshi Wang Ting- gui 王庭圭 (1079–1171).6 Wang is not merely giving an evocative description of the scenery surrounding Panteng Shrine 蟠籐廟, but describing his own sense of awe: When one leaves the county seat and travels south, . . . the mountain gorges become deep and dangerous. The water in the streams stems from a single source. To the west of the mountain, just at the mouth of the cave, water envelops the base of the mountain.7 Old trees overhanging the stream have grown into each other, while their big roots, deep green, protrude like dragons and snakes in strange and ugly shapes. Crooked and bent, [the trees] soar into the clouds. The trees are all several hundred years old. When a storm rages in the forest, the trees tremble and shake, and the water beats against the rocks. The onlooker feels insigni cant, thoroughly cold, and so shaken he cannot stay long. Tradition has it that this place is the lair of a dragon spirit. Hence, in times of droughts and epidemics, people beseech the god with prayers, and always receive a response.8 At rst glance one could read this as the formulaic opening of a temple inscription, with its geographical references, its description of the natural setting, and the rst appearance of the deity, whose response to prayers is immediate. Upon closer inspection, however, the reader becomes aware that the conventions of the genre hide a more personal perspective of a participant, a visitor who comes to worship. When Wang Tinggui writes, ‘The onlooker feels insigni cant, thoroughly cold, and so shaken he cannot stay long,’ one gets the distinct impression Wang is describing his own experience. Our understanding of the inscription as a whole could be greatly enhanced by the knowledge that Wang is describing a sacred site that is meaningful to him personally. Without denying the fact that literati inscriptions reveal only a limited personal perspective, I propose to take that limited perspective extremely

6 Wang Tinggui was born in Anfu in 1080 (also given as 1079), and passed the jinshi exam in 1118. He supported the controversial Hu Quan (1102–1180), even when he had been banished for his critique of the humiliating peace negotiations with the Jin. When Hu Quan was invited back to court under Xiaozong in 1161, Wang brie y advanced in his career, but had by then already reached the advanced age of 81. The vast majority of his extended life, Wang spent as a recluse at home. His collected writings are entitled Luxi wenji, in which several biographies are included written by such prominent gures as Zhou Bida, Yang Zhangru, Jiang Wanli, and Hu Quan. 7 The mountain Wang refers to is Tiantai Mountain in Anfu. Anfu xianzhi (1872), 3.9a. 8 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.4b. The text is not included in Wang Tinggui’s literary collection.

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seriously, with the intention of achieving a better understanding of the private religious experiences of literati. Situating temple inscriptions within broader contexts, reading the texts against the grain, and allowing for the possibility that such texts reveal not only social strategies and negotiations within local religious communities, but also personal religious sentiments, will, hopefully, yield fruitful results. The arguments made in this chapter could be summarized as follows. Ritual practices shaped the communities in which they were performed. Such communities formed by shared religious practices were not isolated, mutually exclusive communities, but units that were ‘constantly de ned and rede ned by inclusion and exclusion’.9 My interest here is in the ways in which the literati imagined their roles within such communities, and their experience of the religious practices that shaped such communities. I shall argue, in the pages that follow, that members of the local and national elites saw themselves as not only belonging to such local communities, but also as active participants in such local religious practices. In their writings, they represented themselves as playing signi cant roles within communities uni ed by religious practice. The role they envisaged for themselves was one of explanation and translation. They saw it as their task to represent local practice in such a way that it matched more broadly established elite discourse. Where there were discrepancies between local practice and elite discourse, they perceived their role to be the rewriting, or the ‘translation’ of the practices they observed. During the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, I argue, local religious practices and their sites served as important resources, providing members of different elite groups with the means to negotiate and renegotiate their place within local communities. Rather than reading these acts of negotiation purely as economic transactions and exchanges of symbolic capital, I argue that they also represented a deeply felt need to belong to local communities, and to play active roles within them. With this in mind, let us look again at the inscription for Panteng Shrine in Anfu by Wang Tinggui. The last sentence of the passage translated above reads as follows: ‘People beseech the god with prayers in times of droughts and epidemics.’10 Uni ed by their hope for a response from the deity to their urgent prayers, and by the experience of travel-

9 Phil Withington and Alexandra Shepard, ‘Introduction’, in Shepard and Withington, eds., Communities, 6. 10 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.4b.

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ling to this remote shrine, the worshippers must have felt some sense of shared identity and community. When Wang Tinggui wrote the evocative description of the setting at Panteng Shrine, did he consider himself to be a member of that community? Did he share the identity of the community on whose behalf he wrote the inscription? Wang’s narrative introduces a local magistrate, who, at a time of extreme drought in the summer months of 1145, led the prayers at Panteng Shrine. From Wang’s description, it is clear that the magistrate was an outsider: unable to draw on his own knowledge, the magistrate had to explore the area and enquire with the local elders to nd a propitious location for such worship. It is these elders, the qilao 耆老, a word that has connotations of experience acquired over a lifetime, who informed the magistrate of the spirit of Panteng and who led the magistrate and his entourage to the shrine. When Wang exclaimed, ‘Ah! The power of this deity!’, after describing the miraculous appearance of the heavy rainfall that followed the prayers carried out here, Wang himself spoke to us not as an outsider, but in the voice of someone who himself sensed those powers, who shared in the bene t of that deity’s powers.11 It is the words of the elders that are subsequently used to describe earlier manifestations of the magni cent powers of the deity in a report submitted to the central court. ‘[The magistrate] included the words of the elders, who many decades ago witnessed innumerable miracles of [the deity’s] ef cacy with their own eyes (mudu 目睹).’12 After recounting some of these miracles, Wang Tinggui writes again: These are extraordinary events, some of which may seem hard to believe, but they all took place recently. The elders observed them with their own eyes, and the people all recounted them in detail.13 Wang drew on the personal experience of the elders to underscore the veracity of these miraculous events, twice using the expression ‘with their own eyes’. His reliance on the standing of the elders within the community and the authority of locally transmitted details to lend veracity to his account, as well as his own sense of awe at the setting of the shrine and the powers of the deity, suggest that he experienced these events not as an outsider but as a participant. Ritual communities were typically constructed in the shared experience of such events as the

11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.5a.

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miraculous rainfall at Panteng, and by describing them as a participant, Wang Tinggui positioned himself as a member of that community. Liu Chenweng (1232–1297), a literatus from Luling and proli c author of temple inscriptions, whose personal circumstances will be discussed further below, also wrote texts about local temples from the perspective of a member of the local religious community.14 Temples, in Liu’s experience, performed central roles in local communities. In Jishui county, for example, the presence of the deity of Lingwei Shrine 靈威廟 ensured that: local practices are digni ed and the people are honest. The fruits of their labour are even more plentiful and abundant, and for three hundred years [the locals] have been known for their scholarly honours and of cial rank.15 This deity not only boasts examination success amongst his powers, but a positive in uence on local morals. One might expect such phrases to be uttered as part of a drive for imperial recognition, and Lingwei Shrine did obtain its name by imperial edict during the Chunyou reign- period (1241–1253), but Liu Chenweng had little interest in such matters. He was, however, deeply interested in what happened at this shrine. After quoting the full text of a Northern Song inscription preserved inside the shrine, which tells the story of the arrival of a large stone, carried to this site by raft on the swollen Gan, he wrote: The shrine was moved from the river westwards. The person who moved it was Sun Keshun 孫克順. Recently, his grandson Jue 玨, together with He Renshu 何仁叔 and Liu Honggui 劉宏規, led the villagers to build a Hall for the Stone Gentlemen (Shilang dian 石郎殿 ). The seventh of the statues in the right corridor has not yet been identi ed. Wang Ziyun is the most illustrious among them.16 We cannot now trace these individuals who safeguarded the shrine from ooding by moving it westward, and who enlisted the help of the villagers to extend its buildings. We cannot con rm the identity of the seventh deity, or nd out who Wang Ziyun was. What matters for our purposes, however, is that Liu Chenweng was very familiar with the local community of worshippers at the temple and with locally held

14 Such texts are included in Liu’s literary collection, Xuxi ji, hereafter XXJ. Liu’s biographical details are discussed in further detail below. See pages 84–91. 15 XXJ, 4.40b. 16 XXJ, 4.39a–b.

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beliefs. His insider knowledge, and the respect he afforded those local gures by including them in his narrative, suggest that Liu Chenweng, too, was writing his inscription as a participant member of the community that these worshippers constituted. Wang Tinggui’s mid-twelfth-century inscription and Liu Chenweng’s mid-thirteenth-century inscription both suggest that these literati imagined themselves to be members of local communities, communities that were shaped by the temples and shrines their texts commemorate. An early fourteenth-century text written for a popular shrine known as Lingji Shrine 靈濟廟 in Longquan, provides another example of such elite membership in religious communities. Its author, Kang Rui 康瑞, was a Longquan native who served as instructor from 1344 in Xin’gan 新淦 county in Linjiang prefecture, just north of Jizhou.17 He was clearly impressed with the extensive worship of this group of deities in Longquan: On the register of of cially sanctioned worship in Longquan, the temple at Gong Stream 龔溪 is the only temple for gods who truly reign supreme within this area. The locals devotedly worship them, homes have their statues, and in [each] neighbourhood there are shrines for them. At times of droughts or epidemics, famines or military upheaval, prayers are immediately followed by a response. . . . The way in which the deities bless the area is by no means limited to providing sons and grandsons.18 Kang Rui was obviously aware of the powerful bene ts brought by these deities, and their powers extended well beyond Longquan: Evidence of their numinous powers is even more manifest further a eld. Within an area of 500 kilometres, [people] rush here to bow down and kow-tow, begging for [the god’s] numinous powers. Further yet, boat- travellers on rivers and lakes who fear the wind and waves all call on him, too, praying for divine assistance. The numinosity of the spirit is so abundant!19 One might hazard a guess here that this was a cult that had spread throughout the region. Despite, or perhaps because of, the wider appeal

17 Kang Rui, zi Duanyu. In 1344 he was given the post of instructor in Xin’gan. Later he served in Ganzhou prefecture, and was eventually promoted to the post of assistant judicial of cer ( panguan) in Longxing (now Nanchang), the seat of the circuit government. Kang’s name is given variously as Kang Duan and Kang Rui. The 1773 and 1873 gazetteers have Kang Rui, the 1683 edition has Kang Duan. No further biographical details are known about him. 18 Kang Rui, ‘Zhongxiu Lingji miao ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.7b. 19 Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.7b.

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of the deity beyond county boundaries, Kang invokes certain strategems to stress the intimate relationship between county and deity: The family name of the gods is Gong. For generations [the Gongs] lived in Tianpei in this county. There were seven brothers and they all lived as recluses, not taking up of cial posts. They had a reputation among the locals for their virtue, righteousness, lial piety and their friendship. In the dingmao year of Tianyou of the Tang dynasty [i.e. 907], the oldest brother, just when he was lifting up a piece of sandalwood, lost his footing and fell in the water. The younger brothers tried to save him, but they all drowned consecutively. They were buried by the entrance of [the village of] Shilong Shuangxi 石龍雙溪. [One of the brothers then] appeared in a dream of a village elder named Liao Jiuweng 廖九翁, saying: ‘My brothers and I have died. We have become gods, and our blood shall feed this land. You must set up a shrine to worship us. We will send the materials there ourselves.’ When they nished there was thunder and rain, creating giant waves that drifted the logs to the place of their grave. The villagers marvelled at this. They built a shrine at this location. Today’s shrine at Luotuan 羅團 in Heshu 禾蜀 canton is located at the original location of their apotheosis.20 The ties between deity and location were rst and foremost ancestral or kinship ties: the gods lived ‘in this county’, they had a good reputation ‘among the locals’, and the shrine was built at the original location of their apotheosis. The gods belonged in this area, and had a loyalty to it in a way that paralleled the ways in which the worshippers also belonged. But there was a second, more sinister, connection between deity and location, expressed in the deity’s own words, ‘our blood shall feed this land’. Their violent death through drowning forced the locals into a new and reciprocal relationship; their ‘blood’ could only ‘feed the land’ if they are themselves fed by regular sacri ce. What Kang Rui introduced as a harmless, bene cial deity represented also a powerful and potentially threatening dark force, which the locals had to serve to avoid its harm.21 These deities and the residents of this locality were drawn into an exclusive and mutually dependent relationship. But what of Kang Rui’s own position within that relationship? Was he an outside observer, or did he belong to the community? His faithful and detailed retelling of the events suggests that he did not deny the importance of such narratives. In fact, there are numerous indications that he believed them to

20 Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.7b–8a. 21 For further discussion of such practices, see von Glahn, The Sinister Way.

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be a signi cant part of the way in which the temple functioned within the local community. His narrative served to con rm the value of such locally held beliefs, and Kang Rui’s retelling of those narratives con- rmed that he, too, would like to be regarded as a member of that community, even if his personal belief in these events is left ambiguous. His long inscription retells in full detail several more recent miraculous events, and then describes, in line with the conventions of the genre, recent efforts to restore the shrine. In 1327, a descendant of the Gong family had donated two-thirds of an acre of land and more than 55,000 strings of cash to pay for a complete refurbishment of the shrine. The ancestral shrine (zumiao) was completely rebuilt on a grander scale and with a great deal more ornamentation; new statues were carved, and all implements were provided in accordance with the ritual prescriptions. The project, completed by the beginning of the new year in 1329, had become a Gong family matter.22 The request had then gone out to Kang Rui to write down these details. We exalt [this temple’s] awesome numinosity which assists the country (guojia 國家) and guards against disaster. Its success manifests itself in the people and is transmitted to later generations, and it keeps on being produced without end. The numinous powers of the deities are an unlimited joy. Like mountains and valleys, they never decay. I intend to make a great announcement about its blessings so as to enlarge and continue the celebration of the favours bestowed on the country. The new temple is very grand and graceful, and this is its beginning. I have respectfully collected these stories to record their dates.23 The elevated language of Kang Rui in this section, the inscription proper, suggests that Kang’s writing was intended to lend prestige to the project. One could surmise that this inscription was intended to pro- mote the shrine from a local popular cultic site to an of cially approved shrine.24 Perhaps the request to Kang for an inscription re ected the shifting social status of members of the worshipping community of Lingji Shrine.25 By describing the powers of the deities as offering blessings to the land ( guo) and its resident great families ( jia), Kang rendered the temple’s bene ts no longer as purely local, but as more widely

22 Kang Rui listed all the more recent Gong descendants on the back of the stone. Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.9b. 23 Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.9a–b. 24 One sees similar developments in the cult of Kang Wang, popular in this area during this time. See Gerritsen, ‘From Demon to Deity.’ 25 See Ter Haar, ‘Local Society and the Organization of Cults.’

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shared throughout the country. What was once a thriving cult with a local body of worshippers, became, with the help of Kang’s narrative, a community with aspirations of boasting an of cially sanctioned temple. One could read this process as hegemonic discourse, suggesting that Kang Rui is wresting control over the temple away from local believers. One could, however, also read Kang Rui’s description as an attempt to gain entrance into and membership of the community of worshippers. His act of writing covered the entire spectrum of envisioning local religious practices: it included on the one hand Kang’s recognition that the deities’ demonic origins lie with the violent deaths of the Gong brothers, and on the other hand Kang’s attempt to attach universal value to the deities’ blessings. Both approaches within the act of writing created a space for Kang Rui among the community of worshippers: through writing, Kang could imagine that his recognition of the origin story of the deities entitled him to membership of the groups of believers; his elevation of the temple into elite discourse facilitated Kang’s sense of belonging to the temple’s community. The inscriptions by Wang Tinggui, Liu Chenweng and Kang Rui, discussed here, all suggested that literati imagined that they belonged, or at least could belong, to the religious communities that lay behind the temples they commemorated in their texts. Literati authors situated the temple in a social space, a local ritual community, and they situated themselves within those communities. Kang Rui cast himself in an active role within this community; his act of writing this inscription was part of a process that attempted to transform the shrine from popular deity cult to of cially sanctioned shrine. If we regard Kang’s role as an active one within the community, then we need to explore how common it was for literati to play such an ‘active role’.

Literati roles in ritual communities

If literati imagined themselves to belong to the communities situated around local temples, what was the nature of their membership? Were they merely observers, passively participating, or did they take a more active part? Liu Ruli 劉汝礪, who served as magistrate in Luling, certainly imagined himself to be an active member of the local community. In 1255, Luling suffered a drought, and Liu decided to climb Mount Yunteng 雲騰山 to carry out prayers for rain. Near the top he found a spring, its water collecting in a pond near Biaoyu Shrine 飆馭廟. Liu

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made his supplications at this spring, hoping to draw on the ef cacious powers of the spring’s deity, despite his dismay at the lax behaviour of those present, who paid little attention to the ritual proscription of washing in this spring. The inscription continued: When he was nished with the prayers for rain he returned home. Rest- ing on his bed he dreamed that he saw carts and horses decorated with streamers lined up in a hall. Someone told him: ‘Quickly go out to worship!’ Startled, Liu got up, and rushed to the place of worship. Wind was blowing, it was thundering, and severe rain fell down incessantly. That year there was a good harvest, and the next year when they prayed for rain, there was also a response.26 Encouraged by this success, Liu decided to make the spring a more prominent place for worship. He contacted a Mr. Zeng 曾, owner of the pond into which the water of the spring emptied, and asked him to stop it being used for washing, so as to prevent pollution of the upper ow of the river. He also improved the access road to the spring. The text hints at considerable local tension: between Magistrate Liu and those who used the spring regularly for washing and bathing, and between Magistrate Liu and the landowners, the Zengs. The text states explicitly that this spring was not the one most commonly used for prayers in times of drought (‘Not all traces of those who prayed for rain in the past led to this spring’);27 the magistrate nevertheless insisted on declaring this the of cial location for rain prayers. The magistrate was clearly imposing his interpretation of correct ritual onto locally divergent practices. For the purposes of my argument, however, the existence of that tension serves to emphasize the active role members of the local elite envisaged for themselves within the arena of local religious practice. Even if many locals disagreed with the magistrate, Liu himself was clearly convinced he had a part to play in the theatre of local religion. We can only guess at the exact nature of the relationship between Magistrate Liu and the Zengs, but it is clear that Liu’s plan to turn the spring into a sacred space dedicated to worship could only work with the cooperation of the Zengs. The dependency of local governors on the locally resident elite to put their plans into effect is a truism throughout Chinese history, and it was no different for local ritual. Magistrates and literati recognized each

26 Ouyang Shoudao, ‘Yongyunchi ming’, XZWJ, 26.1b. 27 XZWJ, 26.1b.

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other as useful partners in transforming local religious practices. When a certain Magistrate Li arrived in Luling in the middle of the thirteenth century, for example, he went to pray at the Luling shrine for Kang Wang, whose cult was widespread in Jizhou at the time. Afterwards the magistrate spoke to Ouyang Shoudao, one of the most prominent literati in the area, saying: The government of the ancients controlled both deities and humans, and never separated the two, as later generations would. I heard recently that there was a shrine for [Kang] Wang here, but the worship [carried out] accords less and less with the Classics.28 The magistrate then instructed Ouyang Shoudao to write an inscription to place at the shrine to explain how this god should be worshipped, a request Ouyang gladly complied with. Ouyang’s inscription explains in great detail how he felt worship here could be improved. He shared the concerns of the magistrate, considering current practices less than desirable. He expressed some doubt, however, about what the effect of his inscription might be. As discussed above, when the abbot at Luo Moun- tain requested an inscription, Ouyang had argued that such texts could not guarantee the longevity of the institution. In this case, Ouyang felt the literati were not doing enough to improve local morals: My composition and calligraphy are not skilled enough to elucidate the abundant virtues of [Kang] Wang. I am only mindful of the Honourable Magistrate’s clari cation of the [proper] meaning of these vulgar practices. He rst promulgated this among the learned scholars of the area, so that they would spread it to the people in the rural communities. Did the confusion [over correct practice] and the fear [of the demonic] in the villages disappear afterwards? No. Not only was there no improvement, but also there was no punishment for this worship [of their deity]. Hence there is also no one to blame.29 A certain resignation comes through in these nal words of the inscription, as if Ouyang accepted that his improving writings only had a limited effect. Not only did few of the commoners listen to him, but literati practices, too, left much to be desired: Only three out of every ten Confucian scholars who live in this area preserve the correct [way of doing things] without deviation. They transform

28 Ouyang Shoudao, ‘Lingyou miao ji’, XZWJ, 16.4b–5a. 29 XZWJ, 16.5a.

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vulgar behaviour without being transformed by vulgarity. Do we not look up to these people?30 The few who did preserve proper behaviour played a transforming role in local society, and Ouyang felt it behoved him to take an active role within the religious community. Both Ouyang Shoudao and the magistrates discussed here were aware that although they would like to transform local practice, their success depended entirely on other members of the community. But what exactly motivated the literati in this participation? What were they hoping to achieve as active participants in local religious communities? Should we see their participation as private acts—personal responses to private spiritual needs—or should we understand them as socially constructed, with implications for their role in society? I shall demonstrate below that their participation should be understood on both levels. Jizhou literati, like other social groups, frequented temples to satisfy private spiritual needs. Temple inscriptions, read carefully, do testify to the nature of those needs. Recognition of this private dimension does not deny the existence of a more public dimension to their participation, and I argue that literati also saw their participation within local ritual communities as a way of enhancing their position within those local communities. I propose that ritual communities served as an arena for negotiations over local power. By imposing their interpretation on local ritual practice, literati attempted to negotiate their place and strengthen their position within the local community. Before discussing the social dimensions of their participation in local religious practices, I shall discuss what I suggest can be read as the private religious experiences of Jizhou literati between 1100 and 1350.

Private religious experiences of the literati

Let me return once more to the inscription for Panteng Shrine in Anfu written by the twelfth-century literatus Wang Tinggui. I suggested earlier that Wang’s evocative description of the scenery, and his reliance on the testimony of the local elders to lend authority to his account, could be read as expressions of a desire for membership of the local community. This is how the inscription ends:

30 XZWJ, 16.5a.

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These mountains and rivers are all controlled by deities who can bring about transformations and give rise to clouds and rain. The god’s blessings reach tens of thousands of people. It would therefore be appropriate to enter [this god] in the register of worship, since we have received such illustrious [favours], but the request has not yet been granted. The abundant powers of the deity, however, are not dependent on whether the god has honorary titles and enfeoffments [or not]. Listing titles and enfeoffments when discussing a god is like asking after posts and titles when discussing a human being. How do important posts and heavy responsibilities in the end bring bene t to the people? It is the same for the gods.31 The deity, locally regarded as impressively powerful, had not yet received of cial sanction from the state, despite the magistrate’s faithful retelling of the deity’s miracles. Wang Tinggui was clearly sympathetic to the locals’ desire for state recognition, but he also made it clear that he himself held another view: the powers of a deity are not dependent on ‘honorary titles and enfeoffments’. Is Wang not revealing some internal contradiction here? Of cially, his view was that requesting state recognition was the appropriate procedure for a locally bene cent deity, but at the same time he could not help expressing a divergent personal view. He drew a comparison with human beings: we should not rely on a person’s of cial titles and posts to recognize his strengths and bene ts. Wang himself had a chequered career history: despite his successful jinshi examination in 1118, he had supported the controversial Hu Quan (1102–1180) at a time when Hu Quan was out of favour, and as a consequence, he spent most of his years writing in Anfu.32 Clearly Wang saw parallels between the deity’s lack of recognition and his own lack of advancement. Wang used this opportunity to communicate his understanding of the value of the deity to say something, indirectly, about his own life experience. In an earlier chapter I discussed brie y a revealing inscription written by Xiao Xuchen, the water transport of cial who was so keen to show off his mastery of bureaucratic procedure. When he wrote his inscription for Zhaoji Temple in 1125, he was addressing a broad audience. His text, as he writes in his nal sentences, was carved into stone and placed in the [temple’s] central hall, ‘to give great glory to the new

31 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.4b. 32 Wang Tinggui’s biography was written by Zhou Bida, and is included in the last chapter of Wang’s literary writings. See Wang, Luxi wenji, fulu 2a–7a. Hu Quan, more than twenty years younger than Wang Tinggui, also hailed from Luling. He was militantly opposed to the paci cation policies of the mid-twelfth century.

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order of the emperor’; he offered this inscription so that religious practices ‘will continue without fail’.33 And yet, alongside his lofty aims of assisting the emperor in the transmission of his orders and safeguarding the continuation of orthodox practices, Xiao also had a personal agenda. He wrote:

My family home is in Quanjiang 泉江, but until I was an adult I followed my father’s of cial postings to the north and south. When he served at court, he always had to ask leave to go, and report his coming home. I do not know how many rivers and lands he traversed, and yet he was never concerned about dangers. All this was the gift of this deity.34 We know nothing else about Xiao Xuchen, nor about his father. We can merely guess at the restlessness of a childhood spent in the wake of a lower governmental of cial career, the father dragging his family from one provincial posting to the next. Life at the capital, with its constant scrutiny of one’s movements, may not have offered much relief, and travel was part of life. For the travelling of cial and his family, this god, for whom Xiao knows neither name nor story, clearly offered stability and security. Gratitude for the sense of protection it had offered both to the of cial and the anxious child must surely have been part of his motivation in reporting the ‘awesome record of the deity’ to the sub- prefectural authorities, leading eventually to the granting of a plaque. While on the surface the text may merely be a recounting of of cial procedures, it can, at the same time, be read as a testimonial of a meaningful private religious experience.

Literati ritual and social strategy

Of course the private and public dimensions of religious practice cannot be wholly separated; rather, we should see them as closely inter- twined, as is clear in the inscription written in the late thirteenth century by Zhao Yike 趙儀可 for Immortal Ge’s Altar in the Wugong Mountains in Anfu county. The altar, named after the famous Jin dynasty immortal Ge Hong (284–364), who allegedly perfected his arts here before moving to Gezao Mountain 閣皂山, was widely known among literati for its numinous powers: ‘Carrying offerings of grain, [believers] rush here

33 Xiao Xuchen, ‘Ci Zhaoji miao e ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.10b. 34 Longquan xianzhi (1773), 9.10a.

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at double speed for an audience [with the deity], and only rarely are their prayers not answered.’35 Zhao had himself spent time here in his younger days: When I was a young of cial, I met my fellow clansman Zhao Yuanyang 趙原陽, a Daoist adept, outside the world of worldly concerns. We visited the Daoist branch temple of Jiyun, looking for authentic traces of the toad of white jade in the realm. We left after three days. That is now twenty years ago.36 Then, in the middle of the autumn, he arranged to meet at the same place, this time with a jinshi Liu Yunzhang 劉雲章, his own clanmate Zhao Kai 趙塏, and a local scholar named Zhou Nanrui 周南瑞.37 At the agreed time we all ascended to the altar. After we performed our rituals, we climbed to the top for the view. There were few clouds and one could look far. Wu and Chu were all there in the blue horizon, even Kong Yan’s sharpness of vision could not improve [the view]. I felt weak for some time. At high noon, when we were about to go down, a Daoist adept invited us for an audience. He explained that they were renewing the platform and were doing restorations because a gentleman often rested there. We asked after his name, which was Shi Yuchan, who appeared to be a descendant of Grand Secretary Shi Tianze 史天澤. At the original shrine, behind the living quarters, sound and light were both restricted, so it was very gloomy. But looking at the elegance and digni ed nature of the temple buildings, one believed it to have been an extraordinary place. [We thought] it should be possible to ensure that Immortal Ge’s [altar] gets refurbished. As in the past we stayed overnight, and when we were about to leave, [the abbot] pointed to the altar plaque written by the chancellor [i.e. Wen Tianxiang], and requested an inscription. I could not refuse, and hence I have written about the origins of this mountain for the walls, so that visitors can read about it.38 The events described here are nothing out of the ordinary. Several friends make an outing to a mountain. While they admire the scenery, they are spotted by a Daoist, who asks the gentlemen to lend their support to his restoration campaign in the form of an inscription. Zhao Yike obliges, and records what he knows about the history of the Wugong Mountains and the altar. But the record tells us much more. Twice Zhao

35 Zhao Yike, ‘Ge xian tan ji’, Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.7b. On Ge Hong, see Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth. 36 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.7b. 37 For Zhou Nanrui brief biographical notes can be found in the Anfu gazetteer. Anfu xianzhi (1872), 11.28b. 38 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.8a.

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visited this place with a fellow clansman (tongzong 同宗), the repetition of the term suggesting its signi cance. Such shared outings consolidated a relationship, especially when Zhao Yuanyang, a Daoist adept, spent much of his time away from the daily interactions of secular life.39 In fact, the consolidation of relationships pervades the inscription. On the second outing, Zhao was joined by his clanmate Zhao Kai, local jinshi Liu Yunzhang, and scholar Zhou Nanrui. The four local dignitaries must have bonded not just through the shared performance of rituals at Ge Hong’s altar, but also through their ascent of Wugong Mountain, Jiangxi’s highest peak, Zhao Yike’s jubilant admiration of the view no doubt enhanced by the exhilaration of reaching the top and the exhaus- tion from the effort. If these men consolidated a pre-existing relationship, their shared membership of the literati community, another relationship was cemented which had much less raison d’être: between the Daoist religious establishment and the local literati. On the surface the nature of the transaction appears to be clear; the Daoist master clearly felt his restoration project would bene t from an explicit connection with the local literati, assuming that the social standing of the literati would translate into cultural capital for his Daoist establishment. Underneath the surface, however, the transaction was complicated by the apparent need on both sides to justify the relationship. Zhao Yike’s retelling of his visit to the Daoist temple, Jiyun, twenty years earlier, now sounds more like a tale fuelled by the need to build Daoist credentials than a mere nostalgic recollection. The Daoist master, for his part, played on Zhao Yike’s con- science by showing Wen Tianxiang’s calligraphy on the temple’s plaque. Allegedly, Wen’s father had come to Immortal Ge’s Altar to pray for a son before Wen Tianxiang’s birth, and Wen Tianxiang had donated this plaque after he had achieved honour in the capital. If someone of Wen Tianxiang’s fame had lent his support to the temple, surely Zhao Yike could not refuse. Zhao’s inclusion of this exchange in the inscription con rms that its message was not merely intended for Zhao’s ears, but also for a wider audience. While the Daoist master stood to gain from the association of his establishment with the prominent literati of the area, Zhao also basked in the glory of being ranked alongside Wen Tianxiang. In the negotiation of the various relationships between the

39 Zhao Yuanyang has a biography in the section on Buddhists and Daoists in the Anfu gazetteer. Anfu xianzhi (1872), 13.64b–65a.

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people involved, the recounted memory of an earlier trip and Wen’s calligraphy became valuable resources. The inscription for Immortal Ge’s Altar reads, at rst glance, as a straightforward account written for the purposes of fund-raising for the bene t of the Daoist Master. A close reading of the text, however, suggests the negotiation of much more complex reciprocal relationships between literati and religious specialist. The writing of this text was an active, dynamic process through which Zhao Yike negotiated his place and his role within the local community. In the text a community was constructed in which he, his relatives, his literati friends, and the Daoist master all manipulated the available resources to position themselves within the local community.

Participation through criticism

Participation in local religious life for Zhao Yike, as would appear from this inscription, consisted of visiting a local temple with friends, and writing an inscription for the temple. He did not, in so far as we can tell from this single inscription, offer his views on other activities that may have taken place there. Other literati used temple inscriptions as a means to convey their views of local religious practice. I would argue that for them, offering critical views of local religious practice should be understood as a desire to participate in that practice. Of course it is precisely the frequency with which we hear the critical literati voice that leads scholars like David Johnson, Terry Kleeman or Edward Davis to dismiss the genre entirely, and they are right to suggest that this literati desire to participate does not mean actual participation or even membership of ritual communities.40 Ouyang Shoudao, whose views we already touched on above, was one of these critical voices. Con- sider, for example, his critique of the activities at Shilong Shrine 石礱廟. Not far from the Luling county capital, the deity of Shilong Shrine, known for its ef cacy, attracted ‘people from far and near’.41 Following standard procedure, the locals requested a name (hao 號) for the deity, so that at a later date further requests could be led with the authorities

40 See, for example, David Johnson, ed., Ritual and Scripture in Chinese Popular Religion (Berkeley: Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1995). See also Kleeman, ‘The Expansion of the Wen-ch’ang Cult’, or Davis, Society and the Supernatural. 41 Ouyang Shoudao, ‘Shilong miaobei’, XZWJ, 13.15b.

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asking for permission to bestow higher honorary titles upon the deity. Despite several requests, the court had not yet granted such permission. Undeterred, the deity, still resident at Shilong, had continually provided blessings. At this point, in 1260, Ouyang Shoudao got to know a local resident and active member of the worshipping community, who persuaded the famous literatus to write an inscription. Ouyang clari es in the inscription that he only once stayed here for a month, and thus, strictly speaking, did not regard himself as a member of the local community. He did, however, use the opportunity to express his views; he explains ‘what makes this deity a deity.’42 In the course of his discussion, Ouyang makes an interesting observation. He rejects the value of requesting a name (hao) for the deity: What is the use for this god in having its name known? From the past, stories are passed on of scholars (shi ) dwelling on high precipices or in secluded valleys, and even though they [themselves] do not care about their usefulness to the world, their bene t reaches everywhere of its own accord. Man and spirit are one. So long as there was a spirit on distant Guyi 姑射 Mountain, and a disciple of Laozi lived on Weilei Mountain 畏壘山, disasters did not take place and the annual harvest was plentiful.43 The passages that Ouyang referred to here both discuss the order in the universe that emanates naturally from insigni cant, unnoticed beings (the demonic man on Guyi Mountain and Gengsang Chu 庚桑楚 on Weilei Mountain), as opposed to being the result of the deliberative policies of a celebrated ruler like Yao or Shun. Ouyang’s point was to argue for the existence of a bene cial power emanating from these higher beings, hermits or gods or virtuous men, whether they were known by name and recognized by the state or not.44 In making this point, Ouyang went against the view, presumably shared throughout the community of

42 XZWJ, 13.15b. 43 XZWJ, 13.14b. The reference is to Zhuangzi, Book 1. Ouyang Shoudao does not quote the text verbatim. A.C. Graham translates this passages as follows: ‘In the mountains of far-off Ku-yi there lives a daemonic man, whose skin and esh are like ice and snow, who is gentle as a virgin. He does not eat the ve grains but sucks in the wind and drinks the dew; he rides the vapour of the clouds, yokes ying dragons to his chariot, and roams beyond the four seas. When the daemonic in him concentrates it keeps creatures free from plagues and makes the grains ripen every year.’ See A.C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book of Chuang- tzu (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 46. 44 For a discussion of this aspect of Chinese religion, see von Glahn, The Sinister Way.

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worshippers around Shilong, that of cial recognition of the deity would be valuable. But Ouyang went even further; he denied not only the value of state sanction, but the role of the worshippers. While the worshippers desired of cial recognition of their deity’s powers and thereby also recognition of their community, Ouyang was voicing his own, privately held view: this deity, like Guyi and Gengsang Chu, needed neither worshippers nor imperial recognition to be of bene t to the world.

Liu Chenweng: personal commitment and critique

Ouyang Shoudao was not alone in expressing personal views that dif- fered from those held by the members of the community that had requested the inscription in the rst place. One of Ouyang Shoudao’s students followed in his teacher’s footsteps; Liu Chenweng (1232–1297), too, frequently used temple inscriptions to express his personal views about local religious practices. Liu Chenweng, of humble background, had gained the attention of Ouyang Shoudao, and under his tutelage became a recommended student in Luling in 1258.45 Only four years later he passed the jinshi examination, but because of his outspoken criticism of the policies of Jia Sidao 賈似道 (1213–1275), the emperor (Lizong, r. 1225–1265) placed him in third position in the palace exams.46 On account of his elderly parents, Liu took on the position of headmaster at the Lianxi Academy 濂溪書院 in Ganzhou in southern Jiangxi, not far from his home. During the 1260s and 1270s, Liu received several invitations to serve in high government posts, but rst the required period of mourning for his mother and then the fall of the Song government in 1276 curtailed his career.47 Liu was deeply moved by the death of Jiang Wanli 江萬里 (1198– 1275), who had taken his own life to express his loyalty to the Song, and

45 For a convenient and full biography of Liu Chenweng, see Liu Chenweng, Xuxi ci (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998), 1–15. 46 In 1259 Jia Sidao had become Grand Councillor and was in the process of pushing through several highly unpopular agricultural reforms. For his biography, see Herbert Franke, ed., Sung Biographies (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1976), 203. 47 Jiang Wanli recommended him for several posts, and Liu did return to the capital as an editor in the history of ce, but his career in central government was soon put on hold again for the mandatory period of mourning for his mother. Seven years later, he was recommended once again for a number of positions in the capital, and this time it was the fall of the Southern Song court in 1276 that cut short his career.

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he spent the last eighteen years of his life withdrawn from Mongol-Yuan public life. Although he received little recognition in any of cial capacity, Liu was widely known and respected for his sharp literary observations, his deep-felt loyalism to the Song, and his outspoken criticism and praise of his contemporaries.48 It is the same frankness that character- izes the many inscriptions he wrote for temples and shrines in Jizhou. Liu was a frequent visitor at local temples and monasteries, and knew a great deal about their history and current circumstances. His writings are engaging, apt displays of his wide knowledge and insight, although by no means every point is delivered with the same clarity of purpose. The mysterious name of a monastery, encountered on a cross-country ramble in the Lu Mountains, Monastic Hall of Purple Ganoderma (Zizhi daoyuan 紫芝道院), led him into a broad-ranging discussion of the many varieties of the fungus ganoderma and their description in Ge Hong’s Baopuzi neipian.49 A temple located near the mouth of the river reminded Liu of the water cascading down in waterfalls near their springs in the mountains, which in turn led him to remind us that the river originated deep underground before welling up into a spring. People only see the downstream part [of a river], . . . but their springs originate in remote lands, something which people often overlook. I measure this earth by the heavens, and I know the sea from such springs. Since writing about Lingwei Shrine also highlights the mouth of the river, I dare not neglect this.50 His verbosity came from this sense of ‘not daring to neglect’ the details, the connections, and the wider associations, even if they were not immediately relevant to the points he wished to make. Armed with a great deal of knowledge, Liu entered into spirited dia- logues both with the people he encountered on his visits and with his readers, sometimes recording his conversations verbatim. In an inscription for Luling’s Chaoxian Monastery, where the Huagai Immortals were worshipped, Liu describes his dif culties in nding out exactly who the Three Immortals were:

48 See also Anne Gerritsen, ‘Liu Chenweng (1232–1297): Ways of Being Local’ in Kenneth J. Hammond, ed., The Human Tradition in Premodern China (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 111–125. 49 Liu Chenweng, ‘Zizhi daoyuan ji’, XXJ, 1.25a-b. Purple ganoderma is associated with Daoism, and can refer to immortality. Zhi 芝 is known as ‘glossy ganoderma’ (ganoderma sinensis), still used today for its medicinal attributes. 50 Liu Chenweng, ‘Lingwei miao ji’, XXJ, 4.38b.

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For this inscription I knew the name of the immortal even without asking others, and those who know say that [a reference to] Lord Fuqiu is enough. I was, however, not able to nd out the names of his pupils. People would say: ‘This is Lord Shen, who once bestowed a poem. Is he not the same as Master Wang?’ Or someone would say: ‘He rode the phoenix in front of Laozi at the same time as Great Master Jin, and when he offered a poem, that was like when Laozi, over two hundred years of age, went to see Lord Xian of the Qin.’ Someone else said: ‘After the poem was bestowed, there were Wang Bao and Wang Qiao, and they both have worthies’ biographies.’ And so on and so forth. But nothing was ever heard of Guo. So then they said: ‘Guo is also a Wang, but he changed his last name, indeed they were paternal cousins.’ We may not know about times long past, but we do know that the idea that they were paternal cousins is complete nonsense! . . . In the records of immortals, there are many Wangs, there are six ancient and recent Wang Qiaos, but those are crude and super cial overviews, and they provide unsystematic and insuf cient evidence, and to entrust Huagai Mountain with inscriptions of [Confucius’ disciples] Yan and Lu like Magu [Mountain] is even sillier.51 This long-winded outpouring suggests that the cult of the Huagai Immortals at this stage was not yet well-known in Jizhou, and that Liu had little to say speci cally about the cult.52 Liu’s style itself, however, is revealing. It illustrates his strong opinions and his readiness to admit to gaps in his knowledge. His urge to record his thoughts and conversations in such detail allows us to gain some insight into his personal religious experience. Liu was a keen walker, and enjoyed nothing more than exploring the mountains in search of shrines and temples. He would leave Luling on foot, and walk through quite rough terrain, sometimes up steep hills, to spend a night or two at whichever temple or mountain hut he encountered on his rambles. He found that with ‘the desolate rustling of old trees, the [worries of the] mortal realm disappeared of their own accord.’53 Sometimes he went to pray, especially during the turbulent years around 1275, when the Southern Song government, to which Liu was intensely loyal, was losing the battle with the Mongol invaders.54 He

51 Liu Chenweng, ‘Chaoxian guan ji’, XXJ, 3.30a–31a. Compare the discussion of this text in Hymes, Way and Byway, 91–2. 52 Two fourteenth-century inscriptions for temples associated with Huagai worship in Luling suggest that by then, such worship had become more widely known. Feng Yiweng, ‘Jiahui guan ji’, Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.34b–35b; Jie Xisi, ‘Tianhua wanshou gong bei’, Jie Xisi quanji, 371–2. See Hymes, Way and Byway, 91–2. 53 Liu Chenweng, ‘Jizhou Nengrensi zhongxiu ji’, XXJ, 4.6b. 54 Ibid.

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was always dismayed when he found temples in ruins, especially if he had once enjoyed a stay there. He was equally delighted when he found rickety buildings restored and leaky roofs rethatched. He had seen Nengren 能仁 Temple, one of his favourite temples in Jizhou, decline from a small but well-kept private monastery to a deserted place: When I went past again several years later, the temple had become over- grown, the road was destroyed. The plants formed a thick forest; gates were bolted, bells and drums had disappeared, and no monks were living there anymore.55 But when he ran into the abbot, ‘his clothes tattered and his shoes worn out, not prepared for guests’, the abbot claimed to be able to restore the place completely, and requested an inscription from Liu.56 Liu refused, leaving the abbot to pace back and forth between the rubble of old paths and waving grasses, and declaring him a fool. Liu’s lack of faith in the abbot turned out to be unfounded; when he stumbled across Nen- gren Temple again on a chrysanthemum-picking expedition, he found the place utterly transformed. He could only apologize, and offer to write the inscription now, full of admiration for the achievements of the abbot. When Liu asked him how he had achieved this, the abbot answered: In the past these elds were not prosperous, but to encourage the juices to ow, one or two of the residents cut open the elds, thereby encouraging the spirit of the land to feel regret over earlier disasters. Gradually [they managed to] increase the boundaries. I selected only people of splendid and grand [abilities] to enter my dwelling. We moved hills and dug valleys, we re ned the crops and replenished the sh, and we rebuilt the dilapidated buildings in the mountains with gold and emerald. I am able to be energetic and able to be frugal, although I was not able to [control] time. As for time, that took care of itself, like wheat when the ground is covered with snow or a spring near a mountain top.57 Liu was greatly impressed by the modest abbot. He felt acutely aware that the abbot and his monks had been driven by unsel sh motives, regarding the dif cult task simply as their path (wu dao 吾道), in contrast to an of cial and his workforce, who could only be driven to work by

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 XXJ, 4.7b.

