In the past twenty years, work on the local culture of central Hunan has been one of the most exciting sources for rethinking the nature and variety of Chinese local society. At the heart of this society is a kind of statuary found nowhere else in China--sculpted images of local people, primarily religious specialists of a wide range, but also parents and ancestors who, according to Confucian orthodoxy, should be represented by tablets, not statues. While the consecration ceremonies of these statues include rites that are common to all China, they are embedded in unique local ritual traditions. Based on two decades of international collaborative research, Alain Arrault focuses on some 4,000 of these statues and studies them on the basis of consecration certificates inserted in the statues, the earliest of which date to the sixteenth century.

In the past twenty years, work on the local culture of central Hunan has been one of the most exciting sources for rethinking the nature and variety of Chinese local society. At the heart of this society is a kind of statuary found nowhere else in China--sculpted images of local people, primarily religious specialists of a wide range, but also parents and ancestors who, according to Confucian orthodoxy, should be represented by tablets, not statues. While the consecration ceremonies of these statues include rites that are common to all China, they are embedded in unique local ritual traditions. Based on two decades of international collaborative research, Alain Arrault focuses on some 4,000 of these statues and studies them on the basis of consecration certificates inserted in the statues, the earliest of which date to the sixteenth century.

The Palace of Eternal Joy (Yongle gong) is a mammoth cult site dedicated to one of late imperial China’s most popular deities, Lu Dongbin. In one of the first book-length studies of a Chinese sacred site, Paul Katz focuses on the Palace’s role in the development of Lu's legend. This highly innovative approach takes into account the various "histories" of the Palace presented in different texts and surpasses previous scholarship by stressing the ways in which the site both reflected and produced cultural diversity. Katz breaks new ground by analyzing the texts in terms of the textuality--the processes by which they were produced, transmitted, and understood. The study begins with a detailed description of the Palace of Eternal Joy and a brief account of its history. The reader is then introduced to the cult of Lu Dongbin. Special consideration is given to various hagiographical traditions, particularly those that influenced the growth of his cult at Yongle. Throughout late imperial China, a growing number of worshipers (among them scholar-officials, Taoist priests, artisans, and dramatists) created an ever-burgeoning variety of images of Lu, ranging from a patron god of ink-makers and prostitutes to a member of that powerful yet rambunctious group of spirits known as the Eight Immortals. In this context, the author explores the Perfect Realization Taoist movement's adoption of Lu's cult during the Jin and Yuan dynasties and highlight the social and religious factors that led to Lu's immense popularity in north China during the late imperial era. Katz next looks at the four type of inscriptions found at the Palace (commemorative, official, hagiographical, and poetic) and identifies the Palace patrons who worshiped there and contributed to its growth. In the description and analysis of the Palace murals that follow, he divides these works into two types: those painted to provide a setting for, and even an object of, Taoist rituals performed at the Palace; and those used to instruct Perfect Realization Taoists and perhaps pilgrims. The