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the promise of rich rewards, even then remaining dissatis ed with the results of their work.58 Liu took the contrast between abbot and of cial much further, turning it into a thorough and emotional critique of society: The postal stations are running out of funds, the [income from] land taxes is dropping. The merchant goods that come in are piling up, yet the prefectural storehouses remain empty. An of cial vainly sends fast missives, relying on documents, dragging along his superiors to listen, and getting the masses of the city to help him. On the day of [this of cial’s] death, there will be attering inscriptions on his grave, and his honorary name will be included in the Of cial History. Those who knew him, however, will regard him as a thief of the people, while those who write about him rave about his human talents. I can not be heavily critical of myself, while praising others who are different. What point is there in saying it? I am about to vent my angriest feelings, and spit out what is most shameful for later generations.59 These are emotional utterances, betraying a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the hypocrisy of a world where an of cial can fail his people so badly, and yet receive praise and recognition from the establishment. Liu was aware that not everyone would share his emotions, ‘only people who have experienced regret over a long period of time will understand the sadness in my words’, but he tried nevertheless to draw his readers’ attention to the contrasts he perceived. Inspired by the name of the temple, he discussed the different interpretations of neng (ability) and ren (human-heartedness). While in Buddhist thought, ‘being capable of human-heartedness’ (nengren) is most important, according to the ru (Confucians), ren is understood to be public-spiritedness, awareness, love, in accordance with principle but without sel shness. . . . [Ren includes] everything before there was writing, and everything after the universe was established. But how could one word fully express all that!60 The problem, according to Liu, was not only that the Confucian concept of ren is too all-encompassing—Liu compared it to trying to understand the nature of a whole body on the basis of an understanding of a foot or a hand alone—but that the Confucian idea of ‘being capable’ (neng) was too perfectionist:

58 Ibid. 59 XXJ, 4.8a. 60 XXJ, 4.8b.

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Neng is understood as ‘there being nothing one cannot do.’ But if you [only] regard ‘there being nothing one cannot do’ as ‘being capable’, then there are always things one cannot do, even if one is a Yao or Shun.61 In contrast, Buddhism understands having something one cannot do as part of one’s capabilities ( yi bu neng wei neng 以不能為能). It was only because of that attitude, according to Liu, this reconciliation with the limits of one’s abilities, that the abbot was able to achieve the impossible and restore this temple with so few resources. The genre of ji, records written for temples, but also for schools, studios, government buildings and the like, allowed an author to expand at will on topics inspired by the names of such buildings. But Liu was doing much more than merely listing the known history of the building and holding forth about the signi cance of its name. Liu used the temple inscription to offer a deeply felt critique of fundamental Confucian concepts on the basis of his personal experience. Liu Chenweng’s critical voice was by no means limited to Confucian concepts; in fact, one would be hard-pressed to identify Liu with any one tradition or school of thought. Rather than taking issue with one group of thinkers, or expressing loyalty to one way of thinking, Liu took issue with any lack of commitment, regardless of the religious tradition. He disliked, for example, visitors who travelled to Dafan Temple for an outing, without any understanding of the principles of Buddhist thought: People think they can travel here to see the sights at the beginning of the new year without an understanding of [concepts such as] the great void, transformation and illusion, but that means obtaining [the Buddha truth] by way of the polluted world! Only when people are about to die of the plague, when they are surrounded by groaning and moaning, and polluted by emissions of vomit, are they ready to gain [insight]. Nothing brings greater uncleanliness than this!62 Having ercely defended the monks’ commitment to Buddhist thought in the inscription for Nengren Temple, Liu clearly felt that the members of the lay community surrounding Dafan Temple did not measure up. He expressed a similar sentiment about the lay community of a Daoist temple on Yusi Mountain, used by visitors as if it was a guesthouse:

61 Ibid. 62 Liu Chenweng, ‘Dafan si ji’, XXJ, 1.14b.

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How is it that in the past people who did not have a xed home looked towards the temple and took on dif cult [challenges], and today people who have xed abodes choose to remain digni ed and do not [even] take up easy [tasks]. This, too, makes me disappointed.63 Liu’s point was that while the men who founded this sacred site were willing to endure such hardships here in order to achieve enlightenment, nowadays people living at home in luxury were only willing to spend a brief time here, and expected to achieve the same enlightenment. In another inscription, the monks themselves, and the Buddhist establishment more generally, came under attack: Only these last seven or eight years the enterprise of Buddhism has become all-encompassing. [ Monks] have become established as of cials and teachers, carrying their Chan robes on their back. There are also important monks who come from the north, going around speaking foreign languages. They spend a thousand words [explaining] one character, evasively calling that ‘helping the teaching.’ They outrage the world by disrespecting custom, playing about with the sutras and ignoring the rules of abstinence, wearing themselves out with their travels among the people. The meaning ( yi) is not something that could be regained by restoring the common laws. Despite favours from court and the avoidance [of taxes] ourishing abundantly, one can only differ from its teachings.64 It is clear that Liu regarded himself as an extremely committed member of the Jizhou community. While others fell short of the standards he set, he himself had wisdom and knowledge to offer to members of any religious tradition. Liu saw himself as a teacher, as we see in this anecdote. When the abbot of Wugong Temple asked him to write an inscription, Liu replied: ‘I can.’ Someone then said: ‘You have seen what [the monastery] is like. The parts you have not yet seen are just like the parts you have seen.’ I did not answer, but raised my hand and wrote the character for ‘one’ ( yi 一). The person said: ‘One? Is that [character] to lead us? Can you give any further indications?’ I did not reply, and wrote nothing further. Only by not writing [anything else] could they understand what [the character ‘one’] signi ed. Some people subsequently understood [what I meant], they bowed their heads and passed their insight on.65

63 Liu Chenweng, ‘Yusi shan Chengtian gong Yuntang ji’, XXJ, 4.37b. 64 Liu Chenweng, ‘Wugong si ji’, XXJ, 4.35a–b. 65 XXJ, 4.36b.

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He presented himself as a spiritual leader, recording his conversations and discussions in the style of Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 Yulu 語錄. It was as teacher that he approached the religious establishments of Jizhou, and it was in his role as teacher that he offered his opinions. In the same way that only some of the Wugong monks understood the signi cance of Liu Chen- weng’s single line (the character yi ), no doubt only few members of the Jizhou population would have fully taken on board his teachings. It is, however, beyond doubt that Liu offered his teachings in good faith. Liu did not criticize the practices he observed as a disinterested outsider; his critical observations were motivated by a deep sense of personal commitment to the community whose practices he described. What are we to make of this at times extremely bad-tempered scholar with his outspoken views about religion? I think we can draw several useful conclusions. Liu Chenweng imagined himself to be a vital part of the broader religious community of Jizhou. For him, the distinctions between Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian traditions were noticeable, but of secondary importance to the overall spiritual health of the community. His writings make clear how deeply committed he was to the local. He was at all times deeply concerned for the well-being of the local community, and presented himself as its intellectual and spiritual leader.

Rewriting local religious practice

Liu and his teacher Ouyang Shoudao were not exceptional in their visions of their involvement in local religious practice. Many others saw themselves as active members of the local religious community, and envisaged themselves as fonts of wisdom and sources of authority on the practices current within that community. Many authors of South- ern Song and Yuan inscriptions interpreted a request for an inscription as a request for advice. In their representation, however, such local practice took on a different meaning. The practice was rewritten, or translated, to conform to what was perceived to be an acceptable standard. Of course any representation of popular practice in the genre of temple inscriptions was always fundamentally rewritten, but at times the mechanics of this process are still visible, and here we can learn useful information about the ways in which literati attempted to rewrite what they perceived to be unacceptable practices.

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When a new Dongyue Shrine was built in Anfu 1317, the famous literatus Jie Xisi described what had happened as follows:66 In the winter of the fourth year of Yanyou [1317], the daruhachi of Anfu . . . began building a Dongyue Shrine . . . outside the eastern city gates. He was assisted in the planning by Magistrate Guo Huitai, the supporting clerks and charitable members of the local population donated their wealth, and since the land was fertile, the [building] materials of good quality, and the workforce hardworking, the shrine was completed by the autumn of the next year.67 They had clearly built an impressive building, with multiple halls, awe- inspiring statues and no less than 72 small shrines. The temple also attracted a large number of worshippers: Young and old, male and female all crawled up there like ants, bowed down and worshipped on their knees like one would behave near one’s parents. They carved a stone for the bridge saying ‘Elegant Valley’ and created a dwelling above it with six pillars which one could reach when walking around to look; they carved a plank for the pavilion with the words ‘Bird’s-eye view’ ( yi lan 一覽), to rest from one’s travels and look at the view, and they appointed a Daoist Master, a certain Yao 姚, to look after the place.68 It was, as is clear from Jie’s description, a popular site for worship that ourished thanks to the cooperation of the local well-to-do with the local of cials. Despite his admiration for their achievement, Jie disapproves utterly of what he perceived to be the attitude of the worshippers:

66 Jie was born in Fuzhou, where he grew up under the tutelage of his impoverished but learned father. He did not embark on his of cial career until 1314, starting as Junior Compiler in the Hanlin and Historiography Academy (Hanlin guoshi yuan bianxiu). When Tugh Temür (r. 1328–31) had established the Academy of the Pavilion of the Star of Literature in 1329, an institution dedicated to the promotion of Chinese cultural values to the Mongols, Jie was among the rst scholar-writers to be appointed. In the early thirties of the fourteenth century, he became one of Tugh Temür’s con dants, and he continued to hold high of ces under the reign of Toghon Temür (r. 1333–1368), eventually being appointed as one of the editors of the Liao, Jin and Song Histories under Tuotuo. He fell ill during the editing of the Jin History, and died at home at the age of 71 in 1344. 67 Jie Xisi, ‘Anfu zhou Dongyue miao ji’, in Jie Xisi quan ji, 328. Romeyn Taylor classi es Dongyue temples as ‘quasi-of cial’ temples. They were part of the of cial pantheon, but their worship was not legally prescribed (as for example worship for the celestial spirits was). See Romeyn Taylor, ‘Of cial Altars, Temples and Shrines Mandated for All Counties in Ming and Qing’, T’oung Pao 83 (1997): 95–7. 68 Jie, ‘Anfu zhou Dongyue miao ji’, 328.

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People who only rely on gods without an understanding of goodness are misguided. If government is in disarray and the harvest fails, will you get what you want from the divine? Heaven has a constant way in [allocating] fortune and misfortune; similarly the state has constant rituals for serving the divine and ruling the people. Rituals cannot be tarnished, the Way cannot be slandered.69 Jie was expressing a commonly held literati view about popular religious sentiment, one that recurred through his writings about temples and religious practice. He took issue with the idea that gods would provide for one’s every need, regardless of one’s moral calibre. People turned to the divine realm only in their hour of need, and expected fortune to come their way as soon as they requested it.70 ‘Seeking fortune but not returning it, this is the way of the people’, he wrote in another inscription.71 Such attitudes may have been prevalent, but Jie strongly disagreed. In his view, heaven was constant in its allocation of fortune and misfortune; ‘fortune and goodness, calamity and wantonness, they are the way of heaven.’72 Whether one is blessed with wealth and good fortune or not, Jie tried to impress upon his readership, depends not on making a request to a deity at the right time, but on the heavens, and the heavens’ allocation of fortune and misfortune is contingent on moral practice. Jie knew he was swimming against the tide here, well aware that popularly held views strongly diverged from his own. That divergence is less interesting than Jie’s attempts to rectify such views. Transform- ing local practice, he believed, could take place through writing such inscriptions. His writings provide a fascinating insight into the mechanics of this transformative process, because, unusually, Jie represented both versions of events: a locally current story about belief or practice, followed by his retelling of the same story, this time couched in what he considered a more appropriate vocabulary. In an inscription for a shrine in the town of Xiajiang 峽江 in nearby Linjiang prefecture, he included the following narrative:

The goddess is Old Lady Wen 温 of the Qin dynasty. She shed in Cheng Creek 程溪, and caught a large sh roe. She hid it at home and it

69 Ibid. 70 See von Glahn, The Sinister Way, for a discussion of such views of religion, especially 13–17. 71 Jie Xisi, ‘Xiaotong miao ji’, Jie Xisi quan ji, 336. 72 Ibid.

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produced seven dragons, ve male and two female. She then reared them, and after their scales and horns were fully grown she set them free in the river. Every day the old lady waited by the riverside, and the dragons gave beautiful sh to her, since she had done her best in feeding them. The rst [Qin] emperor heard of this, and summoned the lady. When she was in mid-stream, the dragons snatched the boat and returned home with it. The woman drowned, and the villagers buried her on the right waterfront of Cheng [Creek], on the bank of Jiang River 絳水. Later mourners wept at her grave, and they disliked the fact that her resting place was by the waves. One evening there was thunder and she was moved to a higher mound, and the worship by the villagers started from here.73 Classically, worship originates at the site of a violent death.74 A woman drowns in the river, and worship springs up to appease her demonic spirit. The account, by the time Jie noted it down, has become entwined with a second narrative, that of the dragons, the most common spirits of the river, and a mutual relationship of nourishment and dependency is developed between the woman and these spirits. The site of the shrine, as Jie himself explained, was highly numinous:

Into Xiajiang ow rivers from Jizhou, Ganzhou, and Nan’an 南安, and this is also a place where powerful merchants and traders gather. Because two mountain ranges almost connect here, the waters are rapid and turbulent. Each year several boats are smashed here. . . . Probably there were branch temples here to appease the evil of the waters, but that can no longer be investigated. Whenever boats go up or down, or there is a drought or an epidemic, there are always prayers here.75 By the time Jie described this site, the different strands of worship and their origins could no longer be separated, but we can guess at their possible constituent parts: the sacred site marking a violent death; a site for worship to appease the river spirits where river traf c negotiates the rapids as the river rushes through a narrow gorge; a meeting-point for merchants from different areas, perhaps combining their own cults with those from other areas. Of course this is guesswork, and probably Jie, staunch Confucian and critic of popular practice, had only offered the tidiest of surface renditions of what was probably an extremely vibrant sacred site.

73 Ibid. 74 See the discussion of such violent origins of deities in Ter Haar and Feuchtwang. 75 Jie Xisi, ‘Xiaotong miao ji’, 335.

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Having given us the bare outline of what goes on in Xiajiang, Jie proceeded to rewrite the practice in a different vocabulary. First he described what a dragon is: Nothing in the realm has greater spiritual quality than a dragon; nothing has greater merit in the realm than the dragon. Its virtue matches heaven, it is the greatest among sh and reptiles, and one cannot fathom its manifold transformations.76 Jie’s dragon received the highest accolades possible in the Confucian view of heaven and earth: it matches heaven. It was not only greater than other animals, it also greatly outshone human beings in its moral qualities: The old lady did not give birth to the dragons, yet she received their gratitude for her rearing and upbringing. In life she was nourished by their giving her sh, in death they wore hemp to mourn her. They moved her resting place to ensure her safety. These dragons did what the sons and grandsons of the local gentlemen were unable to do. No one has more understanding of the main principles of loyalty and liality than these dragons. The virtue of the dragons is of the highest calibre.77 The story of worship performed to appease the demonic spirit became, in Jie’s version, a tale of basic Confucian values: care for one’s elders in both life and death. The dragon, popularly held responsible for disasters on the river, became the embodiment of moral values. Jie knew that he was, as we said above, swimming against the tide of popular opinion, and acknowledged the divergence between his own views and those of the people: It is not in the heart-and-mind of dragons to be good at capsizing boats and drowning people. Those who are disloyal and un lial, who have no humanity and harm righteousness, break themselves away from heaven, and they will encounter [such tragedies].78 Jie placed the responsibility for one’s fate squarely on the individual’s own shoulders. Capsizing on a dangerous river and drowning as a result was nothing to do with the spirits of the river, and everything to do with the moral character of the person who drowns. Jie had further evidence to support his point. When someone from his hometown travelled across Lake Chao 巢湖, great waves threatened to overturn his boat:

76 Jie Xisi, ‘Xiaotong miao ji’, 336. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid.

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The gentleman, wearing court dress said a prayer on his boat. The gentleman dragon (longjun 龍君) returned the courtesy on the water, and the wind stopped immediately. This is how a dragon assists good people. If you do good, would a dragon not help you? Looking at it from this point of view, when someone capsizes or drowns this is not due to the dragon but to the person.79 This sentiment, spelled out explicitly here, also underlies Jie’s statement in the inscription for the Anfu Dongyue Temple: ‘People who only rely on gods without an understanding of goodness are misguided.’80 Although he knew that popularly held views were widely divergent, he used such inscriptions to highlight his own beliefs and to try to encourage moral behaviour. Jie greatly favoured the technique of retelling a popular tale in terms that were meaningful in his own world-view. A shrine in Linchuan received the same treatment: This place at rst had one old pine tree, and often the sound of pan utes was heard hovering above it. There was a well underneath the pine tree, and people drew from it and prayed here. It could revive what was dried up and cure the ill. One day, a god and his pupil spoke to the lay monk in his dream, saying: ‘I am the scholar (xiucai ) Zhu Sen 朱森秀才. My two brothers and I all became hermits here. People at your temple worship us, so we ought to bless your people.’ Then the monk carved three statues of gods out of the pine tree, dressed as of cials just like in his dream, and the temple worshipped them.81 It was the story of a secluded shrine in the mountains, where the spirit of the well appeared in the abbot’s dream. From then on, the statues of three gods were worshipped here, by a spring that had special numinous powers. So far so good. Next, Jie presented his own version: I would say that when the god said [ his surname was] Zhu, he meant ‘zhu’ 株 (tree-trunk), and when he said ‘Sen’, he meant ‘shan’ 杉 (pine). With ‘scholar’ (xiucai ) he meant ‘mei mu’ 美木 (beautiful wood). ‘The three brothers’ refers to the means by which the three pieces of wood came to life. Of course wood is a repository for virtue, the wood [element] rules benevolence, and therefore wood does good, and not evil; it brings blessings, not calamities, while it can greatly protect our people.82

79 Ibid. 80 Jie, ‘Anfu zhou Dongyue miao ji’, 328. 81 Jie Xisi, ‘Fuzhou Ling’gan miao ji’, Jie Xisi quan ji, 331. 82 Ibid.

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Jie did not deny the value of the worship, but changed its signi cance. The communication of the deity, left intact in Jie’s rst version, took on an entirely different meaning in his recounting of what happened. The translation can hardly do justice to the subtle punning and wordplay, but in Jie’s retelling, suddenly, this is no longer about anthropomor- phic deities, who have a reciprocal relationship with their worshippers, but about the bene cial qualities of wood, represented by the tree that grows by the spring. Jie Xisi was well aware of the gap between his own explication of the events and locally held beliefs. It was, in his view, the responsibility of the learned man to bridge that gap. That responsibility was spelled out in the Dongyue text: The divine is what cannot be reached yet is not remote; sincerity is what cannot be fully understood without being stimulated. Sincerity and the divine can only be united to produce blessings by an ethical man ( junzi 君子). To improve the constant principles of worship, and to rectify the vulgar practices of the state, this is one of the matters of the state, and the heart-and-mind of the junzi.83 If heaven and the state existed at one end of the spectrum, and the people at the other, then there was, according to Jie, a realm of action in between those two, which only the ethical man could manipulate. The ethical man alone had the ability to bring together spirituality and truth; he alone could bring about good fortune for people by cultivating the Way and its ritual system. Ultimately, therefore, Jie suggested that whatever form of worship people might engage in at this Dongyue temple, it was only a cultivation of moral values, expressed through correct ritual, that was going to make any difference, and only a cultivated individual, the junzi, could bring this about.

Conclusion

When Zhao Yike and his friends climbed to the top of one of the peaks in the Wugong Mountains to admire the view and visit the temple, bonds were forged between all the participants in the excursion. Zhao and his relatives, Zhao and his literati friends, Zhao and the abbot, these relationships were all given meaning in that shared experience. By

83 Jie, ‘Anfu zhou Dongyue miao ji’, 328.

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writing about it, the landscape and the temple became inscribed with that story, and for those who participated, the temple and its setting became the location of that shared sentiment. The space gained meaning in this process, not just in the minds of those who participated, but also in the minds of those who later read about it, including us. Tem- ples throughout Jizhou during the Song and Yuan became inscribed by similar stories, as literati created and recreated the histories of the local temples. They were literati creations, of course, and in no way should they be read as telling the whole story of these temples. But they do tell signi cant stories: of literati imagining they could belong in the local landscapes, be part of the community, perform meaningful roles within them, and transform the local. They cast themselves in a variety of roles, as guardians of local morals, as teachers and spiritual leaders, as translators of local practice. What matters is that the literati took a great deal of interest in local temples and envisioned themselves as active and authoritative members of the communities they constructed around them. Of the many local institutions they wrote about, the temple offered them by far the best opportunity to belong.

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OTHER WAYS OF BEING LOCAL IN SOUTHERN SONG AND YUAN JIZHOU

Writing about temples allowed Southern Song and Yuan literati from Jizhou to imagine local landscapes within which they belonged and had meaningful roles to play. Temple inscriptions provided Jizhou scholars during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties with the opportunity to associate themselves closely and personally with a wide variety of sacred sites. As we will see in the chapters that follow, temple inscriptions changed signi cantly over time, and literati did not continue to see them as providing such attractive possibilities for shaping their local communities. Before we move on to what happened during the early Ming, however, we need to re ect on the implications of what we have established thus far. The Southern Song and Yuan landscape, I suggested, was a dynamic imagined space, where literati writing combined the view of a threatening and to some extent unknown physical space with the idealization of that space, where humans had successfully negotiated those dangers and threats. The landscape, as I argued above, was not a static space but a dynamic process. Writing about the landscape and about the temples within it was part of that dynamic process, and the landscape of Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou, as we can visualize it today, is a landscape mediated through these writings. Literati wrote texts about landscape and about the temples within it, and in the act of writing, sought to impose order on their environment. Reading temple inscriptions as records of such processes allows us to see the literati as agents in their social and physical spaces. Of course they were not alone in seeking to shape their environments, and I am by no means arguing that their vision of the landscape—a physical world made unthreatening by a constant human presence in the form of temples and shrines where literati members of the community determined the meaning of the religious practices carried out here—was meaningful to anyone but themselves. I am suggesting, however, that we can learn something interesting about the literati from these writings. During the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, when the Jizhou landscape was not yet fully ‘tamed’, local literati turned to temples and shrines for personal

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solace and to create important local roles for themselves. It is important to set out here what this means, and what it does not. First, of course, the vast majority of the local population will have assigned utterly different meanings to local sacred sites, and literati meanings were not constant or uncontested. Second, temples were not the only sites in the social landscape to offer the opportunity to order the environment and to perform local activist roles; other local institutions offered equally interesting opportunities. It would take us too far beyond the focus of this book to explore all of these. Peter Bol’s work on local activism in Jinhua (in Zhejiang), for example, or Robert Hymes’ writings on Fuzhou (in Jiangxi), have already demonstrated some of the multifarious ways in which Song and Yuan dynasty literati carved out spaces in local society through writing.1 It may be instructive, however, to look brie y at other ways of expressing involvement in local society that presented themselves to the literati in Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou, such as writing prefaces for locally compiled genealogies, or writing about schools and academies.

Prefaces for genealogies

The studies brought together by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and James Watson in Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China (1986) chronicled a process whereby from the Southern Song onwards, lineages grew in importance in local society.2 As Ebrey suggests in her overview of the development of ‘descent group’ organization, by 1350 organized descent groups in southern China had charitable estates, ancestral halls for gatherings and ritual purposes, and they engaged in the compilation of genealogies.3 Genealogies became particularly important as documents that established the social status of the descent group, or the alliances forged through marriage between different local descent groups.4 Local literati wrote prefaces for their own, and increasingly for other people’s, genealogical compilations, positioning the descent group

1 See, for example, Bol, ‘This Culture of Ours’; Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen; Hymes, Way and Byway; Walton, Academies and Society. 2 Ebrey and Watson, eds., Kinship Organization. 3 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, ‘The Early Stages in the Development of Descent Group Organization’, in Ebrey and Watson, eds., Kinship Organization, 53–4. 4 Ebrey, ‘The Early Stages’, 45.

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within local society and beyond.5 Not many of such prefaces remain for the Southern Song, more for the Yuan, but as it happens the literary collections of both Ouyang Shoudao and Liu Chenweng contain several prefaces for Jizhou descent groups.6 One of Ouyang Shoudao’s prefaces was for his own illustrious Ouyang family, which he traced back to the Tang, when the rst ancestor moved to Jizhou to serve as its prefect.7 The descent group included of course Luling’s most famous son Ouyang Xiu. As is well-known, Ouyang Xiu’s association with Luling is rather tenuous: he was born in Sichuan, raised in Hubei, and visited Luling only once.8 As Ouyang Shoudao put it rather wistfully: ‘Wenzhong [i.e. Ouyang Xiu] travelled in all directions, and only returned to his native area on a few occasions.’9 Nevertheless, of course it mattered to Ouyang Shoudao to claim the link with the great man, and to position himself and his kin in this line of descent, even though in Shoudao’s time there were no less than six or seven Ouyang branches with genealogies in the wider area.10 Ouyang talked about the process of compiling the genealogy, the numbers of generations involved, and the numbers of branches with genealogies in the area, all with a freshness of approach that suggests this was a new venture for him. Ouyang’s preface for the genealogy of Huang Shidong 黃師董 was similarly engaged with the process itself. Rather than using the genealogical preface as a forum for discussing other matters, Ouyang wrote about the importance of compiling genealogies—without them, how can one know about the different branches and their origins?—and about the dif culties of tracing back many generations when wars and disrup- tions prevented one from making proper investigations.11 He counted himself lucky ‘to live in ordered times, and in a happy place, where one knows where one’s ancestors originated, and where the graves are

5 Hymes, ‘Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy’, 122. 6 As Ebrey points out, Morita Kenji’s work has revealed this increase in the writing of prefaces for genealogies by famous men during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Ebrey, ‘The Early Stages’, 47. She quotes Morita Kenji, ‘S -Gen jidai ni okeru shfu’ T y shi kenky 37 (1979): 509–35. Morita counts only nineteen Song genealogical prefaces. 7 Ouyang Shoudao, Xunzhai wenji (Siku zhenben edition), 19.9b. 8 For more details on Ouyang Xiu’s life, see James T.C. Liu’s biography of Ouyang in Franke, Sung Biographies, 808–816. 9 Ouyang, Xunzhai wenji, 19.10a. 10 Ouyang, Xunzhai wenji, 19.11b. 11 Ouyang, Xunzhai wenji, 11.8b–9a.

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maintained.’12 Writing such genealogical prefaces, his style suggests, was not something he did often. A great deal of scholarship has con rmed that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were periods of enormous growth in a new kind of genealogical compilation.13 Indeed, Robert Hymes has shown that these genealogical compilations were part of the localist strategies in Yuan Fuzhou. ‘The reading and prefacing of genealogies’, he writes, ‘became, in Yuan, in part a medium of acquaint- ance and social connection, especially with local men of note and in uence.’14 Indeed, the genealogy prefaces from Yuan Jizhou suggest that this was true, too, for Jizhou. Nevertheless, I would argue that writing prefaces for genealogies did not yet offer the same appeal to Jizhou literati as shrines and temples did in this period. In part, this is because of the newness of the genre. Prefaces for genealogies were a novel genre at this time. The fractional sample that remains today suggests literati men thinking about the possibilities offered by writing such prefaces, rather than authors thoroughly familiar with the genre. The conventions of the genre of temple inscriptions created certain limitations, to be sure, but, as I have shown in the previous chapter, they also allowed authors to expound their own views on a wide range of issues, an opportunity they frequently used to their advantage. As Peter Bol has persuasively shown for Wuzhou (later Jin- hua prefecture in Zhejiang), literati who were interested in ‘the creation of a literati cultural community with a local identity’ were also involved in local governmental reforms, in creating local geographical, biographical, and literary compilations, and in writing local histories.15 But as Bol’s study makes clear, the transformation from private genealogical records with prefaces compiled by members of the family to genealogies as public records of family histories took place gradually, and perhaps was complete in Jinhua before it was complete or even fully in train in Jizhou. Far more work needs to be done here, examining in greater detail the signi cance of genealogies in Song-Yuan-Ming Jizhou. For

12 Ouyang, Xunzhai wenji, 11.10a. 13 Peter K. Bol, ‘Local History and Family in Past and Present’, in Thomas H.C. Lee, ed., The New and the Multiple: Sung Senses of the Past (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004), 319. See also Hugh R. Clark, ‘Reinventing the Genealogy: Innovation in Kinship Practice in the Tenth to Eleventh Centuries’, in Lee, ed., The New and the Multiple, 237–286. See also Ebrey, ‘The Early Stages’; Morita, ‘S -Gen jidai ni okeru shfu’; Hymes, ‘Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy’. 14 Hymes, ‘Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy’, 127. 15 Bol, ‘Local History and Family’, 338.

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now, I think we can proceed on the assumption that in Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou, temples and shrines offered more attractive opportunities for local transformation than did genealogies. What about the other types of local institution so prominent in literati consciousness of the time? Below, I will brie y discuss literati writings on schools and academies.

Schools and academies in Southern Song and Yuan Luling

The most important educational institutions in Luling were the Ji’an prefectural school and the Luling county school. The county school was located in the northern corner, while the prefectural school had a more prominent location inside the southern walls, near the gates and the river moorings. Both schools were probably founded in the middle of the eleventh century, and repeatedly restored and rebuilt over the following centuries.16 Alongside such government-sponsored institutions were large numbers of more or less private academies, some small and short-lived, others large, famous, and proud of their long heritage.17 The Southern Song and Yuan were periods of active growth in academy building, and Jizhou was no exception.18 Such schools and academies are often referred to as ‘local’, but this raises the question: in what

16 The oldest extant gazetteer for the area, the Ji’an prefectural gazetteer from the Jiajing reign-period (1522–1566) of the Ming dynasty, tells us that the Confucian school of the prefecture was founded in 1044, when it was located to the south-west of the prefectural seat. It was then moved once in 1125, and again in 1188, and did not settle at its sixteenth-century location until the Ming. See [ Jiajing ] JAFZ (1522–66), 7.1a. The county school, founded in the same year according to much later gazetteers, was also restored repeatedly during the course of the following centuries. JAFZ (1875), 17.30a–42a. 17 On the difference between public and private educational establishments, see Hsiang-kwang Liu, ‘Education and Society: Local Education in Hui-chou, 960–1800’ (Columbia University Ph.D., 1996). 18 The Jiangxi educational historian Li Caidong has made a comprehensive study of academies in Jiangxi, and his gures yield some fascinating insights. He has found data for at least four academies newly built in Jizhou during the Northern Song (in Longquan, Taihe and in Yongfeng), which suggests a period of stability and prosperity in the area at this time. Academy building continued during the Southern Song, when about twenty new academies were built in Jizhou. This amounts to less than one eighth of all Jiangxi academies built during this time, so that Jizhou was by no means at the forefront of Jiangxi academy building activities. This changed during the Yuan, when almost a quarter of all new academies built in Jiangxi were located in Jizhou. See Li Caidong, Jiangxi gudai shuyuan yanjiu (Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993), 53–102.

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ways were such academies local?19 Were they, like temples, sites of community construction and local identity formation? Or were academies and schools imagined within a much wider network of institutions that disseminated and celebrated cultural traditions crossing administrative boundaries? Were academies local sites for the exploration of and participation in the culture of the whole empire?20 To answer such questions, I will focus brie y on literati writings about a few of the educational establishments in Luling, speci cally Bailuzhou Academy 白鷺洲書院 on Bailu Islet 白鷺洲 in the Gan, founded in 1242 by Grand Councillor Jiang Wanli, and the county school in Luling.21 Jiang had founded Bailuzhou Academy as soon as he arrived in Luling, and because the academy gained such great fame, Jiang would be remembered for his contribution to local culture in a shrine established on Bailu Islet.22 Jiang appointed none other than Ouyang Shou- dao as head of the academy. Although Ouyang Shoudao’s leadership of the academy was brie y interrupted in 1253, when he served as assistant head of Yuelu Academy in Changsha, Hunan, he remained committed to Bailuzhou Academy for most of his life.23 Under his leadership, student numbers rose quickly, and one of the men to study under Ouyang Shoudao was Wen Tianxiang (1236–1283). Wen was ranked rst in the 1256 metropolitan examinations, a feat that would be mentioned in the academy records for many centuries.24

19 See, for example, Robert Hymes, ‘Lu Chiu-yüan, Academies, and the Problem of the Local Community’, in De Bary and Chaffee, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, 432–456. Paul Smith also refers to academies as ‘local’ institutions. Paul Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Smith and von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transi- tion, 23, 26. 20 Similar issues are discussed in a study by Thomas Lee on Jizhou. See Thomas H.C. Lee, ‘Song Yuan shuyuan yu difang wenhua—Jizhou diqu shuyuan, xueshu, yu minjian zongjiao’, (n.d., manuscript). 21 Jiang’s biography can be found in Franke, ed., Sung Biographies, 207–209. 22 Liu Wenyuan suggests that Jiang Wanli arrived as governor in Jizhou in 1238, and did not found the academy until 1242. Liu Wenyuan, ‘Jiang Wanli yu Jizhou’, Ji’an shizhuan xuebao, 20.4 (1999), 53. Other documents suggest Jiang arrived in 1241, and founded the academy almost immediately. See, for example, Liu Yi, comp., Bailuzhou shuyuan zhi (1871, reprint, Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu, 1995), 5.4b. Hereafter, BLZ. 23 Yuelu Academy, or Marchmount Hill Academy, is discussed extensively in Wal- ton, Academies and Society. The academy was founded in 976, and was one of the four famous Song academies. 24 Liu Wenyuan, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan (Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 120.

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Ouyang Shoudao’s writings on Bailuzhou Academy

So what did Ouyang write about the academy? How did he imagine the connection between Bailu and Luling? Ouyang’s most explicit statement about Bailuzhou Academy appears in a 1263 text, written two decades after it had been founded. The piece was written to commemorate the establishment of a private building (a pavilion) for the use of the headmaster at Bailuzhou Academy.25 The inspiration for the piece was provided by Emperor Lizong’s (r. 1225–1265) decision to confer of cial recognition on the headmasters of academies: In the past, the heads of academies did not receive regular employment (zhengyuan), so they often served concurrently as [prefectural] professors. Only since last year has [their position] been established as an of cial appointment.26 Of cial recognition of the position also provided an opportunity to build a proper residence for the headmaster. Ouyang Shoudao had used his private home when he served as headmaster and had given his lectures at home, but his successor did not have such facilities. The prefectural authorities then donated some land inside the city walls not far from the islet, and provided the building materials and the labour needed for the construction of accommodation for students and a residence for the headmaster. The comparison with the prefectural school obviously mattered to Ouyang: From now on the headmaster has somewhere to stay, and in form and appearance he can truly be an equal with the professor of the prefectural school.27 Ouyang Shoudao went on to elaborate on the role of academies in the wider educational system of the realm. At rst, he wrote, education was freely available throughout the realm as there were schools both in the capital and in the villages. Teachers who had achieved knowledge and insight above others would take students into their homes. This all changed when the Way was lost. Scholars started to retreat to the mountains, where they were inaccessible for students, and while great

25 Ouyang Shoudao, ‘Bailuzhou shuyuan shanzhangting ji’, XZWJ, 14.5a–8b. The text is also included in BLZ, 5.1a–4a. It discussed brie y in Walton, Academies and Society, 77–79, and in Meskill, Academies in Ming China, 15–16. 26 XZWJ, 14.5a. 27 XZWJ, 14.6a.

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learning thrived in these remote places, none of this learning was transmitted to others. The exception to this were the academies, where scholars continued to debate and give lectures. In more recent times, Ouyang continued, men who had gained knowledge and learning in such academies were given civil service appointments. After this brief history of educational establishments, Ouyang returned to the matter that concerned him most: If in an area of 500 kilometres there is only one professor, then the prefecture will treat [the headmaster] as an outsider, and not consider him part of the staff. When the headmaster is included, there are two [professors]. In our Luling, there are as many as twenty to thirty thousand scholars (shi ), and when those who visit, clasping their writing tablets, do not nd places at the prefectural school, they go to the academy. But never before has the senior person, teaching students at an academy, been a servant in the imperial service, appointed by the court.28 From the style of writing, it is clear that Ouyang was satis ed with this new-found respect for the of ce of the headmaster. But there is a personal dimension; while Ouyang had given so much of his active life to the running of Bailuzhou Academy, he had never before had the opportunity of demanding respect from his fellow Luling scholars and from the members of the central government. At the same time, Ouyang Shoudao sought to represent his Bailuzhou Academy as a site for teaching and learning that went well beyond the local. The education provided here contributed, in fact, to the ourishing of the dynasty as a whole: In the three ages of antiquity, there was no contact between the learning in the capital and in the villages, and between the scholars who resided in mountains and grottoes. In later ages, the teaching of [those who secluded themselves] in the mountains was not authorized by the emperor. Only today these two [i.e. state sponsored education and private learning in academies] are combined, and it is because of this that the culture of our Song [dynasty] is most ourishing. Ouyang suggests here that the Song empire as a whole bene ted from the inclusion of headmasters into the central government bureaucracy. What took place at Bailuzhou Academy, both the learning of the students and the housing of the headmaster, re ected on the state of education in the empire as a whole. In other words, for Ouyang Shoudao,

28 XZWJ, 14.7a–b.

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local education was signi cant, not because it was local, but because it was a signi cant part of learning in Southern Song China. The community envisioned here was the wider community of scholars, drawn together by shared ideals and cultural values. The location of the academy might well have been local, but the meaning Ouyang assigned to this went well beyond the local.

Liu Chenweng on Luling educational establishments

Of course Ouyang Shoudao was not only a local man, but a man with wider ambitions. Was he alone in this vision of education in Luling? Ouyang’s student, Liu Chenweng, had, as it turns out, rather similar feelings about the educational establishments in Luling, although a more strongly de ned sense of local pride also appears in Liu’s writings about Bailuzhou Academy. When Jiang Wanli, founder of Bailuzhou Academy, committed sui- cide to demonstrate his loyalty to the Song, Liu was deeply affected. He decided to spend the remainder of his life locally, supporting himself by teaching and writing. In the last year of Southern Song rule, a shrine was built to commemorate Jiang Wanli, and Liu marked the occasion with an inscription.29 From the rst lines of this text, Liu celebrates the in uence Jiang Wanli had locally, in ‘our prefecture’ (wu zhou 吾州). The founding of the academy, Liu wrote, ensured that Jiang gained widespread admiration in Jizhou: ‘The gentry considered him virtuous and the clerks and the common people admired him.’30 As Liu saw it, this was Jiang’s personal achievement: How could it just be that the learned discussions of the scholars are superior, and the customs of the common people are re ned? The cultural achievements of this gentleman [i.e. Jiang Wanli] touched people’s hearts, so that he continues to be remembered like this, now that he has passed on.31 The achievement may have been personal, but the outcomes were long- lasting, and through it ‘our prefecture’ had gained in standing.

29 Liu Chenweng, ‘Luzhou shuyuan Jiang wenzhong gong citang ji’, in Liu Chenweng ji (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1987), 85–87. 30 BLZ, 5.4b. 31 Ibid.

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Liu Chenweng made the connection between this academy and Jizhou more explicit than Ouyang Shoudao did in his writings. Accord- ing to Liu, Ouyang Shoudao began his tenure as headmaster when the area counted no more than ten reputable scholars. In the years that followed, however, the fame of the school had reached the capital, more individuals from the area were successful in the examination system, and a number of individuals had gained empire-wide reputations.32 Liu clearly regarded Bailuzhou Academy to be signi cant, both for the local residents, and for the wider standing of that locality. The academy appeared in Liu Chenweng’s vision of the local landscape, but Liu’s representation of that landscape was also shaped by an imagined audience at the capital. We see similar sentiments in Liu’s discussions of the county school. Liu Chenweng had passed examinations in the hall of the county school when he was only thirteen, and returned to the hall when he had passed the examinations at the imperial palace a decade later.33 He had no nostalgic feelings for the hall, and in a commemorative text written to celebrate the building of a new hall for the Luling county school, he described his memories of his education there as follows: At that time the hall was so full one could hardly take a single step. Lec- tures were held here, and people also ate here. Later they borrowed the pavilion of the county registrar, and used his kitchen. The stairs on the left were restricted and inaccessible, and whenever it rained, water poured in which could not be dispersed, and it had been like this for one hundred years. Even in times of ourishing and good government, those responsible did no planning. All they did was add a few inches to the windows in the tower, so that the wind and rain entered even more!34 The school obviously needed restoration, but due to a lack of funds, this had not yet been carried out. Only when a local magistrate took the initiative, donating his own funds to pay for some of the restoration project, did a fund-raising campaign gain suf cient momentum to pay for the outstanding balance. The restorations were nally completed in the winter of 1296, the second year of the reign of Khubilai’s grandson. Liu was by now nearing the end of his life—he died in the rst month

32 Ibid. See also Xiao Donghai, ‘Ming Wanli zhongxiu Bailuzhou shuyuan kaoshu’, Ji’an shizhuan xuebao, 16 (1995): 16. 33 Zhou Wenying et al., Jiangxi wenhua (Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 249–250. 34 Liu Chenweng ji, 99.

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of 1297—and the piece he composed to mark the completion of the restorations hinted at his impending demise:35 I am still like the child [I was] standing at the entrance of the hall. The great stele is restored, but I am as loyal and steadfast as before. Indeed, without noticing, I have become older, but I still feel the humility of my rst intentions to seek morality. Hence this hall has seen my deep sighs at the outset of my life and those at the end.36 The school building was clearly wrapped up in Liu Chenweng’s personal re ections. This school was where Liu marked the most signi cant occasions in his life as a scholar. The school was, however, not merely a physical manifestation of Liu’s recollections of a life as a local scholar. Liu saw such educational establishments as located ‘at the heart of the heart-and-mind of heaven and earth’ (xuexiao you wei tian di xin zhi xin ye 學校又為天地心之心也). Schools were political, as well as personal, spaces: Han [Yu] and Ou[yang Xiu] once managed to bring peace to the age by revering disputations and eradicating evil. Thus before Guan and Luo [i.e. the four main thinkers of lixue] and outside Yang and Mo [i.e. outside of the Confucian tradition], they established the meritorious tradition of schools (xue xiao gong zong 學校功宗). This is what is called ‘establishing the heart-and-mind of heaven and earth’ (tian di li xin 天地立心). Neither the common man nor the extraordinary person are worthy of being called ‘the heart-and-mind of heaven and earth’. It is extremely rare that schools ourish while the examination system is in a state of decline, and when educational establishments ourish, human talent emerges. Thus it is schools that are the heart of the heart-and-mind of heaven and earth.37 So Liu Chenweng placed a heavy emphasis on educational establishments. For Liu, schools were manifestations of the most basic of Con- fucian principles. Echoing Mencius, Liu made a strong argument for valuing education over laws and punishments: If you seek out and punish those who are not in hiding, then those who are implicated all become like [ Zhang] Yi and [Su] Qin; those who read legal books all become like [Shang] Yang and [ Li ] Si; the enfeoffed gentlemen, lords, and kings will all become like the ve hegemons.38 Even though

35 Liu Zongbin, comp., Liu Chenweng nianpu, in Wu Hongze, ed., Songren nianpu (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 2003), 7959–7984. 36 Liu Chenweng ji, 100. 37 Ibid. 38 Zhang Yi 張儀 and Su Qin 蘇秦 were evil political strategists of the Warring States. Shang Yang 商鞅 and Li Si 李斯 reputedly caused the end of the Zhou.

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merit and the name of the law are both spread in conjunction across the realm, there will be very few ordinary people who do not behave as monsters.39 The morals of the age were established and cultivated in schools, and thus the value of institutions such as the county school in Luling was in no sense limited to the local but reached the entire realm. Clearly, both Ouyang Shoudao and Liu Chenweng greatly valued the educational establishments of Luling. During the second half of the thirteenth century, the Luling that had started as a place with only a few scholars had acquired an academy known throughout the realm, with more students and scholars than could be accommodated. This academy had rmly put Luling on the Southern Song map, in part because of its famous founder and in part because of its renowned students. Liu Chenweng was most explicit about the value of the academy for the locality, declaring that ‘our prefecture’ had gained much from it. Local educational establishments were sites where local pride and regional identity could be explored and enhanced. These writings by Liu Chen- weng and Ouyang Shoudao, however, reveal a stronger interest in the empire-wide resonances of educational institutions than did their writings about temples. In writing about the wider importance of the learning that took place locally, they imagined an audience that went well beyond the region. They both emphasized the bene t to moral values and cultural enrichment that these institutions brought to the realm as a whole.

Bailuzhou in the fourteenth century

Bailuzhou Academy passed through some turbulent years during the fourteenth century, when the academy was partly destroyed by ghting in the area. The river that owed around the islet on both sides was responsible for further damage; as one local observer noted, in 1354 a great wave swept away most of the main hall, leaving standing only the statues of the sages.40 A man named Zhongxian 忠憲, governor of the

39 Liu Chenweng ji, 100. 40 Wu Shiyin, ‘Zhongxiu Bailuzhou shuyuan ji’, in BLZ, 5.7a–9a. The author, Wu Shiyin (1303–1366), was from Yongxin county in Ji’an. He became a jinshi in 1348, after which he became county vice-magistrate in neighbouring Yongfeng county. In 1354 the Luling government was added to his duties, and he was summoned as clerk to serve in the Jiangxi provincial government.

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prefecture, took on the responsibility for the necessary restorations.41 The project cost a total of 50,000 strings of cash, which, according to the same observer, were paid for not from the local governmental cof- fers, but by local dignitaries.42 When the restorations were complete, Zhongxian’s efforts were honoured with an inscription, stating: Without the Master [ i.e. Confucius], there would be no teachings to pass on to the next generation. Without Jiang Wanli, there would not be a building on such a vast scale as there is on this islet, and without Zhong- xian, we would not have the means to celebrate this academy as something that never disappears from the realm.43 With this statement, the signi cance of all these connections was made explicit. The teachings of Confucius were the rst and foremost element, but without the academy that Jiang Wanli had founded here, those teachings would not be passed on. In its turn, the academy continued to be signi cant only through these recent restorations. Through this inscription, a complex meaning was assigned to the academy, and that meaning was not particularly local. Rather, the academy was set in an empire-wide landscape, and given meaning within that far wider context. In a time of social unrest and physical devastation caused by the political collapse of the Yuan government, Zhongxian focused on the restoration of this academy as a way of re-establishing order. The order he sought to re-establish was not merely about the local but about balance and well-being in the realm. Writing about local education, in other words, was a way of speaking about what mattered throughout the empire, and a way of connecting with wider, shared trends, rather than creating a separate, local identity. Set alongside local institutions such as schools, academies and genealogical compilations, temples seem very different. Writing about temples in Jizhou—regardless of the type or size of the institution— offered literati from Jizhou something they could not achieve elsewhere: an exclusive relationship that allowed them to manipulate the terms on which that relationship was built. Writing about temples allowed the literati from Jizhou to shape the landscape, and give meaning to

41 The administrator referred to as Zhongxian by Wu Shiyin served as daruhachi in Ji’an prefecture. The Ji’an administrative records for the Yuan are incomplete, however, and no precise dates can be given for his period of service. His Mongol name is given either as Ni-ya-si-la-ding 尼雅斯拉鼎 or as Nei-su-er-ding 納速兒丁. 42 BLZ, 5.8a. 43 BLZ, 5.8b.

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the spaces they inhabited. Schools also mattered, and writing about genealogical compilations was beginning to matter more, but the local temples, shrines, and abbeys of Jizhou mattered far more. Local temples allowed literati to belong locally, and to determine the meaning that belonging would take.

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LOCAL TEMPLES IN EARLY MING: THE CENTRAL VIEW

In the late fourteenth century, Hanlin Compiler Xie Duan 謝短, a Luling man, wrote an inscription for Longyin Abbey 龍吟觀 in Longquan county. The monastery dated back to the Tang dynasty, and underwent extensive renovations at the end of the Southern Song dynasty. It was extended again in the early fourteenth century, but ghting at the end of the Yuan dynasty reduced the buildings to ruins. Then, in the early Ming, a Daoist master named Li Juchen 李居辰 started to clear the rubble to begin restorations once again. In the gengsu year of Hongwu [i.e. 1370] an edict ordered all counties to establish an of cial of ce [to manage] Daoist affairs. Juchen was the rst to take on this task. When Juchen passed away, his pupil Xiao Zhen 蕭珍 (zi Jiuhe 九和) continued what had been the ambition of his teacher. He managed to let some of the land ( just less than an acre) and collect the grain tax (42 picul and six peck). With his pupil Xiao Ruyi 蕭如一 he planned to extend the original foundations. The people of the area were all pleased and admired him. [The master and his pupil] then gathered workers, moved the materials, enlarged the old buildings, and prepared new plans. In the end they had a [separate] room for eating, and a system [to manage] the granary. . . . When the wind touches the jade disks, the tingling [sound] is truly from another world. The high and dry location of the place has been used well, and complements the natural scenic beauty. The building work started in the autumn of 1390, and nished in the winter of the next year.1 So far so good. A monastery was restored, and a local dignitary wrote a text to commemorate the event. We have seen many such inscriptions before, and yet there is something strikingly different about this text. It continued: Mr. Cai Yue 蔡鑰 informed me of all the details, and then asked me for an inscription. I had long ago been told of a monastery in Longquan called Longyin, but I had never been there. Only after I wrote his entire story down did I know of the beginnings of the monastery, that there

1 Xie Duan, ‘Zhongxiu Longyin guan ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1873), 16.34a–b.

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was a monk named Heshan 鶴山 who continued the work, that Yifeng 一峰 and Yixian 一閒 restored the building, that [Li] Juchen had written a history, and that he had [pupils called] Jiuhe and Ruyi.2 Xie Duan had heard of the monastery, but knew nothing about it until he was approached by Cai Yue. He had never visited the place, and never met any of the people involved. He was not exactly uninterested in the monastery, yet the text does not suggest any direct involvement either. His contribution, requested from Xie Duan, the high government of cial, by a local gure about whom we know nothing, was offered from a distant perspective. I would argue that this brief passage reveals several changes that took place during the early Ming dynasty in what was from then onwards known as Ji’an prefecture (see Map 5). The most important change was that Ji’an men were called to serve at the capital. They hailed from all counties of Ji’an, entered government service in large numbers, and served the early Ming emperors, some as very close advisers indeed. The success of Ji’an men in central government service, I suggest, changed literati attitudes to the local community. For them, the appeal of the locality, and of such local institutions as temples and monasteries, changed. As I have argued, Southern Song and Yuan literati from Jizhou wrote about local temples to make their mark in local society. They positioned themselves within the local communities that took such sacred sites as their centres, and sought to shape those communities. Early Ming Ji’an men distanced themselves from the local, and turned their gaze to the capital. Their connections at the capital mattered more to them than their local communities at home. For those who stayed behind, the central government, and the Ji’an men who served there, also mattered in a different way than they did during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Association with the central government conveyed status and prestige. If local men wanted to enhance the prestige of a Ji’an temple, they turned to their fellow Ji’an men at the capital, who then offered their inscriptions from a distance. Men like Xie Duan wrote inscriptions for establishments they had never visited, like in this inscription for Longyin, and sometimes not even heard of before they were approached. John Dardess, in his study of Taihe county during the Ming dynasty, has a slightly different perspective on this period of outstanding success

2 Xie Duan, ‘Zhongxiu Longyin guan ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1873), 16.34b.

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for men from this area. Dardess suggests that during the Song, local pride and identity was focused largely on the prefecture as a whole, something I have seen con rmed time and again in the sources.3 Song and Yuan literati referred to themselves as men ‘from Ji’, or men ‘from Luling’, without specifying in which county in Jizhou they were born. Dardess, whose study focuses on Taihe, suggests that: Somehow, between the end of the Sung and the forming of the Ming in 1368, Chi’an prefecture broke apart in all respects save for its administrative function in the apparatus of the imperial state.4 Around the middle of the fourteenth century, he argues, literati authors begin to refer to themselves as ‘men from Taihe’, which he takes as his starting point for his study of Taihe. Having looked at a longer span of time, and a broader geographical unit, I have found little evidence of this ‘break-up’ of Ji’an identity in the Ming. I agree that men from the same county, whether from Taihe or from any of the other Ming counties, often pointed out this shared connection. At the same time, however, the prominent literati from early Ming Ji’an who served at court, and whose temple inscriptions we will be reading in this chapter, offered their texts, and thereby their patronage, to men from all over Ji’an. Without denying the existence of a shared county pride, especially among the extraordinarily successful and powerful Taihe clique, Ji’an also mattered as a focal point for a shared prefectural identity, especially for men from, say, Yongfeng, or Wan’an. Their counties may have been less prominent, but they certainly made sure their readers knew they belonged to the same prefecture that had produced men like Yang Shiqi and Liang Qian 梁潛. There is another difference between my arguments here, and those of John Dardess. Dardess chronicles a process of change that begins, in the late fourteenth and early fteenth centuries, with a strong collective identity, manifest in expressions of local pride, appreciations of the local landscape, and celebrations of local connections through friendships and marriages.5 This ourishing Taihe then begins to lose its appeal, in Dardess’ masterly analysis, during the course of the fteenth century. ‘The sixteenth-century residents’, he writes, ‘seem not to have

3 John Dardess, A Ming Society: T’ai-ho County, Kiangsi, in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 3. 4 Ibid. 5 Dardess, A Ming Society, 2.

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cared about it one way or the other.’6 Reading temple inscriptions from the entire prefecture reveals, as Dardess suggests, signi cant changes over the course of the fteenth century. There is no doubt that the counties of Ji’an were deeply affected by the political changes of the late fourteenth and early fteenth centuries, and that those changes are manifest in writings produced by local men. I understand those changes, however, in a slightly different way, although these two views are by no means mutually exclusive. While Dardess places the emphasis on the existence of a strong collective identity in early Ming Taihe, which gradually disappears over time, I am struck mostly by changes in the location of that local pride. During the early Ming, the men from Ji’an constantly drew attention to their location at the capital, and to their distance from the local. A local pride did indeed exist, but in the early Ming, that pride was located not in Taihe itself—or any other Ji’an county—or in Ji’an prefecture as a whole, but far away at the capital. The emphasis on location at the capital emerges most clearly when we compare Southern Song and Yuan expressions of local pride and Ji’an identity, which were rmly located in Jizhou. From the middle of the Ming onwards, the sense of pride and identity altered signi cantly: it moved from the capital back to the locality, and rather than viewing the local from the centre, the local was once again viewed from the locality. In what follows I will brie y sketch the political changes of the early Ming, and the dramatic changes in the political fortunes of men from Ji’an, before turning to the temple inscriptions of the early Ming to illustrate the point that Ji’an literati were no longer envisioning local communities to which they sought to belong. They distanced themselves from the local, cementing instead their contacts at the capital.

Political change and social transformation in early Ming Ji’an

There can be little doubt that the fourteenth century was a hugely disruptive period in Ji’an. When the Yuan government began to disin- tegrate in the rst half of the fourteenth century, Jiangxi was one of the areas where peasant revolts erupted, and in the battles over territorial control in the middle of the century, Jiangxi was the scene of heavy ghting. In 1352, the Red Turban armies of Liu Futong 劉福通

6 Ibid.

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attacked Jiangxi and established control over Ji’an, only to lead to further uprisings and revolts in the decade that followed. Brutal ghting ensued, causing widespread death and destruction.7 The area rst became the stronghold of the rebel general Chen Youliang 陳友諒 in 1360, and then, after the naval battle on Lake Poyang in 1363, fell in the hands of a rival Yuan rebel by the name of Zhu Yuanzhang. As Edward Dreyer has shown, the Poyang battle was a decisive moment in Zhu Yuanzhang’s campaign for the uni cation under his control, which followed in 1368.8 Much has been said about the various social transformations that took place under the regime of Zhu Yuanzhang. His emphasis on the agricultural foundations of the empire is well documented, as is his attempt to impose the state cult on all levels of the population.9 To achieve this, the emperor issued a series of edicts. From the rst year of his reign (1368), a system of worship at the altars for soil and grain (sheji tan 社稷壇) was instituted throughout the empire. Each prefecture, sub-prefecture, and county was to build an altar for soil and grain to the north-west of the city walls; worship at the altar for soil and grain became a legal obligation for every tax-paying adult man at his appropriate level in the realm and would henceforth be one of the most important elements of the state cult.10 To understand local practices, Zhu Yuanzhang sent his of cials into the countryside to take note of all ef cacious gods, terrestrial deities, and worthies that regularly received worship. Deities deemed worthy were entered in the Sacri cial Statutes (Sidian 祀典), and were to receive worship on a regular basis.11

7 For general descriptions of the traumatic events of the fall of the Yuan dynasty and the establishment of the Ming, see F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 517–548; Edward Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History 1355–1435 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 12–64. 8 Dreyer, Early Ming China, 49–52. 9 On the agricultural base of, for example, the Ming scal administration, see Ray Huang, ‘The Ming Fiscal Administration’, in Twitchett and Mote, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, especially 106–112. On Zhu’s imposition of the state cult, see, for example, Romeyn Taylor, ‘Of cial Religion in the Ming’, in Twitchett and Mote, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, 840–892. See also Romeyn Taylor, ‘Of cial and Popular Religion and the Political Organization of Chinese Society in the Ming’, in Kwang-ching Liu, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 126–157. For an insightful review of Zhu Yuanzhang’s policies and their revisions, see Sarah Schneewind, ‘Visions and Revisions: Village Policies of the Ming Founder in Seven Phases’, T’oung Pao 87 (2001): 317–359. 10 Long Wenbin, ed., Ming huiyao (1887, reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1956), 117. 11 Ming Taizu shilu (1418, reprint, Taibei: Academia Sinica, 1962), 35.3b; Yu Ruji,

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Following this edict, local of cials were no longer permitted to perform the worship of deities not entered in the Sacri cial Statutes, regardless of their local following.12 Over the following years, further edicts were issued, instructing each locality to standardize worship so that it would conform to the state cult.13 The rituals included worship of the celestial deities of wind, clouds, thunder, and rain; and of terrestrial deities such as the gods of mountains and streams, of soil and grain, of walls and moats, and hungry ghosts. For each of these rituals, the dates and times of the worship, the size and shape of the buildings, the procedures during the ritual, the sacri cial texts, and the preparation of the sacri ce were determined in minute detail.14 Recent research has tended to stress the constantly changing nature of Zhu Yuanzhang’s policies, and questioned the lasting effect of his regime.15 Even if the Hongwu reign-period (1368–1398) was not the beginning of an entirely new social structure, the evidence from Ji’an suggests that his policies had a signi cant impact at the local level. Throughout the prefecture, or so the gazetteer records would have us believe, new temples were built, shrines were erected and monasteries were restored.

Rebuilding Ji’an’s shrines and temples

During the rst decades of Ming rule, Ji’an county magistrates initiated a vast program of temple building and rebuilding. Much of their effort focused on the establishment of proper shrines for the state cult, and

comp., Libu zhigao (1620, reprint, Taibei: Shangwu, 1983–6), 30.15a–b; Shen Shixing, comp., Da Ming huidian (1587, reprint, Taibei: Shangwu, 1983–86), 86.11b. 12 Long, ed., Ming huiyao, 180. 13 This worship was to include worship of ‘sagely emperors, enlightened kings, loyal of cials, and martyred scholars entered in the Sacri cial Statutes and not located at an improper ( yin) shrine’. Yu, Libu zhigao, 30.16a. 14 See, for example, Yu, Libu zhigao, 30.17a–30a. 15 The work of Edward Farmer explored various aspects of Zhu Yuanzhang’s new social and economic policies. The overall argument of his work is that Zhu Yuanzhang constructed a ‘new’ China by imposing and legislating a new order. See, rst and foremost, his Zhu Yuanzhang and early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden, E.J. Brill: 1995). The amount of revision to policies issued during Zhu Yuanzhang’s reign transpires from Schneewind, ‘Visions and Revi- sions’. For an overall discussion of Zhu Yuanzhang’s reign, see the studies included in Sarah Schneewind, ed., Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History (Society for Ming Studies, forthcoming).

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we see evidence of these activities throughout the prefecture.16 Buddhist and Daoist temples also came under the control of the central state, and Zhu Yuanzhang issued a constant stream of edicts relating to all aspects of Buddhist and Daoist monastic life.17 Though his policies were not consistent, his overall intention was to restrict the social in uence and freedom of Buddhist and Daoist institutions.18 Many of his new regulations were hopelessly unrealistic; in 1392, for example, he ordered the Buddhist registry of ces to start keeping detailed records ‘that give full knowledge’ (zhouzhice 周知冊) and to distribute them throughout the realm.19 They were to contain the relevant details of each monk, including the date of his ordination and the serial number of his licence. While it is easy to dismiss such orders as impossible to implement, the evidence from Ji’an suggests that Zhu Yuanzhang’s orders did lter down to the county level, where local governors and well as members of the local clerical elite were clearly aware of their existence. Local gazetteers contain records of the various altars for the state cult, lists of temples for local deities, and lists of Buddhist and Daoist temples and monasteries. They provide, as shown earlier, a highly unreli- able record for the actual number of temples that existed. Many more such buildings will have gone unrecorded, and the record that does exist will always be slanted towards the interests of the elite readership of

16 In Jishui, for example, Magistrate Li Hengfu 李恆甫 began rebuilding the altars and shrines for the state cult as soon as he arrived in 1373. An altar for hungry ghosts was built in the county capital, and the altars for soil and grain and for terrestrial and celestial forces were relocated closer to the county capital. Jishui xianzhi (1875), juan 12. In Anfu, the altars for soil and grain as well as the altars for celestial and terrestrial forces were rebuilt at a new location. Anfu xianzhi (1872), juan 3. In Wan’an, the magistrate had a similar set of government-sponsored altars built. Wan’an xianzhi (1873), juan 7. In Luling, Longquan, Yongfeng, and Yongning the same government temples were built, all in the early years of Hongwu’s reign. JAFZ (1875), juan 8–10. 17 For a more detailed discussion of the early Ming policies with regard to local religious practices and organization, see Anne Gerritsen, ‘The Hongwu Legacy: Fifteenth- century Views on Zhu Yuanzhang’s Monastic Policies’, in Schneewind, ed., Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History. 18 Chün-fang Yü suggests that those aspects of Buddhism that could be combined with Confucian values—in particular tantric rituals—were tolerated (through the favouring of ‘doctrinal’, or ‘sutra instruction’ ( jiang), temples), but that all other aspects, in particular meditation and the study of the sutras was in so far as possible con ned to the temples. There they were to remain isolated and separated from the lay population. See Chün-fang Yü, ‘Ming Buddhism’, in Twitchett and Mote, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, especially 904–909. See also Chün-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 19 Long, Ming huiyao, 695.

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such gazetteers. All we can be sure of is the picture compilers wished to convey to that readership. We saw earlier that for the Southern Song, we have records of about 85 temples, 23 of which we only know by name. We know that the other 62 Southern Song temples were either built or restored during the 147 years between 1127 and 1274. By contrast, we have records for about 260 temples in the early to middle Ming (the 132 years between 1368 and 1500), and of those 260 there are only eight for which we know only the name. The record would have us believe that sixteen of those 260 were restored immediately in the rst year of Ming rule in 1368, a further sixteen in 1369, and 25 in 1370. A staggering 227 temples and shrines were restored during the Hongwu, Jianwen (1399–1402) and Yongle (1403–1424) reign-periods in Ji’an prefecture. Of course these gures tell us very little. For the vast majority of records, the entry in the prefectural or county gazetteer reads something like this: ‘Fushou Temple. Located in the 35th township. Built in 1163 and restored in the tenth year of Hongwu (1377) by the monk Guangtong.’20 It tells us nothing about the kind of place it was in 1163, nor about what happened in the almost two hundred years between foundation and restoration, or about the extent of the restorations of 1377. Where temple inscriptions themselves have been included in the gazetteers, we can glean further information about the actual processes involved, as we see in this example: When our illustrious Ming began, a start was made on [the restoration of] the multitude of destroyed [temples]. Zhu Ximing 朱熙明, pupil of [previous Daoist master Zhang] Tianquan 張天全, could not bear the destruction of the abbey his teacher had worked so hard for. So he enlisted Luling’s Chen Yunwen 陳允文 and others to donate money and manpower. In the jiazi year of Hongwu [i.e. 1384] they made plans from the entrance gates down to the corridors. Throughout the sacred buildings, they changed what was rotten and preserved what could be maintained. They worked towards it as if it was a long-term plan, but they nished it unexpectedly fast.21 We learn a bit more here: leadership came from a Daoist master, who took on this restoration project in part out of loyalty to his master, suggesting the site was actively used until its destruction. The reference to Chen Yunwen, now meaningless because he cannot be traced, suggests

20 JAFZ (1875), 10.21a. 21 Liu Dunxin, ‘Qinghua guan ji’, Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.35b–36a.

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members of the local community became involved. And nally, it was completed more quickly than had been expected. More commonly, however, it took much longer than expected to complete the restoration of an entire temple, as we see in this example: From the spring of 1439, it took seventeen years to the winter of 1455 to announce its completion. [The Daoist master Wu] Huanfei did not make use of any outside help. He just limited his many expenses, imposed strict rules on [materials] that were left over, and rst and foremost relied on his own money, doing the work in the proper order, never using too many people for a small job. Therefore it was dif cult to get to the end, and it took a long time.22 These temple restorations were complex processes that required funding, labour, and the skilful management of resources—the purchasing of materials and assigning of manpower to small jobs was clearly as much a challenge in the fteenth century as today. The compilers of local gazetteers nevertheless assumed that their readers could conceive of a prefecture where as many as 227 temples and shrines were restored within the space of just over fty years. What is more, they could conceive of this in a prefecture that had been the site of extensive ghting in the decades before 1368, and had suffered a traumatic time during the civil war surrounding the debacle of Yongle’s usurpation. The nineteenth-century compilers of gazetteers, especially those who compiled the Luling, Yongfeng and Longquan gazetteers, are rarely explicit about the textual and epigraphic sources they had used to compile the sections on temples and monasteries, but they will have had access to the earlier editions of the Ji’an prefectural and county gazetteers, no longer extant.23 However they gained their information, the compilers present us with a record of far-reaching change throughout Ji’an. Political disruption and local warfare had led to the destruction of much of the sacred landscape. Many of the sites in the landscape that had attracted the attention of Jizhou literati like Ouyang Shoudao, Liu Chenweng and others had been left in ruins. A new emperor was in place, and orders were being issued for a rebuilding on a grand scale. The landscape that was shaped by the traces of institutional, communal and individual histories was being thoroughly remodelled. Ji’an was not the same place that Jizhou had been.

22 Xiao Weizhen, ‘Huixian guan ji’, Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.41a. 23 Peter Bol discusses the importance of looking at earlier sources included in local gazetteers in Bol, ‘The Rise of Local History’, especially 44–54.

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Ji’an men and the central government

The thorough programme of rebuilding that took place throughout Ji’an prefecture during the early decades of the Ming dynasty was not the only signi cant change. These changes in the landscape went hand in hand with another change with far-reaching consequences. The literati in Ji’an were no longer mostly local men, but part of the highest echelons of the political elite. Before we discuss the changes in the inscriptions they wrote, we need to take stock of the transformation of the Ji’an elite. As John Dardess has demonstrated for Taihe, men entered the civil service in great numbers during the early Ming, and occupied crucial positions in the central government until the middle of the fteenth century.24 The gures for examination success in Ming Ji’an are truly staggering.25 Over one thousand Ming jinshi hailed from Ji’an, more than from anywhere else, and the vast majority of those jinshi degrees were obtained during the rst century of Ming rule. By 1464, Ji’an had already produced 449 jinshi degree holders, as opposed to 248 from Fuzhou and 146 from Suzhou.26 A closer look at these early generations of successful men will highlight Ji’an’s unusual accomplishments.

The rst cohort: Ji’an men serving Zhu Yuanzhang

The rst cohort of men who advanced to high positions under Zhu Yuanzhang’s rule was largely made up of men from Taihe. Among them were men like Chen Mo 陳謨 (1305–ca.1389), who spent most of his life under Yuan rule, working as a tutor in Taihe, but advanced to a post at the capital after Zhu Yuanzhang came to the throne. His nephew, Yang Shiqi, would later make a much greater impression on the historical records, but Chen Mo is signi cant as one of the rst Taihe

24 Dardess writes: ‘In the rst half of the fteenth century, T’ai-ho men entered Ming government in extraordinary numbers. From 1403 to 1457, more than 453 of them, or about ten men every year, entered bureaucracy through one or another of the available channels.’ See Dardess, A Ming Society, 174. 25 The table in the appendix illustrates the success rates of jinshi candidates from Ji’an. 26 Ho, The Ladder of Success, 247–8. The years 1400 and 1404 were outstandingly successful for Ji’an: the three highest ranked candidates in both years all hailed from Ji’an. No other prefecture ever managed to do as well as this. See also Li Tianbai, Jiangxi zhuangyuan pu (Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997) and Liu, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan.

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men to serve the Ming. He was a friend of the poet and of cial Liu Song 劉崧 (1321–1381), a fellow Taihe man, who, like himself, grew up under Yuan rule, and went on to hold several posts in the central government under Zhu Yuanzhang.27 Chen Mo, older than Liu Song, survived Liu Song by eight years, and dedicated several writings to his friend.28 Xie Jin (1369–1415), a precocious youngster from Jishui who passed the jinshi exam in 1387 before he turned twenty, also served Zhu Yuanzhang, but made himself so unpopular with his frank criticisms of the emperor that he was sent back to Jishui in 1390, where he remained until Zhu Yuanzhang’s death.29 The Ji’an men Lan Zizhen (1334–1386) and Chen Cheng (1365–1458) also served at Zhu Yuanzhang’s court. Lan, of the she minority, served only brie y in the 1380s until his premature death in 1386, but Chen, a jinshi of 1394, went on to serve Yongle as ambassador, and wrote an impressive travelogue after his journey to Inner Asia in 1414–1415. He retired in 1425, and spent the remaining thirty years of his life at home in Jishui.30 Zhu Yuanzhang, thus, had a signi cant group of Ji’an men at his court. And it was not only the rst Ming emperor who drew heavily on men from Ji’an: the Jianwen emperor, who ruled from 1398 to 1402, chose a Jiangxi man as one of his three closest advisers.31

Ji’an men serving Zhu Di

The real brain-drain from Ji’an, however, occurred during the reign of Zhu Di 朱棣, known as the Yongle emperor (r. 1403–1424). Liang Qian 梁潛 (1366–1418) and Yang Shiqi (1365–1444), both from Taihe, were part of this cohort. Liang Qian, a provincial graduate from Taihe, started out with a series of posts in local government. In the rst year of

27 See Dardess, A Ming Society, 174. On Liu Song, see also Rao Longsun, ‘Liu Song yu Xijiang pai’, Xinan shifan daxue xuebao (1997): 99–104. 28 Chen Mo, Haisang ji, juan 9. 29 For his biography, see DMB, 554–558. 30 DMB, 144–145. 31 The Jianwen emperor’s Jiangxi adviser, Huang Zicheng (1350–1402), hailed from Fenyi, just north of the Ji’an prefectural border in Yuanzhou. See Dreyer, Early Ming China, 158. The ve Yongle grand secretaries from Jiangxi were Xie Jin, Hu Guang, Jin Youzi, Hu Yan, and Yang Shiqi. Only Hu Yan and Jin Youzi did not hail from Ji’an. See Dardess, A Ming Society, 96–7. See also Henry Tsai, Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2001), 109–10.

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Yongle’s reign, he was invited to come to the capital to take part in the editing of the Veritable Records of Taizu. He later served as director general of the Yongle encyclopaedia, and was chief examiner at the capital in 1415. Liang Qian then held an appointment in the secretariat of the heir-apparent. While the Yongle emperor campaigned in the north, Liang Qian was among those responsible for the behaviour of the heir-apparent. This responsibility would cost him dear; he and several other high of cials were executed in 1418 after the alleged misbehaviour of the heir-apparent came to the attention of the emperor.32 Liang Qian and his close contemporary, Yang Shiqi, were among the Taihe men who shaped and directed much of the Ming government during the rst half of the fteenth century.33 Yang was summoned to Nanjing in 1398. Under Yongle he rose to the post of grand secretary, one of the founding members of what would become known as the Grand Secretariat (neige 內閣). As Dardess has shown, Yang Shiqi’s patronage, extended to fellow Taihe men while he was serving as grand secretary, meant that ‘the grip of a handful of men from one county in China on the controlling levers of Ming government was quite extraordinary.’34 Under Yang’s tutelage, Taihe men like Minister of Personnel Wang Zhi 王直 (1379–1462), Xiao Zi 蕭鎡 (d. 1464) and Chen Xun 陳循 (1385–1462) all rose to prominent positions. According to Peter Ditmanson, however, it was not only Taihe men who enjoyed Yang’s friendship. Among the hundreds of biographies and grave inscriptions composed by Yang, only a minority were written for Taihe men.35 Yang Shiqi and Liang Qian were called to serve at the capital on the basis of their literary reputations, and never passed the palace examinations. Shortly after their arrival, however, Ji’an men began to pass the examinations at the highest levels, and in great numbers. Between 1397 and 1493, Ji’an men passed the triennial palace examinations ranked rst, second or third in over half of the examination years, and in both

32 Dardess writes, ‘On August 27, 1418, Liang Ch’ien was placed under arrest, charged with having failed to warn the heir apparent not to pardon a military of cer—whom the heir apparent had just convicted and sentenced to exile.’ Liang was executed on 16 October, 1418. Dardess, A Ming Society, 185. 33 For Yang Shiqi’s biography, see DMB, 1535–1538. For a further study of Yang Shiqi’s career, see Yang Zhihua, ‘Shilun Yang Shiqi dui Mingchu shehui zhengzhi de gongxian’, Jiangxi shifan daxue xuebao 31.4 (1998): 65–69. 34 Dardess, A Ming Society, 144. 35 Peter Ditmanson, ‘Intellectual Lineages and the Early Ming Court’, in Papers on Chinese History 5 (1996): 6.

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1400 and 1404, the rst three places all went to Ji’an men.36 When the Yongle emperor chose his grand secretaries in 1402, three of the seven were men from Ji’an, and one hailed from just across the Ji’an border in Yuanzhou. Apart from Yang Shiqi from Taihe and Xie Jin from Jishui, they were Hu Guang 胡廣 (1370–1418), also from Jishui, and Jin Youzi 金幼孜 (1368–1432) from Xiajiang.37 A fth Jiangxi man, Hu Yan 胡儼 (1361–1443), was born in Nanchang. The Ji’an connection formed a powerful bond amongst these men. Hu Guang, for example, was born in Jishui in 1370. In the year he was born, Hu’s father Hu Shouchang 胡壽昌 (1333–1378) began serving Zhu Yuanzhang in various provincial postings. At the time of his father’s early death, Hu Guang was only eight years old. Brought up by his mother and his paternal grand-uncle, he worked extremely hard, and repaid their faith in him by being ranked rst among the metropolitan graduates in the examinations of 1400. Wang Gen 王艮 (1368–1401), two years his senior and also from Jishui, was ranked second, and Li Guan 李貫, from Luling, was ranked third. Despite Hu Guang’s association with Jianwen, who had ranked him rst in these exams, Hu Guang was selected by the Yongle emperor to serve as his grand secretary, where he worked closely with another of the Ji’an grand secretaries: Xie Jin. Xie Jin, who had passed the exam at a much younger age, and had gained more experience in the central government, served as his senior grand secretary. Xie Jin felt a responsibility for the success of his fellow Ji’an men at court, and began to encourage men from all Ji’an counties to aim for examination success. It was a responsibility that extended to the lesser-known parts of the prefecture; when men from Yongxin county had only limited examination success—between 1368 and 1400 only one man from Yongxin had passed, two from Yongxin passed in 1402, and a further two in 1404—Xie wrote: When I look at the nine counties [of Ji’an], its scenery is magni cent, and outstanding people are born there. It must surely be possible for them [all] to enjoy wealth and success. [. . .] It is a question of people’s ambition. When a tablet was erected in the school [in Yongxin] to display the names of the successful jinshi candidates, I wrote an inscription to

36 Liu, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan, 310–314. 37 Jin Youzi hailed from Xiajiang, just north of the Anfu border. His collected writings hardly mention his hometown, and only refer to Anfu. See Jin Youzi, Jin Wenjing ji, juan 7 and juan 9.

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encourage the gentlemen from Yongxin to strive for further success in the examinations. I know that this must start with the schools.38 Xie Jin himself hailed from Jishui, where more candidates passed than in any other county, but his loyalty is clearly not merely with Jishui but with all the Ji’an counties. Brilliant as he was by all accounts, Xie Jin was no diplomat. Having spent the years between 1390 and 1399 in exile at home after offending the rst Ming emperor, he repeatedly offended the Yongle emperor as well, in 1407 and again in 1411, after which he was executed in jail. Hu Guang, a much more discreet and cautious gure, then took his place as the senior gure among the grand secretaries. Yang Shiqi and Jin Youzi, another Yongle grand secretary, both wrote glowing descriptions of Xie after his death, and testify to a close and personal friendship between these men. They shared not only their background in Ji’an, but their dedication to the government of Yongle.39

The cohort of 1404

For Hu Guang, passing rst in the examinations of 1400 led to fame throughout the realm. Zeng Qi, who was ranked rst in the 1404 metropolitan examinations, achieved less enduring fame, although he, too, managed to capitalize upon his Ji’an connections. Zeng Qi was born in 1372 in Yongfeng. His great-great-grandfather had served the Song government; his grandfather and father had both served in the Yuan government. He was just over thirty years old when he took the metropolitan examinations, and after ranking him rst, the Yongle emperor appointed him as editor in the Hanlin Academy. His cohort of successful jinshi candidates from Ji’an was bigger than any before it or after. Zhou Shu 周述 (1375–1437), from Jishui, was ranked in second place, and Zhou Mengjian 周孟簡 (1378–1430), also from Jishui, third, and these three were followed by at least four more Ji’an men. These included, for example, Li Shimian 李時勉 (1374–1450). Li’s family had only recently moved to Anfu, and after his examination success he was appointed to the Hanlin Academy, where he, too, worked

38 Xie Jin, ‘Yongxin jinshi timing ji’, Wenyi ji, 10.27a. 39 Hok-lam Chan, ‘The Chien-wen, Yung-lo, Hung-hsi, and Hsüan-te reigns, 1399–1435’, in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., Cambridge History of China, volume 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part I, 210.

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as one of the editors of Yongle dadian and of the Veritable Records of Ming Taizu.40 Li Shimian was a highly critical civil servant, voicing outspoken opinions about the building of the new palatial buildings in the north in 1421, for example, and about the emperor’s sexual activities during the period of mourning for the Yongle emperor in 1425.41 Twice he was jailed, once with horri c injuries after being tortured, but still he survived. He was rehabilitated under the Xuande emperor, was appointed as libationer in 1441, and served another two emperors until his death in 1450. Also among the 1404 graduates was Zhou Chen (1381–1453) from Jishui, who passed the exam when he was only in his early twenties, and served ve different emperors. He would gain a reputation under Xuanzong for the tax concessions he offered to those under his juris- diction in the lower Yangzi region, and became well-known for his ef cient nancial administration and economic reforms.42 Then there were Li Zhen (1376–1452) from Luling and Wang Zhi (1379–1462) from Taihe. Wang Zhi spent almost forty years making a career in the Hanlin Academy, drafting documents for several emperors. In 1443, Wang Zhi became minister of personnel on the recommendation of Yang Shiqi, and remained in post until he was in his late seventies in 1457, when he was dismissed after the palace coup and allowed to return home, where he died in 1462.43 Li Zhen became a Hanlin bachelor in 1404, worked on the compilation of Yongle dadian, and served for a time in Guangxi and Henan. Li Zhen was to make his name as author of a collection of short stories, ‘More Stories Written while Trimming the Wick’, written in 1419, and published in an illustrated edition in 1433. The success of the 1404 cohort would never be repeated, but it is indicative of the enormous political powers that were combined in men from Ji’an serving the early Ming emperors.

40 DMB, 865–868. 41 The memorial submitted by Li Shimian in 1420 is largely translated in Tsai, Perpetual Happiness, 126–7. 42 Huang, ‘The Ming Fiscal Administration’, 110–111. As governor of the Southern Metropolitan Region, Zhou Chen wrote an in uential report, showing that the people who had disappeared from the registers due to increased mobility of households, had frequently not moved far away from their original registration. See Heijdra, ‘The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China’, 479. For a discussion of the reforms Zhou Chen proposed, see Chan, ‘The Chien-wen, Yung-lo, Hung-hsi, and Hsüan-te reigns’, 296–7. 43 For Wang Zhi’s biography, see DMB, 1358–1361.

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Religious leaders from Ji’an

It was not only members of the secular elite, however, who allied themselves closely with the central government. Religious leaders, too, were drawn into the central bureaucratic system of the state. Rao Zhengdao 饒正道, for example, known by the religious name Chongxu 沖虛, was born in Jishui, and attracted attention because of his particularly strange face. A Master of the Way recognized that this boy was not meant to be a mere mortal, and took him to a Daoist monastery. There he acquired a range of techniques including carving talismans and manipulating thunder. After the founding of the Ming, he was called to court to become music and dance-master on the staff of the chamberlain for ceremonials (taichang yuewu sheng 太常樂舞生), and Zhu Yuanzhang also called upon him during a period of severe drought. He was so effective in calling up rain that the Yongle emperor was equally impressed, and made him chief sacri cial of cer at the northern capital. Though born in Jishui, his entire working life was centred around the imperial court.44 Liu Bowan 劉伯完, a scholar from Anfu, was skilled in astrology, geography, medicine and prognostication. He was made of cer in the Imperial Observatory (lingtai lang 靈臺朗) and then held a post in the Directorate of Astronomy.45 During Zhengtong (1436–50), another Anfu astronomer held a post in the same of ce.46 Liu Deyuan 劉德淵, from Longquan, was skilled at prognostication, and was invited to the court in Beijing at the end of the Zhengtong period.47 These local men offered their services at court, and were appreciated for what they provided. They were drawn into service at the capital, and carried out their religious duties as charged by the emperor.

Men from Ji’an writing at court

Many men from Ji’an served at court in the early Ming. They served in larger numbers, and in higher positions than they ever had before, or ever would again. Ji’an continued to produce high calibre graduates

44 JAFZ (1875), 37.72b–73a. 45 JAFZ (1875), 37.47a. 46 JAFZ (1875), 37.47a–b. 47 JAFZ (1875), 37.47b.

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during this period, and many of them made a signi cant impression on government. Men like Yang Shiqi, Xie Jin and Liang Qian became famous names throughout the realm, and to some extent remain well known even today. Others served in high positions, but were forgotten soon after. What matters here is that while they were in imperial service, they extended their patronage to other Ji’an men. As Dardess has shown, collegiality held these men together, as they gathered in county-based meetings. Although Dardess suggests that meaningful contrasts can be drawn between Taihe collegiality and, say, Anfu collegiality, I am not persuaded that these were lasting signi cant differences. Men recognized themselves as men from a county, but also as men from Ji’an, and also as Jiangxi men. Their loyalties depended on the circumstances, and changed depending on what suited them. Someone like Yang Shiqi, who extended his patronage to great numbers of men from Taihe, still wrote many more texts for fellow of cials in the central administration.48 For the men from Ji’an who lled the ranks of the central government in signi cant numbers until well into the fteenth century, central government was where their attentions were focused. As a consequence, the Ji’an authors contributing inscriptions to commemorate restorations in their home counties during the rst century of Ming rule were remote gures, writing their texts from a distant perspective. To be more precise, many wrote their texts while in of ce at the capital. The frequency with which they referred to this distance, and to their location at the capital, suggests that this mattered a great deal to them. ‘In the winter of the fourteenth year of Yongle [i.e. 1417] villager Wu Daohong 吳道弘 came to court, and together with Hu Shaowu 胡紹武 asked me to write an inscription for them.’49 The author of these lines is Liang Qian, director general of Yongle dadian and minder of the Yongle heir-apparent. One year after agreeing to write this inscription on behalf of his fellow Ji’an men, Liang would lose the emperor’s trust and be executed at court, but when Wu Daohong and Hu Shaowu visited Liang at court, nothing could have indicated such a dramatic reversal of fortunes. They would hardly have made the journey had they not felt that Liang’s association would be bene cial for their abbey. Liang, for his part, must have felt it was important to

48 Ditmanson, ‘Intellectual Lineages and the Early Ming Court’, 6. See also Peter Ditmanson, ‘Contesting Authority: Intellectual Lineages and the Chinese Imperial Court from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries’ (Harvard University Ph.D., 1999). 49 Liang Qian, ‘Donghui guan ji’, Bo’an ji, 3.11a.

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stress his location at court. Not only did he state explicitly that they visited him at court, but he also made clear he knew little of the abbey: ‘I am indeed from the same prefecture (tong jun ren 同郡人), but I have never been to Yueshan 月山. Hearing Daohong and Shaowu tell me about it, I felt cheered, and in my mind’s eye I saw the place.’50 Liang was happy to contribute an inscription, ostensibly so that visitors would know of the sacri ces made by those who had restored the abbey, but perhaps also so that visitors would know of the great status of the man who had written the inscription. Liang liked to point out the fact that he was at the capital whenever he had the opportunity. When he was asked to contribute a text for the mountain dwelling of a man named Hu Youchu 胡有初, he ended with the following words: A certain son of Youchu came to the capital. Then Hanlin Bachelor Hu Guan 胡灌 came to me to ask me for a text, which I wrote on his behalf. Hu Guan is Youchu’s nephew.51 Although Hu Guan clearly was not a personal associate of Liang Qian, and he did not know Hu Youchu well enough to know the name of his son, he was happy to contribute, perhaps because these Hu’s were the descendants of the illustrious Hu Quan (1101–1180), who had rst built his residence on this mountain. Hu Quan’s fame had made this a renowned site, as Liang wrote: Curious gentlemen often climb to the top to enjoy the view in all directions. Invariably someone points to the Hu family residence, enquiring after the martyr who lived there, feeling deeply affected.52 Liang Qian may have liked this sense of personal connection between himself and the famous Hu Quan, but clearly he also relished the opportunity to point out that the descendants of Hu Quan had to travel to the capital to make this request for an inscription. Liang Qian was not alone in expressing such sentiments. Xiao Weizhen 蕭維禎, a jinshi of 1430, held several central government posts, cul- minating in a post as minister in the Nanjing Department of Military Affairs, a post he left in 1465.53 In his inscription for Huixian Abbey 回仙觀 in Luling, he wrote:

50 Ibid. 51 Liang Qian, ‘Furong shanfang ji’, Bo’an ji 3.5b. 52 Ibid. 53 Luling xianzhi (1873), 27.14a.

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This year in the autumn [the monk] Huanfei did not regard hundreds of kilometres too far to honour me with a visit at the Nanjing Censorate with his pupil Sun Xiaode 孫蕭德 and ask me for an inscription.54 The tone of the inscription is respectful of the efforts undertaken by the monk in restoring an abbey that, like so many others in Ji’an, had not survived the ghting at the end of the Yuan dynasty. Xiao expressed the sincere hope that people would read his inscription and appreciate what the monk had done, including this long journey to the capital where he, Xiao Weizhen, served his emperor. At the same time, one might guess, they would appreciate the status of the inscription’s author. When an abbey in Longquan was restored in the 1430s, its Daoist master Yin Wuyuan 尹務元 travelled to the capital to request a permit (du die 度牒).55 While he was there he asked Xiang Fei 項篚 to write down the narrative of the temple’s history to make a formal request of the high government of cial Xiao Zi for an inscription. The text itself is formulaic, and probably closely follows the written details that had been prepared for him. Nevertheless, the fact that Yin Wuyuan had to travel to the capital to make the request for an inscription is clearly stated at the outset of the text.56 When the famous Xie Jin wrote an inscription for a Daoist monastery in Jishui, he ended his inscription with these words: In the fth year of Yongle [i.e. 1406] a certain Zheng served at Shenle Abbey. He requested an inscription from me, but I had no time. The next year, when I had completed it, I received an order to come to the capital. When the rituals were completed and I was about to return home, I received another request to record the entire story of the abbey. I then wrote this poem.57 The emphasis added by Xie Jin is clear: initially too busy to write an inscription at all, he was then called to the capital to serve the emperor just at the time he was completing the text. A further request came, but as he made sure the reader understands, he was still at the capital

54 Xiao Weizhen, ‘Zhongxiu Huixian guan ji’, Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.41a. 55 In 1417, the Yongle emperor had reiterated the Hongwu prohibition of private temples and monasteries. Yu, Libu zhigao, 34.30b–32a. The number of monks was repeatedly restricted by issuing quotas for the number of residents at Buddhist and Daoist monasteries per administrative unit. It may well be that Yin Wuyuan intended to use the inscription to lend weight to his application for of cial registration. 56 Xiao Zi, ‘Zhongxiu Ziyang guan ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1771), 7.22a. 57 Xie Jin, ‘Qingtan Jixu guan ji’, Jishui xianzhi (1875), 8.14a.

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when the poem was composed. As in the examples of Liang Qian and Xiao Weizhen, these high of cials were by no means unwilling to make their contributions to the institutions in their home prefecture. At the same time, they were keen to stress that their outlook was centred on their ultimately more important roles at the capital, from where they were sending their contributions. Their location at the capital when writing inscriptions makes for a distant relationship between author and local temple, as the authors themselves frequently point out. As Liang Qian said, when writing the inscription for Wu Daohong and Hu Shaowu, he had never been to the temple, but could imagine it on the basis of the tales they told him. The Hanlin Compiler Xie Duan, too, stated clearly that he had never been to Longyin Abbey in Longquan. ‘I had long ago been told of a monastery in Longquan called Longyin, but I had never been there.’58 Authors like Liang Qian and Xie Duan were therefore much more dependent on the information they were provided with. In one inscription, Liang Qian did not even know the exact start and completion dates of the project he was commemorating: ‘It started in xx year/month/day of Yongle and was completed by the time of xx year/month/date.’59 When Liu Dingzhi (1409–1469) was asked to write an inscription for Donghua Abbey in his native county, Yongxin, he wrote: ‘Since I have taken up my post I have not been back to Donghua Abbey, and that is now more than thirty years ago. I have, however, always had the place in mind.’60 Like Liang Qian, Liu makes an effort to sound as if he remembers the place well, and suggests that there are other reasons why he had not been back: ‘The scenery of this county is slightly hidden, there is no postal route that crosses it and few of cials visit this place, so the old foundations are not well known.’61 But Liu Dingzhi was the only successful jinshi candidate from Yongxin in the examination year of 1436, was ranked third in the palace exams, and had made a successful career in the Department of Ritual since then. He wrote this text after a short visit home, when the Daoist master had taken him on a brief tour of the grounds to show him the recent restoration efforts. He would have been highly regarded in his home

58 Longquan xianzhi (1771), 7.17a–b. 59 Liang Qian, ‘Yanzhen guan Ziwe ge beiji’, Bo’an ji, 4.35b. 60 Liu Dingzhi, ‘Xuxiu Donghua guan ji’, Yongxin xianzhi (1874), 7.6a–7a. 61 Ibid.

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county, but Liu clearly saw himself as a man of the capital, who had left his roots in Yongxin far behind him. Clearly, these men from Ji’an, who served at court in such high numbers, had not lost interest in the temples in their native area. They relate very differently, however, to these temples from their counterparts in Southern Song and Yuan Jizhou: they are far less involved. Rather than seeking to shape the practices associated with the temples from the inside, they write about them from a distance. All of the inscriptions written by early Ming literati from Ji’an share this characteristic, but none more so than Liang Qian. His writings allow us to get a better sense of how exactly these authors distance themselves from their native communities.

Distance from the local: the writings of Liang Qian

Liang Qian was one of the ‘eminent native sons’ of Taihe, and people would travel to the capital and ask of cials like him to write texts for their local establishments, often for temples and abbeys, but also for family genealogies and other institutions of local culture.62 Liang clearly maintained links to his native community, although those links are never intimate. He wrote his inscriptions for Ji’an from his post in the metropolitan government, and his writings suggest that his most important social circles were located at the capital. Liang’s writings demonstrate a certain ambivalence over this distance. On the one hand, as we have seen, he stressed his governmental position, on the other hand his writings reveal a deep sense of attachment to his native Taihe. Consider for example this description of Longcheng Temple 龍城寺: There is a temple called Longcheng [Dragon Walls] twenty kilometres to the east of Taihe. The mountains come from myriad kilometres to the south-west, jumping up and down like dragons, all interconnected. Approaching the temple, the mountains surround it with luxuriant growth like a city wall, hence the name of the temple. Behind it ows the Gan, in front lie the peaks of Ziyao 紫瑤 and Sangu 三顧. Looking out over them, one sees [the temple’s] remoteness, enclosed between steep peaks and cliffs and never-ending lush greenery, while from the temple lazy clanging noises rise up. Climbing to the top, one sees pines and cypresses

62 Dardess, A Ming Society, 118–9.

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in the mist, as if one has gone far from the dusty world of mortals, while on Mount Tiantai 天台 [in Zhejiang] and Mount Lu [in Jiangxi] crowds constantly surround you. Indeed its scenic beauty has no match.63 Dardess argues that this passage shows how the site ‘conveyed a strong sense of otherworldliness to Liang Ch’ien’.64 This may be true, yet it seems to me that Liang could not resist bringing up the connection to the ‘dusty world of mortals’. The temple, which had Northern Song origins, was largely rebuilt in the early years of the fteenth century by a team of monks under the direction of a certain Dingcheng 定成, whom Liang knew quite well. About him Liang writes: I love the intelligence of Dingcheng and his ability to write poetry. Among those he had contact with were many famous scholars, like the former minister of the Department of Personnel Liu Song. They all privately admired [Dingcheng].65 This connection to the famous government of cial from Taihe, Liu Song (1321–1381), and the suggestion of close social links between the monk and other of cials at the capital, can only have been included to serve a particular purpose: to lend a certain weight to Liang’s inscription. The contact between Liu Song, who had passed his jinshi degree in 1370, and subsequently held posts in Department of Military Affairs, in the Department of Ritual, and eventually as minister in the Department of Personnel and the monk Dingcheng conveys tremendous status on the monk and on Longcheng Temple. This worldly aspect of Liang’s inscription for Longcheng, I would suggest, may well have been more signi cant than what Dardess calls his ‘sense of otherworldliness’. There is no doubt that Liang was fond of Taihe. His literary writings include many pieces written for friends and connections in Taihe, and they often betray a deep attachment to the beauty of the area. At the same time, Liang was not at all attracted to locally held beliefs. This combination of fondness for the area and disdain for its local traditions

63 Liang Qian, ‘Zhongxiu Longcheng si ji’, Bo’an ji, 4.42b–43a. 64 Dardess, A Ming Society, 37. His translation reads: ‘Here the hills approach from several hundred li to the south-west, undulating like an uninterrupted chain of dragons. They make a forested ring around the temple, hence its name [Dragon Wall]. You can see the Kan River far off in one direction, and the San-ku peaks in another. You nd yourself among steep cliffs with endless green and idle rustling sounds. Atop the heights, you are among the mist-clad pines and cypress, so far from the everyday world that it is like being up among the sacred mountains T’ien-t’ai and Lu-shan.’ 65 Liang Qian, ‘Zhongxiu Longcheng si ji’, Bo’an ji, 4.43b.

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is clear in an inscription written for a mountain dwelling in Luling.66 The text is full of references to the beauty and culture of Luling. The inscription begins with a description of the outstanding beauty of Hibiscus (Furong 芙蓉) Mountain, where the dwelling was located: I remember in the past when we let the boats loose amongst green springs and white egrets. Looking several kilometres beyond Wen River, Hibiscus Peak stands out lusciously and prominently. Coloured clouds open up and close in around it, and a multitude of mountains surround and face it, but not a single peak stands as a match to it. [. . .] Every person in the realm admires and longs for the [kind of ] ourishing of loyal virtues and literary culture that Luling has had for hundreds of years. [People] assume that the spirits of its mountains and valleys produced such outstanding talent. They all desire to view its scenic beauty, and those who have not yet had the chance regret this.67 These passages reveal the great pride, fondness, and respect for the culture of the area Liang professes. In between these two statements, however, Liang wrote: For generations tradition has it that on [Hibiscus Peak] one can nd materials like cinnabar (dansha), kongqing, and amber (hupai).68 People also say the mountain serves as a prison for ghosts. Thus it also has the name Heaven’s Gaol (Tianyu 天獄). People say this is where spirits and the like are arrested and detained. Of course this is utter nonsense, but those who are fond of the bizarre like to pass down such tales. The prefectural gazetteers even mention it as if it were a true fact, but people do not know that this is simply not the case. How sad, to have a mountain like Hibiscus Mountain and not be able to roam around, climb up and down to pick out its most scenic beauty spots, merely because of this belief in such ridiculous and unfounded theories. It is laughable.69 Although Liang had a great deal of respect for the culture of Luling, this does not stretch to beliefs that may be peculiar to only this area. Locally held beliefs are devalued in this text, and his inscription seems to be directed at those who would agree. Reading these texts in their wider perspective suggests that for men like Liang Qian, writing in the early Ming, one’s native county was a

66 Liang Qian, ‘Furongshan fang ji’, Bo’an ji, 3.4b–5b. 67 Bo’an ji 3.4b–5a. 68 ‘Kongqing’ is a green liquid found inside large chunks of copper ore. All are thought to have medicinal powers. 69 Bo’an ji 3.4b–5a.

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place to be fond of. The landscape, in Liang’s mind, was a place of great scenic beauty. Once again, the landscape as it is conjured up through Liang’s writings, was not devoid of his own perspective. But that perspective, I would argue, is not particularly local. Rather, the landscape is a place where connections that are meaningful at the capital are forged. The community, constituted by the shared enjoyment of this landscape, is not formed within this landscape, but located at the capital.

The local signi cance of ‘distant’ inscriptions

There are, of course, at least two sides to the inscriptions written by Ji’an men located at the capital. Their inscriptions were meaningful not only to their authors, but also to those who requested and displayed these texts locally. In assessing the distance that is a signi cant characteristic of these early Ming inscriptions, we need to explore the issue from both sides: from the perspective of those who stayed behind in Ji’an—the recipients of these high-powered endorsements—and from the perspective of their authors at the capital, who, as I shall argue, were not merely addressing a Ji’an audience, but a far wider one. Although many men left to serve at the capital, not everyone did. So how did those who stayed behind experience the changes that had taken place? During the rst century of Ming rule, members of the local community in Ji’an were mostly looking outside their locality for con rmations of their worth. Local men were keen to establish and strengthen contacts with their fellow Ji’an men at court. Moreover, they used requests for temple inscriptions to re ect some of the status of central government of cials at court onto their local institutions. Let us take a Buddhist temple in Longquan as example. Zijiao Temple, originally built during the Tang, had received an of - cial plaque in 1060, when a prominent Longquan man, the Northern Song central government of cial Xiao Zuo 蕭佐, had written an inscription. The temple had fallen into disrepair, and it was not until the early years of Yongle’s reign that a local villager expressed a desire to restore the buildings. This local landlord, a man named Peng Yongwei 彭用威, enlisted the help of two monks from nearby Ganzhou prefecture, pre- paring a small dharma hall for them to live in. After they surveyed the situation, they declared the dharma hall unsuitable for the veneration of the Buddha, and made clear that a great deal of funding would

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be needed. Peng Yongwei acceded, offered his own funds, and raised more funds from the locals in the area. It took ve years to complete, but at the end of that period the buildings were all of an impressive beauty, the temple authorities had all the necessary tools and implements for the performance of rituals, and had even taken repossession of lands the temple had once owned but then lost. The entire restoration process was by all accounts a purely local affair. Peng, whose family had been of high standing in Longquan for more than twelve generations, had used his local reputation to enlist the help of other wealthy families in Longquan to make their contributions. To mark its completion, however, Peng and his fellow Longquan men did not turn to a fellow local. Instead, they requested an inscription from a Taihe man; they approached Xiao Zi. Xiao Zi had passed the jinshi examination in 1427, and would eventually become chancellor at the Directorate of Education and grand secretary in 1452 until his death in 1464: a high of cial indeed, and with no Longquan connections. Xiao Zi’s text reveals little personal involvement with the temple and its restoration process. His narrative is full of detail, listing the names of those involved and detailing the extent of the restorations, but largely devoid of emotion. His only words of praise are these: If the disciple of [the monk] Fusheng had not taken on this responsibility, and [Peng] Yongwei had not provided his assistance, then no one would have known of the collapse and rebuilding of this temple. There is a connection between such collapses and restorations in the realm, and it can only be overcome with the kind of contribution that [Peng] Yongwei and the disciple of Fusheng have made to Zijiao [Temple]. This is something I admire.70 This is in fact the central theme of Xiao Zi’s inscription. The affairs of the realm (tian xia zhi shi 天下之事) collapse and may ourish again, but only when people take personal responsibility for them. It is an extremely general, even bland remark. Xiao clearly had no personal af nity with the temple, and made no effort to sound personally involved. From a local point of view, one would suspect that no personal link was necessary for the text to ful l its requirements. Xiao’s name and his high standing at court was what mattered.71 So much so that he

70 Xiao Zi, ‘Zhongxiu Zijiao si ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1771), 7.29a. 71 An interesting comparison could be established between this Ming inscription by Xiao Zi and the Northern Song text by Xiao Zuo. Xiao Zuo’s text, written around 1060, reveals equally little personal involvement. Xiao Zuo extensively quotes the monk, who

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could draw on exactly the same theme in a second inscription requested by a monk from Longquan. He wrote: ‘The restoration of Ziyang Abbey in Longquan was entirely due to its Daoist Master, Yin Wuyuan.’72 From the perspective of the Longquan men, the endorsement of such a high of cial clearly provided enough credit and standing to negate the fact that Xiao Zi had nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment in question. Longquan was off the beaten track, and boasted far fewer successful men than, say, Taihe. They nevertheless had access to the social and political capital of their fellow Ji’an men, and were keen to convey that. For Zixiao Abbey 紫霄觀, located thirty kilometres north of the Luling county seat and restored in 1370, the locals asked the high Daoist of cial Zhang Yuchu 張宇初 (1361–1410).73 Again, it is clear from the inscription that Zhang did not have much personal af nity with Zixiao. Zhang explains that in 1406, when he was put in charge of the editing of the Daoist Canon,74 he was approached with a request to write an inscription for this abbey. The Yongle emperor had issued an edict in the summer of 1406 instructing such ancient sacred sites to be rebuilt. The abbot of Zixiao and his pupils brought a copy of the edict to Zhang’s mountain dwelling, and requested an inscription. Zhang Yuchu was at the time one of the most highly regarded Daoist masters of the early Ming dynasty. His literary collection includes texts for temples, academies, studios, and Daoist abbeys throughout Jiangxi.75 For the abbot of Zixiao, the endorsement and support of this great master must have been extremely valuable. By referring to the edict, a

had visited Xiao, and told him of the recent restoration efforts. Xiao did not comply with the request for an inscription until after the monk’s death, when fellow monks told Xiao that his hope for an inscription had been his dying wish. Xiao reveals no personal commitment other than ‘not wishing to insult the dead’, and complies on his way to a posting. Xiao Zuo, ‘Zhongxiu Zijiao si ji’, Longquan xianzhi, (1873), 16.27a–b. 72 Xiao Zi, ‘Zhongxiu Ziyang guan ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1771), 7.22a. 73 Zhang was a high Daoist of cial indeed. The of cial residence of the Zhang patriarchs was Longhu Mountain, Guixi county in Guangxin prefecture ( Jiangxi), more than 200 km north-east of Luling. Zhang, the forty-third Heavenly Master, received honorary titles and of cial protection from Zhu Yuanzhang. He repeatedly carried out of cial rain prayers for the court in Nanjing, and held an imperial seal to authenticate the charms he made. He was put in charge of the compilation of Daoist literature under the Yongle emperor. DMB, 107–8. See also Florian Reiter, Grundelemente und Tendenzen des religiösen Taoismus: Das Spannungsverhältnis von Integration und Individualität in seiner Geschichte zur Chin-, Yüan- und frühen Ming-Zeit (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988). 74 The Daozang appeared in 1445 in 5.305 chapters ( juan). 75 His literary collection is entitled Xianquan ji. His Daoist works have all been included in the Daozang.

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document applicable not just to Jiangxi but throughout the realm, Zhang Yuchu’s endorsement was lifted out of the local perspective and placed in a national and imperial context. The local was given signi cance and meaning by making it refer to the world beyond Ji’an.

Chen Mo’s Chenghuang inscription

Those who stayed behind in Ji’an bene ted from the connection with these high-powered men at court. But did it work the other way round too? Did the Ji’an men at court look to their native prefecture in their writings? Although it is conceivable that the men from Ji’an were keen to show off their success in central government only to a purely local audience, a close reading of their writings suggests that they were, in fact, keen to demonstrate local compliance with national policies to an audience that was much broader than purely local. Ji’an men were keen to show off local adherence to centrally issued policies to an empire-wide, or ‘translocal’, audience. Determining a text’s audience is, of course, notoriously dif cult, but a close reading of several examples will allow us to test the idea that the audience was translocal rather than local. The temple for the god of walls and moats in Taihe, which had much older origins, was rebuilt in 1381. An inscription, written for this temple during the early years of Hongwu’s reign, demonstrates local of cials’ compliance with ritual regulations from above.76 It was written by Chen Mo (1305–ca.1389), a native of Taihe, and one of the Ji’an men serving as a high court of cial in the early Hongwu government.77 Chen Mo’s inscription, written to celebrate the Taihe refurbishment of the Chenghuang temple, shows off the exemplary local execution of a central government instruction. But to whom exactly was he showing off ? Chen Mo started with an extensive quote from the edict issued in 1370:78

76 Chen Mo, ‘Chenghuang ji’, Taihe xianzhi (1879), 3.20a–b. The text is also included in Chen Mo’s literary collection, Haisang ji. 77 For Chen Mo’s biography, see Taihe xianzhi (1879), 16.2a–3b. For more information about this group, see John Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 78 The edict dates from 1370. See Romeyn Taylor, ‘Ming T’ai-tsu and the Gods of Walls and Moats’, 40. See also Taylor, ‘Of cial Altars, Temples and Shrines’, 115, and the discussion on the implementation of this edict in Hamashima Atsutoshi, ‘The City-god Temples (ch’eng-huang-miao) of Chiangnan in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties’, Memoirs of the Research Department of the Tôyô Bunko 50 (1992): 1–27.

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We have published the investigation of the Sacri cial Statutes, and consider it appropriate to transform the appearance of temples for the gods of walls and moats. Temples at the prefectural level should be built in accordance with the pattern of prefectural government [buildings]; temples at the sub-prefectural level and the county level should be [built] in accordance with the pattern of the sub-prefectural and county government [buildings]. If there are old clay idols and statues, they must all be destroyed and [the material] turned into plaster. The walls of the two corridors and those in the central hall must be re-covered with plaster, and clouds and mountains must be painted on the walls. Every deity throne and every seat must be arranged as it is done in the of cial and ceremonial buildings. The rank of its primate will be ‘the god of walls and moats of xx place’.79 This is no brief reference to an edict, but a rehearsal of much of the text. The passage dwells at length on the administrative aspects of the temple, with an emphasis on the various ways in which the worship of this deity is to be incorporated into local representation of the central government. By this edict, Zhu Yuanzhang was the rst to introduce an otherwise popular deity into the of cial pantheon. Perhaps Chen Mo was partly trying to convince himself that by undertaking the white- washing of the walls, the destruction of the old idols and the complete rearrangement of the lay-out of the ritual space, worship of the god of walls and moats could become palatable. He certainly made no attempt to hide his disgust of locally current practice: ‘How great, this system! We began by washing away the lth of these dissolute customs, so as to follow the corrections of the Sacri cial Record.’80 In what follows it becomes clear that Chen Mo, who went to the capital in Nanjing shortly after the founding of the Ming, was writing from the perspective of a government representative. The Provincial Department (sheng bu 省部) then considered and discussed the form [the changes should take], and ordered the implementation of these changes in the provinces (wai sheng). The provinces respectfully received the [instructions] and passed them on to the appropriate sub- ordinate authorities.81 Chen Mo was not only giving the perspective of someone located at the capital, but also showing the ways in which such new regulations passed through the system. We see the edict originate in the capital,

79 Chen Mo, ‘Chenghuang ji’, Haisang ji, 7.22b–23a. 80 Haisang ji, 7.23a. 81 Ibid.

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and then see it ltering down to the grass-roots level. Once it arrived in Taihe, Chen Mo’s narrative changed, and the focus became nar- rower. He named the magistrate in charge of Taihe at the time of the receipt of the edict, and listed the three colleagues (the county security of cer, the county registrar, and the county jailor) who collaborated with the Taihe magistrate on this clearly extensive project of Chenghuang temple renewal. They discussed the order of work together. They measured out suitable land and surveyed its size; they selected the best materials and carefully allocated these; they chose responsible men and assigned them to suitable positions. By morning they economized and by evening they put things in order. They inspected with kindness but supervised with sever- ity. They were tolerant of what was broad, and respectful of what was narrow, until they knew that everything was in accordance with the law. The gates and corridors, the halls and sleeping quarters, everything was magni cent, bright and airy.82 Chen Mo’s elaborate narrative and his almost poetic description of a surely somewhat dull construction project served a purpose. He wished his readers to know that the building of a temple for the god of walls and moats was taken extremely seriously in Taihe. The four highest county of cials worked together, and worked extremely hard on making sure that the temple complied exactly to the letter of the law. But why? Why would the Taihe readership of this inscription—perhaps those who wandered into the temple and read it there—need to know the minutiae of the administrative procedure involved? It is hard to think of a reason why this detail would be better than a brief reference to the edict that triggered so much of the local rebuilding in Ji’an. Perhaps we should look for an explanation not in Taihe, but in the capital. When men like Chen Mo began to become involved in Zhu Yuan- zhang’s regime, they were not there to determine policy. As Dardess and others have shown, ‘The Kiangsi intelligentsia had no part in shaping the framework of Confucian ideas that rationalized the new Ming despotism; that was the work of men from Chekiang.’83 Men from Zhejiang, most notably those associated with Jinhua like Song Lian 宋濂 (1310–1381), Liu Ji 劉基 (1311–1375), and Wang Wei 王褘 (1323–74), had the ear of the emperor, and were part of the construction of a new

82 Haisang ji, 7.23b. 83 Dardess, A Ming Society, 174.

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system.84 Perhaps Chen Mo was pitching Taihe against Jinhua here, showing fellow members of Zhu Yuanzhang’s broad circle of Confu- cian advisers that Taihe could be measured along the same ruler as Jinhua? For now this has to remain speculative, but Chen’s audience surely went beyond Taihe when he wrote: Looking [towards the emperor], this temple signi es praise for his imperial wisdom; looking down [towards the people], it generates joyful sentiments among the people. From far and near people throng here to admire the temple, and before people had sighed [they exclaimed] how great, how wonderful, such great transformation! This is the most superior appearance of such temples. How could this merely be the extraordinary beauty of one county!85 Chen’s text explicitly removed the temple from its local setting, and ascribed it a value that is distinctly national. The Taihe temple served not only to glorify the emperor, but set an example for the entire realm. It is as if Chen was reassuring those who issued the regulations that it had indeed a moral purpose, and that the results of the edict their emperor issued were indeed within the moral needs of the realm. In the next section, Chen quoted at length from an inscription by the leading Yuan scholar Wu Cheng 吳澄 (1249–1333).86 It referred extensively to the annals of the Han, to show that if there was no classical precedent for the inclusion of Chenghuang worship in the of cial state cult, there was at least historical precedent. Chen Mo’s long quotation from Wu Cheng’s text suggests that the unease of the inclusion of Chenghuang had by no means subsided by the time of his writing. Chen continued to speak to his colleagues at court: The words of Mr Wenzheng [i.e. Wu Cheng] are broad, clear and comprehensive. They amply provide what was missing in the Ritual Statutes (Lidian 禮典), while our sagely Son of Heaven has judged from his

84 On the participation of Jinhua men in early Ming government, see, for example, John D. Langlois, ‘Political Thought in Chin-hua under Mongol Rule’ in John Langlois, ed., China under Mongol Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 137–185. On Liu Ji, see Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy, throughout. 85 Haisang ji, 7.23b. 86 His extensive quotations from this locus classicus of inscriptions for the god of walls and moats suggest that Wu Cheng’s inscription had laid some of the foundations for the Confucian advisers at Zhu Yuanzhang’s court. They sought to render acceptable the inclusion of the god of walls and moats, a god whose worship had no legal precedent before 1370, in the state cult.

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imperial centre to eliminate all confusion and vulgarity. [The emperor] has made sure the gods of walls and moats have grand and lofty dwellings, instead of improper, small and vulgar shrines.87 This was clearly not a text written to celebrate the efforts of the local magistrate who supervised the building project. This text was written to engage in a dialogue with other scholars and of cials, located in Zhu Yuanzhang’s wider circle, about the value of these newly implemented ritual regulations. The last lines of the inscription emphasize this yet again: If the people are at peace, then the god will bring them blessings, and the local landlords will be doubly [blessed]. Indeed, the diligent promulgation of this imperial virtue will ensure the growth of the virtue of the commoners, which will be manifest well beyond the reach of this temple. The god’s blessing of these people will exist in eternity and will know no bounds. Everyone will be transformed by what [the emperor] has bequeathed to us. I had to write this down, and carve this text into a stone, so that it could serve to demonstrate this to visitors.88 There can be little doubt that the readership of this text is not located in Taihe, but anywhere in the country, including at the imperial court in Nanjing.

Liu Qiu’s Chenghuang inscription

The inclusion of temples for the god of walls and moats in the of cial Sacri cial Statutes caused a stir at court, as inscriptions like the text by Chen Mo suggest. Their authors contributed to a debate held at court about the wisdom of this imperial decision. They suggested that by carrying out the proposed refurbishments at existing temples for the god of walls and moats, such temples, and thereby their gods, were brought under imperial control. Another example, written to celebrate the completed refurbishment of the Chenghuang temple in Anfu, was written by Liu Qiu 劉球 (1392–1443). Liu Qiu, born in Anfu, passed the jinshi examination in 1421, one of the years that produced a bumper crop of 28 successful jinshi candidates from Ji’an.89 Liu Qiu did not take up a post until ten years later, and internal evidence sug-

87 Haisang ji, 7.24a. 88 Haisang ji, 7.24a–b. 89 These gures are based on the jinshi table included in the 1776 Ji’an prefectural gazetteer. JAFZ (1776), juan 25.

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gests that he wrote the inscription for the Chenghuang temple during this period of ten years, spent at home teaching and writing. Liu Qiu had an extraordinary career at court: he went to the capital in 1436, when he was invited to join the Hanlin Academy, and participated in the editing of Xuanzong’s Veritable Records. During these years the eunuch Wang Zhen 王振 (d. 1449) was building up his position of power at court. Encouraged by Wang Zhen, the Zhengtong emperor (r. 1436–1450) embarked on a series of expensive campaigns to Luchuan 麓川 (an independent state in northern Burma) in 1441. Liu Qiu was appalled by these wasteful and purposeless exercises, and submitted a memorial expressing his views.90 The emperor, needless to say, did not heed Liu’s advice, but Wang Zhen was angered by Liu’s readiness to criticize the emperor. When lightning struck and destroyed one of the palaces in 1443, Liu submitted another memorial, setting out ten points of criticism with regard to the present state of governing.91 His outspoken critique dealt mostly with matters of foreign relations—he disliked both the campaigns to the south-west and the dangerously high demands for tribute from the north—but he also addressed the role of the emperor: his lack of inspection tours and drought relief, and his harsh use of the people’s labour in state projects. Wang Zhen was now furious, and on 30 June 1443 he had Liu Qiu assassinated in prison. Although Liu Qiu was eventually rehabilitated, and offered a posthumous post in the Hanlin Academy as well as a shrine in his native Anfu, this only happened after Wang Zhen had been killed on the disastrous northern campaign of 1449, which led to the emperor’s imprisonment at Tumu 土木.92 There is no suggestion of Liu’s stormy relationship with the powers at court in his inscription for the Chenghuang temple, and initially no hint of his highly critical stance. On the contrary, the text celebrated the ability of the representatives of the central government to assert their power over such capricious local deities as the god of walls and moats. The rst sentence immediately set the stage: Nowadays the authorities of the realm are able to assert order on matters of worship without [attempting] to atter the gods. Such worship includes only the previous sages and worthies and the gods of mountains and valleys, the god of soil and grain, and the god of walls and moats.93

90 The memorial is included in Liu Qiu’s complete works, Liangxi wenji, 2.1a–3b. 91 Liangxi wenji, 2.3b–9a. 92 DMB, 1348. 93 Liu Qiu, ‘Anfu xian zhongxiu chenghuang miao ji’, Liangxi wenji, 4.1a.

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But Liu Qiu’s faith in the ability of the government to control matters of worship was not entirely blind. He was aware of the dif culties posed by the inclusion of the god of walls and moats in this list, and indicated this awareness by discussing the differences between the previous sages and worthies, and the god of walls and moats. Myriad generations throughout the realm have honoured the teachings of the previous sages and worthies. The ef cacy and luminosity of the god of walls and moats, however, can at any one time reach only one small [area]. . . . The teachings that the previous sages and worthies promulgated invariably lead people to return to what is good and to abandon what is not good. The god of walls and moats, however, can bring both harm and blessings, can do good and not good. [Only] when [gods] have a constant desire to do good in the world, bring universal bene t to the state (guo jia) and offer merit for all its people, can they be added to the Rites.94 In Liu’s eyes, the difference was clear. The bene ts of the teachings of sages and worthies were appreciated by all, their transforming in uence was universal. The power of gods of walls and moats, however, did not reach beyond their own protectorates, and even then, such gods could bring harm as much as bene t. Of cial recognition and inclusion in the state cult, usually reserved for abstract spiritual beings such as the gods of mountains and valleys, was in part intended to neutral- ize the powers of a deity.95 By including the god of walls and moats, traditionally a popular deity, the emperor had gone against established orthodoxy.96 Liu questioned the validity of this decision by drawing attention to this anomaly. Having discussed the nature of the god of walls and moats, Liu Qiu then focused more speci cally on Anfu’s Chenghuang temple. The god had received the title of Count of Brilliant Assistance (xian you bo 顯佑伯) and the temple was restored during the Hongwu era, but the restoration cannot have been very thorough as not long thereafter the

94 Ibid. 95 The neutralizing powers of naming and listing a demon/deity is discussed, for example, by Anna Seidel, ‘Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments; Taoist Roots in the Apocrypha’, in Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, vol. II, Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques XXI (1983), especially 320–332. For an example of an arguably similar process in thirteenth-century Jizhou, see Gerritsen, ‘From Demon to Deity’. 96 Compare the discussion in Taylor, ‘Ming T’ai-tsu and the Gods of Walls and Moats’, 115.

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building fell into disrepair again. Then, with the arrival of Magistrate Zhao Min 趙敏, things started to change. Zhao had initiated a large- scale restoration process that involved not only large sums of money but an extended workforce. Once the buildings had been completely restored, the people of Anfu had the following song of praise for Zhao Min: Before [Magistrate Zhao Min] arrived, this god frequently sent calamities to our people when he came to the shrine. Now that [the Magistrate] has established good government, the god has brought security to the people, made our activities fruitful, and gave us cause for celebration. Since you, Our Magistrate, have established control over this temple, worship will never cease. Please look after our elders and infants for ever.97 The text creates the impression of a seamless transition, or perhaps even a blending into one of worship for the deity and gratitude for the magistrate. The administrative powers of the magistrate and his bene cial government reached far enough to incorporate the deity, whose only wish was to bring bene t to the area. In other words, under the guidance of the magistrate, Liu would have us believe, the deity has relinquished his power to do harm, thereby qualifying himself for inclusion in the Sacri cial Record. Stressing the universally bene cial qualities of the Anfu Chenghuang deity allowed Liu Qiu to justify the inclusion in the Sacri cial Statutes of this otherwise problematic deity. There is little doubt that for men like Chen Mo and Liu Qiu, the presence of temples for the god of walls and moats in the state cult posed problems. Their texts attempted to iron out these dif culties and nd ways of justifying the decision made at court. In doing so, they were representing the perspective of the state. In their eyes, it was the interest of the entire state (guo jia) that was at stake here. While Chen Mo clearly addressed his colleagues at court and perhaps even the emperor, Liu Qiu was less explicit about his audience. But Liu’s perspective, too, went well beyond the Anfu and Ji’an borders. To justify a decision made at the central level by referring to its bene t to the state is to help along the national cause, not merely a local cause. The theme of Chenghuang temples was widespread in fourteenth and fteenth-century texts from Ji’an. Another author, writing about the newly restored Chenghuang temple in Jishui during the reign of

97 Liangxi wenji, 4.1b.

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Hongwu, also tried to justify Chenghuang worship. For him, the key was the direct comparison between magistrate and deity: Those gods that have the ability [to bene t] people (you neng min 有能民) are invited to enjoy the odours of sacri ce. Clerks that are able to [operate] on behalf of the people ( you wei min 有為民) are invited to hear cases and pass judgments. Where he is intelligent and fair, the Chenghuang [deity] is regarded as ‘manifest assistance’; where they are incorrupt and benevolent, magistrates are determined to be ‘following goodness’. Where their fame and reputation permeates the area, their actions re ect that.98 Again, as in Liu Qiu’s text, we see the comparison between gods of walls and moats and local representatives of imperial rule. They are measured by the same standard and receive comparable honours. By drawing gods of walls and moats into such comparisons, the authors created the impression that they can be judged and measured in such ways, and that they t into the structure of local control imposed by the state. It is exactly what Zhu Yuanzhang would have hoped to achieve with his inclusion of Chenghuang deities. The broad discussions in such temple inscriptions suggests, however, that even if literati authors had dif culties accepting the emperor’s point of view, they were at least willing to work towards that acceptance. It is with the central government point of view in mind that they take part in this dialogue, and it is the central government perspective they are trying to defend.

Conclusion

Let us recall, by way of conclusion, the situation of the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. We noted there that Ji’an men made careers at home. Successful jinshi degree holders like Ouyang Shoudao and Liu Chenweng spent the great majority of their time working at home. Their outlook was local, although their reputations went well beyond the Jizhou borders. We have seen that authors like Yang Zhangru, Ouyang Shoudao and Liu Chenweng were interested in activities that centred on local temples, shrines and monasteries. Their writings reveal close involvement with the religious institutions of the area, and a deep concern with the religious activities that took place at such sacred sites. These authors voiced strong opinions in the texts they composed.

98 Huang Sishan, ‘Jishui Chenghuang miao ji’, JAFZ (1776), 14.1b–2a.

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They were often not happy about the activities they observed, and attempted to impose what they believed to be a more acceptable view on the practices they observe. I have argued above that there is a powerful motivation behind their writings. They saw the religious life of their local community as a useful medium to impose their authority. Local temples and religious institutions offered them the opportunity to manifest themselves as men of in uence and standing within the local community. Their writings about the local temples were, I have argued, ways of acting locally and transforming the local. Where the central government offered little perspective of a career or a post, the local took its place as their main focus, and served as their main arena for establishing power. Local religious practices worked as a ‘ eld’, and formed part of local elite strategy.99 I propose that this pattern, which continues through much of the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, was severely disrupted in the period under discussion in this chapter. The change started with the extreme physical disruption of the ghting of the end of the Yuan. Ji’an was among the places in southern China that suffered heavy losses; it was the battle-ground of several major actions, and located at the boundary of several landlords’ territory. Most of the notes on the temples listed in the Ji’an gazetteers refer to ‘destruction at the end of the Yuan’, though only rarely do we nd out the exact date of the destruction, or its manner. The gazetteers are keen to suggest, however, that after the founding of Ming rule in 1368, the entire prefecture embarked on a huge rebuilding program. Magistrates in each county hurried to declare their completed temples and altars for the state cult, quickly adding new ones or rebuilding temples that did not comply with the steady stream of newly issued regulations. The gazetteers also suggest that throughout the prefecture hundreds of shrines, temples and monasteries were rebuilt. While there is no evidence of Timothy Brook’s widespread amalgamation of temples, following the imperial order to amalgamate of 1384, the extant inscriptions of this period frequently refer to the imperial orders that inspired and motivated this extensive restoration program.100 Temple inscriptions and gazetteers alike suggest that the

99 Esherick and Rankin, Chinese Local Elites, 330–345. 100 Timothy Brook, ‘At the Margins of Public Authority: The Ming State and Bud- dhism’, in Theodore Heuters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yü, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Con icts, and Accommodations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 161–181.

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state’s instructions for the reorganization of local religious practice did not fall on deaf ears. Throughout Ji’an, magistrates and other local of cials, monks and Daoist masters, as well as local dignitaries and landlords, were keen to show both their awareness of the central order for the refurbishment of temples and their compliance. What did this mean for the relationship between literati from Ji’an and their local religious institutions? How did it compare with the relationship, discussed earlier, during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties? I have argued that it was an entirely different relationship. While temple inscriptions of the Southern Song and Yuan revealed a desire to belong locally, the temple inscriptions from the period between 1368 and 1500 could be characterized as a centralized view of local religion. Two closely related factors lie at the heart of this character- ization. First, Ji’an men were drawn into the central government from the early years of Zhu Yuanzhang’s rule onward. Initially, they were selected on the basis of their literary reputations, but soon thereafter men began to pass the jinshi examinations in high numbers. Peak years followed in 1404 and 1415, when 37 and 29 candidates passed respectively. Another surge in numbers occurred in the middle of the century; after 28 candidates had passed in 1421, 30 passed in 1451 and 34 in 1454. Men from Jiangxi served as close advisers to many emperors, and men from Ji’an frequently served as grand secretary. It meant that many of the Ji’an gentlemen who were asked to contribute temple inscriptions were physically located at the capital, far more so than during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. But their mental location was far more signi cant than their physical location. Their outlook was towards the capital and court, as they frequently made clear in their inscriptions. The locals asking for inscriptions travelled the long road to the capital, and were rewarded with a text that was emphatically composed ‘at the capital’. I am not suggesting that these men forgot their roots in Ji’an; as Dardess has shown, for the many Taihe men who served in the early Ming, their Taihe identity was hugely important. That celebration of the local, however, happened at court, at a distance. The people they were trying to impress with their texts were located at court, and the topics they addressed were relevant to an audience well beyond Ji’an. The inscription for the Chenghuang temple discussed by Chen Mo was a clear example of texts for local institutions that were written to engage in a national dialogue. Not all texts were as emphatic about their audience at court as Chen Mo’s, but they too were concerned

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with discussing, for example, the validity of the widespread institution of Chenghuang temples with like-minded of cials, taking that dialogue well beyond local borders. When authors like Liang Qian took time to discuss local practices, they made little effort to hide their disdain. Of course Ouyang Shoudao was also highly critical of the local practices he observed, most notably in his famous Kang Wang inscription. But the difference, I suggest, is that Ouyang Shoudao spent considerable effort suggesting an alternative for the local community. It mattered to him that a new practice was imposed to replace the old, and that he was known to be the one offering the alternative. Liang Qian merely observed from a distance, and noted that he nds local practice laughable. He cared little either way whether such practices might be changed at any stage, and felt no responsibility to undertake such change. The second factor that is part of the change between the South- ern Song and Yuan inscriptions and the Ming texts discussed here is closely related. At the local level, these inscriptions indicate, the court functioned as the main source of authority and ‘cultural capital’. It mattered, it would seem, for those locally active in the restoration processes, to gain the endorsement in the form of a temple inscription of someone located at the capital. It seems to have worried few that such inscriptions were at times hardly factually accurate and at other times written by authors blatantly uninterested in the exact circumstances at the temple. What mattered, one has to conclude, was that the establishment was, in one way or another, drawn into the culture of court. Through association, the local institutions gained during this period a sense of the centre. For those in Ji’an, it was important to be somehow involved with the centre. While jinshi gures uctuated, careers at times were abruptly halted, and high pro le gures might be thrown in jail, executed, or stripped of their titles, an interest in the centre, and a desire to be known to be associated with it, continued throughout much of the fteenth century. It was not until the sixteenth century that the situation reverted back to a focus on the local. The association with the capital was, of course, by no means permanent, but it was serious and impressive while it lasted.

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LATE MING JI’AN: A NEW SACRED LANDSCAPE?

The thirteenth-century landscape, as seen through the eyes of men like Wang Xiangzhi and Liu Chenweng, was threatening and partly unknown; after all, during the Song, Jizhou was still to some extent a frontier region, to which Han Chinese culture had only spread fairly recently. It was also, rst and foremost, a landscape marked by sacred sites. Writing about monasteries and abbeys, shrines and temples of Jizhou gave the literati—and after all, it is through their eyes we see this landscape, not through the eyes of the vast majority of the population—opportunities to shape and construct a personal landscape. As I have shown, Jizhou literati were drawn to the sacred sites in their landscape, because writing about them allowed these writers to inscribe their landscape, and order their spatial environment. Their extant writings, temple inscriptions, provide a record of literati attempts to belong to the local communities, and to assign meaningful roles to themselves within these communities. Seventeenth-century Ji’an was, unsurprisingly, a very different place. During the Ming, the south, and in particular Jiangxi, had found a rm space on the map of the empire because of the supplies of grain it produced to feed the less fertile and more arid regions in the north. Jiangxi and Huguang were the main grain-producing provinces of the empire, and Jiangxi and Huguang barges travelled constantly up and down the rivers delivering the goods to feed the ever more densely populated Jiangnan region. Jiangxi’s reputation for trade was linked to the reputation of the production of ceramics in Jingdezhen in Raozhou prefecture (see Map 6). The ceramic production of this busy city in the north-east of the province, with products—famed as highly desirable luxury goods in Europe—shipped by the Raozhou merchants all over the empire, gained it the nickname ‘City of year-round thunder and lightening’ (sishi leidian zhen 四時雷電鎮), due to the never-ending noise of hammers pounding the earth and smoke lling the skies.1

1 Yu Longsheng, ‘Mingdai Jiangxi shangren de xingshang tese’, in Shangrao shifan xueyuan xuebao 22.4 (2002): 78.

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Map 6. Ming prefectures of Jiangxi. Map based on China Historical GIS, Version 3.0 (April 2005)

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Initially, there was plenty of land available for grain production in Jiangxi.2 However, as the population grew during the late Ming, and pressures on peasants increased because of rising taxes and corvee duties, more Jiangxi peasants lost their lands to powerful landowners who were better equipped to exploit the grain export. For those who lost their land, the options were threefold. They could try their hand at trade, they could migrate to Huguang, or further a eld to Guangdong and Guilin, or they could join the household of a wealthy landowner as tenants. The rst option, to turn to commerce, was, as Yu Longsheng has shown, heavily favoured in Jiangxi, and number of merchants grew quickly. The mountains, useless for grain production, provided ample products for manufacturing and trade: Jiangxi merchants exported, apart from ceramics, tea, paper, sugar, tobacco and ramie cloth.3 Migration was also a popular option. Huguang took most of the migrants from Jiangxi, as is still the case today. Land in Huguang was cheaper and more copiously available, and home was near enough to make occasional trips back for worship and ritual duties. It was a well-known fact that men from Jiangxi worked and settled in Huguang; an oft-quoted fteenth-century statement suggested that ‘half of Jiangxi males have gone west to become merchants in Huguang’.4 For those who could not migrate or succeed in commerce, entering tenancy in a large landlord household was the only remaining option, and it has been suggested that tenant numbers were particularly high in Jiangxi. Shi Youmin argues that early Ming success in the examinations in Jiangxi, and especially in Ji’an, was partially to blame. For the large numbers of gentlemen who had passed the exams and gained status and power at the capital, their ability to purchase local land and establish extended estates in their native areas had substantially increased.5 Jiangxi had become a region of large estates, tenant farming, and mercantile activity. Jiangxi would never be known

2 Heijdra, ‘The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China’, 533. 3 Yu, ‘Mingdai Jiangxi shangren’, 77–79. 4 The statement was made by Qiu Jun 邱濬 (1420–95), a scholar of statecraft. Timothy Brook, Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 95. 5 Shi Youmin, ‘Shixi Mingdai Jiangxi de dianpuzhi yu zudianzhi’, Jiangxi shehuikexue lishi yanjiu 11 (2003): 171–173.

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as a ‘centre’ of economic activity, but the area had changed signi cantly during the course of the Ming, and the effects of those changes were visible in the constantly developing natural landscape. Ji’an literati saw a different landscape. More signi cantly perhaps, they saw a different role for themselves in that local landscape. Temples no longer appeared in their writings as central nodes of local transformation. While in the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, literati wrote about temples as pre-eminent spaces of local activism, Ming literati distanced themselves from temples. In early Ming, as we saw, they distanced themselves physically, their location at the capital a constant refrain. In late Ming, as the following chapter argues, they employed a variety of strategies to express the distance between themselves and the sacred sites they wrote about. Before we explore the signi cance of that distancing further, however, we need to look more closely at the Ji’an landscape as it was conjured up in late Ming literati records. In the following pages we will follow the traveller and geographer Xu Xiake (1587–1641) on his 1636 journey through Ji’an. Xu’s journey between 1636 and 1640 was to Chicken Feet Mountain ( Jizu shan 雞足山) in Yunnan, which initially led him through Zhejiang and Jiangxi, before taking him through Huguang, Guangxi and Guizhou to Yunnan. Reading Xu’s descriptions of the Ji’an he visited, enables us to see Ji’an through his eyes, noting the features he found noteworthy, and lingering over the sites where he chose to linger. Through his travel record, we will see a landscape that is utterly different from the landscape of Song Jizhou. Gone are the references to threatening and fearsome sites, gone also the references to outstanding academic success. In their stead, we nd well-travelled paths, and sites with venerable histories of visiting worthies. The most striking sites, in Ji’an literati eyes, were not the sites where negotiations with the invisible world had taken place, but sites of historical association and reminders of a glorious past.

Xu Xiake in Ji’an

Xu travelled with a Buddhist monk named Jingwen 靜聞 and two servants. In the winter of 1636, they entered Ji’an prefecture from the north-east, where they had seen the Huagai Mountains near Le’an

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county (see Map 7).6 They travelled by boat into Yongfeng, where they spent the night at the county seat. For the next two days they continued by river towards Jishui. Xu was impressed by its strategic riverside location: [The river] curls around the eastern gates of Jishui, and turns towards the southern, western and northern gates, where it ows into the Gan. The river that encircles three sides of Jishui is the En, which comes from Yongfeng. The Gan only passes the northern gate.7 Xu had intended to travel on—obviously he was not expecting any sites of great interest in Jishui—but incessant rain kept the group there, and he decided to spend the day visiting the Zhang family. The Zhangs, Xu noted, had for many generations been able to send their sons to take part in the examinations, although they never achieved success, and had in more recent times been even less fortunate. ‘Even though this is a large family, no one studies, and hence not one of them wears a gentleman’s gown, which makes me very sad.’8 Jishui was not what it had once been in terms of examination success. In the rst long century of Ming rule, Jishui had an average of almost four successful candidates per examination year. That extraordinary average dropped to just over one candidate after 1499.9 While it had produced more degree holders than any other Ji’an county in the rst half of the Ming, it had dropped to a shared third place in the second half, and had only half the successful candidates that Anfu county produced during this period. Xu’s despondency over the Zhang family’s lacklustre performance may well have echoed a wider sentiment in the Jishui area.

6 For Xu’s biography, see Arthur Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington: Government Printing Of ce, 1943), 314–316. His diaries are also discussed in Julian Ward, Xu Xiake (1587–1641) The Art of Travel Writing (Richmond: Curzon, 2001). See also Li Chi, The Travel Diaries of Hsü Hsia-k’o (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1974). The best edition of Xu Xiake’s travel diaries is Xu Hongzu, Xu Xiake youji (Late Ming, reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai guji; 1980) in 3 vols. For maps of his travels, see the third volume of Xu Xiake youji. A map of Xu’s 1636–1640 journey can also be found in Timothy Brook, ‘Communications and Commerce’, 627. 7 XXKYJ, 148. 8 XXKYJ, 149. 9 To be more precise, between 1371 and 1499, Jishui produced 146 jinshi degree holders, or on average 3.7 successful candidates per examination year. Between 1502 and 1643, Jishui produced only another 65, or on average 1.3 per examination year. JAFZ (1776), juan 25.

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Despite the by now torrential rain, nothing could keep Xu in Jishui, and they sailed on, up the Gan, heading southwest towards Luling. Although he did not visit it, Xu did note the existence of Longhua Monastery, near the Jishui city walls: The monastery is very old, and recently it has been restored and re- roofed. There is a shrine for Zou Nangao 鄒南皋 [i.e. Zou Yuanbiao, 1551–1624]. On the eastern wall in front of the monks’ hall is a text carved in stone written by Han Xizai 韓熙載, and Xu Xuan 徐鉉 also wrote eight lines.10 Through Xu Xiake’s description we learn something of the landscape as he saw it. A monastery like Longhua had become more than a place of worship and retreat alone; it was a site with its own cultural history, such as the shrine for the scholar Zou Yuanbiao, who had died just a decade earlier. The grave inscription for Chan Master Yuanji 元寂 by Han Xizai (902–970) and Xu Xuan (916–991) was what had made this monastery famous, and why it had merited an entry in the Comprehensive Gazetteer (Da Ming yi tong zhi).11 The picture Xu formed of the landscape was thus de ned and coloured further by encounters with the gures who had been there before. The restoration Xu referred to had been started in 1628, but according to the 1660 prefectural gazetteer, the work had not yet been completed in 1640, when it was destroyed again by soldiers.12 No doubt Xu Xiake had noted the monastery’s entry in his Comprehensive Gazetteer, one of the few books he had with him on his travels, but although he copied its noteworthy information in his diary, he did not tarry to visit the monastery himself. Their next port of call was Bailuzhou, the islet in the Gan River, just outside Luling’s city walls. They moored the boat, and after dealing with some thieves, who had come on board earlier and tried to steal their belongings, they settled themselves at Jingtu Chapel 淨土庵 on Bailu Islet. Xu Xiake was looking forward to visiting Bailuzhou, having long known about its beauty and history.13 The academy had of course seen its heyday during the Southern Song, when Ouyang Shoudao taught such luminaries as Wen Tianxiang and Liu Chenweng, but it had fallen into disrepair during the Yuan dynasty.14 In 1355 some efforts

10 XXKYJ, 149. 11 Da Ming yitongzhi, 56.18b. 12 JAFZ (1660), 16.7b. 13 XXKYJ, 150. 14 It was rst destroyed by soldiers in 1292, and damaged by oods two years later.

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had been made to restore the academy, but it was not until 1526 that serious money was spent on the buildings’ renovations, supervised by the prefectural magistrate. Xu and his fellow travellers spent several days at Bailuzhou, some of them holed up in the Academy because of the incessant rain, some visiting the old town of Luling, which Xu described as ‘quiet and peaceful’, and some trying to get to the nearby Shen’gang Mountains 神岡山.15 Their attempts were thwarted twice, however, because the rain had made the mud soft and the road impassable. When the skies nally cleared a little, they managed to make an outing to Dajue Chapel 大覺庵. Dajue had originally been called Juebao 覺報, and was entered under that name in the Comprehensive Gazetteer, which also added the fact that the chapel was built on the site of Zhou Bida’s residence—again the association with a gure from Ji’an’s past was considered more noteworthy than the evidence of human control over nature’s forces.16 The next day the travellers embarked on a tour of the Qingyuan Mountains to the east of Ji’an prefectural seat, returning to Ji’an twelve days later. They climbed Mount Tianyu 天獄山, or Heavenly Gaol Mountain, the mountain whose name had so annoyed Liang Qian when he wrote, ‘[p]eople also say the mountain serves as a prison for ghosts. Thus it is also has the name Tianyu. People say this is where spirits and the like are arrested and detained. Of course this is utter nonsense.’17 Xu Xiake had little interest in strange stories and local practices, and mentioned no details about the mountain. He also mentioned little about the market town of Yonghe, although they passed it on their way to Jingju Monastery in the Qingyuan Mountains. Yonghe, conveniently located on the banks of the river, had been a place of great glory during the Song, a site of early industrial manufacturing of pottery that once exceeded Jingdezhen in output and quality. By Ming times, however, it had lost its standing, and Xu did not even note its Song dynasty pagoda, or the remains of the Song dynasty potteries (still standing today). Neither was Jingju Monastery what it had once been. Founded by the Seventh Patriarch in the eighth century, Jingju was one of the most

The daruhachi of Ji’an circuit ordered the local gentry to contribute towards its restoration in 1295, but it was damaged by heavy oods again in 1342. 15 Ibid. 16 Da Ming yitongzhi, 56.18a. 17 Liang, Bo’an ji, 3.5a. See the fuller discussion of this text in the previous chapter, page 136.

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famous sites of Buddhism during the Song dynasty. By Ming times, however, the buildings had begun to be used for other purposes. During the early sixteenth century, most famously, they had become the meeting place for the members of the famous Jiangyou group, made up of latter-day Wang Yangming-ists like Nie Bao (1487–1563) from Yongfeng, Zou Shouyi 鄒守益 (1491–1562) from Anfu, Ouyang De (1496–1554) from Taihe, and Luo Hongxian (1504–1564) from Jishui. These four men were honoured together with Wang Yangming in a Five Worthies Shrine at the location of the old Buddhist complex. As a site, it had therefore become strongly associated with these Confucian thinkers, and was hence used as an academy. In the early seventeenth century, two local gentlemen became extremely interested in restoring Jingju. They were the Jishui scholar and of cial Zou Yuanbiao and the Taihe philanthropist Guo Zizhang 郭子章 (1542–1618). Their plan was initially to try and restore both the Confucian academy and the Buddhist temple at one site, but according to Xu Xiake’s diary, it was due to the strong opinions of the abbot of Jingju Monastery that this did not happen. The abbot who had been put in charge of Jingju by these two gentlemen was Chan Master Zhenyuan (Zhenyuan chanshi 真元禪師), also known as Benji 本寂, who served as abbot from 1615 until his death in 1638. At the time of Xu’s visit, both Zou and Guo had already been dead for some time, but Benji was still busy restoring the site to its Buddhist function. It had been decided to have all the buildings associated with the academy, including the meeting hall and the Shrine for the Five Worthies, moved away from the central sacred site, and to embark on the building of a new hall in the middle of the site, a project not yet completed when Xu visited, as he noted in his diary.18 So with this redevelopment and investment, the complex of sacred sites in the Qingyuan Mountains was undergoing a revival of sorts. It became noteworthy, in late Ming views of this area, for its associations with these important secular scholars, rather than for its signi cance as a sacred site. After their return from the trip to Qingyuan, the travellers spent another few days at Bailuzhou. The weather nally allowed them to reach the Shen’gang Mountains, located south of the prefectural seat, on the west bank of the Gan River. The southern slopes of these mountains

18 XXKYJ, 152. For Benji’s biography, see QYZL, 52. The Five Worthies are Wang Yangming, Zou Shouyi, Nie Bao, Ouyang De and Luo Hongxian.

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led to another river, owing into the Gan from the west, carrying the oodwaters of the mountains in Anfu and Yongxin into the Gan. At this strategic point, where the Anfu and Yongxin Rivers meet the Gan, at the southern foothills of the Shen’gang Mountains, they noted another signi cant shrine. This was the shrine for Governor Liu (Liu fujun miao 劉府君廟). Liu Zhu 劉竺 had been governor of the area in the sixth century, and was honoured after his death for his protection of the area. During the Song dynasty, the god had been enfeoffed as King Lihui 利惠王, and by sixteenth century, the shrine was known as Shen’gang Huiyou miao 神岡惠佑廟.19 Xu’s account, however, reveals little personal interest when religious sites are described. In the vision of this landscape of a local resident, this probably was a highly numinous location, with rivers owing in the direction of several important towns, and mountains towering over the rivers. One might have found a powerful mix here of prayers to the rain gods hiding in the rivers, prayers to ward off the dangers associated with river travel, especially when those travelling were carrying precious loads, and prayers from those who brought their own deities along with them on their journeys by land and water. None of that appears in Xu’s account. Xu is a tourist with a particular interest in nature. The absence of interest in the sacred in Xu’s writings does not in itself attest to a wider lack of interest in such sites. Nevertheless, the contrast with thirteenth-century accounts is noteworthy. When they nally left Luling, the travellers had spent almost three weeks here, and clearly enjoyed their sightseeing tours in the area, despite the overwhelmingly bad weather. Their journey now continued towards the west, in the direction of Yongxin county, located to the west of Luling. They journeyed by boat, although their hosts in Luling had attempted to discourage them, fearing the narrow rivers with their treacherous rapids. But Xu insisted on travelling by boat, more worried about the possibility that snow might hold them up on land. They passed some shing villages with hundreds of boats, villagers making their living from the catch in streams and lakes scattered in the area. Further on, where the mountains are steeper and the river more dif- cult to pass, they found villages that depended on trade in rewood for their existence. This was clearly a less af uent part of Ji’an. They encountered more interesting scenery, with rocks and caves and peaks

19 [Wanli] JAFZ, 16.4b.

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to explore, and apart from negotiating the infamous rapids in the river, they also had to negotiate broken bridges that had crumbled into the river. A contemporary observer described this stretch of the river to the east of Yongxin as follows: On both sides [of the river] dark mountains face each other, [forming] stone walls leaning sideways. [The mountains] are covered with thick forest, while strangely shaped stones are scattered on the ground. They look like a multitude of horses in angry battle. Waterfalls spring up amongst them, thrashing against the stones like thunderclaps. Boats pass by, travelling up and down the river, frequently crashing into the sides. Hundreds have hit a rock and sunk. The boat hands do their utmost, turning pale as they veer between safety and danger. Because of this, travellers make offerings to the gods. There are even more temples [for river gods] than Yellow Ox Shrines (huangniu miao 黃牛廟). The county as a whole annually transports several hundreds of thousands of bushels [of grain]. Boats that safely reach the two capitals have all been blessed by these gods.20 Xu and his fellow travellers clearly had much to be grateful for when they arrived safely at their destination, for the landscape still posed serious dangers to the traveller. The emphasis, however, in this literati view of the sites, is on boats, crews, travellers, and grain transport; the forces of nature have become nothing more than a stunning backdrop. Xu and his companions arrived in Yongxin on the last day of the year, and nowhere could they nd suitable lodgings, until a local passer- by recognized them as visitors from the capital. ‘Are you from the southern capital?’ he shouted out, inviting them to his humble abode. It turned out that this man had once visited his brother, who held a post in the Department of Ritual, at the capital. Despite the remote location, the travellers still managed to nd people of a similar status to take them in and share a meal with them. From here Xu Xiake decided to explore the countryside to the north. Jingwen took luggage on to a town called Lujiang 路江 further to the west in Yongxin, and Xu Xiake set off alone, on foot, to walk north towards the Wugong Mountains, also known as the Peaks of Immortal Ge (Gexian feng 葛仙峰), and back down to Lujiang. In the next nine days, Xu travelled a distance of probably over 150 kilometres through mountainous

20 Yin Tai, ‘Majia miao ji’, JAFZ (1776), 14.39b–40a.

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terrain, most of the time through dense fog, which hampered not only visibility but also progress.

Xu’s visit to the Wugong Mountains

Xu Xiake rst travelled through the mountains to the north-west of Yongxin county seat, the He Mountains 禾山. He passed a temple called Heshan 禾山寺, but although the abbot tried to persuade him to stay, inviting him to accompany him on a trip to a nearby cave to make his offerings, Xu Xiake pressed on northwards, towards the Wugong Mountains. As he passed the Yongxin-Anfu border, he entered the next mountain range, the Chen Mountains 陳山. The high peaks and deep ravines he encountered here made it clear that he needed someone to carry luggage, so he hired a local hand to help him. Their ascent to the top of the Wugong Mountains started at a small temple called ‘Branch Palace for the Three Immortals’ (Sanxian xinggong 三仙行宮). They were climbing in incessant rain, so when they passed Jiyun Abbey after only a short climb, they stopped to dry themselves. They found Jiyun Abbey beautifully decorated for the New Year’s celebrations. Decorating the buildings for the Spring Festival was regarded as an important part of the festivities in these parts.21 The abbey was, however, in an incomplete state. Although Jiyun Abbey was not listed in Xu Xiake’s copy of the Comprehensive Gazetteer, it was an institution with a venerable history. It had foundations dating back to before the Tang dynasty, and had been extensively restored in 1265. It was also the site of active worship of the Immortal Ge, who was said to have practiced the Way in these mountains. Sites for worship of Ge Hong were in fact scattered throughout the Wugong Mountains, and many names of sites in the mountains reminded the traveller of Ge’s practices.22 They travelled onwards and upwards, taking with them one of the adepts from Jiyun Abbey. These high, and in places inaccessible, mountains had a multitude of sites for Buddhist and Daoist worship scattered among them. Many were located near the peaks: Jiulong 九龍 Mountain, for example, at 1699 metres one of the higher peaks of

21 The quote from the Wanli gazetteer is included in the 1683 Yongxin gazetteer. Yongxin xianzhi (1683), 3.12a. 22 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 2.13a.

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the Wugong range, had a Buddhist temple below its peak, on a tiny at space surrounded by high peaks. The mountain gazetteer for the Wugong Mountains, compiled rst in the late Ming and completed during the Qing dynasty, lists as many as 40 shrines, chapels, temples and monasteries, and the likelihood is that there were many more.23 Many such sacred sites had stories associated with them. The chapel at Ji Peak, for example, was said to have some calligraphy written on the walls by an early Ming Daoist named Bai Yuchan 白玉蟾. When he travelled here, he wrote a poem on the wall in running script, which only became visible when the wall was washed down.24 Again, the landscape is not so much testimony to the overwhelming powers of nature, as to the cumulative layers of history and culture that covered these sites. Before Xu Xiake reached Jiulong Peak, he rst passed a temple called Guanyinya 觀音崖, also known as Baifa Chapel 白法庵. This temple had been founded quite recently by a dharma master named Baiyun 白雲法師, and after Baiyun’s death, his disciples named the chapel after their master, so that in later years it would be most commonly known as Baiyun. Guanyinya, as Xu Xiake referred to it, was located at a fairly accessible location, with a road heading straight down towards Jiangkou, and another leading straight up to the top of the mountain. It was also, in Xu Xiake’s observation, open to the lay believers from the locality for visits and worship.25 Baiyun’s student Yinzhi 隱之 was Xu’s host here, and he told him about some of the miracles associated with Baiyun, and about the pond that he had carved out of the hard rock in front of the temple. Baiyun, who founded the temple here during the Jiajing period of the Ming dynasty, clearly operated on the fringes of the orthodox establishment. Baiyun’s terse biography in the 1872 Anfu gazetteer suggests that he was once jailed for calling on powerful gods while he was working on

23 Zhang Cheng, ed., Wugong shanzhi (n.d.), juan 2. This edition in seven juan consists of two texts: the rst compiled by the Ming dynasty vice-minister of the Seals Of ce, formerly Hanlin Academy bachelor, Zhang Cheng 張程. During the early Qing dynasty, it was supplemented by a descendant of Zhang Cheng, Zhang Guangxun 張光勳. The manuscript copy, of which I obtained a photocopy in the Anfu county museum, is divided in unpaginated juan. 24 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 2.21a. For a biography of Bai Yuchan (zi Baisou 白叟, hao Haiqiong 海瓊), who became an immortal in the Wugong Mountains, see Zhang, ed., Wugong shanzhi (n.d.), juan 4. 25 XXKYJ, 164.

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the building of a Buddha hall on the outskirts of a town. When an epidemic spread just after he had cursed the area, he was hastily freed, and Baiyun took to the road, travelling through Shanxi and Shaanxi, and south to Guangdong and Guizhou. It was only after his return to Wugong that the appearance of a white oriole in a pond inspired him to establish a shrine at this very location.26 Yinzhi told nothing of all this to Xu when he talked about his old master. The 1875 prefectural gazetteer provides Baiyun’s biographical details, but leaves out Baiyun’s encounter with the law, and the Wugong Mountain gazetteer does not list him at all among the Buddhist and Daoist masters associated with the mountain.27 Perhaps Xu had stumbled here, at this junction of frequently travelled roads up and down the mountains, on a popular temple that was frowned upon by the more orthodox establishment, but one that held much more signi cance for the local population than the more exclusive Buddhist temples further up the mountains. Hints like this remind us that the view of the landscape from literati accounts is a very limited one, not one shared by the ordinary people who lived and worked in these mountains. Nevertheless, it is precisely the literati perspective that concerns us here. Xu Xiake had not intended to stay at Guanyinya, but his clothes and shoes were thoroughly wet, so he was persuaded to stay at least to change his clothing. Then they set off again, keen to reach the peak behind the temple. They did manage it, but only to nd themselves completely surrounded by fog, with a view that consisted only of thick white clouds. By accident they encountered two men on the road, making their descent, who pointed out that they had already passed the place where they intended to spend the night. The next day, the fourth of their journey on foot in the mountains, they headed west towards Jiulong Peak, with a visibility that varied from seeing nothing, to moments of glorious clarity that showed a view of a multitude of peaks piercing the skies. Here they encountered Jiulong Temple. As Xu describes it, ‘[t]he monastery was built against the western side of the Wugong mountain range, with high peaks suddenly opening up and forming an enclosed area, with a at space in the middle.’28 The monastery was built over a period of fourteen years between 1553

26 Anfu xianzhi (1872), 13.66a. 27 JAFZ (1875), 37.72b. The monks’ biographies are included in Zhang, ed., Wugong shanzhi, juan 4. 28 XXKYJ, 164.

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and 1566 by a Chan Master from Ningzhou, around the same time Guanyinya was founded by Chan Master Baiyun further to the east. According to Xu Xiake, Jiulong was a secluded and inward looking monastery, much more cut off from the world of mortals than Guan- yinya. Despite their secluded existence, the monks at Jiulong were keen to receive Xu Xiake and invited him to stay, but Xu pushed on once again, heading further south and down the mountain. When he got to Lutai, a settlement due south of Jiulong Mountain, he found the few houses there full of guests for the New Year’s festivities, and only when one of the villagers took pity on him did he nd a bed. Even in these remote parts, travellers could obviously expect to nd lodgings. The next day Xu Xiake managed to indulge in one of his passions: exploring a famous cave.29 In such mountainous areas there were many deep caves, some large enough to hold many hundreds of people, others too small to hold a single person. Many such caves were sites of religious signi cance, such as the 21 ‘Cave Heavens’ that form part of Daoist sacred geography.30 There was a Buddhist chapel in the entrance of the cave, founded by the Anfu scholar Liu Yuanqing 劉元卿 (1544–1609) and called ‘Stone Gate’ (Shimen 石門). Xu was always keen to enter such caves and noted down carefully what he found inside them, their dimensions and the colours of the stone. This was a deep cave, with deep pools inside, and strangely shaped stones. But because of their failure to obtain a torch, Xu and his servant made little headway with their explorations here, and when they nally emerged darkness was already falling outside. Finally at Lujiang after an exhausting journey, Xu met his companion Jingwen again, and they decided to continue their journey from here by sedan chair. Following along several streams, they travelled close to several borders: the county border between Yongxin and Yongning to the south, the county border between Yongning, Yongxin, and Cha- ling, and the provincial boundary between Jiangxi and Huguang. From here they passed into Huguang, and via Chaling and Hengzhou on to Guangxi, Guizhou and eventually to Yunnan.

29 For a discussion of Xu Xiake’s interest in caves, see Ward, Xu Xiake, especially 167–171. 30 For an excellent introduction to the signi cance of caves in sacred geography, see Thomas Hahn, ‘The Standard Taoist Mountain and Related Features of Religious Geography’, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 4 (1988): 145–156.

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Counties off the beaten track

Re ecting on Xu’s diary entries for Ji’an, one cannot but be impressed by his ability to describe the scenery and conjure up the remote atmosphere of the places he visited. Xu’s interests were on the whole not spiritual, and although Xu was willing to stray from his route to visit some sites of religious signi cance, a great many sacred sites that we know existed from the Comprehensive Gazetteer remained unnoticed in his diary entries. Xu’s journey took him more or less along a straight line from Yongfeng in the north-east, via Jishui and Luling in the middle to Yongxin in the west, with a brief expedition to Anfu in the north. The southern counties of Taihe, Wan’an and Longquan stayed almost entirely outside Xu’s picture. Xu was aware of Taihe, as his travels along the river He towards Yongxin took him along the northern county borders of Taihe, but at no stage did Xu express an inclination to leave his route and make a detour to Taihe. We can only speculate why this was the case. Was it the landscape of Taihe, which lacked the steep mountains and deep caves that Xu was so attracted to? Taihe, which was carved right through the middle by the arterial Gan River, was at the heart of the so-called Ji-Tai Basin, and famous for its fertile lands, but Taihe was not altogether devoid of mountains. It also had its share of temples, but Xu Xiake was not especially interested in religious thought, so it should come as no surprise that he passed by some of the famed local religious sites.31 His decision not to venture into Taihe may also be explained by what Dardess refers to as the lack of interest in the landscape in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Taihe. Taihe’s days as the leading county of Ji were long over, and few of the nationally renowned literati were from Taihe, or writing about Taihe. It was a county in decline, and Xu decided not to bother with it. Wan’an and Longquan, also ignored by Xu Xiake, were further off his route, but they were also further off the beaten track in terms of Ji’an’s prefectural identity. If he had taken a detour to either of these places, he would have encountered an identity that probably leaned

31 Ward disputes this, and argues that Xu’s interest in Buddhism is evident in the amount of time he spends visiting monasteries, talking with monks, and ful lling the request of his companion, the monk Jingwen. Ward, Xu Xiake, 172–177. I would suggest that Xu, like many of his literati contemporaries, was interested in Buddhism as part of his cultural world. He does not, however, express any overtly Buddhist (or Daoist) sentiments in his descriptions of the landscape and the sacred sites he visits.

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more towards Ganzhou in the south than towards Luling in the north. Wan’an was located along the Gan in the southernmost part of Ji’an prefecture; Longquan was located in the south-western corner of the prefecture, surrounded by Huguang counties in the west, and Ganzhou prefecture to the south. While Wan’an was at least on the main tho- roughfare north to Luling, Longquan was truly a backwater. Longquan produced only ve jinshi degree holders between 1502 and 1643, and Wan’an a more respectable 32. Longquan had done better in the rst half of the Ming, with a total of twelve jinshi degree holders, but Wan’an had increased its number from twenty degree holders between 1371 and 1499. Throughout the Ming, Wan’an and Longquan were the poorest and least developed part of the prefecture. Wan’an was perhaps most notorious for its Eighteen Rapids. The section of the Gan River that passed through Wan’an was extremely treacherous, as Matteo Ricci found when he and his companion were thrown overboard here in 1595.32 The Wan’an county magistrate, Wei Xiang (Qing), exclaimed in desperation after he arrived for duty in Wan’an: As for monasteries and temples, there is only this one temple, Xianju 仙居 Monastery, where [people] worship the Buddha and sacri ce to the gods. It also serves as a place where the gentlemen of the county reside temporarily. . . . As for the various gentlemen who come to lecture at Xianju Monastery, they do not even get individual sticks of incense burned for them.33 Of course Wei Xiang was exaggerating. The Comprehensive Gazetteer mentions at least two other temples, Taiping Monastery and Jingxiu Abbey, both located north of the Wan’an county seat, and there were probably hundreds of other shrines, temples, and monasteries sprinkled in the landscape. What matters is that few of them entered literati consciousness, because the local gentlemen of Wan’an lacked the connections with members of the Ming regional or national elite that would have allowed them to request commemorative inscriptions. For Longquan, the Comprehensive Gazetteer lists only one temple, Faji Cloister 法濟院, a temple with Song origins that had been restored during the Hongwu reign-period.34 But there was also Taixiao Abbey

32 Brook, ‘Communications and Commerce’, 606–07. 33 Wei Xiang, ‘Xianju si ji’, Wan’an xianzhi (1873), 18.51a–52a. 34 Da Ming yitongzhi, 56.19a; JAFZ (1875), 10.17b.

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泰霄觀, famous for its inscription by Wen Tianxiang, preserved in the local gazetteers. By the early sixteenth century, Taixiao was undergoing its third Ming restoration (having been restored once before in 1370, and again in 1428) under the auspices of the abbot of Taixiao.35 The abbot was an enterprising individual: he rst set his sights on Taixiao and only then travelled to the capital to obtain the right quali cations to be appointed as abbot. When the renovations were complete, he approached a retired of cial in Taihe, Ouyang Yun 歐陽雲 (1479?– 1550), to write the inscription. Ouyang Yun, a jinshi of 1499, had earlier become embroiled in a court controversy, and spent the last 40 years of his life in Taihe. He wrote a detailed account of the history of the establishment.36 There was also the famous Baishi Shrine 白石廟 that had frequently proved its worth in times of drought, and was commemorated by a literatus at the behest of the county magistrate.37 Longquan’s temples were thus connected to a wider circle of literati than in Wan’an. But while the northern counties of Ji’an had continued to develop, and provided a rich cultural backdrop for Xu’s travels, the southern counties of Ji’an seem, by Ming times, not to have developed a great deal, and remained off the beaten track.

Travel writers taming the landscape

Seeing the Ji’an landscape through the eyes of men like Xu Xiake and the compilers of county and prefectural gazetteers brings to the fore the main point of this chapter. Ming Ji’an, and especially late Ming Ji’an, was a much more familiar space than Jizhou had been. It was, I would argue, men like Xu Xiake, who travelled through the area and wrote in great detail of what they saw, who contributed to making it so. Xu Xiake was, after all, not the rst man to travel the mountains and caves of Ji’an: from around 1500 we have the records of a great many itinerant literati. Of course, scholars of Song China had also travelled, as had merchants and monks. What had changed was the numbers in which they did this. The records, travelogues, poems, and diaries of travellers in Ji’an were part of a process that made the natural scenery of most

35 JAFZ (1875), 10.21b–22a. 36 Ouyang Yun, ‘Zhongxiu Taixiao guan ji’, Longquan xianzhi (1873), 16.33a–b. For his biography, see Taihe xianzhi (1879), 17.15a–b. 37 Zou Hansheng, ‘Zhongxiu Baishi miao beiji’, Longquan xianzhi (1873), 16.36b–37a.

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places more familiar. The social and economic changes in Jiangxi had clearly made it a far more widely developed place in the Ming dynasty than it had been in the Song, and travel writers also contributed to the sense of familiarity and understanding of the scenery. Take the Wugong Mountains. Xu Xiake, on his way to far-off Yunnan, decided to make a nine-day detour on foot to climb these mountains. Perhaps he was only told of the beauty of these mountains by the magistrate of Ji’an in Luling, or by the gentlemen he met in Yongxin, from where he set off on his journey north. Far more likely, however, is that he knew of the Wugong Mountains well before he came to Ji’an. We can only guess, as Xu tells us nothing speci c about why he chose to visit these mountains, but one of the reasons why such mountains in Ji’an were known throughout the realm to educated literati like Xu Xiake was the existence of extensive literati travel records. Roughly one hundred years before Xu Xiake walked into the Wugong Mountains, for example, a man named Liu Yang 劉陽 had done something similar.38 Not that Liu Yang was a true traveller like Xu Xiake: Liu was a local man, born in Anfu in 1496. He passed the provincial examinations in 1525, but a provincial degree ( juren 舉人) remained his highest attainment. He served in a variety of provincial posts, as magistrate in Anhui and censor in Fujian for example, but never in the central government.39 In the autumn of 1539, almost one hundred years before Xu Xiake arrived here, Liu set off on a trip into the Wugong Mountains. He travelled with three gentleman friends, starting in a rowing boat for the rst part of the journey. They stayed one night in an inn by the road, and another in the open eld, admiring the promising harvest. Gradually as they progressed, the water began to ow faster, and they had to watch out not to lose their ropes and oars overboard. When the path up the mountain separated from the river, a mountain dweller joined them as guide, as the paths were known to be hazardous. Someone joked: ‘If you take one wrong step, there will be eternal laughter.’40 Some may have been amused, but others in the party felt frightened, and did not enjoy this part of the journey. But they all reached the top safely, and spent several days at a small temple from where other peaks could be reached.

38 Liu’s account, entitled ‘You Wugong ji’, has been included in the reprint edition of the Wugong Mountain gazetteer. Zhang, ed., Wugong shanzhi, 514–516. 39 Zhang, ed., Wugong shanzhi, 516. 40 Zhang, ed., Wugong shanzhi, 515.

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A journey like this was obviously not without its hazards. The dangers of the road were compounded by weather that was, as it would be for Xu Xiake, overwhelmingly grey, cloudy, and cold. Signi cantly, however, the dangers for these gentlemen travellers were only the dangers any hill walker or mountain climber would face. Throughout their journey, they were guided by men from the mountain villages, fed and offered accommodation by the monks who lived in the many chapels and temples in the mountains, and received instruction in the life of the immortal Ge Hong from a Daoist master. At no stage did they seem particularly remote from the populated world. They walked along well-travelled paths, admired well-cultivated lands in the foothills, and visited familiar sites higher up. Throughout their journey, they were in known territory, and they felt themselves to be in control of their surroundings. Liu makes no reference to spiritual powers, to dragon lairs, or to awe-inspiring mountain demons. Of course Liu may well have privately feared the spirits who, in local perception, undoubtedly populated the mountains. But Liu’s narrative is a tale of control, and in this account Liu and his fellow travellers are masters of their surroundings.

Liu Shou’s journey to Wugong

An account from over sixty years later, written by Liu Shou 劉守, looks at rst glance to be different.41 Liu Shou’s narrative was much more literary, describing the scenery with much greater depth and colour: Whenever [the river], on its course down [the mountain], bumps into something, it makes a sound. Doesn’t a river have a language like that of humans? Of the many thousands of mountains and peaks it encounters, some soar up into the clouds like a brush or like a clump of bamboo shoots, others form layers of mountain walls, as if someone placed plaques of stone leaning against a screen; . . . some look like dragons and phoenixes turning and leaping up, or like tigers and leopards jumping and leaping, like things that y or walk, and that doesn’t even describe them all. . . . The strange elegance of the mountain grows further in the eyes of the percipients, who exaggerate its grandeur, unable to describe it exactly, as they have not yet reached its top. The scenery is deeply mysterious, strange, and evidently numinous.42

41 Zhang, ed., ‘You Wugong shan ji’, Wugong shanzhi, 537–39. 42 Zhang, ed., Wugong shanzhi, 537.

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Liu Shou was moved by the beauty of the landscape; his description of the scenery is not just orid, but also infused with an other-worldly vocabulary. But the odd features in the landscape only ‘look like’ dragons: Liu Shou compares them to other-worldly beings, rather than fearing that they are, in fact, such beings. Where the accounts of Liu Yang and Liu Shou were similar, however, is in their familiarity with the territory. For both men, this is all terra cognita, and the tales they tell are part of Anfu lore. Their accounts included the stories transmitted in the gazetteers for the area: about a husband and wife named Wu who became immortals here and lent their names to the mountains; about Immortal Ge, who practised his alchemy here; and about Wen Tianxiang’s father, who came here to pray for a son. These are well-known stories; Liu Shou quoted from a Song dynasty inscription by Zhao Yike, who wrote about the altar for Immortal Ge, and retold all the same tales.43 By the time Liu Shou searched for words to do justice to the imposing beauty of the scenery, he was describing a familiar, almost intimate place. The Ji’an landscape contained a whole range of such sites. These were often strikingly beautiful, but it is not so much the beauty itself that made them known, as the appreciation and celebration of that beauty by famous men. When people visited the area, they were looking through the eyes of previous visitors at a landscape that was richly embellished by their descriptions. Ji’an had become a place full of memories, reminiscences and traces of the past.

Conclusion: the Ming sacred landscape

What, then, can we conclude about the sacred landscape in late Ming Ji’an? In some ways little had changed. From a remote vantage point, the same rivers carved through the landscape, and the same mountain ranges soared into the sky. Some temples that had marked the Song landscape were still there. Bao’en Monastery in Yongfeng was still there, for example, as was Chongyuan Abbey, north of the Jishui seat, although it was now called Xuantan Abbey 玄壇觀.44 There were also many new temples, their details as hard to trace for the late Ming as they were for the Song. The Wanli gazetteer for the prefecture lists

43 Zhao Yike, ‘Ge xian tan ji’, Anfu xianzhi (1872), 17.7a–8a. 44 Da Ming yitongzhi, 56.18b–19a.

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about 160 Buddhist and Daoist institutions, and mentions that most of those are in charge of between two and twelve smaller temples and halls for Buddhist and Daoist worship.45 Even so, there were probably many more, some of them perhaps only in existence for a few years, others lasting perhaps as long as thirty or forty years without a record of their existence ever entering the written histories. Many of the same tales about local gods and numinous events were still being told, part of landscape and local memory. Gangying Shrine 剛應廟 in Jishui, for example, was still identi ed by the same story, told in the Song dynasty, about the Song empress, who was escaping her enemies aboard a ship on the Gan. A god appeared to her in a dream, and after following his advice she evaded her persecutors.46 Lingji Shrine in Longquan also makes its appearance again in the Wanli gazetteer, with its tale of the seven brothers who all drowned here.47 Such tales may only have existed in the written histories of the area, and been transmitted only by the diligent compilers of local gazetteers, but for literati visitors and local gentlemen, they were rmly embedded in the landscape, and inextricably mixed into their understanding of the local area. The power of the river had clearly not diminished in local perception. During the Wanli era, there was a shrine south of the prefectural city where those passing by boat always had to worship. The god, known only by the surname of Xiao, who had been enfeoffed as Lord of Heroic Assistance (Yingyou hou 英佑侯), offered at least the hope of a safe passage on this busy arterial river.48 No doubt the river banks were also dotted with shrines to appease the souls of those who had not been so lucky. The Wanli prefectural gazetteer lists only one such shrine, with the terse statement that: [t]he god is known as King Nanping of the Tang. One avoids his name. This deity drowned here and the common people thought that [his ghost] could still wield powers, so they built a shrine to worship him.49 The violence of death by drowning conveyed extreme numinous powers, just as it had during the Song dynasty.

45 [Wanli] JAFZ (1573–1620), juan 16. 46 Jishui xianzhi (1875), 12.24a–b. The same tale is included in Da Ming yitongzhi, 56.20b, and in JAFZ (1660), 16.7a. 47 [Wanli] JAFZ (1573–1620), 16.9a. 48 [Wanli] JAFZ (1573–1620), 16.4a–b. 49 [Wanli] JAFZ (1573–1620), 16.4b.

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But, as I have argued in this chapter, some things had altered. The social and economic changes that affected all of China, in particular the shift from the north towards the south as centre of gravity for grain production in the empire, the shift towards large landholdings worked by tenant farmers, the growth of regional trade and manufacture, and the general increase in population, also affected Jiangxi province and Ji’an prefecture. More pressure on the land because of the increased population and the constancy of tax demands meant that a higher percentage of the Jiangxi population than ever before had abandoned agricultural production and worked in manufacture and commerce. The existence of great landlord estates may well have increased particularly in Ming Ji’an because of the extraordinary success of early Ming literati in the examination system. These estates remained, even when the success rate of Ji’an candidates had dropped dramatically. The gentlemen of Ji’an engaged enthusiastically in travel, as the records of their journeys testify. Overall, the landscape they described was a far more familiar place in the perception of the Jizhou literati than the environment in which the Song literati lived and wrote. The scenery inspired less fear, and the surroundings had become part of their every day life. That familiar, well-travelled landscape, however, inspired a very different type of writing, as we shall see in the next chapter.

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TEMPLES AND LITERATI COMMUNITIES IN LATE MING JI’AN

In 1571, a group of elders and landowners gathered in a Zhenwu 真武 shrine.1 The shrine was located in a mountain range called Western Hua, sometimes referred to as the Huagai Mountains, bordering on the Qingyuan Mountains in Ji’an county.2 The elders were planning the restoration of a Daoist cultic centre known as Chongxian Abbey 崇先觀. The entire complex had been devastated by re some time before, because—so it was believed—‘the shrine’s religious leader was using it to make a pro t, and did not apply proper rules in his work and prayers.’3 The only building left standing was this Zhenwu Shrine, and this is where the elders made their plans for the restoration. It would eventually be a comprehensive restoration project: they planned to build places of worship for the Jade Emperor, the Nine Emperors and Zhenwu, pavilions for Wenchang, Chongyuan, and Huagai, an altar for Guanyin, and a hall for the god of thunder. After the sacred spaces for the worship of these gods were completed, there were plans for the more utilitarian spaces to be distributed over the site: a puri cation hall, residences, and kitchens. Finally, they would build residential spaces ‘in preparation for gentlemen travelling here or staying here’.4 Their planning would not be complete without commissioning a text for a stele. When a literatus, a jinshi from Taihe, climbed to the top of these mountains in 1572, the men in charge of the restoration project approached him. The gentleman’s name was Wang Mingchen 王鳴臣, he was nearly sixty, and had only recently retired from a post

1 Shrines for Zhenwu (‘True Martial Spirit’) were part of the imperial sacri ces in the late Ming. See Taylor, ‘Of cial Religion in the Ming’, 884. They had been introduced into the state cult by the Yongle emperor. See Shahar and Weller, ‘Intro- duction’, 25. On worship of Zhenwu during the Song dynasty, see von Glahn, The Sinister Way, 161–164. 2 These Huagai Mountains are of course not to be confused with the far more famous Huagai Mountains further to the east in Fuzhou prefecture, the focal point for the worship of the Three Perfected Lords. 3 Wang Mingchen, ‘Xihuashan zhongxiu dianyu beiwen’, QYZL, 99. 4 Ibid.

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as vice-commissioner in Guizhou and returned to Taihe.5 The elders asked Wang to provide a text. Wang agreed, and the text was carved in stone in due course. It was preserved for posterity when it was included in the Qingyuan Mountain gazetteer, the Qingyuan zhilüe. In many ways, it is a text like thousands of others in the genre. Wang begins with a powerful description of the natural surroundings, describing a miracle that spurred on the building of a site for worship here in the late Tang dynasty. The text includes further details about the temple’s more recent history and about the people involved in the restoration, and ends with some re ective observations about the wider signi cance of the worship taking place here. Despite its generic qualities, the text is interesting for several reasons. It is quite different from the texts originating in the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, as well as from earlier Ming texts. Southern Song and Yuan texts frequently cast their literati authors in the role of active participants in the religious communities they describe. Even when such literati authors would perhaps not have deigned to set foot in the shrine or temple they commemorated, I have argued, they ‘participated’ by offering their critical opinions of the worship practices they observed, and frequently by providing alternatives. Men like Ouyang Shoudao in the Southern Song and Jie Xisi in the Yuan, for example, wrote their texts to air their strongly felt opinions about the temples they were commemorating. More often than not, they found something worthy of their critique in the temples they wrote about, and in stating their alternatives, such gentlemen frequently presented their own wisdom and expertise as a source of inspiration and motivation for change. For the Southern Song gentleman, then, the local temple was extremely important. In writing temple inscriptions, he could write the story of the local community, and he could write himself into a central position within that community. For some scholars it offered private religious sanctity, for others the opportunity to display authority and local prestige. For many literati in the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, the temple was a complex site where a variety of sentiments and strategies came together and became intermingled. The temple, in these inscriptions, was marked as a central place in the locality, as a meaningful site with its own history. Wang Mingchen, in this late

5 Wang Mingchen had gained his jinshi degree in 1544. See QYZL, 100.

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sixteenth-century inscription, did something very different. He situated the worship that took place here in a wider context by discussing its signi cance, but he did not offer his own opinions about the practices associated with the temple, nor did Wang Mingchen himself make an appearance in the text. Unlike in the Southern Song and Yuan inscriptions, in this inscription the author remained on the outer edge of the community constructed in the text. Interestingly, this late Ming inscription is equally different from its earlier, Ming dynasty relations. I have argued that early Ming inscriptions often highlighted prominently placed individuals, who were located at the capital, and who stressed their remote position in the text. The point of those texts, seen from the local perspective, was to elevate the religious establishment by linking it to one of the many early Ming Ji’an of cials in the central administration. Seen from the central perspective, inscriptions for local temples offered opportunities to address issues that transcended the locality. There is a distinct absence, in the inscriptions of the early Ming, of a close, personal relationship between literati authors and local temples. Did this characteristic persist in the late Ming? Wang Mingchen did serve in the central government, but by the time he wrote this text he had retired from his career in the provinces. He never mentioned his own career or his of cial connections in the text, making it unlikely that the gentlemen in charge of this restoration project chose him because of his political associations. Reading the inscription as a commodity that gained socio-cultural capital as it was exchanged between the different actors involved does not provide all the answers here. Wang Mingchen could hardly have been affecting his social position by writing about this restoration project if he did not create a place for himself within the text. Neither did the project seem to be interested in Wang for the purposes of elevating the social position of the shrine. So how should we read this text?

Wang Mingchen’s inscription

Where the spiritual essence of yin and yang and of the ve phases (er wu zhi jing 二五之精) gathers to form lofty mountains, they are entrusted with extraordinary beauty and mysterious qualities.6

6 QYZL, 98.

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Right from the start of Wang Mingchen’s text, the setting is a realm beyond our mortal existence. Within this setting of outstanding beauty and mysteriousness, human beings communicate with the world inhabited by gods and immortals, and form a close and interdependent relationship with them. The gods’ [existence] does not continue without human beings; human beings are not complete without gods. Whether [the gods] give [human beings] support with blessings and power or whether [the gods] are brilliantly manifest in [human beings’] hearts-and-minds is one and the same thing. Attaining the Way is silently contained within the mortal realm. Great merit started of its own accord during the time of Kang, and who could prevent it?7 This communication with gods is of an entirely different nature from the exchanges and negotiations we encountered in Southern Song Jizhou. Then, as we saw in Chapter Two, the landscape was marked by spaces where interaction with the gods had occurred, sites that provided evidence of man’s successful negotiations with the forces of the invisible world. Those forces were always greater than man, successful negotiation rarely permanent. Here, the relationship is completely different. The relationship with the gods exists entirely within man; without human beings there is no such thing as ‘gods’. There is no difference, to Wang’s mind, between deities giving rewards to human beings, and the manifestation of godly qualities within man. Becoming fully human, and gaining an understanding of the Way, are all fully within the grasp of humans alone. I am not suggesting Wang Mingchen’s underlying thought is new. As Richard von Glahn posits, Chinese religious culture can be characterized by two ultimately con icting ‘orientations’: the ‘eudaemonistic’ value system—within which human beings seek blessings from the gods to enhance their own welfare, and try to avoid harm through exorcism— coexists with the ‘belief in a moral equilibrium’, where all human actions evoke responses from the world of spirits.8 Both, as von Glahn’s book demonstrates, can be traced back to antiquity, and both existed, though not unchanged, throughout the period under discussion in this study. Von Glahn’s study is about the religious practices and mental

7 QYZL, 99. 8 von Glahn, The Sinister Way, 13–15.

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worlds of non-literate believers; my interest here is in the high culture of the literati. Nevertheless, von Glahn’s analysis makes sense here. Wang Mingchen conceived of a world in which deities and spiritual forces respond directly to human action. In fact, Wang went one step further—moral human action is the manifestation of spiritual force. The gods, in Wang Mingchen’s vision, are there to offer protection to both people and their places. Human beings, in return, have a responsibility to ‘bestow honour onto the temple, make its appearance ourishing, keep the shrine radiant, maintaining it for many generations.’ This mutual, reciprocal relationship was important to Wang. ‘Then there is no shame over the ef cacy of the gods, and there is no satire over the people’s worship. Ritual comes from worship, and its records come from the methods used.’ Wang’s inscription was requested by the local elders who had extensive plans for the restoration and building of a variety of temples and shrines here. The text Wang produced for them was an interpretation of the place of man in the cosmos. He stressed the interdependent relationship between man and gods, with the emphasis on the human realm. Wang’s belief was in the moral equilibrium of the cosmos, and he encouraged an interpretation of all religious practices carried out at this site in that belief. In discussing these matters in a temple inscription, Wang Mingchen was distancing himself from the particular, and from the local. He was expressing thoughts that were meaningful not to a local audience, but to a ‘translocal’ audience—an audience that went beyond local boundaries, and sought to create an intellectual community without spatial frontiers. I argue below that this is common throughout late Ming temple inscriptions from Ji’an. Literati distanced themselves from the particular and the local, not physically as their early Ming predecessors did, but mentally. In a variety of ways, as we will see, they conjured up translocal communities. How was Wang’s interpretation of what happened at this site different from the interpretations offered by, say, Jie Xisi in his Yuan dynasty temple inscriptions? Did he not, too, offer his own vision of the local practice, translating it as he went along? While there are parallels to be drawn, there are also important contrasts. Jie Xisi positioned himself within the community of believers, and offered his interpretation as an insider. Wang Mingchen, on the other hand, remained an outsider. The community he aspired to belong to is not local or regional. His text, I contend, was aimed at a far- ung community of like-minded fellow

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literati who were not connected by territorial bonds. This orientation towards like-minded intellectuals across regional boundaries is, I propose, a characteristic of late Ming Ji’an temple inscriptions.

The men from Ji’an

As we saw in Chapter Six, writing about local sites to a translocal audience was also a characteristic of early Ming texts. The difference between early Ming texts and inscriptions from the late Ming, however, is the location of the authors at the capital. Whereas the Southern Song and Yuan elites from Jizhou had been largely local intellectuals, men who did not hold positions in the central government, but made their living by teaching and writing in their local community, the early Ming writers, as we saw in the previous chapter, were part of several highly successful generations of examination candidates who held unprecedented positions of power at the capital. So who were the men that followed them? Can we make any generalizations about Ji’an’s late Ming literati? Certainly the number of candidates from Ji’an prefecture who passed the jinshi examinations in rst place (zhuangyuan 狀元) dropped sharply in the 45 examination years between 1509 and 1644. Luo Hongxian from Jishui was given that honour in 1529, and a second man from Jishui, Liu Tongsheng 劉同升 (1587–1646), received the title over one hundred years later in 1637, just before the end of the Ming dynasty.9 In comparison, no less than ten Ji’an men achieved the same elevated status during the rst half of the Ming, i.e. in the 45 examination years between 1368 and 1508. In percentages, this consti- tutes a drop from almost a quarter of all zhuangyuan hailing from Ji’an during the rst half of the Ming, to only just over four percent during the second half. Only six other Ji’an men received a high ranking the exams: three in second place and three in third place, each constituting only a third of their equivalent numbers during the rst half of the Ming.10 The total number of jinshi degrees awarded to men from Ji’an dropped from 628 to 373.11

9 Li, Jiangxi zhuangyuan pu, 243–4. During the entire Qing dynasty, only one Ji’an man was ranked rst in the metropolitan examinations: a man named Liu Yi (1797–1878) from Yongfeng, who passed in 1835. 10 Liu, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan, 311–313. 11 For speci c detail, see the tables in the appendix.

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Ji’an men had known extraordinary successes during the rst 138 years of Ming rule. During the second 138 years, the level of success had diminished dramatically, but it would be an exaggeration to say that Ji’an no longer produced any men of signi cance. Men from Ji’an continued to serve the emperor: Guo Zizhang (1543–1618) from Taihe, for example, was a 1511 jinshi who served in a series of provincial and central government positions. Wang Mingchen, born in Taihe in 1513 and a jinshi of 1544, served as vice-commissioner in Guizhou. Zeng Gao 曾皋, a Luling man and jinshi of 1592, held of ce in the Department of Works, and was known for his skills in water control and construction techniques, while Long Yuqi 龍遇奇 from Yongning, a jinshi of 1601, rose to the position of regional inspector for Shaanxi. But there were far fewer of such high of cials, and they served in far less powerful positions. Compared to the early Ming cohort of Yang Shiqi and Hu Guang, men who ruled the roost under the early Ming emperors and used their connections to advance the careers of many more Ji’an men, Ji’an men who served during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could do little to advance their own careers, let alone those of others. If Ji’an men failed to leave a signi cant mark on the government of the latter Ming dynasty, they compensated for that by shaping the intellectual history of the late Ming. A group of in uential intellectuals known as the Jiangyou group was based in Luling, although the members of the group had students from well beyond the Ji’an borders.12 Among the most famous members of the group were men like Zou Shouyi and Luo Hongxian, and their views were further transmitted by their students Hu Zhi 胡直 and Zou Yuanbiao. Zou Shouyi (1491–1562) from Anfu entered the jinshi examinations in 1511, where his talent was spotted by Wang Yangming, who ranked him rst. He nally gained third place in the palace examinations, and was subsequently posted in the Hanlin Academy. His tenure there did not last long; after one year he returned home to Anfu for further study and re ection. In 1518 he visited Wang Yangming in Ganzhou prefecture, further south in Jiangxi province, and again in 1522. After Wang’s death in 1529, Zou continued lecturing and promulgating his own understanding of Wang’s teachings in and around Jiangxi.

12 On the Jiangyou group and its philosophy, see Kandice Hauf, ‘The Jiangyou Group: Culture and Society in Sixteenth-Century China’ (Yale University Ph.D., 1987).

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If Zou Shouyi was the oldest member of the Jiangyou group, Luo Hongxian was its undisputed leader. After passing the jinshi examination and gaining rst place in 1529, at the young age of 25, Luo spent the next ten years out of of ce. His return to of ce in 1539 was only short-lived: in 1541 the emperor mis-interpreted one of his writings, and dismissed him from of ce. He moved back to Jishui, and from then on spent most of his time at home. He established a school, where he taught his students and wrote many of his in uential texts. Apart from his philosophical writings, he is also known for his interest in geography, most notably his revised and enlarged 1555 version of the late thirteenth-early fourteenth-century map, the Enlarged Territorial Atlas (Guangyutu 廣輿圖).13 Among his students was Hu Zhi (1517–1585). Hu grew up in Taihe with a father who was a disciple of Wang Yangming, although it was not until much later that Hu Zhi also came to see himself as a pupil of Wang Yangming. He studied under Luo Hongxian in Jishui, but then moved on to Guangdong. He passed the jinshi degree eventually, and from 1560 onward he held several provincial posts. For a signi cant part of his adult life, however, from 1573 to 1581, he retired to his native home in Taihe to look after his mother and to teach students in the area.14 Jishui man Zou Yuanbiao (1551–1624) was roughly two generations younger than Luo Hongxian. He passed the jinshi examination in 1577, but had a chequered career that started off almost immediately with a six-year period of exile in Guizhou. He held positions in Nanjing, Beijing, and Guangdong for ten years, but then spent twenty years at home studying, teaching, and writing. He was a moderate Wang Yang- ming follower, and had hundreds of followers himself. He returned to government in 1620, but died shortly afterwards.15 These four Ji’an thinkers—Zou Shouyi, Luo Hongxian, Hu Zhi and Zou Yuanbiao—were the public face of the prefecture, their fame reaching well beyond its borders. Men from Ji’an clearly were less closely connected to the emperor in the second half of the Ming than in the rst. Gone were the days when Ji’an men passed at or near the top of almost every class, and when Ji’an men had a say in who lled which position. Dardess’ story of Taihe men losing interest in their own county

13 DMB, 980–984. On map-making at this time, see Brook, ‘Communications and Commerce’, 659–661. 14 DMB, 624–5. On his life and thought, see also Dardess, A Ming Society, 241–5. 15 DMB, 1312–1314.

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is in some ways told as a story of decline, despite the fact that Taihe men turned their attention to what Dardess terms ‘philosophical furors’ in the late Ming.16 Taihe may well have declined, but Ji’an prefecture was still a place to be proud of. Ji’an men continued to make their mark on late Ming society and culture, by participating actively in the study and teaching of Wang Yangming’s ideas, and by drawing attention to Ji’an as a centre of intellectual activity. Their writings about local institutions in general, however, and about temples in particular, changed. That change is what concerns us in these nal chapters.

Distancing strategies

The inscription by Wang Mingchen, I argued at the outset of this chapter, still constructed a ‘community’ in the sense I have employed throughout this book: by assigning meaning to a temple, literati brought about a sense of belonging among those who shared in that interpretation. Those who ‘belonged’, however, were no longer local residents as they had been in earlier periods. Instead, they were now fellow intellectuals, drawn together by shared interests and outlooks, rather than by shared experiences in a local landscape. Wang Mingchen distanced himself from the local temple. Before we can ask why that distancing occurred, we need to establish that Wang Mingchen was not alone in this. The temple inscriptions discussed below are all very different, but they share, as we will see, a variety of mechanisms that create distance between the individual and the temple, and establish connections with a translocal community. That translocal community can be drawn together, for example, by an interest in ‘Buddhist thought’ rather than in a speci c set of Buddhist practices, or by an interest in ‘literary tales’ rather than in narrating speci c events, but in all cases, the meaning of ‘the local’ has once again undergone signi cant change.

Fo versus ru

In the seventies of the sixteenth century, the Taihe philosopher Hu Zhi, who was at the time in his late fties or early sixties, travelled to the Wugong Mountains in Anfu. He had never been there before, but his

16 Dardess, A Ming Society, 215–246.

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friend Zou Jifu 鄒繼甫 had often talked to him about the outstanding beauty of these mountains. Hu Zhi and Zou Jifu had both passed their jinshi exam in 1556, and the two men had served together in junior posts in the Ministry of Justice. Hu Zhi visited Tuping 屠坪, one of the mountains’ oldest monasteries, observed the vastness of Ji Peak 箕峰, and gazed down on the clouds from Thunder Peak. Hu’s journey to these mountains was not merely pleasure; Hu had been asked for an inscription by the monk Benjiao 本教 from Shengfo 勝佛, another monastery in the Wugong Mountains. Shengfo was an elaborate monastic complex, built between 1553 and 1566. It boasted a Buddha hall, a meditation hall, dining halls, bell and drum towers, and an impressive front entrance with a bridge over the river leading to a set of large gates. The entire construction project had cost, according to Hu, 8,000 taels of silver. It had all been built by Benjiao’s teacher, a monk only known as Ningzhouzhe 寧州者, or ‘the one from Ningzhou’, who had brought several disciples to this remote spot, and set them to work.17 Hu Zhi was deeply impressed, perhaps even more by the achievements of the Shengfo monks than by the scenic beauty of the surroundings. Back home after his journey, he pondered on the signi cance of what the monk from Ningzhou and Benjiao had achieved here. Ah, how great and complete this achievement! Those who study Daxiong 大雄 [i.e. kyamuni Buddha] could not have achieved this just by working diligently despite hardship, by taking [the idea of ] retribution seriously, and by applying pressure to other people.18 Rather, Hu Zhi surmised, ‘They must also have the righteousness ( yi 義) of the Great Harmony (datong 大同)’.19 It is a thought he explained further in a development of this theme. In the beginning [kyamuni] ed the palace of King Jingfan 淨飯 [i.e. his father], and instead begged for a place to live in Zhiyuan Monastery 祗園精舍. He fed the wild animals at the expense of his own requirements, preferring to beg for food in Shewei City 舍衛. He harmed himself by doing this, but how could his rejection of [such comforts] not demonstrate Great Harmony to the people? Through begging, [kyamuni] found somewhere to live, and therefore, in offering housing to people, we

17 Hu Zhi, ‘Wugong Jiulongshan Shengfo chanlin ji’, Henglu jingshe zanggao, 12.10a– 11b. 18 Henglu jingshe zanggao, 12.10b–11a. 19 Henglu jingshe zanggao, 12.11a.

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should distinguish between the unclean and the clean. Through begging, [kyamuni] was given food, and therefore, in feeding people, we should not ask whether they are rich or poor.20 kyamuni Buddha’s choices, to reject the comforts of his princely home and live in the wilderness, served as a great inspiration and lesson for his disciples. His actions demonstrated the utopian principle of Great Harmony, and showed how his followers must now do the same: offer sustenance and residence to anyone who asks for it, regardless of their outward appearance and regardless of their status. How this was related to the monks’ achievement in the mountains becomes clearer in the next section. [kyamuni] never had any material goods that he regarded as his private property. While people’s origins always affect them, [kyamuni] overcame such things. His goodness (liang) was not accidental. If it had been any different, then how could this temple have been built so large and complete!21 Again, it was the example of the Buddha’s life that provided moral inspiration. While ordinary people were hindered by personal desires and needs, the Buddha’s followers had no regard for themselves. With- out such inspiration, Hu Zhi suggested, a temple like this could not have been built. It led him to re ect on his own tradition of ru learning (wu ru 吾儒): Some time ago I was in charge of education in the western region.22 On a number of occasions there were of cial indictments of people in power, who were detained at a Confucian temple, accused of spending funds from the treasury, using them for reversing [their own] dif culties. When we investigated the underlying reasons [for such incidents], their mistake turned out to be their regard of what is public (guan 官) as private (si 私). How could our Confucian teachings (wu ru zhi jiao) have let this happen? Indeed, the way of the Great Harmony has its origin in our Confucian learning, but nowadays [Great Harmony] cannot be found here, and in vain one looks for it there. There must be a reason for this.23

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 The ‘western region’ refers to Sichuan, where Hu served as vice-commissioner for education from 1567 to 1569. 23 Henglu jingshe zanggao, 12.11a–b.

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His experience in Sichuan, with of cials embezzling public funds and using them for private purposes, had obviously shaken him. His disap- pointment focused not so much on the of cials who misbehaved as on the teachings that failed to inspire them to morally upright behaviour. It was the contrast between Confucian of cials misappropriating funds, and the monks at Shengfo denying themselves everything to build this temple, that struck Hu Zhi most. We know little about the speci c context in which Benjiao asked Hu Zhi to write this inscription. We do know, however, that for a signi cant period in his life, Hu Zhi was deeply torn between Buddhist thought and the Confucian (ru) tradition. Some thirty years earlier, in 1548, he had spent time at a Buddhist monastery, and twice experienced what he described as ‘enlightenment’. It led him to believe that leaving the secular world and becoming a monk would be the right path for him. Shortly afterwards, however, he changed his mind, and devoted himself again to the study of the texts of ru learning in preparation of the jinshi examinations.24 His interest in Buddhism remained strong throughout his life, and perhaps Benjiao asked Hu Zhi for an inscription because of his reputation for being sympathetic to Buddhism. But perhaps Benjiao approached Hu Zhi for reasons related to Hu Zhi’s by then quite widespread fame as literatus and of cial, with in uence beyond Ji’an? Even if we cannot nd more concrete information about Benjiao’s motivation, it would seem that Hu Zhi’s critical re ections on ru teaching and practice, and his unabashed admiration for the inspiration kyamuni provided to his followers are perhaps suggestive of Hu Zhi’s underlying turmoil. We can read the text as testimony to the enduring in uence of Buddhism on his thought, and his persistent disenchantment with of cial life. While the text reveals something of Hu Zhi’s private experience, it also re ects on one of the themes that concerned late Ming literati: the relationship between Buddhism and Confucianism. In the same way that Wang Mingchen in his inscription for Chongxian Abbey in the Qingyuan Mountains re ected on issues that went beyond the immediate locality, and addressed a far- ung audience of fellow-literati rather than near-by visitors to the temple,

24 See the discussion of Hu Zhi’s spiritual journey in Rodney Taylor, ‘Journey into Self: The Autobiographical Re ections of Hu Chih’, History of Religions 21.4 (1982): 321–38.

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Hu Zhi addressed an intellectual community well beyond Ji’an. There is very little evidence of a personal connection between Hu Zhi and Shengfo Temple.

Incorporating Buddhism

For Hu Zhi, accommodating Buddhism in his Confucian life presented a challenge, and caused tensions manifest in his writings. For many other late Ming literati in Ji’an, however, Buddhism formed an inalienable part of their outlook on the world. Take the example of Liu Guangzhen. Liu Guangzhen was one of the many servants of the imperial bureaucracy who remained largely invisible in the historical record. We know he passed the jinshi examinations in the class of 1631, a year in which only six candidates from the whole of Ji’an prefecture were successful. Yongxin was more successful than the other Ji’an counties that year; two Yongxin men passed at the same time, something that had not happened since 1562, and only happened four times in total between 1500 and 1644.25 Liu Guangzhen’s career was undistinguished: we know he served brie y in the Department of Punishments, before serving as magistrate in various locations, gaining a reputation for his upright character. He was successful in implementing improvements to the irrigation system while he served in Leizhou 雷州 in Guangdong, and gained a promotion to vice-commissioner of Yunnan. His collected writings, sadly, do not remain. We do, however, have the inscriptions he wrote for two Buddhist temples in his native Yongxin. Dongshan Monastery in Yongxin was probably Yongxin’s foremost religious site. It was situated to the east of the county seat, and had a history dating back to the Northern Song. It had been destroyed during the ghting at the end of the Yuan, and was restored again during the early years of Hongwu’s reign, a pattern like so many others in the Ji’an area. It had received a certain amount of imperial recognition: a plaque was bestowed during Yongle’s reign, and during Wanli’s reign it took on the of cial status of a Monks’ Of ce. At several stages the buildings were expanded and the famed bridge in front, the Qingfeng Bridge 清風橋 for which Xie Jin had once written

25 His fellow jinshi was a man named Long Dawei 龍大維, who remains equally invisible in the historical record. He served in the ministry of personnel, but the prefectural gazetteer does not even include his biography.

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an inscription, was rebuilt.26 Yet Liu Guangzhen referred to none of these major events in the site’s history, writing instead an inward-looking piece. His text contained all the characteristics of the genre. He started off, like almost all such texts do, with a vivid description of the natural surroundings of the sacred site, and his location of the site was given from a personal perspective: Our county has always had many old monasteries, and Dongshan Mon- astery is one of them. Its old name was Tianzhu 天竺, and it is situated on the border of my village. Looking at it from the point of view of the county, it is in the eastern corner, hence the name.27 For him, Dongshan was the local temple, located on the edge of the place where he grew up. It may be the eastern corner of the county, but for Liu Guangzhen that only explained the name, not its signi - cance for him. Liu Guangzhen wrote this at the end of his life, looking back at his of cial career after he had returned home.28 Yet he only mentioned his life outside Yongxin obliquely: When I was young, I practiced tranquillity at a monks’ dwelling.29 But then I observed that the community of monks was disrupted and [several monks] were arrested by the Censorate. After I had gained my degree I made a report of this for the palace and I succeeded in rectifying the problem ( fan zheng 反正).30 This is interesting. As a student, he could only stand by and watch the monks’ public humiliation by the censors. Once he had gained his jinshi degree, however, he was able to use his in uence at court to have this wrong righted again. Clearly, Liu Guangzhen had a commitment to Buddhism from an early age onward, although he wrote nothing about his time in government service. It seems unlikely he ever visited the Yongxin temple again while he held of cial appointments, or he would surely have mentioned it here. Instead he continues:

26 Yongxin xianzhi (1874), 7.1a. 27 Liu Guangzhen, ‘Dongshan si beiji’, Yongxin xianzhi (1874), 7.1a. 28 We know nothing about the dates of his birth and death, only that he served in several of ces and returned home afterwards. 29 Liu Guangzhen does not clarify whether this was at Dongshan Monastery or somewhere else. 30 Liu, ‘Dongshan si bei ji’, 7.2a.

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When I returned home after of cial service, I looked round, and saw that the temple buildings (lit. ‘physical environment’, Sanskrit: Dharmadhtu) were lying waste, which is almost impossible to discuss. . . . People planned what was needed for the restoration, and I contributed thirty strings of cash. Once a beginning had been made, the of cials in post, the local gentlemen, and the champions of charity (Sanskrit: dna) all gladly opened their purses to help. Thereafter the quantity [of donations] was always suf cient. Such merits achieved soon transformed [the place] to make it brilliant. The [buildings] took on a serious and awe-inspiring form. This will ensure that the Buddha sun always shines down, and the enlightened sky never darkens. This is the power of taking pleasure in renunciation and being good at passing on.31 His style of writing and his vocabulary, infused with transcriptions from the Sanskrit, suggest a man committed to Buddhist principles. Perhaps we can think of the different communities in which Liu Guangzhen may have been involved as three concentric circles. The widest circle is the national eld, in which he operated as an of cial. He drew on his connections within this world to have the maltreatment of monks at the hand of censors recti ed. He had at one stage operated within that circle, but his words also suggest a certain remove from it. His nostalgic ‘When I was young’, and his reference to returning home after service, suggest the creation of distance between the person who acted like that and the more private person he is now. The smallest circle within that outer circle is the Yongxin community, where he had now returned home. Again, he draws on that community, this time by setting the example with his own generous contribution, followed immediately by the notables and wealthy of the Yongxin community, to pay for the restorations. They are rewarded, too, by being listed by name and presumably by the size of their contribution, on the back of the stele. Between these two spheres lay the circle formed by the community of believers beyond the Yongxin boundaries. This circle was addressed most directly in Liu Guangzhen’s writing. The continued ourishing of the Buddha and the enduring success of an establishment that would last ‘for one thousand ten thousand kalpas’32 were more important than anything else to Liu. Like Wang Mingchen and Hu Zhi, Liu Guangzhen envisaged the community to which he spoke as a translocal society.

31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.

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He shared with them the belief in the centrality of the Buddha’s message, to which the local temple was entirely subservient. His writings show, once again, that literati addressed fellow literati across regional boundaries.

Writing about walls and moats (chenghuang) in the late Ming

When the rst emperor of the Ming insisted on including worship of the god of walls and moats in the state cult, he caused a great stir among the Confucian literati at court and in the provinces. As we saw in Chapter Six, literati like Chen Mo and Liu Qiu discussed the moral justi cation for this inclusion in their inscriptions for Chenghuang temples. Early and mid Ming inscriptions for local temples, I argued, were used to discuss issues of national importance, and the audience for these discussions was national rather than local. By the late Ming, the system of including temples for the god of walls and moats in the state cult had been in place for over two hundred years. Had the controversy over temples for the god of walls and moats died down, or was the issue still vexing literati? To answer this question, it may be interesting to look at an inscription for a Chenghuang temple written by Zou Yuanbiao. When the Chenghuang temple in Jishui was fully restored between 1604 and 1606, the Jishui magistrate approached Zou Yuanbiao for an inscription. Zou Yuanbiao was happy to oblige, but not necessarily because of his deep admiration for the magistrate: ‘The great sages brought order to ritual and were strict about the meaning of worship. Such matters are worthy of commemoration, and hence I wrote this inscription.’33 The restoration of the Chenghuang temple was, in Zou Yuanbiao’s eyes, not a mere local achievement. Rather, it was the implementation of the work envisaged by the great sages. Restor- ing a local temple was about bringing order to the ritual system and about taking worship seriously, and in that sense Zou placed this early seventeenth-century restoration directly in the context of the ordering of ritual implemented by the rst emperor of the Ming. ‘Our Great Ancestor (Taizu) created this empire, established its outer boundaries, and recti ed the Sacri cial Statutes. The worship of the walls and moats

33 Zou Yuanbiao, ‘Chenghuang miao ji’, Jishui xianzhi (1875), 12.22b.

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was to be made manifest by magistrates.’34 As magistrates and local gentlemen pledged to build temples for the god of walls and moats in their respective prefectures and counties, their pledges ‘were all turned into rati ed decisions by the rst emperor himself ’.35 In these rst lines of the inscription there is no question of doubt over the decision of the rst emperor to include the god of walls and moats in the Sacri cial Statutes, no hint of the controversy that raged in the empire in the late fourteenth and early fteenth centuries. But after Zou had complied with the requirements of the genre of such inscriptions—he told of the ood that had soaked the beams of the old temple, the rot that had affected the wood throughout, and the good intentions of the magistrate to restore the temple as soon as he stepped out of his carriage upon his rst arrival in Jishui—Zou did refer indirectly to the controversy: I have heard that previous Confucian scholars often doubted whether worship of the she 社 and the gods of walls and moats should be restored. Do they not know that the word she means ‘to grow grain’ ( yang gu 養穀)? Among the ve elements it takes the position of the element wood, and the great Yu 禹 regarded it one of the six treasuries (liu fu 六府).36 Grain is what feeds our people, and whose merit is that? As for high city walls and deep moats, it is best for them not to be hidden. Only [gates] made of metal and deep [moats] form proper defences for the common people. If [this worship] did not exist, then Zhongliu 中霤 [i.e. the god of the interior] would be useful at the gates and wells of a single family. But if the common people all worship [the god of walls and moats], then how great is the bene t of the god for the whole area!37 Despite Zou’s best attempt, the controversy could not be solved by his reference to classical precedent. Yes, she could be ranked among the elements, and be part of Yu’s conception of the realm, but Zou could not hide the absence of classical precedent for worship of the god of walls and moats. What it could provide, in Zou’s view, is protection for a whole community, as opposed to for a single family.38 The issue of the inclusion of Chenghuang temples had, it would seem, not yet been laid to rest. Zou Yuanbiao, like Chen Mo and Liu

34 Zou, ‘Chenghuang miao ji’, 21b. 35 Ibid. 36 The six treasuries of nature, i.e. water, re, metal, wood, earth and grain. 37 Jishui xianzhi (1875), 12.22a–b. 38 On the she, see Kenneth Dean, ‘Transformations of the She 社 (Altars of the Soil) in Fujian’, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 10 (1998): 19–75.

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Qiu had done before him, felt the need to justify the decision. His loyalty to the rst emperor was never in doubt; Zou ensured this by referring to him in the rst and last lines of the inscription, giving him the highest accolade possible: a great sage who brought order to ritual and took worship seriously.39 Apart from expressing his loyal support of the rst emperor’s enterprise, Zou used the text to express the high esteem in which he holds this worship. As he wrote, from the moment the temple was restored, ‘the animals were no longer ill, the harvest was abundant, the grain ripened, and all who came here to worship at this shrine praised its beauty’.40 Nevertheless, the veneer of praise did not hide Zou’s underlying and remaining doubt over the appropriateness of the existence of such temples. By raising that doubt, and by using the inscription to explore the issue, Zou’s discussion was taken out of the immediate local environment. It was a matter for the realm as a whole, with implications that reached well beyond the local. The difference with the early Ming translocal inscriptions, however, is the location of the authors. These authors were not only local men, but men in and of the locality. They were writing from within Ji’an, without creating a Ji’an community in their texts. The local connection had become far less exclusive, and the capital had become far less important for the locality.

Collecting local stories

The inscriptions discussed so far all tackled overarching themes that mattered to all literati: the sense of balance in the cosmos, the relationship between the traditions of fo and ru, the appropriateness of the inclusion of Chenghuang worship in the Sacri cial Statutes. In all these texts, I have suggested, the literati explored such themes with an— imagined—audience that was not bound to the locality. Of course not all late Ming temple inscriptions from Ji’an were as broad and far- reaching in their intention. Some texts had a more modest focus, doing not much more than telling the story of the temple itself, or, sometimes, only telling one story associated with a particular temple. Wang Mingchen, who wrote the inscription to mark the restoration of the abbey in the Qingyuan Mountains discussed at the outset of this

39 Zou, ‘Chenghuang miao ji’, 21b and 22b. 40 Zou, ‘Chenghuang miao ji’, 22a.

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chapter, for example, included the following story in the text. Presum- ably the story had been told to him by the elders who had gathered in the Zhenwu shrine to plan the restorations in 1571. They suddenly noticed that Zhenwu’s left foot had sunk down. When they dug it up they found a bag with a human skull, which they quickly moved elsewhere. That evening thunder and rain burst out in turns, with bright ames extinguishing swiftly. The people in the surrounding foothills looked at each other in great fright. These good gentlemen . . . [thought] that because they had touched the vile vapours, this had brought about the violent shaking. [They asked,] If we do not restore [the buildings], how can we settle the wrath of the deity and reach his benevolence?41 Wang offered no opinion, and gave no analysis, keeping himself at a certain remove from these events. He introduced a slight distance between himself and ‘the people’ who were frightened, and between himself and ‘the good gentlemen’, who thought their contamination by the skull caused the cosmic unrest. Of course, the classical language leaves the subject of sentences often unspeci ed; whether Wang Mingchen included himself among those who asked if the restoration might settle the wrath of the deity is not entirely clear. Either way, Wang’s narrative never explicitly joined him into the circle of believers and worshippers. By incorporating the story into the inscription, the temple gained a history. It received a place in the story of the locality, and united those who knew the story by creating a shared sense of identity. Wang Mingchen, however, was located on the outside of that community, and made no attempt to engage with it. His writing acknowledged the existence of that community, but he remained a mere observer. The author as collector of tales, or as recorder of the strange and bizarre, is also clearly manifest in this following example. Rather than playing the active roles that the likes of Ouyang Shoudao, Liu Chen- weng, and Jie Xisi envisaged for themselves, this author, a local man named Zhao Erqi 趙爾圻, cast himself as neutral observer.42 In Luling county, there was a monastery called Jingde 景德寺. It had Tang origins, had perhaps known its heyday during the Song dynasty, and had been extensively restored at the beginning of the fteenth century. By the late Ming, the buildings had become neglected, however, and although

41 QYZL, 98–99. 42 Zhao Erqi, ‘Jingde si ji’, Luling xianzhi (1873), 45.8b–9a.

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fteen statues and one copper bell remained, the temple had fallen out of use. Then three miracles occurred. The rst was this incident: One [statue] looked like a god, of a dazzling beauty all over. They intended to use this to renew and restore the temple. The monastic code had long become lax, and the temple had been used as a government of ce. The various statues were not on display, but a thief had his eyes on them. He had secretly carried off the statue of an enlightened being and hidden it under the bed. One night there was a woman from the neighbourhood who had lost her breeding hen. She took a torch and followed the [animal’s] chuchu-ing noise. She stumbled across the thief in the bed, and in chasing him, it seemed as if he entered the statue. Today it is the tenth [statue] where the gold on his face is a bit damaged.43 The tale gives a vivid impression of the state the temple was in, but why did the author include it? The aim of this inscription would hardly have been to enhance the temple’s status in the eyes of visiting dignitaries from other areas, or this incident would surely have been glossed over or ignored. Such modest circumstances would not exactly qualify the building for a place among the great establishments of the realm. Perhaps Zhao Erqi’s interest was in telling the story itself, rather than in the implications of that story for the temple and its meaning in the locality. The telling of two further miracles associated with the temple ts with this reading. The text goes on to retell the second miracle: Even though the copper bell had a bamboo post to suspend it, it was placed crookedly, in a corner of the dharma hall. When you knocked it, it went ‘jing’; there was a rough echo, short, and without a ‘chenghong’ sound or a ‘tang ta’ sound. People used to say, ‘This instrument is cracked, it has no use’. The monks, however, maintained that it was because it was in a crooked position, and since it was obstructed, it could not make its full sound, and therefore one’s ears had to be attuned to get [the sound]. Then a lay Buddhist tried to make a metal frame to suspend the bell. That same night, the wife of this lay person was moved by a strange dream. The next day, she undid the clasp on her hip [on her dress], and used that for a pivot. Then, when they had suspended it, and struck the bell, the sound shook every tree in the area. The people were delighted.44 It was then decided that these ominous signs should not be ignored, and that a Hall for the Heavenly King should be built. As soon as their spades hit the ground to dig for the building’s foundations, they

43 Ibid. 44 Zhao Erqi, ‘Jingde si ji’, 45.9a.

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stumbled upon ‘something shimmering and dancing’. As they carefully dug further, they saw that it was the head of a Buddha. ‘From the mud and stones appeared a nose and eyes, a neck and jaws.’ It turned out to be a sandalwood Buddha statue with coiled hair on his head, and with remnants of green decorations. From then on, ‘people came to worship it continually from far and near’.45 So this inscription ended on a glamorous note: from these humble beginnings the locals had managed to create a site attracting worshippers from far and near, with a Buddha statue arising from the mud just like its symbol, the lotus. It is a story lovingly told, full of detail and onomatopoeic verve. The author, however, was just that—a teller of tales. He had an interest in the literary, and told the stories well, but he did not seek to transform the practice, or even to be considered a member of the community of worshippers. He merely told his tale.

The story of Perfected Being Xu

Ji’an literati of the late Ming presented stories in their narratives as literary tales, rather than as local histories. They were motivated by an interest in tales of the bizarre that went beyond the speci c locality. Rather than creating an exclusive relationship between the tale and the locality in which it was situated, the tales were inclusive, applicable well beyond local boundaries. See, for example, the inscription written to mark the building of a shrine for Perfected Being Xu (Xu zhenjun 許真君), also known as Xu Xun 許遜, in Longquan county. The author, another unknown local man by the name of Guo Weijing 郭維經, began by retelling Xu’s hagiography, although, as he claimed, ‘the tales of his exploits are familiar until this day’.46 The cult of Xu Xun ourished during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, with the centre of gravity near Nanchang in northern Jiangxi, and the hagiographic corpus of Xu Xun is extensive.47 We cannot now retrace, unfortunately, which hagiography Guo Weijing might have been familiar with. He referred to Xu’s slaying of snakes and dragons rst, even before he traced the broad outlines of Xu’s life. The theme of demon and dragon slaying

45 Ibid. 46 Guo Weijing, ‘Xu zhenjun miao ji’, JAFZ (1875), 10.14b–15a. 47 The history of Xu Xun and the corpus of texts associated with his cult have been studied closely by Akizuki Kan’ei in his study of present-day Daoism. See Akizuki Kan’ei, Chgoku Kinsei D ky no Kenky; J my d no Kisoteki Kenky (Tokyo, 1978).

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was central to Xu Xun’s hagiography, as Kristofer Schipper has shown, and it may well have been one of the de ning aspects of Xu’s cult in Guo’s times.48 Guo then went through the main events of Xu’s ‘life’: his father’s move to Nanchang; his early study of ‘strange books’ ( yishu 異書) and alchemy; his study with Wu Meng 吳猛;49 and his career as magistrate in Sichuan. His exploits in Sichuan were referred to in the most cursory of fashions: ‘He was widely known for touching stones and turning them into gold, for lightening the tax burden for the people, and using a pole and water to heal people.’50 Guo’s retelling of Xu’s life ends almost immediately after these skeletal references to three separate tales: The people were deeply moved and admired him, praising him in songs. Then he left his post and returned to the east. . . . There his techniques became even more re ned and his godliness even more elaborate.51 Several explanations present themselves immediately for this extremely truncated version of Xu’s life. It could be the result of drastic cutting by the gazetteer’s compiler, who perhaps disapproved of the more overtly Daoist elements in the hagiography; it could be the result of Guo Weijing’s own disapproval of the Daoist elements and/or his preference for the seemingly Confucian sentiments behind the three tales he brie y referred to. It could also be that he considered the elements in the story to be so familiar to the local followers that they did not need to be repeated. Either way, Guo Weijing told a story that went well beyond the local. After all, Perfected Being Xu was not from Longquan, and Xu’s only connection to Longquan was its relative proximity to Xishan near Nan- chang, where the cult had ourished from the Tang dynasty onward. After the outlines of Xu’s life had been provided, the author made a brief attempt to establish a connection to the local:

48 K.M. Schipper, ‘Taoist Ritual and Local Cults of the T’ang Dynasty’, in Michel Strickmann, ed., Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honor of R.A. Stein, vol. 3 (Brussels: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, 1985), 812–34. 49 According to Schipper, Wu Meng is ‘a local saint from the Lake Po-yang and Nan-ch’ang region, about whom there are many legends from the third century on’. Schipper, ‘Taoist Ritual and Local Cults’, 814. On Wu Meng, see also Miyakawa Hisa- yuki, ‘Local Cults around Mount Lu at the Time of Sun En’s Rebellion’, in Holmes and Welch, eds., Facets of Taoism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 83–102. 50 Guo Weijing, ‘Xu zhenjun miao ji’, 10.14b. 51 Ibid.

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The original name of our area was Longquan. . . . To investigate why the area has this name, we need to start with the beginning of the Kaiyuan period [713–742] of the Tang dynasty. There were two dragons that played in Wuling. The dragons created a pool, hence the name Longquan. Dragons originated here.52 Suddenly we move into a different gear, and the language slows down. But the text dwelt on something that must have been widely known to all local inhabitants—by stating that Longquan, or ‘Dragon Pool’ gained its name from two dragons creating a pool, Guo was stating the obvious, rather than writing an exclusively local story. The emphasis is on the literary tale, the story of Perfected Being Xu, which was only marginally linked to the locality. These inscriptions, with their particular stories, may seem different from those by Zou Yuanbiao and Wang Mingchen. Rather than addressing grand themes, they focus on the particular, the individual. As texts, however, they do not create a sense of belonging within the temple’s community for the authors who wrote the inscriptions. In contrast to the texts written during the Southern Song and Yuan by authors who clearly felt their own identity and their position in local society was closely tied to the locally based community of the temple, these authors seem to have turned away from the local temple as a eld in which they could manifest their authority and perform active roles.

Conclusion

The Ji’an landscape had become a familiar and known space, in part simply because more people lled it and more land was cultivated, but in part also because the land was now well-travelled. Tourists and travel writers like Xu Xiake traversed the landscape and brought even the most remote mountains and sacred sites to the attention of interested readers throughout the realm. Their accounts revealed a space that is given meaning by its illustrious past, the traces of heroes of Ji’an’s past visible everywhere. Writing about that space, and particularly about the landscape, had changed in important ways. Ji’an literati had by no means stopped writing inscriptions for local temples, but they no longer claimed personal

52 Ibid.

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and exclusive relationships to local sacred sites. They were no longer interested in establishing the temple at the core of a locally based community, united by shared values and interpretations. They still addressed local themes and incorporated local tales, but they did not assign to themselves meaningful roles within the communities formed by such local histories. They employed strategies that created distance, by writing about the philosophical and literary aspects of religion rather than about local ritual practices. Where they did position themselves as active members, the community they wished to belong to was translocal, reaching well beyond the Ji’an boundaries, even though the majority of the authors were not located at the capital as they had been in the early Ming, but in Ji’an. The question of why this might have been the case will form the subject of the next chapter.

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OTHER WAYS OF BEING LOCAL IN MING JI’AN

Ouyang Shoudao and Liu Chenweng, Luling men who lived at the end of the Southern Song and the beginning of the Yuan dynasty, felt drawn to the temples in the local landscape. They wrote long texts about these temples, providing shared histories for their communities, and positioning themselves as leaders and active members within these communities. Their fellow literati of the early Ming were still ‘local’ men, but for a period of time at the end of the fourteenth and in the rst half of the fteenth centuries, they were ‘local’ in a different way: they were stationed at the capital and served in high governmental positions. They were still interested in the local temples, but only from a distance; they wrote histories of local institutions, and shaped the activities that happened within the local communities from their lofty positions at court. Things changed towards the end of the fteenth century. Ji’an no longer provided vast numbers of metropolitan degree holders to ll the ranks of the central government bureaucracy, and many Ji’an literati found themselves in lower provincial positions, or stationed at home for signi cant periods of time. Interestingly, this physical reloca- tion coincided with a shift in their attentions. Although they were still contributing inscriptions for temples as we saw in the previous chapter, literati from late Ming Ji’an were no longer using those inscriptions to make their mark on local society, and to transform their localities. How can we account for this shift in temple inscriptions? Part of the explanation perhaps lies in the changes in the landscape we noted in Chapter Seven. By the middle of the Ming, or by the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ji’an had largely become terra cognita. The temples and monasteries that dominated the landscape were now familiar spaces with venerable histories. Many claimed associations with luminaries from the past; almost all of them had been visited and written about before. One can imagine that Liu Chenweng, on his wanderings through the mountains of Luling in the late thirteenth century, felt he could say something new and fresh about the temples he found, in a way that Liu Shou, hiking to the top of the Wugong

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Mountains in the early seventeenth century, did not. It is, however, impossible to nd conclusive evidence for an absence of interest, and this changed sensibility is, in any event, only part of the story. More pertinent, perhaps, is the explanation Dardess gives: sixteenth- century localism in Taihe, expressed in pride in local morals and enjoyment of the local landscape, was in decline.1 There is little doubt that examination success declined, and that late Ming literati from Ji’an had far less political in uence than early Ming literati had. In many ways, late Ming Ji’an had less to set it apart from other prefectures, and men from Ji’an who lived outside of Ji’an had less reason to associate themselves with Ji’an. Ji’an was not as special as it had been. Rather than seeing this process of change in negative terms, however—a prefecture less special, a place in decline—we can also describe this process in positive terms. Literati from Ji’an—thinkers, teachers, philosophers—played leading roles in one of the most signi cant transformations of late imperial intellectual culture: the diffusion of Wang Yangming’s ‘School of the Mind’ (xin xue 心學).2 Several generations of men from Ji’an participated; their discussion meetings ( jiangyue 講約) in Ji’an shaped the thought of many more generations. Signi cantly, however, men from other parts of China also took part, and discussion meetings were held in a number of places. The men from Ji’an were not exclusively focused on Ji’an; they participated in an intellectual discourse that included a far wider community of like-minded intellectuals. Southern Song and Yuan men like Ouyang Shoudao and Liu Chenweng had little to say about the philosophical problems or intellectual lineages that their contemporaries in other places wrote about. Hu Zhi and Luo Hongxian, on the other hand, were active and important thinkers in ongoing intellectual debates that were held throughout China. Little wonder, then, that their writings about local temples also spoke to issues that went beyond the prefectural boundaries. The community they chose to be active within was not limited to the local; instead, they addressed an audience that was empire-wide. Undoubtedly, this change in outlook explains some of the difference in style we have observed in temple inscriptions. What it does not explain,

1 Dardess, A Ming Society, 215–16. 2 On Wang Yangming, see DMB, 1409–1416. On late Ming Confucianism, see, for example, Willard Peterson, ‘Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought’ in Twitchett and Mote, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, 708–788.

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however, is the lack of interest in the local temples themselves. Wang Yangming and his followers were deeply interested in the local; one of the topics they debated was local activism. So why were they not writing about local temples as sites of local activism and community transformation as their Southern Song and Yuan colleagues had done? Again, I think we need to phrase the question in positive rather than negative terms. Instead of nding evidence to explain a loss of interest in temples, I will illustrate, in this nal chapter, a growth of interest in other institutions that served as sites of community interest. By the late Ming, I argue, a number of other local institutions were available— genealogical records ( jiapu 家譜 or zupu 族譜), local educational establishments, community covenants—and for the literati of late Ming Ji’an and their empire-wide audiences, these became more fruitful sites of community activism. I am not suggesting that genealogies or local schools were not available in earlier periods—we discussed their roles brie y in Chapter Five—but it was not until the Ming, and especially the late Ming, that writing about genealogies, schools and academies, and community covenants offered literati such opportunities for the creation and transformation of local communities.

The lineage and genealogical writings

In A Ming Society, John Dardess sketches the outlines of a transformation in familial organization that took shape during the early Ming.3 Although common-descent groups existed well before the Ming, the warfare and social disruption that surrounded the end of the Yuan and the establishment of the Ming dynasty meant that during the early Ming, familial groups re-established their common origins by compiling genealogical records. Some such records were said to be rescued from before the tumultuous period, others were clearly newly established records, but all of them, Dardess shows, were compiled on the basis of meticulous research.4 For their prefaces, these family historians from Taihe usually turned to their honoured fellow county men who served at the capital. Men like Yang Shiqi and Wang Zhi contributed great numbers of such prefaces. The transformation Dardess refers to occurred in Taihe around the turn of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, when

3 Dardess, A Ming Society, 112–138. 4 Dardess, A Ming Society, 123.

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common-descent groups gradually became lineages. Dardess detects four speci c characteristics of this late fteenth- and early sixteenth- century process of lineage formation in Taihe: kinship connections are no longer exclusively established on the basis of concrete evidence; lineages begin to construct temples to worship their common ancestor; the activities are supported by shared nancial organizations; and complex rules and regulations are established to control the kinship group. Lineage prefaces are also no longer compiled by the Taihe gentlemen at the capital.5 It is not a transformation exclusive to Taihe, Dardess suggests. He proposes to understand this development as part of the kind of localist strategies that Hymes suggested existed in local society from the Southern Song onward.6 As the court and imperial service offered fewer possibilities for con rming elite status, localist strategies became more important. Dardess chronicles a process in Taihe that leads to a growth of compilations of lineage records around the beginning of the fteenth century, with prefaces written by men who are not necessarily located at the capital. This is fascinating. Just at the time when we have noted a decline in the production of literati inscriptions for local temples, Dardess observes the increase of lineage record compilations in Taihe. Could it be that the Ji’an gentlemen who saw local temples as nodes of local social and cultural development in the period from the South- ern Song to the early Ming, at this point began to see the lineage as a more useful focal point for their activities? Was it the locally based scholars of the wider Ji’an region who took the place of the high court of cials from Taihe who wrote the prefaces for the early Ming genealogical records? It certainly seems that a number of the men we have encountered in the previous chapters wrote prefaces for genealogies. From the literary collections preserved in the Siku quanshu, it transpires that Yin Tai’s 尹臺 literary collection, for example, contains four prefaces for genealogies, Hu Zhi’s collection has ve, and Luo Qinshun’s 羅欽順, another Taihe man, contains twelve. Luo Hongxian tops them all with no less than nineteen.7 Of course these are by no means complete gures. Genealogies were

5 Dardess, A Ming Society, 125–6. 6 Dardess, A Ming Society, 137. 7 Yin Tai, Donglutang ji, 1.76b–79b, 2.3a–5b, 2.35a–37a, 3.16b–19b; Hu Zhi, Henglu jingshe zanggao, 8.46b–48a, 9.38b–40b, 10.3b–5b, 10.23a–25b, 10.25b–28a; Luo Qinshun, Zheng’an cungao, juan 9; Luo Hongxian, Nian’an wenji, juan 12.

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compiled at all levels of society, and only a fraction of the genealogies has survived. The Shanghai Library, which holds the largest collection of Chinese genealogies in the world, owns about 24 genealogies from what was Ji’an prefecture.8 Of those 24, the majority of the editions date from the early twentieth century, with only about ve from the nineteenth century, and a further three from the eighteenth. The earliest extant Ji’an jiapu in the Shanghai Library dates from 1761.9 So for Ji’an, the extant genealogies were all produced at a time that lies well outside of our period. Nevertheless, even some of those much later genealogies proudly claim prefaces and commemorative texts written by famous late Ming scholars.10 It goes without saying that the kinship connection between the late Qing or Republican era compiler of the genealogy and the actual kingroup for whom the famous scholar in question compiled a preface is dubious.11 Interestingly, those late Ming prefaces clearly still held value in the early twentieth century, perhaps had even increased in value, as evidence of the long and venerable ancestry of the family. So late Ming scholars from Ji’an wrote prefaces for Ji’an genealogies. Is it possible to say anything about why these scholars wrote their prefaces, or about what they hoped to achieve with their writings? For

8 Of course the genealogical collections in the Family Library in Utah also have extensive holdings, but they include only a small number from Ji’an. 9 This is the genealogy for the Tang family from Xiayang in Yongxin. Tang Wenwei, comp., Xiayang tang shi zupu (1761). 10 For example, the third edition of the genealogy of the Yang family from Jishui, which dates from the late Qing, contains a commemorative text by Grand Secretary Xie Jin, who served under Yongle. See Yangshi sanxiu zupu (n.d.), juan 5, citang ji, 1a–4a. The same Xie Jin also contributed a preface to the genealogy of the He family from Yongxin. See He Changyao, He shi shisan xiu zupu (1925), juan shou, 10a–11b. This He genealogy boasts, apart from the Xie Jin preface, also prefaces by Zou Shouyi ( juan shou, 18a–19b) and Luo Hongxian ( juan shou, 20a–22a). Finally, the genealogy for the Peng family from Youtian in Luling county, compiled in 1925, contains a preface by Zou Shouyi. See Peng Shipei, ed., Youtian Longtang Peng shi zupu, prefatory materials, 3b–4b. 11 As Dardess has pointed out, already by the mid to late Ming, the compilation of genealogies was no longer based on thorough research, and claims of veracity were no longer carefully checked. When a twentieth-century member of the Wang family, a certain Wang Zhisong, included a preface entitled ‘Wang shi zupu xu’, composed by none other than Ouyang Xiu in his genealogy, he no doubt knew himself how unlikely it was that actual kinship ties connected the Wang family for whom Ouyang Xiu had composed his text, and the family of Wang Zhisong. What matters is that in the twentieth-century environment in which Wang Zhisong composed his text, this text by Ouyang Xiu conveyed a meaningful connection. See Wang Zhisong, comp., Wang shi xuxiu jiapu (1921), juanshou, 1a–2a.

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that we have to look more closely at the texts themselves. Many of the authors who wrote prefaces mention the social signi cance of the lineage. In ancient times, writes Yin Zhi, it was the sage kings who ordered society and ensured human relations were correctly balanced. Yin Zhi dismisses later attempts to transform the ways of the ancients by means of modern governance. ‘Far better is to provide leadership through the clari cation of one’s genealogical records.’12 Yin Zhi is not arguing this in isolation; on the contrary, he feels strengthened by a venerable local tradition of valuing the compilation of genealogical records, a process started by Ouyang Xiu, and hence used as a model throughout the realm.13 Again, he stresses that society should be ordered by taking account of the great constants visible over periods of one hundred generations, but also of the small distinctions manifest in shorter periods of, say, ve generations. So for Yin Tai, the compilation of the genealogical record of a family is a way both to understand and to transform one’s socio-cultural environment. It is a point he feels strongly about. ‘In making such records, one wishes to implement the righteousness [of one family] throughout the realm. That is why genealogies are composed.’14 Through writing a preface, Yin Tai takes part in that transformative process. Yin Tai is perhaps more explicit about the transformative power of genealogical compilations than most, but he is not alone. Hu Zhi, albeit more implicitly, also argues for their importance. The collation of family records strengthens kinship ties, Hu writes in one preface, and the tightening of the family regulations allows the righteousness of the family to ourish.15 In another preface, Hu expresses his abundant admiration for the Zhou family from Wan’an, praising the harmony in their family life, the helpfulness between their siblings, and the obedience of their servants. He sees all this as the result of generations of study and self-cultivation. What is more, he considers the compilation of the family records similarly as an act of self-cultivation. In the same way that the ethical man ( junzi), even if he lives the life of a hermit, transforms not just the realm but also heaven, earth, and the myriad things, the genealogy has a powerful effect on society.16 It is a process

12 Yin Tai, Donglutang ji, 1.77a. 13 Yin, Donglutang ji, 1.77b. 14 Yin, Donglutang ji, 2.35a–b. 15 Hu, Henglu jingshe zanggao, 8.48a. 16 Hu, Henglu jingshe zanggao, 9.40b.

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Hu sees beginning with the family, then spreading throughout the land, after which it is taken up by the wild beasts, the sh and the natural world, and eventually by heaven, earth, and the myriad things.17 These are no mean powers attributed to the compilation of family records! Clearly, men like Hu Zhi and Yin Tai considered genealogies as a valuable tool for the social and moral transformation of the world they inhabited. Compared with the ways in which literati wrote about temples to bring about change in their local world, these late Ming authors were far more direct about the affective powers of these local institutions. There is, however, an important difference. While the literati authors of temple inscriptions, in particular those of the Southern Song and Yuan, wrote from an insider’s perspective, positioning themselves within the—imaginary—temple communities, the authors of lineage prefaces are de facto outsiders. Nowhere is membership of a community more clearly de ned than where that community is based on kinship. Of course a genealogy usually contains a large number of prefaces, some of which were composed by members of the lineage themselves, not least the actual compiler of the genealogy. The prefaces included in the literary collections of the authors themselves, however, are rarely for the author’s own lineage. Far more commonly, the authors—almost all famous individuals, otherwise their literary collections would not have been preserved—were asked to lend their fame to the family by writing a preface. In that sense, the process is no different from the genealogy preface. But where a temples was open to anyone who wished to belong to its community, a lineage was not. The transformative process that scholars like Hu Zhi and Yin Tai write about so enthusiastically, is, on the whole, observed and encouraged from the outside, and not from within the community. For writings written from within a community in an attempt to transform it, we have, once again, to look elsewhere.

Local educational establishments

If the local writers in Ji’an regarded genealogies to be more useful sites of local moral transformation than temples, then what about the schools and academies of Ji’an? Did they see institutions like Bailuzhou Academy, for example, or the academy in the Qingyuan Mountains, as

17 Hu, Henglu jingshe zanggao, 10.5a.

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sites where local communities were constructed and shaped? Two sites located near the city walls of Luling—Bailuzhou Islet and the Qingyuan Mountains—provide a useful testing ground. Both sites have extant gazetteers: the gazetteer for the academy at Bailuzhou Islet (Bailuzhou shuyuan zhi), compiled by Liu Yi 劉繹 in 1871, and the mountain gazetteer for Qingyuan (Qingyuan zhilüe), compiled by Xiaofeng Daran (1589–1659) in 1669.18

Bailuzhou Academy in the late Ming

When Ming rule was rst established in Ji’an, an era of frantic rebuilding followed, as we have seen in Chapter Six. Government buildings, of cial altars, Chenghuang temples, Buddhist and Daoist shrines and monasteries were built or reconstructed throughout the prefecture. Inter- estingly, Bailuzhou Academy seems not to have been touched during the whole of the fteenth century. If any restorations took place, no records in the academy gazetteer or in the county and prefectural gazetteers document these.19 Not until 1526 did the prefectural magistrate make some attempt at the restoration of this once so famous academy. Then, in 1542, Ji’an Magistrate He Qigao 何其高 took drastic meas- ures. He removed the remains of a temple on the islet, Ci’en Temple 慈恩寺, and rebuilt the academy on its foundations.20 As one observer remarked, all buildings on the islet were by then almost entirely derelict, although traces remained of the foundations of some of the buildings that had stood here long ago.21 When his work was complete, he invited scholars from the nine Ji’an counties ( jiu yi zhi shi 九邑之士) to come and admire what he had done, and he requested a commemorative inscription from the by then rather elderly Taihe scholar Luo Qinshun (1465–1547).22 Luo, who led a more or less reclusive existence in Taihe,

18 See also the discussion of these sources in Chapter Five. References throughout are abbreviated: Bailuzhou shuyuan zhi is referred to as BLZ, and Qingyuan zhilüe as QYZL. 19 The Luling gazetteer notes the following: ‘From the 1355 restorations to 1526 is a century and many decades. It was only then that Magistrate Huang Zongming initiated the restorations of Bailu.’ Luling xianzhi (1873), 16.5a. 20 On Ci’en Temple, see JAFZ (1875), 8.45a. 21 Luo Qinshun, ‘Chengnan Bailu shuyuan ji’, BLZ, 5.10a–11a. 22 On Luo Qinshun, see Liu, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan, 226–230. For his activities in Taihe, see Dardess, A Ming Society, passim. For in-depth studies of his philosophy, see Irene Bloom, Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The K’un-chih chi by Lo Ch’in-shun (New York, 1987). See also Youngmin Kim, ‘Luo Qinshun (1465–1547) and his Intellectual Context’, T’oung Pao 89.4–5 (2003): 367–441.

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initially politely declined the invitation on account of his great age, but He Qigao, hoping to use his text as a means ‘to encourage all students in the area’, did not give up.23 Pursuing Luo by letter, He wrote that he wished Luo ‘to tell all students they must match the brilliance of our Master [i.e. Luo Qinshun]’.24 He Qigao obviously felt that this academy, with an accompanying text by this prominent thinker, would enhance scholarly endeavours throughout the prefecture. He Qigao also set aside some land to provide an income to fund extended stays of scholars at the academy. To mark this donation, he asked Yin Tai, then a young scholar from Yongxin, to write a text.25 It is an interesting piece of writing that elegantly weaves together the theme of learning with the practical value of the piece of land donated by Magistrate He Qigao. Yin draws out the analogy between the student and the Way he seeks to attain on the one hand, and the farmer and the land he tills on the other. Learning begins with the committal to memory and the recitation of the texts of the Classics, a process Yin sees as parallel to the farmer sowing the seeds at the beginning of the season. Next come the physical aspects of the learning process, where eyes and ears are trained by learning to play musical instruments, and the hands and feet become versed in the steps and movements of the rituals. This he compares to the tending of young plants. The mastery of moral values, such as lial piety and mourning, are like the growing to maturity of the grains, and the preparations for examinations and selection for of ce, nally, are like the reaping of the harvest.26 His text does not, however, read as the somewhat facile re ection on the importance of studying as this analogy perhaps suggests. Yin Tai uses the opportunity to re ect on what he perceives to be a threat to the tradition of learning. ‘If the scholar does not concentrate fully on his studies, then he can become deluded by other teachings. Once he is deluded by other teachings, he cannot be saved from them.’27 As Yin Tai sees it, Buddhism and Daoism, and in particular Chan-Buddhist principles, ‘threaten to cloud the clarity of our Way’.28 The danger, as Yin Tai perceives it, is in the accommodating attitudes of Buddhists and

23 Luo Qinshun, ‘Chengnan Bailu shuyuan ji’, BLZ 5.9a. 24 Luo Qinshun, ‘Chengnan Bailu’, 5.9b. 25 Yin Tai would later rise to serve in the central secretariat of the Nanjing Depart- ment of Ritual, but at the time of the restoration, he was only in his mid-thirties. 26 Yin Tai, ‘Bailu shuyuan xuetian ji’, Donglutang ji, 4.18b–22a. 27 Yin, ‘Bailu shuyuan xuetian ji’, 20b. 28 Yin, ‘Bailu shuyuan xuetian ji’, 21b.

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Confucians: ‘Some say the essence [of Buddhism and Confucianism] is the same. Particularly Chan-Buddhists use [this argument] out of self-interest.’29 In the end, Yin Tai argues that this is where there is a difference between the farmer tilling the land, and the scholar striving to attain the Way: The farmer knows how to control the weeds in his land, but when the scholar does not attain the Way in his learning, he forgets what it is he extracted from [his learning]. Thus the learning of the Way of the scholar is not as good as that of the farmer, who never fails to perform the tasks needed on his land. But we must ensure this eld [donated by] our master [i.e. Magistrate He Qigao] for the purpose of study is not put to shame.30 He ends with a reminder for all those reaping the bene ts of this piece of land: ‘We will depend on this land to feed our scholars, so how could we not be mindful of their learning!’31 With that nal statement, the general argument about the signi cance of learning is brought back to a local level. Here, then, we see a parallel to the kind of critical statements the Southern Song and Yuan scholars were making about the temples. Yin Tai uses this opportunity in this rather broad and general re ection on the signi cance of learning, to make two critical observations that are revealing of him as a person. The rst is a comment about the general intellectual climate of accommodation between Confucianism and Buddhism that, as we saw earlier, had a personal resonance for a number of the Ji’an scholars.32 It may also be a direct consequence of Wang Yangming’s legacy in the area, his comments directed at the latter-day Wang Yangming-ists who, as we saw in the previous chapter, were interested in bringing Buddhism and Confucianism closer together. Yin Tai is not speci c enough, however, to provide full evidence for this hypothesis. The second is his nal comment about his appreciation for the local magistrate. He Qigao has offered this piece of land, and Yin Tai wishes to ensure that those who enjoy its bene ts at this academy, will not take it for granted. He is, in other words, attempting to shape the local community of scholars with his comments. In contrast to Yin Tai’s genealogy prefaces, where he expressed his commitment to local

29 Ibid. 30 Yin, ‘Bailu shuyuan xuetian ji’, 22a. 31 Ibid. 32 Most notably Hu Zhi, as we saw earlier.

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moral values by seeking to transform communities to which he himself did not directly belong, here he is targeting the local community of scholars of which he himself is a part. Through the act of his writing for this academy, he positions himself as an active member within that community. The academy itself was moved again in 1573, this time to a location to the north of Luling. This building was then restored once again in 1586. In 1592, Magistrate Wang Keshou 汪可受 decided to re-establish the buildings on the Islet itself, and moved the academy back, adding several new shrines and buildings. In 1635, Magistrate Lin Yizhu 林一柱 carried out the last Ming restorations and extensions to the buildings.33 The 1592 restoration was perhaps the most thorough of the sixteenth-century restorations, drawing on a wide range of local gentry to contribute nancially to its costs. The academy gazetteer was compiled in 1871, when throughout Ji’an, county gazetteers were being compiled. It includes a complete list of donations made to the restoration project of 1592.34 It is a fascinating document, containing hundreds of names, complete with their of cial title, their place of origin, and the exact amount they donated. The of cials at the prefectural level as well as at the county level made the highest donations, some paying up to one hundred silver tael. The donations from the county elite, some of whom were serving elsewhere, and some were enrolled as students in the academy, were mostly in the region of several tael. The Luling elite donated most money, but people from each of the other counties contributed as well. Even those appointed to county governments in military posts donated two to three taels each. It was clearly considered in the interest of the prefecture as a whole to reinstate Bailuzhou as a centre of academic excellence. Such contributions from throughout the prefecture con rmed the shared sense of ‘ownership’ of the academy throughout Ji’an. These sixteenth-century inscriptions suggest that at least the prefectural magistrates and some lower-level local scholars regarded it to be in the interest of the prefecture as a whole to reinstate Bailuzhou as a centre of academic excellence. Yin Tai shared their sentiment, as did Luo Qinshun, who had written in 1542:

33 BLZ, 8.21b–22b. 34 BLZ, 3.1a–15b.

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Protecting and nurturing [the people] is a constant task. Together with the learning of the prefecture and its counties, they are like the outward show and inward thought to each other, that ensure that talented people daily increase, and that local customs are promulgated widely.35 Clearly Bailuzhou was relevant for the prefecture as a whole, and the education provided at this newly restored academy was thought to bene t it. Dardess is no doubt right that for Luo Qinshun, Taihe had lost its attraction for providing a shared identity.36 Nevertheless, there was still a prefectural unit they recognized as valuable, and they were happy to lend their names to a project that enhanced its cohesion and community identity.

The Qingyuan Mountains

For much of the sixteenth century, however, not Bailuzhou, but the Qingyuan Mountains were the main site for intellectual activities in Ji’an. The Qingyuan mountain range is located close to the prefectural capital Luling (see Map 7). This range never had the kind of magical quality that the remote Wugong Mountains had, but they were probably the most famous mountains in the area. When Zhou Bida had visited the Qingyuan Mountains in 1163, he was impressed by the imposing mountains that hid the secluded temple of the seventh patriarch. The Song dynasty Qingyuan Mountains were still partly unknown territory. By the late Ming dynasty, however, the Qingyuan Mountains had become a favourite meeting place for local scholars and learned men from all over the empire. Gazetteer records suggest that the same fate befell Jingju Monastery, the most signi cant site for worship here, as the many other temples in the area. They were destroyed at some point during the chaotic years of the late Yuan, and were hastily rebuilt under early Ming rule. In the case of Jingju Monastery, the gazetteer notes the restoration of 1376, and its elevation to the status of ‘amalgamated monastery’ in 1391. It is quite clear, however, that little further development happened in the Qingyuan Mountains until the arrival of Wang Yangming in the area in 1510.37 As has been discussed by a number of

35 BLZ, 5.16a. 36 Dardess, A Ming Society, 249. 37 In 1510, Wang arrived in Luling, where he served as magistrate for less than one year. Wing-tsit Chan, ‘Wang Shou-jen’, in DMB, 322.

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scholars, Wang Yangming used Buddhist sites for some of his teaching, and the temples in the Qingyuan Mountains were among them.38 After Wang Yangming’s death, biannual gatherings to discuss the teachings continued in the area. As one scholar described the scene: The nine counties of Jizhou all have academies, and there are hundreds of scholars. They always gather in one hall. Every year they gather in the spring and the autumn and stay there for three days. There are always many visitors, to the point that they ll every empty monk’s bed. Their chanting lls the forests and valleys, and the learning of the west bank of the river ( jiang you 江右) was known throughout the realm.39 The Qingyuan Mountains were known ‘throughout the realm’, as this author maintains, for the Confucian learning of the latter-day Wang Yangming followers that gathered here. Most famous were the four followers of Wang from Ji’an: Nie Bao, Zou Shouyi, Ouyang De, and Luo Hongxian.40 When Luo Hongxian travelled on the Gan with friends in the summer of 1548, he attended one of these gatherings: On the 25th day [of the sixth month] we gathered at Qingyuan. Scholars from all over the prefecture arrived. Altogether about 160 people gathered, lay persons and monks, some arriving earlier than others. They could not all stay overnight. Every morning they assembled in the hall, and various gentlemen explained [the theory of ] innate goodness (liangzhi 良知) and the damage done by certain ideas. When the [gentlemen] withdrew, everyone went to their bedrooms to [continue] discussing. Every night they only stopped around midnight.41 These dynamic conferences only lasted for a time during the sixteenth century and into the early seventeenth. By the early Qing, in 1662, an observer wrote that the place had completely changed: That is now thirty years ago. The lecture halls are covered in lush grass, the ever diminishing number of monks of the temple have cut off all contact with the world. There is little hope for this not to turn into a dusty eld or a tiger’s lair.42

38 See, for example, Kandice Hauf, ‘‘Goodness Unbound,’ Wang Yang-ming and the Redrawing of the Boundary of Confucianism’, in Kai-wing Chow, On-cho Ng, and John B. Henderson, eds., Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 135–137. 39 Luo Hongxian, ‘Xia you ji’, Nian’an wenji, 5.22a. 40 For an extensive discussion of these four gures, see Hauf, ‘The Jiangyou Group’. 41 Luo Hongxian, ‘Xia you ji’, Nian’an wenji 5.22a. 42 QYZL, 138.

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This text shows how quickly the fortunes of such a place could turn around, and how constantly the need for restorations presented itself to local governors. Nevertheless, the philosophical writings of Wang Yangming and his followers had ensured a permanent place for the Qingyuan Mountains, both in the cultural landscape of Jizhou, and in the consciousness of gentlemen and scholars throughout the realm. Qingyuan’s reputation as a cultural centre remained standing, even when its buildings had long ago lost their roofs.

The Jiangyou group

The heritage of the seventh patriarch had by the sixteenth century been swallowed up by the Confucian activities on the mountain of the Jiangyou group, who held regular large meetings here. The main theme of their discussions was how the Chan tradition should or should not be part of Confucian learning. By the early seventeenth century, the buildings were crumbling, and the famous imperial of cial and Con- fucian philosopher Zou Yuanbiao (1551–1624) was one of the local gentlemen involved in the restoration. Zou had attended some of these large meetings of the Jiangyou group in the Qingyuan Mountains in the years before he passed the jinshi exam, when he was in his early twenties. Over the decades, he had seen the buildings of the Jingju complex gradually growing more run-down: Every time there was a meeting, several hundred people attended, and the sound of chanting was impressive. It truly was a region of outstanding learning. So many people attended that the buildings [of the academy] could not house them all, so many slept in the temple buildings. The halls were all dilapidated, and when the wind blew, they made a jingling noise, and [the buildings] wobbled as if they were about to collapse. The shrine was also leaning to one side, and everyone agreed [the buildings] ought to be renewed.43 Despite the agreement over the necessity of restorations, there was disagreement over how to proceed. In Zou’s analysis, there were two ways of looking at the issue: Some said this is the land of the [Buddhist] patriarch (zu di 祖地), and at times of [Confucian] meetings, [the monks] ought not to have to

43 Zou Yuanbiao, ‘Preface for the restoration of Qingyuan’, QYZL, 166.

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smell the meat and sh. They considered it most suitable if the temple halls and monks’ residences would all comply with [Buddhist] monastic guidelines (qinggui 清規), and that for the shrine itself another high and dry location would be selected. Others claimed that they had established the correct way (zhengdao 正道), and that therefore the restoration of the Buddhist temples and monks’ residences should take place beyond the walls of these buildings, and that [the temple buildings] should not be used for [Confucian] instruction.44 This argument re ected, in a way, the deeper divisions between those who felt that Buddhism threatened the very foundations of the ru tradition and those who wished to have the supremacy of their Confucian tradition re ected in the architecture of the site. As we saw, Yin Tai would be most likely associated with this group. Others were more willing to recognize the invaluable contribution the Buddhist (chan) tradition had made to Confucian (ru) thought, and the primacy of the Buddhist presence on this mountain, Hu Zhi among them, as we saw in the previous chapter. The issue was resolved by Zou’s appointment of the monk Benji as supervisor of the project. As Zou put it, ‘To make true the ru tradition, you need to know about the Buddha; only when you know about Buddhism do you understand the ru tradition.’45 Although Zou did not dare to express himself in a language that blended the two traditions (he he yu 和合語), he felt strongly that the heritage of the mountain should be preserved. ‘A harmonious match [between the two schools of thought] is hard to nd, and one rarely encounters such a beautiful situation. How could people be willing to let this precious mountain revert to emptiness? Let those who come here sneer!’46 Zou’s encouragement of the monk Benji, and his fund-raising efforts among his friends and exam-year cohort meant that the Buddhist buildings were restored fully, a project that continued well beyond Zou’s death in 1624. The academy and the worthies’ shrine were also rebuilt, but outside the boundary of the sacred Buddhist space. Clearly, for Zou Yuanbiao the signi cance of this restoration project went well beyond the mountain itself, and probably beyond county and prefecture as well. The discussions preceding the restoration, on one level dealing with such practicalities as the smell of meat upsetting

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.

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the vegetarian residents of the mountain, were on another level really about the relative place of the two traditions. It was a matter close to the heart of the prominent Ji’an thinkers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, as we also saw in their temple inscriptions, one that constantly transcended geographical borders. Issues of local identity or local responsibility for the project did not feature in these discussions, and when Zou wrote his fund-raising notice, it was not local gentlemen he targeted, but those members of the national elite that he shared connections with. ‘Restoring Qingyuan’ was a project of the realm, or of the tradition, and not a local project.

The local in the Qingyuan Mountains

At the same time, there were those for whom the activities in the Qingyuan Mountains enhanced the sense of a speci cally local, namely Ji, identity. Zou Depu 鄒德溥 from Anfu, for example, who gained his jinshi degree during the Wanli reign-period, peppered his 1617 account of the restorations at Qingyuan with references to ‘our Ji’ (wu ji 吾吉).47 He writes about the initial spread of Buddhism to ‘our Ji’, Magistrate Wu who came to be in charge of ‘our Ji’ and further enhanced ‘our greatness’ (wo hong 我洪); he mentions the gentlemen ‘greatly developed our Ji’ (da zao wo ji 大造我吉) as they planned the restorations of Qingyuan: I personally think that our Ji has reason to celebrate. Scholars and gentry who come here mostly seek to attain the matchless learning of myriad sages. The pure and cultivated enter these halls, the intelligent and enlightened enter these rooms, and as they become acquainted among the elds, they all feel lucky to know that there is a Qingyuan tradition of learning, and whenever they ‘manipulate the dust brush’ [i.e. hold discussions], this is always the thought that is rst considered.48 For Zou Depu, then, this academy and the intellectual activities in it are inseparable from the sense of local pride and identity this generates. As Zou sees it, the reputation and high standards of learning associated with Qingyuan thanks to the likes of Zou Shouyi, Nie Bao, Ouyang De and Luo Hongxian, have lifted ‘our Ji’ above the rest. As an Anfu

47 Zou’s text has the phrase ‘our Ji’ six times. Zou Depu, ‘Daxiu Qingyuan Jingjusi shu’, QYZL, 164–5. 48 Zou Depu, ‘Daxiu Qingyuan Jingjusi shu’, QYZL, 165.

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man, he regards the learning of Luling as the learning of Ji, and he is happy to claim his share in its fame and reputation.

Luo Hongxian and the Yongxin school

Around the middle of the sixteenth century, during the years that Luo Hongxian spent at home in Jishui, he once found himself in Yongxin. He noted that the school buildings, located to the east of the county town, were all dilapidated and uncared for. He raised this issue with Yin Tai, a native Yongxin man. Yin explained to Luo that the school had suffered in recent inclement weather, and that plans were afoot to carry out extensive renovations at a different site. The site was eventually restored between 1554 and 1558, and Luo Hongxian was asked to write an inscription. Luo was of course a mere visitor in Yongxin, and the absence of any explicit references would suggest that he was not among those who made nancial contributions: ‘They requested that Yin [Tai] wrote down the later events and create a record of the surnames of those who worked so hard.’49 Although Luo was an outsider, he still used the inscription to write a powerful plea for the signi cance of such schools. Interestingly, Luo Hongxian’s point is not to stress the importance of schools for learning per se, but to emphasize the importance of schools for the creation of gentlemen, shi. These shi are much more than learned individuals, the shi are men who ful l important roles for the community. ‘What made one a scholar in ancient times was not merely learning (gu zhi wei shi fei du xue 古之為士非獨學).’50 Men of ancient times selected a place to live, and worked from then onward to improve their environment, and thereby themselves. Simple implements would be created for the performance of rituals, instruments made out of hollow shapes to create music, and elevated areas established for the execution of dances and steps. Once he mastered the skill of writing letters and poems, there would be the recitation of poems; once he learned to wield the implements for shooting and driving a carriage, there would be archery and hunting. As the place attracted merchants, the need for proper distinctions manifested itself, and the gentleman would create a proper dwelling so as to shield himself:

49 Luo Hongxian, ‘Yongxin gaijian xuegong ji’, JAFZ (1660), 35.61b. 50 JAFZ (1660), 35.60a.

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This way his eyes and ears would not be distracted and his wisdom remain sharp. His urges and desires would not subjugate him, and his focus and aims remain broad. This is how [the scholar] perfected his place of residence (shan qi ju ye 善其居業).51 In this interpretation, a scholar is someone who brings civilization to where he lives by creating proper places for worship, by perfecting the Confucian arts, and by establishing proper distinctions. Of course the focus of becoming fully human is towards the inside, so that the shi ‘is lial and brotherly, and full of dif dence in his actions at home’ and towards the public realm, where he is ‘human-hearted and righteous, and full of sagely insight in his work for the state’.52 But it is the place where the scholar lives that bene ts: when he chooses the place to live (ze di er ju zhi 擇地而居之),53 there is nothing there. Once there is learning, the place has everything it needs, it has become a place of culture. So far so good. The problems arise when government and education fall in decline. ‘When government and education (zheng jiao) deteriorate, the authorities do not regard schools as a priority.’54 Not only do schools fall in disrepair, but those who would otherwise raise the standards of the area fail to apply their mental and physical energies. Hence the signi cance of the restorations carried out here at the Yongxin county school. Now that the school is at a new site, and the eyesore caused by these dilapidated buildings has been removed, the focus can once again be on improving the area: As a result, the residents put their schools in order and await its business, so they can practice [what they learn] towards their family and put it into use for the state. . . . If their superiors apply themselves fully like this, then the [local] residents will always be mindful of it.55 Once again Luo stresses the signi cance for the area. It is not merely the actual learning based on books and aimed at passing the examinations Luo advocates. He represents the school as the place from where the values of the area can be raised, and where people themselves take such initiatives. Of course there are the ritual and educational uses of the Confucian temple that have to be catered for:

51 JAFZ (1660), 35.60a–b. 52 JAFZ (1660), 35.60b. 53 JAFZ (1660), 35.60a. 54 JAFZ (1660), 35.60b. 55 JAFZ (1660), 35.61b–62a.

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At regular intervals, [activities like] making offerings, ceremonial drinking and archery always happen here. One also always comes here for the recitation of poems and for rest from travel, and during examinations literary compositions are compared here.56 But Luo takes it one step further. Luo presents the school as a kind of hub of community life, where much more than learning can happen: We might also ask this. We regard our looking up and down, moving forward and backward as [the performance of ] a ritual. Do we do this so we can communicate with the spiritual (shenming 神明) and to serve our elders, or may we also have a more laissez-faire and playful attitude? We consider our harmonized chanting to be music. Do we do this so we can nourish our inner nature and our emotions, and to cleanse what is polluted, or may we also indulge in a more relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere?57 Is Luo not suggesting that the rituals and music carried out in the Con- fucian temple do not necessarily have to be executed with such solem- nity? Hauf ’s suggestion that the writers she studied seemed in uenced by popular religions may well be applicable here.58 Perhaps it was the contrast between boisterous gatherings at temple festivals and the sol- emn ritual performances that struck Luo Hongxian? Perhaps he hoped to introduce the idea that the movements and sounds of a Confucian ritual could also be regarded as playful and light-hearted, and enjoyed by more than just a select few? Luo is not explicit enough to answer these questions conclusively, but there seems little doubt that for Luo, the signi cance of the temple and what happens inside it is more than merely the education it provides. Luo wishes it to be a central space within the community that has meaning for everyone involved. The text as a whole is a statement of Luo’s commitment to the local community, and the signi cance of the Confucian school within that community. The community he targets is not speci c to the county alone. In fact, it is speci cally not county-based, but prefectural in outlook. This evidence suggests that for these intellectuals, Ji’an prefecture was the domain within which a community of like-minded scholars was created, through the writing of texts regarding the educational establishments within that prefecture. If temples had largely lost their appeal as sites of local community transformation, then other institutions do

56 JAFZ (1660), 35.62a. 57 JAFZ (1660), 35.62a. 58 Hauf, ‘The Jiangyou Group’, especially Chapter seven.

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seem to have taken their place. Lineage records were among them, as were local educational establishments. And while lineages were always exclusive communities, and the author of a preface could never belong to that kin-based community through the power of his writing alone, educational establishments were inclusive. They offered opportunities for local scholars to create signi cant sites for the construction of communities, and to bring about their moral transformation. This interpretation ts well with a parallel development that took place during this time: the appropriation of community schools (shexue 社學) by members of the local elite. As Sarah Schneewind has chronicled in her study of community schools, they went from being mandated for every single Ming county and prefecture by the rst emperor of the Ming dynasty, to institutions that were championed by high of cials in what she calls the ‘mid-Ming’ (1430–1470). In the ‘high Ming’ (1470 to 1530), administrators instituted them in the counties and prefectures where they served; and in the nal stage, the late Ming (1530–1644), members of the local community took the initiative in building community schools, appropriating these imperially mandated institutions for their own, varied, agendas.59 Here, too, the initiative shifts from central government and its of cials in the rst part of the Ming, to the local in the latter part of the Ming, as we just noted in the text by Luo Hongxian. Education, whether it was conceived of as an elite activity and located mainly in prestigious academies, or whether it was thought of as an enterprise that should be available to every boy in the country in the form of community schools, was an inclusive activity. Ming local communities, far more than in the Southern Song and Yuan, were envisioned as cultural spaces that brought people together, regardless of their social and economic status. It happened in genealogies, as it did in educational establishments, as it did in community covenants.

Community covenants

One of the developments of the late fteenth century, well-documented by a variety of scholars, is the use of the community covenant (xiangyue

59 Sarah Schneewind, Community Schools and the State in Ming China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). These points are brie y stated on pages 3–4, and discussed in more detail in the conclusion, 163–166.

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鄉約) as a means to re-establish and maintain order within local society.60 The community covenant does not, of course, originate in the Ming but in the Northern Song. The community covenant written by Lü Dajun 呂大鈞 (1031–1082) for Lantian 藍田 in 1077, famous mostly for Zhu Xi’s elaborations on the text, is one of the earliest community covenants extant today.61 Here I am not as interested in the origins of this type of document as in the use of such covenants as tools for local organization in late Ming Jiangxi. The story of the reappear- ance of the community covenant in Ming times usually starts with Wang Yangming’s stay in southern Jiangxi.62 Appointed to deal with the bandits that roamed the area in 1518, he initiated the community covenant especially as a means of local defence.63 When Wang left the area, the community covenant quickly fell out of use. As Hauf ’s work has made clear, however, students of Wang Yangming in Ji’an prefecture continued to write about the community covenant and its local application throughout the sixteenth century. Hauf cites examples from a number of Ji’an men who wrote prefaces for covenants, most notably Nie Bao (1487–1563), Zou Shouyi (1491–1562), and Luo Hongxian (1504–1564).64 Nie Bao spent a lifetime

60 For a recent study, see Joseph P. McDermott, ‘Emperor, Elites and Commoners: the Community Pact Ritual of the Late Ming’, in Joseph McDermott, ed., State and Court Ritual in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 299–351. 61 For a full discussion of the text by Lü Dajun and Zhu Xi’s version, see Monika Übelhör, ‘The Community Compact (Hsiang-yüeh) of the Sung and Its Educational Signi cance’, in Chaffee and de Bary, eds., Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, 371–388. See also Kandice Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant in Sixteenth Century Ji’an Prefecture, Jiangxi’, Late Imperial China 17.2 (1996): 3–4. 62 Note that as Kandice Hauf points out, ‘Wang Yangming and his Jiangxi followers were not the rst or only Ming literati interested in the covenant.’ Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant’, 5. 63 For a discussion of Wang Yangming’s community covenant, see Hauf, ‘The Com- munity Covenant’, 7–11. 64 Hauf lists the following texts as her sources: For Zou Shouyi, ‘Xu Yongfeng xiangyue’ (Preface to the Yongfeng Community Covenant), Dongguo Zou xiansheng wenji (Toyo bunko edition) 1.47a; ‘Xu Yongxin xiangyue’ (Preface to the Yongxin Com- munity Covenant), Dongguo Zou xiansheng wenji (Ming edition) 2.26b; ‘Xiangyue houyu’ (Afterword to a Community Covenant), Dongguo Zou xiansheng wenji (Toyo bunko edition) 8.15a–16b; ‘Xinchang xiangyue xu’ (Preface to the Xinchang Community Covenant), Dongguo Zou xiansheng yigao 2.17b–19a; ‘Shu xiangyue yigu bu’ (An Essay on the Record Book for the Charitable Granary of the Community Covenant), Dongguo Zou xiansheng wenji (Toyo bunko edition) 10.33b. For Nie Bao: ‘Yongfeng xiangyue houxu’ (A Later Preface to the Yongfeng Community Covenant), Shuangjiang Nie xiansheng wenji 3.8a–9b. For Luo Hongxian: ‘Ke xiangyue yin’ (An Introduction to the Engraving of the Com- munity Covenant), Nian’an Luo xiansheng wenji 6.6a–7b.

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in the provincial administration, and by all accounts did his utmost to improve the local order wherever he was posted.65 Zou Shouyi became a pupil of Wang Yangming during Wang’s time in Jiangxi between 1517 and 1520. Zou served in of ce for several years, but made his real mark mostly after 1541, when he embarked on two decades of lecture tours.66 Luo Hongxian, nally, was interested in Wang Yangming’s teachings, but entertained more doubts about them. While Zou Shouyi wrote theoretical explorations of the issue of local governance, Luo Hongx- ian was more practically engaged with local government. In the late 1550s, for example, Luo was put in charge of local defence in Jishui, when it was attacked by bandits.67 These three men all wrote prefaces for community covenants in Ji’an, something Hauf sees as evidence of their local activism and their commitment to turning around a local society that had otherwise broken down.68 Their local activism had not merely an organizational purpose to it, but also an educational one: ‘The community covenant was a practical method for the moral training of all people. The Jiangyou men did not just want to tell people what to do, but wanted them to develop their ethical self-suf ciency.’69 Finally, Hauf argues that these men wished to create a community: ‘The longing is for both Gemeinschaft, to bind people together on the model of the family; and Gesellschaft, to unite people voluntarily out of mutual interest.’70 In discussing the covenant prefaces, Hauf demonstrates a variety of aims behind the implementation of community covenants, including the reduction of administrative burdens on locally serving of cials, the smoothing over of local tensions, and the protection of the community

65 Liu, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan, 236–239. 66 Liu, Ji’an gudai mingren zhuan, 240–43. See also Willard Peterson, ‘Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought’, in Twitchett and Mote, eds., Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, 726–7. 67 DMB, 981–2. 68 As Hauf states in her conclusion, ‘strong interest in the covenant indicates a break- down in the organization of local society’. Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant’, 39. 69 Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant’, 14. 70 Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant’, 16. Traditionally, of course, ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ have been seen as part of a process of historical change, with society moving from a stage where familial ties bound people together (Gemeinschaft) in the Middle Ages, to a stage where more rational choices are employed to establish communities (Gesellschaft). From that perspective the longing for both Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft would be unusual. More recent work, however, has argued for the continued existence of Gemeinschaft while Gesellschaft began to be the norm.

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from outside invasions.71 On the basis of Hauf ’s work, then, it would seem that in sixteenth-century Ji’an the covenant offered local scholars a way of being involved with local society and transforming society from the local level. It might, thus, be possible to argue that the community covenant began to operate as one of the loci for the sense of community belonging when the temple no longer gured in that role in literati consciousness. Hauf approaches the issue from a slightly different angle. When she asks why local scholars such as Nie, Zou and Luo might be interested in the community covenant, she states that: A major reason for interest in the community covenant was the decline in the local administration system set up by Zhu Yuanzhang in the late fourteenth century. This decline created a vacuum which the national government did not, or was not always able to, ll. The local elite sought to ll this vacuum for complicated reasons including altruism, a desire for order, to protect themselves and their lifestyles, and to gain power and prestige.72 Hauf concentrates on the Ming dynasty as a whole, and takes the local administration established by Zhu Yuanzhang as her starting point, followed by a ‘decline’, a ‘vacuum’ that had to be lled. It seems to me that this demonstrates the value of looking at the Song-Yuan-Ming period as a coherent and continuous period. Taking the early Ming as starting point and seeing Zhu Yuanzhang’s reign as a period of strong centralism with powerful local administrative structures enhance the image of the sixteenth century as a time of collapse of local structures, motivating the locally based literati to search for alternatives. The community covenant then appears to be an innovative structure that allows the local literati to take on an activist role. Taking a longer perspective in view, and seeing the early Ming as merely a brief aberration in a longer period of local activism starting in the Southern Song, allow one to see that the community covenant is one among many other institutions available to the local literati as tools for community building and transformation. It then becomes interesting to ask why the community covenant stood out as particularly useful among the other local institutions during this time. First,

71 Hauf ’s evidence comes here from Zou Shouyi’s ‘Xiangyue houyu’, Dongguo Zou xiansheng wenji, 8.15a–16b. She also discusses the signi cance of local magistrates in implementing a covenant successfully. Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant’, 21. 72 Hauf, ‘The Community Covenant’, 23.

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however, we need to ask more precise questions to ascertain whether local literati did indeed perceive the community covenant as an institution through which to build and shape local communities of which they were themselves active members. In a preface for the Yongxin community covenant, Zou Shouyi discusses why he considers the community covenant such a useful tool for social transformation. Self-cultivation (xiu shen 修身) is what provides the moral bre of society; without it, he writes, ‘parents are not treated with liality, elders are not respected, there is no harmony in the local community (xiangli 鄉里), sons and grandsons are not educated’, and so on. The common people (shuren 庶人) themselves do not engage in this self-cultivation, rather, they depend on the leadership of others. ‘Those who excel at providing education must begin with the common people.’ Once their good practices are encouraged and their divergences strictly forbidden, then everyone will ‘migrate to doing good and reform their failings’.73 The best way to reach the common people, as Zou sees it, is by having a community covenant, as it can achieve all these goals: liality and obedience, reverence and respect, peace and harmony, and instruction and learning.74 He ends by saying that it is not just Yongxin that could have such bene ts, but that others could and should adopt the same system. With that, he clari es exactly the scope of the area he encompasses in his text. The community covenant aims to improve the moral bre of the entire county, by establishing the guidelines for behaviour from the bottom up. The covenant, or so Zou Shouyi imagines, has this transformative power that reaches throughout the county. Thereby it also, of course, creates a shared identity for the county and sets it apart from other counties, who can only hope to imitate. It is not a community he himself belongs to—Zou Shouyi hailed from Anfu, to the north of Yongxin—but it does include the Yongxin elites as well, both those with learning and those in positions of government, who are all given roles in the implementation and promulgation of the text. In another preface, this time for Yongfeng county, he echoes these sentiments almost verbatim. Here, too, he stresses the importance of moral transformation from below:

73 Zou Shouyi, Dongkuo Zou xiansheng wenji, 2.16b–17a. 74 Zou, Zou xiansheng wenji, 2.17b.

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When one teaches in the villages (xiang 鄉), then one [encourages] a coherent type of learning. When the village communities exist in harmony with each other, they form a union (bangguo 邦國), and when such unions are in harmony, then they become the realm.75 The transformation of the realm thus begins with the local community (xiang). It is, to a certain extent, an intellectual exercise for Zou Shouyi. He refers to his antecedents: the learning of the Cheng brothers, the 1077 community covenant for Lantian, and his own teacher Wang Yangming.76 And if he lifts Yongfeng to the status of these important cultural connections, he does so indirectly, as it is the recently arrived magistrate of Yongfeng who has requested the preface. One would thus be hard-pressed to situate Zou Shouyi himself within this community in Yongfeng. By situating himself amongst the greats of Chinese moral philosophy, and dealing with the people of Yongfeng only via the magistrate, he positions himself at some remove. Nevertheless, I would argue that Zou conjures up a sense of belonging through this community covenant that encompasses all social levels in Yongfeng. It is a community constructed on the principles of residence, and it is aimed to appeal to all those who wish to be included. There is no doubt that for Zou Shouyi, the community covenant is a tool. It can be used to govern the people, and for that purpose it is wielded by the magistrate. So Magistrate Lu ‘governed Yongxin by means of the community covenant’, Zou writes, and ‘Master Pengshan 彭山 ruled Rongcheng 榕城 [i.e. Yongfeng] by means of the covenant’.77 Of course the magistrates then employed others to distribute the text through society: ‘[The magistrate] of our county gave the elders the community covenant to simplify extending ritual control over the various households they were responsible for.’78 Essentially, it remains, in Zou Shouyi’s eyes, a top-down process of rule. Its ef cacy as a building block for the community, however, lay in its universal applicability. Where of cials needed it to prevent their affairs from multiplying, farmers

75 Zou, Zou xiansheng wenji, 2.40b. 76 Zou, Zou xiansheng wenji, 2. 41a–b. The reference to Wang Yangming in his capacity as the governor who used the community covenant to bring order and stability to the people of Nan’gan 南贛 also occurs in other places in Zou’s writings. See, for example, Zou xiansheng wenji, 10.12b–13a. 77 Zou, Zou xiansheng wenji, 10.13a. 78 Zou, Zou xiansheng wenji, 10.12b.

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needed it to conserve their physical strength. While the good became isolated without it, the bad only prolonged their bad behaviour. The rich could not preserve their wealth, while the poor became easily oppressed without a covenant.79 No one can do without it: powerful or weak, young or old, rich or poor. It is in making such rather sweeping statements that we see Zou Shouyi gathering the entire county together, if not literally, then at least metaphorically. By declaring that everyone is in need of this one and the same text, he creates a shared identity, as if the text could serve as an identifying marker of belonging to the community. The signi cance here lies not so much in whether or not, say, the members of the poorest population in Yongxin felt the existence of a community covenant made any difference to them. Rather, it lies in the way in which Zou Shouyi imagines this to be the case. For him, this is about belonging, and about moral transformation that can be achieved through belonging. Where he writes for other counties, such as Yongfeng and Yongxin, he facilitates that sense of belonging for other people. Where he writes about his own county, Anfu, he positions himself clearly within the community. ‘Wu yi 吾邑, my area’, he writes repeatedly in the text, will use this community covenant, and it will cure it of its ills and make it a better place to be.80 Certainly for Zou Shouyi, the community covenant allowed him to make this community his own.

Epilogue

In The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition, Paul Smith identi es the main political challenges of the period 1100–1500: the enduring search for balance in the relationship between the Han people and the non-Han inhabitants of the steppe, the reach of the state and the changing nature of its relationship with the socio-economic and cultural elite, and the transformation of society.81 Not all these political challenges have appeared in this book. Within Ji’an, the relationship between Han and non-Han peoples, for example, did not occupy a prominent place in literati attentions. The reach of the state, however, and the changing nature of its relationship with the socio-economic and cultural elite, as I have shown,

79 Zou, Zou xiansheng wenji, 10.13a–b. 80 Ibid. 81 Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Smith and von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition.

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did take a central position in the literati writings that have informed much of this book. I have asked how far the state determined how literati identi ed themselves. Did they see themselves as local activists, or as representatives of the central state? The answer to that question changes throughout the Song-Yuan-Ming transition. Certainly during the early Ming the state did form a point of focus and a shared identity for the Ji’an elites. That time is relatively short, and embedded in longer periods where the local was more attractive than the central as a site for community identity and belonging. In Ji’an, however, the impact of Zhu Yuanzhang’s policies was signi cant enough to cast some doubt on the representation of the Song-Yuan-Ming transition as a single, continuous, historical epoch. The reach of the state and its relationship with the Ji’an elite in the early Ming sets that period apart from the earlier and later eras. The ways in which the elites, made up of local gentlemen and locally serving of cials, sought to belong locally also changed during this period. During the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, temples and religious sites of all sorts were important for expressing local community activism. Those same temples, however, began to function as sites for demonstrating state allegiance and state-oriented activism during the early Ming. By the late Ming, temples had been superseded by other sites of local activism, including academies and schools, lineage prefaces, and community covenants. Smith suggests that the Song-Yuan-Ming period as a whole can be characterized by a widening gap between the central government and its of cials. While of cials during the Northern Song were closely allied with the central state, from the Southern Song onward, the more autonomous elites turned away from the centre, focusing on regional and local concerns.82 In a slightly different view, Peter Bol has recently suggested that, ‘a localist turn following an era of statist policies is something of a pattern in Chinese history’.83 The Song and Ming dynasties both started with intense periods of activist policies and state-led attempts at social reorganization, followed by periods in which the elite turned its attention to regional and local concerns. While the period between 1100 and 1600 as a whole may be characterized

82 Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Smith and von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition, 21. 83 Bol, ‘The Localist Turn’, 4.

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by the kind of widening gap between state and local elites that Smith suggests, I would argue that we can nuance that view further by seeing the kind of pattern Bol proposes: starting with a localist turn in the Southern Song, which continues into the Yuan dynasty, the Ji’an elites take a de nite ‘statist turn’ in the early Ming. From the second half of the Ming, the love-affair between Ji’an of cials and the central government has come to an end, and Ji’an elites turn their attentions once again to the local level. In this light, the early Ming looks more like ‘the aberration’, as Bol suggests, than the beginning of a new social structure.84 It is only in the context of the period as a whole, starting with the founding of the Southern Song, and ending with the moment when the late Ming-early Qing transformations are in full swing, that this pattern manifests itself clearly. Taking the longer perspective also reveals a slightly different pattern of change from the one noted by Dardess in his study of Ming dynasty Taihe. Dardess begins with the early Ming, and notes the evocative descriptions of the late fourteenth- and early fteenth-century Taihe landscape. He reads these as expressions of ‘hope and optimism about life in general’, and as evidence of a sense, shared among the younger elites of Taihe that ‘the greater world (the world of government) was calling for them to enter and rise high in its service’.85 This sense of optimism, expressed in landscape description, faded in the sixteenth century, Dardess writes, and was replaced by a sense that Taihe needed to be ‘remedied’ through community compacts and lineage discipline. Taihe was no longer providing high numbers of of cials for central government, and Taihe was a place people wished to leave rather than describe lovingly. Here, I have taken both a broader perspective, i.e. the prefecture as a whole as opposed to a single county, and a longer perspective, i.e. looking at a period that started two hundred years earlier. When Southern Song literati wrote about home, they wrote about Ji, the prefecture that included Taihe. Late Ming literati called it Ji’an, but again it was the prefecture as a whole rather than the individual county they focused on. Although men from Luling liked to single out their county as a place of great culture, the men from Jishui were always there to remind them they were not the only county in Ji’an, and the men from

84 Bol, ‘The Localist Turn’, 3. 85 Dardess, A Ming Society, 248.

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Anfu did the same for the Jishui men. Even though differences between the counties mattered in the context of intra-prefectural competition, the men from Ji’an professed a pride to belong to Ji’an to the outside world. That Ji’an included regions that were much poorer, or much further off the beaten track, did not diminish their pride in the area as a whole. While Taihe was at the forefront of Ji’an prominence in the early Ming, and perhaps less signi cant in the late Ming, it was always part of this wider Ji’an pride and identity. People may well have wanted to leave Taihe in the sixteenth century, as Dardess suggests, but, as this study of the prefecture has shown, local men continued to wish to stay in Ji’an. The desire to ‘remedy’ local society through local institutions, which Dardess sees as starting in the sixteenth century, also existed, the evidence here would seem to show, before the Ming. Southern Song and Yuan literati were constantly writing about ways in which local practices and morals should be improved. They saw the temple as a useful tool for such local ‘remedying’ rather than the community compacts and genealogies they later used, but I see continuities rather than new beginnings. Finally, there is the question of representativeness. The focus on one prefecture over a long period of time has provided the kinds of insights discussed above, but are any of those Ji’an insights of value for our understanding of Song-Yuan-Ming China as a whole? Most importantly, the focus on Ji’an has highlighted that the concepts of ‘local’ and ‘national’ need constant de nition and rede nition. The work by Song scholars like Robert Hartwell, Robert Hymes, and Patricia Ebrey had already clari ed that the appeal and value of ‘the national’ was not of enduring importance for the socio-economic elites, and that ‘the local’ became more important after the Southern Song for manifesting elite status. Hymes’ works pointed both to elite marriage strategies and to local religious cults as evidence of this local outlook. The example of Ji’an suggests the value of taking these insights beyond the Southern Song. Not only is the continuity with the Yuan important, but so too is the continuity with the later Ming. The early Ming period should be seen as a brief aberration, not the beginning of new trends, and even during the early Ming, those positioned at the central capital continued to write about the local, and manifest themselves as local gentlemen. Belonging locally, or longing to belong locally, mattered throughout the Song-Yuan-Ming period, and forms the most signi cant continuity throughout this book.

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APPENDIX

Successful jinshi candidates from Ji’an in the rst half of the Ming:1 Year Luling Taihe Jishui Yongfeng Anfu Longquan Wanan Yongxin Yongning Total 1371 2 3 4 7 1 0 0 0 0 17 1385 0 2 2 5 0 0 2 1 0 12 1388 1 2 4 3 0 0 0 0 0 10 1391 0 2 0 1 0 2 0 0 0 5 1394 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 3 1397 3 3 0 1 0 0 2 0 0 9 1400 1 0 4 2 0 0 0 0 0 7 1404 4 9 12 2 3 3 1 2 1 37 1406 1 6 6 4 1 1 0 2 0 21 1411 1 4 2 1 2 0 3 0 0 13 1415 2 7 11 6 2 0 0 1 0 29 1418 2 7 7 0 2 0 0 0 0 18 1421 5 7 8 3 3 0 0 1 1 28 1424 3 2 4 5 3 0 1 1 0 19 1427 1 6 2 1 0 1 0 2 0 13 1430 2 0 4 0 4 0 0 0 0 10 1433 0 3 6 2 1 0 1 0 0 13 1436 1 4 3 0 4 0 0 1 0 13 1439 1 1 2 0 1 0 1 1 0 7

1 Figures based on JAFZ (1776), juan 25. 2/5/2007 10:52:17 AM 232 appendix 628 21 11 5 30 34 22 5 18 18 11 10 15 17 12 14 9 14 12 10 18 10 8 20 3 3 0 00000 00 00 62 40 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 ) ( cont. Year1442 Luling Taihe 2 Jishui 4 Yongfeng Anfu Longquan 4 Wanan Yongxin 2 Yongning Total 3 0 144514481451 11454 01457 41460 5 41464 4 21466 0 21469 3 61472 0 6 21475 4 0 11478 1 4 61481 4 6 51484 0 2 6 21487 0 0 1 11490 3 0 3 11493 2 2 1 41496 3 2 0 2 31499 0 2 3 4 51502 0 1 10 3 11505 2 2 11 0 4 11508 0 0 6 0 4 1 0 1 1total 1 3 2 0 0 1 6 1 4 2 6 0 4 71 2 0 3 0 4 1 1 2 0 0 6 0 6 0 4 135 0 4 0 5 0 3 1 1 0 155 5 0 3 0 4 0 0 6 2 59 1 3 0 0 5 1 7 0 3 0 136 3 0 8 0 12 0 0 0 20 37 3

GERRITSEN_f11_230-234.indd 232 2/5/2007 10:52:17 AM appendix 233 18 16 12 6 14 9 16 6 6 8 7 7 7 5 11 10 9 6 6 9 14 012 2 3 0 0 0 0 2 : 1146 0 0 1 25. juan (1776), based on JAFZ Figures 2 Successful jinshi candidates from Ji’an in the second halfSuccessful jinshi candidates from of the Ming Year1511 Luling 0 Taihe Jishui 3 Yongfeng Anfu Longquan 1 Wanan Yongxin 1 Yongning Total 151415171521 41523 01526 01529 2 01532 0 01435 1 11538 2 11541 0 4 61544 1 1 31547 0 2 01550 1 4 21553 0 2 0 31556 2 1 6 31559 0 4 2 31562 0 0 0 11565 0 0 2 01568 0 0 0 21671 0 2 0 1 2 2 2 0 7 2 0 3 1 2 2 2 1 3 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 4 2 1 0 1 2 2 0 0 0 2 2 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 1 0 2 3 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 3 0 0 1 0 7 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 1 3 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

GERRITSEN_f11_230-234.indd 233 2/5/2007 10:52:17 AM 234 appendix 7 7 8 8 9 7 3 5 2 11 5 5 7 8 8 9 10 10 3 6 8 8 12 5 ) ( cont. Year1574 Luling Taihe 2 Jishui 2 Yongfeng Anfu Longquan 2 Wanan Yongxin 0 Yongning Total 0 0 0 1 0 157715801583 11586 31589 11592 0 11595 0 11598 2 21601 1 31604 1 1 01607 5 0 01610 2 1 21613 2 2 01616 0 0 0 11619 0 4 0 11622 0 3 0 11625 0 2 0 11628 1 2 1 2 21631 0 2 1 2 31634 0 1 0 3 41637 0 1 1 0 41640 0 0 2 1 0 41643 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1total 1 1 1 0 1 0 3 2 1 0 0 0 63 1 0 3 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 2 0 0 2 65 0 3 0 0 3 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 2 0 0 1 0 0 3 0 56 1 0 0 3 0 0 0 1 0 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 18 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 3 0 0 0 1 8 0 114 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 1 2 5 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 32 0 0 1 0 2 0 0 0 19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 373

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academies 19, 54, 60, 100, 103–112, Beijing 184 203, 220 belief restoration costs 111, 211 literati 5, 55, 66, 71, 73, 77–79, see also Bailuzhou Academy, Lianxi 96–97, 135 Academy, Yuelu Academy local 73, 93, 97, 135–136 activism, local 12, 20, 100, 156, popular 5, 136 202–203, 222–223, 227 religious 32–34, 43, 180–181, 192 Akizuki Kan’ei 197n47 Bell, Colin 60n31 ancestral halls 20 belonging Anderson, Benedict 14, 59n30 concept of 49, 59 Anfu and exclusion 5, 68, 194, 207, 220 buildings for the state cult fostered through community in 120n16 covenant 225–226 Chenghuang temple in 144–147 linked to memory 14 examination success in 157 and the local 6, 15, 18, 46, 52, 59, Hu Zhi in 185–189 65–98, 153, 227 in late Ming 216, 224, 226, 229 through intellectual pursuits men from 67–69, 77–81, 129–130, 185–200 161, 171, 183 in Yongxin 4 in Records of Great Sites 32n20 Benji 161, 215 roads in 23, 162 Benjiao 186, 188 sacred sites and temples in 26, Biaoyu Shrine (Luling) 74 28–29, 36, 40, 68, 77–81, 92, Bloom, Irene 208n22 96–97, 126–127, 173 Bol, Peter K. 12, 16n28, 48n4, 54, Xu Xiake in 164–168 100, 102, 122n23, 227 Anhui 171 Boltz, Judith Magee 29n16, 34n26 anthropology 11, 13–14, 52, 55–57 Bossler, Beverly 12n18 Aoyama Sadao 9n12 Bourdieu, Pierre 54–55 Appadurai, Arjun 14, 15n25 Brook, Timothy 54–55, 149, 155, audience, translocal 140, 144, 157n6, 169n32, 184n13 181–182, 188, 192, 202 Buddha 137, 166, 169, 186–188, 191, 197, 215 Bai Yuchan 165 Buddhism 44, 49, 88–91, 161, Baifa Chapel (Anfu) 165 185–186 Bailuzhou Academy 104–110, chan 39, 90, 159, 161, 167, 209, 215 159–160 deities 51 in late Ming 207–208, 211–212 and monastic guidelines 215 restoration 208, 211, 214 in practice 8, 29, 87 restoration costs 211 in relation to Confucianism Bailuzhou shuyuan zhi 104–105, 107, 185–192, 194, 209–210, 214–215, 110–111, 208, 209n23, 211n33–34, 217–219 212n55 temples 44, 50, 65, 87–90, 120, 137, Baishi Shrine (Taihe) 170 166, 174, 188, 190, 195–197, 215 Baiyun 165 worship 38 Bao’en Monastery (Yongfeng) 173 lay see laity Barth, Fredrik 52 bureaucracy Beardsley, Richard 59, 60 imperial see government, central Beattie, Hilary 11n14 Burke, Peter 12n17

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Cai Yue 113–114 and local history 11n14 Campany, Robert Ford 29, 80n35 local and regional 8, 12, 20, 56, 82, capital, positions in see government, 91, 149 central rituals 57n24, 58 careers see government, central theory of 59–62 Carpenter, Christine 62n42 translocal 181–182, 185, 194 caves see Daoism: cave heavens Comprehensive Gazetteer (Da Ming yi tong ceramics 21, 22, 153, 155, 160 zhi) 159, 160, 164, 168–169, Chaffee, John 60n36, 104n19 173n44, 174n46 Chaling 167 Confucianism Chan, Hok-lam 127n39, 128n42 in relation to Buddhism 88–89, Chaoxian Monastery (Luling) 85 120n18, 185–192, 194, 198, 210 charitable estates 61, 100 and early Ming 142–143 Chen Cheng 124 and late Ming 202n2, 213–214, 218 Chen Mo 123–124, 140–144, 147, and of cials 188, 192 150, 192–193 and temples 76, 94, 187, 215, Chen Mountains 164 218–219 Chen Xun 125 as tradition 23, 48–50, 60, 91, 95, Chen Youliang 118 109, 161, 188, 193, 198, 215 Chen Yunwen 121 see also schools, worthies Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao and Cheng court Yi) 225 imperial 9, 83, 150 Chenghuang see god of walls and moats see also government, central Chong Tianzi 1n1 crops Chongren 29 in Jiangxi 21 Chongxian Abbey (Luling) 177, 188 in Ji’an 43 Chongxu 129 cults Chongyuan Abbey ( Jishui) 173 demonic 44, 74 Chongyuan 177 popular 73, 74 Ci’en Temple (Luling) 208 state 51, 118–119, 141, 143, 146, Cixi 1 192 Clark, Hugh R. 11n14, 59n30, territorial 56, 57, 58 102n13 Classic of Moving Dragons (Hanlong D’Andrade, Roy 52, 55n19 jing) 36 Da Ming Huidian 119n11 Cohen, Myron 61n39 Da Ming yi tong zhi see Comprehensive collections, literary 17, 47, 65, 67, 70, Gazetteer 102, 139 Dafan Temple (Luling) 89 late Ming 204, 207 Dajue Chapel (Luling) 160 communication, with higher forces 30, Daoism 49, 91, 198, 209 180 adepts 80, 92, 113, 122, 139, 150, community compact see community, 164 covenant cave heavens 167 community deity 51 of believers 5 in practice 8, 29 and belonging 5, 68, 74 religious orders 44 building a shrine 1 and temples 50, 80–81, 120, 129, covenant 20, 60, 220–227, 229 132, 174, 177 and identity 9, 15, 51, 58, 117, 216, Daozang 30n17, 139 227 Dardess, John and kinship 207, 220 on Confucianism 140, 142–143 and literati 18, 47–63, 68, 74–77, on genealogies 205n11 82, 98, 99, 102, 107, 114, 178, on Taihe 114–117, 123–125, 130, 197, 210–211, 219, 224 134, 150, 168, 184, 185n16,

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202–205, 208n22, 212n36, Enfeoffment 78, 146 228–229 Enlarged Territorial Atlas 184 Datong 186–187 epidemics 68, 71, 166 Davis, Edward 8, 17, 66n4, 82 Esherick, Joseph 53n11 De Bary, Wm, Theodore 60n36 examinations Dean, Kenneth 56, 58, 193n38 candidates 36 deities 97 civil service 48, 125 local 72 success 54, 70, 108, 123, 126, 128, of cial recognition of 84, 147 150, 155, 157, 175, 182, 189, 218 popular 146 success rate in Jishui 157n9 pantheon of 5, 141 exorcism 180 temple 16, 67, 93 terrestrial 118–119 Faji Cloister (Longquan) 169 of thunder 177 Family Library (Utah) 205 Diamond Sutra (Jin’gang jing) 43 Fan Deqin 26n8 Dictionary of Ming Biography see Goodrich, fangshi, see religious specialist Luther Carrington Fangyu shenglan see Topography for Visiting Dingcheng 135 Scenic Sites discussion meetings ( jiangyue) 202, 212 Farmer, Edward 119n15 Ditmanson, Peter 125, 130n48 Faure, Bernard 50n6 Dodgen, Randall 61n39 Faure, David 56 Donghua Abbey (Yongxin) 133 fear 34, 51, 171–172, 175 Dongshan Monastery (Yongxin) Feng Yiwen 42, 86n52 189–191 Fenyi 124n31 Dongyue Shrine (Anfu) 92, 96–97 Feuchtwang, Stephan 56, 58, 94n74 dragons 26–27, 31–37, 43, 67, 94–96, liality 95 173, 197 Finlay, Robert 22n2 Dreyer, Edward 118, 124n31 Five Worthies Shrine (Luling) 161, 215 drought 26–27, 35, 67–69, 71, 74–75, oods 31, 44–45, 70, 110, 162, 193, 94, 129, 145, 170 159n14 drowning 43, 72, 94–96, 174 Fogel, Joshua 6, 60n33 Duara, Prasenjit 56–57 Foucault, Michel 52 Dyer, C. 62n42 Franke, Herbert 84n47, 101n8, 104n21 Ebrey, Patricia Buckley 8n9, 18n34, Fried, Morton 59, 60 34n26, 48n3, 100, 101n6, 102n13, Fujian 171 229 Fuqiu, Lord see Huagai economic growth Furong (Hibiscus) Mountain 136, 160 in Jizhou 23 Fuzhou 23, 29–30, 42, 56, 57, 92, elders, local 69, 77, 177–178, 181, 100, 102, 123 195, 219, 224–225 elites Gan River 9, 21–22, 37–38, 43, 70, and central state 8 134–135, 157–159, 161, 168–169, in contrast to ‘people’ 58–59 174, 213 local 8, 11–12, 17, 30, 71, 75, 123, Gangying Shrine ( Jishui) 174 149, 182, 211, 220, 223–224, ganoderma 85, 85n49 227–228 Ganzhou 23, 71n17, 84, 94, 137, 169, national and political 39, 48, 68, 183 123, 169, 216, 226 Gao Liren 22n2 readership 17, 68, 120 gazetteers, local 16–17, 47, 65, 120, religious 39, 120, 129 122, 136, 149, 159, 170, 198, 208, status 53–58, 204 211–212 scholarly 4, 22 Ge Hong 29, 79–82, 85, 163–164, Elvin, Mark 6, 56 172–173

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Ge Lixiang 33 Hargett, James 26n9 Gemeinschaft 61–62, 222 Hartwell, Robert 6, 53, 229 genealogies 19, 100–103, 203–207, Hauf, Kandice 60n36, 183n12, 220, 227, 229 213n38, 219, 221–223 in libraries see Shanghai Library, He Changyao 205n10 Family Library He Mountains 164 Gengsang Chu 83–84 He Qigao 208–210 genre 49, 73, 89, 91, 102, 190 He River 163, 168 geomancy 26, 33 Heijdra, Martin 11n16, 128n42 Gesellschaft 61–62, 222 Hengzhou 167 Gezao Mountains 79 Heshan 114 Giddens, Anthony 52 Heshu 72 god of walls and moats 55, 119, Hirsch, Eric 13–14, 30, 35, 45 140–148, 151–152 Ho Ping-ti 9n13, 58n29, 123n26 in late Ming 192–194, 208 Hong Mai 17 and Zhu Yuanzhang 51 Hongwu see Zhu Yuanzhang government, central 12, 48, 66, 76, Howe, Nicholas 62n42 84n47, 93, 106, 171, 227 Hsu, Madeline Y. 60n35 careers in 4, 12, 79, 114, 150, 179, Hu Guan 131 190, 192, 201, 203 Hu Guang 124n31, 126, 183 early Ming 113–151, 227 Hu Quan 25, 39, 67, 78, 131 and education 218, 220 Hu Shaowu 130–131, 133 late Ming 179, 182–185, 201-229 Hu Shouchang 126 passim Hu Yan 124n31, 126 view of temples 113–151 Hu Youchu 131 Graham, A.C. 83 Hu Zhi 183–189, 191, 202, 204, Granaries 60 206–207, 210, 215 Grand Secretariat (neige) 124n31, Huagai Mountains (Fuzhou) 156, 125–127, 138, 150 177n2 Great Harmony see Datong Huagai Mountains ( Ji’an) 177 Guangdong 155, 166, 184, 189 Huagai, the three immortals 29–30, Guangxi 156, 167 42, 85–86, 177 Guangyutu see Enlarged Territorial Atlas Huanfei 132 Guanyin 50, 177 Huang Shidong 101 Guanyinya (Anfu) 165, 167 Huang Sishan 148n98 Guilin 155 Huang Tingjian 38–39 Guizhou 156, 166–167, 178, Huang Zicheng 124n31 183–184 Huang Zongming 208n18 Guo Huitai 92 Huang, Ray 118, 128n42 Guo Weijing 197 Huguang (Hunan and Hubei) 9, 22, Guo Zizhang 161, 183 104, 155–156, 167, 169 Guo, Lord see Huagai Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi 33n23, 36, 43, Guyi Mountain 83–84 44n53 Huixian Abbey (Luling) 131 Haar, Barend ter see ter Haar, Barend Hummel, Arthur 157n6 Hahn, Thomas 167n30 hungry ghosts, altar for 119, 120n16 Hamashima Atsutoshi 140n78 Hymes, Robert P. 7n6, 8n10, 29n16 Han Xizai 159 on culture 52 Han Yu 109 on genealogies 102 Hanlin Academy 127–128, 145, 183 on Huagai 42, 86n51 Hanlin and Historiography on localism 53, 100, 204, 229 Of ce 92n66 on Lu Jiuyuan 61n37, 104n19 Hansen, Valerie 8, 16n29, 17, 47n2, on models of religion 8, 44 50 on Song-Yuan continuity 18n34

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identity from Jiangxi 22 and belonging 5 from Jizhou/Ji’an 9, 23, 123, 144, and the centre 117 148, 182–184 and community 9, 14, 212 Jishui 22–23 literati 18, 48–49, 51 Chenghuang temple in 147–148 local 6, 216 Huagai in 29 national 12 Kang Wang in 41 and place 6, 117 in late Ming 205, 217, 222, 228–229 regional 13 magistrate in 192–193 immortals 180 men from 25, 124, 126–129, 161, female 4, 5, 26 182, 184 in Jishui 28 sacred sites and temples in 28, 31, in Taihe 28 38, 39n37, 70, 132, 173–174 Tao and Pi 25 shrines for state cult in 120n16 see also Ge Hong, Huagai, Lady Tan Xu Xiake in 157–159, 168 inscriptions, temple Jitai basin 22, 168 early Ming 113, 194, 207 Jiulong Mountain 164, 166–167, and fund-raising 80, 82, 169 186n17 late Ming 177–182, 185, 201–202, Jiulong Temple (Anfu) 166–167 216 Jiyun Abbey (Anfu) 164 and literati views 84, 91, 93 Johnson, David 82 and locality 179, 181–182, 195, junzi 97, 206 199, 201 juren 171 situating in context 68 as source 16–17, 47, 65–66, 73, 117 Kang Rui 71, 73, 74 telling local stories 194–197 Kang Wang 41–42, 73, 76, 146, 151 written at the capital 123–151 Katz, Paul 16n29, 48n3 kilns Jia Sidao 84 in Yonghe 22, 37–38 Jiandeng yuhua 4 Kim Youngmin 208n22 Jiang River 94 kinship 13, 56n22, 100, 203, 207, 220 Jiang Wanli 67, 84, 104, 107, 111 Kleeman, Terry 48n3, 66n5, 82 Jiangkou 165 Kowaleski, Maryanne 62n42 Jiangyou group 20, 161, 183–185, Kümin, Beat 62n43 213–216 ky d tai 60 jiangyue, see discussion meetings Jianwen see Zhu Yunwen ladder of success 58, 123 jiapu, see genealogies laity Jie Xisi 25, 42, 86, 92–97, 101, Buddhist 44, 89, 96, 196 107–110, 178, 181, 195 worship by 8–9, 120n18, 165, 213 Jin Youzi 124n31, 126 Lan Zizhen 124 Jingde Monastery (Luling) 195 landscape Jingdezhen 22, 153, 160 as constructed space 45, 99, 108, Jinggang Mountains 23 110, 153, 199 Jinghu 23 idea of 14 Jingju Monastery 39, 44, 160–161, inscribing 35–37, 46, 48, 99, 137, 212, 214 180 restoration 214–215 in Jizhou/Ji’an 13, 18–19, 99, 123, Jingtu Chapel (Luling) 159 153–175 Jingwen 156, 163, 168n31 late Ming 153–175, 185, 201, 228 Jinhua (Wuzhou) 100, 102, 143 as process 13, 45, 99 jinshi sacred 18, 26, 27, 30, 77, 94 examination 78, 84, 133, 144, 150, shaping of 27–31 169–170, 188–189, 214 temples in 15, 44

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Langlois, John D. 143n84 Liu Deyuan 129 Lantian 221, 225 Liu Dingzhi 25, 133 Laozi 83, 86 Liu Dunxin 121n21 Layder, Derek 51–52, 55 Liu Futong 117 Le’an 156 Liu Guangzhen 189–192 Learning of the Way 51, 210 Liu Ji 142, 143n84 Lee, Thomas H.C. 102n13, 104n20 Liu Jiangsun 42 Leizhou 189 Liu Qiu 144–148, 192–193 Levi, Giovanni 12n17 Liu Ruli 74 Li Caidong 103n18 Liu Shou 172–173, 201 Li Chi 157n6 Liu Song 124, 135 Li Guan 126 Liu Tongsheng 182 Li Hengfu 120n16 Liu Wenyuan 104n22, 104n24, 123n26, Li Juchen 113–114 126n36, 182n10, 208n22, 222n65–66 Li Shimian 127–128 Liu Yang 171, 173 Li Si 109n38 Liu Yi 104n22, 182n9, 208 Li Tianbai 123n26 Liu Yuanqing 167 Li Zhen 1, 4–5, 9, 128 Liu Yunzhang 80–81 Liang Qian 116, 124–125, 130–137, Liu Zhu 162 151, 160 Liu Zongbin 109n35 Lianxi Academy 84 Liu, Hsiang-kwang 103n17 libraries see Shanghai, Family Liu, James 7n6, 101n8 Libu zhigao 119n11, 119n13–14, 132n55 Liu, Kwang-ching 118n9 lieux de mémoire 15 localist turn Lin Yinzhu 211 as discussed by Peter Bol 12 Linchuan (in Fuzhou) 23, 96 Locality and Belonging 14 lineages 13, 20, 57, 100, 203–204, locality 5, 9, 11, 12 206–207, 220, 227–228 and belonging 15, 18 Lingji Shrine (Longquan) 71, 174 construction of 15, 56, 179 Lingwei Shrine ( Jishui) 70, 73 and identity 42, 195 Linjiang 23, 71, 93 meaning of 13, 14, 15, 185 literati and pride 117 as authors 16, 47, 50, 58, 65, production of 15 129–151, 195 and tales 197 and belief 55, 66, 67, 77 and temple 178, 194 careers 5, 79, 84, 114 Long Dawei 189n25 and central government 114, 117, Long Wenbin 118n10, 119n12 123–137, 179, 192 Long Yuqi 183 and community 18, 47–63, 74–77, Longcheng Temple (Taihe) 134 98, 102, 178, 195, 219, 224 Longhu Mountain 139 condemnation of local practice 17, Longhua Monastery ( Jishui) 159 82–84, 89, 91–97, 93, 136, 178 Longquan identity 48–49, 51 academies in 103n18 late Ming 201, 217, 228 gazetteers from 122 ritual 79–82 Ge Hong in 29 and temples 65, 111 in late Ming 168–170, 174 writing about the local landscape 4, men from 25 20, 99 and other counties 23 see also elite religious leaders from 129 Liu Bowan 129 sacred sites and temples in 25–27, Liu Chengzhi 26n9 30, 32, 40–41, 71–73, 79, 113–114, Liu Chenweng 25, 39, 42, 70–1, 74, 132–133, 137–139 84–91, 122, 148, 153, 159, 195, shrines for the state cult in 120n16 201–202 shrine for Xu Xun 197–199 on schools 107–110 Longxing see Nanchang

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Longyin Abbey (Longquan) 113–114, modernity 133 in China 7 Lovell, Nadia 14 Mongols loyalty 95 invasion of 7, 86 to Song 85, 86 in Yongxin 1 to Zhu Yuanzhang 194 monks 30, 36–37, 50, 91, 114, 121, Lü Dajun 221 132, 138, 150, 156, 166, 170, 186, Lü Dongbin 38 189–190 Lu Jiuyuan 61n37 ‘More Stories Written while Trimming Lu Mountains 85, 135 the Wick’ 4, 128 Luchuan 145 Morita Kenji 101n6 Lujiang 163, 167 Mote, Frederick 11n16, 118n7 Luling mountains history of 22, 25–26 in Anfu 67, 79–82 Huagai worship in 29–30 in Ji’an 199 in late Ming 183, 195, 201, 205, in Jishui 25, 28 208, 211–212, 217, 228 in Jizhou 45 magistrate in 74, 76 in Longquan 31 men from 4, 25, 70, 78, 101, 113, in Taihe 25, 28, 134 116, 124, 126, 128 see also Chen, Furong, Gezao, Guyi, and other counties 23 He, Huagai, Jiulong, Longhu, Lu, sacred sites and temples in 37–43, Luo, Luozi, Tiantai, Wugong. 65, 82–86, 131–132, 136, 139 schools and academies in 103–107, Nait Konan 6 110 Nan’an 94 shrines for the state cult in 120–122 Nan’gan 225n76 Xu Xiake in 159–160, 162, Nanchang 23, 71, 126, 197–198 168–169, 171 Nanjing 125, 131–132, 141, 184, 209 Luo Hongxian 25, 161, 182–184, 202, Nengren Temple (Luling) 87 204–205, 213, 216–217, 219–222 Neo-Confucianism 60 Luo Mountain 65, 66, 76 Newby, Howard 60n31 Luo Qinshun 204, 208, 209, 211–212 Nie Bao 161, 213, 216, 221, 223 Luotuan 72 Ningzhou 167, 186 Luozi Mountain 28 Nora, Pierre 15 Lutai 167 ‘Notes on Travelling the Jizhou Mountains’ ( Jizhou zhushan youji) 38 macro-regions, see Skinner magistrates 34, 69, 76, 92, 111n41, offerings 4, 79 120n16, 142, 144, 147–148, 192, 198, Ouyang De 161, 213, 216 208, 211, 214, 216, 222, 225 Ouyang Shoudao 91, 104–110, 122, Marmé, Michael 11n14 148, 195, 201–202 McDermott, Joseph 221n60 and Bailuzhou Academy 105–107, memory 159 linked to belonging 14 on genealogies 101–102 Mencius 109 inscriptions by 65–66, 75–77, merchants 36, 88, 94, 153, 155, 162, 82–84, 151, 178 170, 175, 217 on Kang Wang 41 Meskill, John 60n36, 105n25 Ouyang Xiu 25, 101, 109, 205n11, 206 metropolitan degree holders see jinshi Ouyang Yun 170 migration 155 Ming Huidian see Da Ming Huidian Panteng Shrine (Anfu) 67, 68, 69, 77 Ming Huiyao 118n10, 119n12 parish 49 Ming Taizu shilu 118n11, 125, 128 Parkin, David 14n22 Miyakawa Hisayuki 198 Peng Shipei 205n10 monasteries see temples Peng Yongwei 137–138

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Perdue, Peter 11n14 regulations 73, 140, 144 periodization 6, 60 and state cult 93, 119–120, 218 Peterson, Willard 202n2 and space 141 population and worship 192, 194 growth 22, 155 rivers see rapids, spirits, He, Gan, Jiang, in Jiangxi 22n3, 175 Yangzi porcelain see ceramics Rowe, William 7n7, 11n14 postal stations 88 Ruler for Moving Dragons (Hanlong chi) 36 pottery see ceramics Poyang, Lake 21, 22, 23, 118, 198 sacri ce 72 prayers Sacri cial Statutes (Sidian) 118–119, 141, for rain 26, 27, 74 144, 147, 192, 194 for relief 68 Sangren, Steven 56 for harvest 75 Schipper, Kristofer 56, 198 pride, local 116 Schirokauer, Conrad 60n36, 61n38 Qingfeng Bridge 189 Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig 60n32 qinggui, see Buddhism and monastic Schneewind, Sarah 118–119, 220 guidelines scholar-of cials see literati Qingyuan Mountains 38, 160–161, schools 89, 100, 203, 207–208 177, 188, 195, 207 community 220 in late Ming 212–217 as focal point 19, 20, 61, 103–112, Qingyuan zhilüe 39n36, 39n38, 161n18, 207–220 177n3, 178, 179n6, 180n7, 195n41, restoration 217 208, 213n42, 214n45, 216n47–48 in Yongxin 1, 217–220 Qiu Jun 155 Seidel, Anna 146n96 Quanjiang 79 Sequel Record of the Listener 33, 42 Quanzhou 57n25r Shaanxi 183 Shahar, Meir 49, 177n1 Rankin, Mary Backus 53n11 Shang Yang 109n38 Rao Longsun 124n27 Shanghai Library 205 Rao Zhengdao 129 sheji tan, see altars for soil and grain Raozhou 153 Shen Shixing 119n11 rapids, river Shen Tingrui 30n17 in Yongxin 163–167 Shen’gang Mountains 160–162 in Wan’an 169 Shengfo Monastery (Anfu) 186, Record of the Listener 17, 32, 44 188–189 ‘The Jizhou Camphor Tree’ 33 Shepard, Alexandra 62n44, 68n9 Records of Great Sites 25–40 Shi Tianze 80 Red eld, Robert 59, 60n31 Shi Youmin 155 Reiter, Florian 139n73 Shi Yuchan 80 religious specialist ( fangshi) 31, 44 Shiba Yoshinobu 11n14 restoration costs see academies, temples Shilong Shrine (Luling) 82–84 Ricci, Matteo 169 shrines see temples Ritual Statutes (Lidian) 143 Sichuan 187–188, 198 ritual Sidian see Sacri cial Statutes and community 61n57, 68–69, Siku quanshu 204 74–77, 82 Silk industry 23 Department of 133, 135, 163, 208 Siu, Helen 56 duties 155 Sivin, Nathan 29 and gods 181 Skinner, G. William 11, 56 literati 79, 97, 100 Smith, Paul Jakov 6, 8, 12n18, local 14, 50n6, 57, 200 104n19, 226–227 performance of 56, 58, 217–219 social domains 51

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soil and grain, altars for (sheji tan) Tan, Lady 1, 4–6, 14 118–119, 120n16, 145, 193 Tang Wenwei 205n9 Song Lian 142 Tanigawa Michio 60 Song-Yuan transition 18, 65–98, 85 taxes 88, 90, 113, 118, 128, 155, Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese 174–175, 198 History, The 6–7, 12n18, 104n19, Taylor, Rodney 188n24 226 Taylor, Romeyn 92n67, 118n9, Song-Yuan-Ming transition 4, 102, 146n96, 177n1 223, 227, 229 temples space ancestral shrines 74 central community 219–220 cults of 12 constructions of 13–14, 30, 43, 45, Buddhist see Buddhism and temples 48, 54–55, 61, 74, 98–99 building 40–42 familiar 170, 199, 201 de ned 49–51 negotiations in 6, 45, 48, 68, 180 Daoist see Daoism, and temples sacred 15, 48, 50, 75, 141, 177, 215 in gazetteers 16n30, 120–121 spirits (shen) 34n26, 180, 219 inscriptions see inscriptions, temple river 94–96, 162–163, 174 and literati 18, 111, 149 state cult see cult, state and temples, for in the local landscape 4, 58 state cult meaning assigned to 16, 54, 185 Strauss, Claudia 54n19 permits for 132 Strickmann, Michel 198n48 restoration 121, 147 Su Qin 109n38 restoration costs 73, 186 Sun Xiaode 132 rise and fall 65, 87, 122 Suzhou 123 as socially integrative spaces 55–58 Szonyi, Michael 56, 57n24 for state cult 50, 141, 146, 192 ter Haar, Barend 17n31, 33n23, 56, Taihe 57, 58, 73n25, 94n74 roads in 23 Tiantai, Mount 135 sacred sites and temples in 25, 28, Tianyu Mountain see Furong Mountain 32, 38, 40–41 Toghon Temür 92n66 Huagai worship in 29 Tönnies, Ferdinand 61–62 academies in 103n18 Topography for Visiting Scenic Sites (Fangyu Dardess on 114, 116–117, 150 shenglan) 37, 39 men from 123–128, 130, 134–135, travel records 17, 38–39, 124, 157, 138–140, 161, 170, 177–178, 175 183–185 late Ming 170–175 temple for the god of walls and moats by Liu Shou 172–173 in 140–144 by Xu Xiake 19, 153–170 Xu Xiake and 168 travel in late Ming 202–204, 208, 212, by foot 30, 163 228–229 by river 23, 71, 79, 94–95, 153, Taixiao Abbey (Longquan) 169–170 157, 162–163, 171, 174, 213 tales by sedan chair 167 literary 17–18, 185, 197, 199 to the capital 131–132, 134, 150 local 4, 37, 136, 194–197, 200 to shrines and temples 67–69, 89, Ming 133, 173 92, 177, 185–186, 199, 213, 219 of miraculous events 26, 31, 32, Tsai, Henry 124n31, 128n41 35–37, 42–43, 45, 69, 73, 80–81, Tugh Temür 92n66 96, 160, 195–198 Tumu 145 religious 5, 12, 43–44, 67, 136, 174, Tuotuo 92n66 198 Tuping Monastery (Anfu) 186 transmission 32 Twitchett, Denis 11n16

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Übelhör, Monika 60n36 women uprisings chaste 5 local 22 immortals 26 millenarian 7 in Ji’an 17n31, 92 Red Turbans 117 statues of 5 in tales 30, 43, 94, 196 Veritable Records of Ming Taizu see Ming see also Lady Tan Taizu shilu worthies, Confucian 51, 60, 86, von Glahn, Richard 118–119, 145–146, 215 on community granaries 60n36 Wu Cheng 143 The Country of Streams and Wu Daohong 130–131, 133 Grottos 11n14 Wu Hongze 109n35 on the god Wutong 17 Wu Huanfei 122 review of Hansen 50n8 Wu Meng 198 The Sinister Way 72n21, 83n44, Wu Shiyin 110n40, 111n41 93n70, 177n1, 180–181 Wu Sidao 1, 4, 14 The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition 6, Wu Xi 1, 4 12n18, 226n81 Wugong Mountains 23, 40, 79–82, 97, on vernacularization 8 163, 165, 185–186 Liu Shou visiting 172–173, 201 Walton, Linda 54, 61n38, 100, Xu Xiake visiting 164–167, 171 104n23, 105n25 Wugong shanzhi 165n23, 166, 171n38, Wan’an 23, 32n20, 116, 120n16, 172n41–42 168–170, 206 Wugong Temple (Luling) 90–91 Wang Gen 126 Wutong, the god 17 Wang Keshou 211 Wang Mingchen 177–181, 185, 191, Xiajiang 93–95, 126 194–195, 199 xiangyue, see community covenants Wang Mingming 56–57 Xianju Monastery (Wan’an) 169 Wang Mo 26n9 Xianzong shilu 145 Wang Tinggui 67–71, 74, 77, 78 Xiao Donghai 108n32 Wang Wei 142 Xiao Ruyi 113–114 Wang Xiangzhi 153 Xiao Weizhen 122n22, 131–133 Yudi jisheng 25, 26–40 Xiao Xuchen 47, 78, 79 Wang Yangming Xiao Zhen 113–114 followers 161, 183–185, 202–203, Xiao Zi 125, 132n56, 138–139 210, 213–214 Xiao Zuo 137–139 in Jiangxi 212–213, 221–222 Xiaofeng Daran 39n36, 208 thought 20, 202, 214, 225 Xie Duan 113–114, 133 Wang Zhen 145 Xie Jin 25, 124, 126–127, 130, 132, Wang Zhi 125, 128, 203 189, 205n10 Wang Zhisong 205n11 Xin’gan 71 Wang, Lord see Huagai Xingsi 38–39 Ward, Julian 157n6, 168n31 Xu Hongzu 156n6 Watson, James L. 18n34, 100 Xu Huailin 21n1 Weber, Max 52–53 Xu Xiake youji 19n35, 157–167 Wei Xiang 169 Xu Xiake 19, 156–172, 199 Weller, Robert 49, 177n1 in Ji’an 156–164 Wen Tianxiang 25, 39, 80–81, 104, travel to Wugong Mountains 159, 170, 173 164–167 Wenchang 177 Xu Xuan 159 wenji, see collections, literary Xu Xun 197–199 withdrawal from society Xu yijianzhi see Sequel Record of the at end of Song 85 Listener Withington, Phil 62n44, 68n9 Xu zhenjun, see Xu Xun

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Xu, Perfected Being see Xu Xun Yuan Xuande see Zhu Zhanji invasion 6, 18, 86 Xuantan Abbey ( Jishui) 173 in scholarship 7 Xuanzong see Zhu Zhanji Yuanji 159 Xunzhai wenji, see Ouyang Shoudao Yuan-Ming transition Xuxi ji, see Liu Chenweng disruption in 19, 110–111, 113, 117, 122, 149, 189, 203, 212 Yan Zhenqing 38–39, 40 Yuanzhou 23, 33–34, 124n31 Yang Shiqi 25, 116, 123–126, 130, Yudi jisheng see Records of Great Sites 183, 203 Yuelu Academy 104 Yang Wanli 25 Yueshan 131 Yang Zhangru 41, 67, 148 Yunnan 156, 167, 189 Yang Zhihua 125n33 Yunteng Mountain 74 Yangshi sanxiu zupu 205n10 Yangzi River 21 Zeng Gao 183 Yichun 33–34 Zeng Qi 127 Yifeng 114 Zhang Cheng 165n23 Yijianzhi see Record of the Listener Zhang Guangxun 165n23 Yin Tai 163n20 Zhang Tianquan 121 Yin Tai 204, 206–211, 215, 217 Zhang Tianyou 23n6 Yin Wuyuan 132, 139 Zhang Yi 109n38 Yinzhi 165 Zhang Yuanshu 29 Yixian 114 Zhang Yuchu 139 Yongchu shanchuanji 26 Zhao Erqi 195–198 Yongfeng Zhao Kai 80–81 academies in 103 Zhao Min 147 gazetteers 122 Zhao Yike 29, 79–82, 97, 173 and Huagai Immortals 29 Zhao Yuanyang 80–81 men from 116, 127, 161, 182n9 Zhaoji Temple (Longquan) 78 and other counties 23 Zhengtong see Zhu Qizhen in Records of Great Sites 25, 27–28 Zhenwu Shrine (Luling) 177, 195 sacred sites and temples in 32, 38, Zhenwu 177 40, 120n16, 173 Zhenyuan 161 Wu Shiyin in 110n40 Zhongliu 193 Xu Xiake in 157, 168 Zhongxian 110–111 Yonghe 22, 37–38, 160 Zhou Bida Yongle dadian 25, 125, 128, 130 ‘Notes on Travelling the Jizhou Yongle see Zhu Di Mountains’ 38–39 Yongning 120n16, 167, 183 and other famous Jizhou men 25, Yongxin 67n6 examination candidates from and Qingyuan Mountains 212 126–127, 189 residence of 160 in late Ming 205, 209, 217–218, and Wang Tinggui 78n32 221, 224–226 Zhou Chen 25, 128 of cials from 110n40, 133–134, 190 Zhou Mengjian 127 and other counties 23 Zhou Nanrui 80–81 and tale of Lady Tan 1–4, 9, 14 Zhou Shu 127 temples in 190–192 Zhou Wenying 108n33 Xu Xiake in 162–164, 167–168, zhouzhice (records that give full 171 knowledge) 120 Yu di zhi 35n28 Zhu Di (the Yongle emperor) Yu Longsheng 153, 155 and Daoism 139 Yu Ruji 118n11 and of cials from Ji’an 124–133, Yü, Chün-fang 120n18 205 Yuan Haowen 33n23 and the state cult 177

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temple building under 121–122, Zhu Zhanji (the Xuande emperor) 137, 189 128, 145 Zhu Mu 37 zhuangyuan 123n26, 126, 127, 182–184 Zhu Qizhen (the Zhengtong Zhuangzi 83 emperor) 129, 145 Zijiao Temple (Longquan) 137 Zhu Xi 61n37, 91, 221 Zixiao Abbey (Luling) 139 Zhu Ximing 121 Ziyang Abbey (Longquan) 139 Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu emperor) Zizhi daoyuan (Luling) 85 and god of walls and moats 51, Zou Depu 216 141, 146, 148 Zou Hansheng 170 local impact in Ji’an 119–124, 227 Zou Jifu 186 and local religious practice 118–120, Zou Shouyi 161, 183–184, 205, 213, 141, 192 216, 221–226 and of cials from Ji’an 22, 123–123, Zou Yuanbiao 159, 161, 183–184, 126, 140, 142–144, 150 192–194, 199, 214–215 and religious leaders from Ji’an 129, zupu, see genealogies 139 Zurndorfer, Harriet T. 11n14, 60n34 and state building 12, 19 Zhu Yunwen (the Jianwen emperor) 121, 124, 126

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ISSN 1570–1344

1. Berg, D. Carnival in China. A Reading of the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12426 8 2. Hockx, M. Questions of Style. Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12915 4 3. Seiwert, H. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13146 9 4. Heberer, T. Private Entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam. Social and Polit- ical Functioning of Strategic Groups. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12857 3 5. Xiang, B. Transcending Boundaries. Zhejiangcun: the Story of a Mi- grant Village in Beijing. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14201 0 6. Huang, N. Women, War, Domesticity. Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14242 8 7. Dudbridge, G. Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture. Selected Papers on China. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14770 5 8. Cook, C.A. Death in Ancient China. The Tale of One Man’s Journey. 2006. ISBN-10: 90 04 15312 8, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15312 7 9. Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Shaping the Reforms, Academia and China (1977-2003). 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15323 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15323 3 10. Berg, D. (ed.) Reading China. Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse. Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15483 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15483 4 11. Hillenbrand, M. Literature and the Practice of Resistance. Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15478 7, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15478 0 12. Hsiao, L. The Eternal Present of the Past. Illustration, Theatre, and Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573-1619. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15643 2 13. Gerritsen, A. Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15603 6 14. Starr, C.F. Red-light Novels of the late Qing. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15629 6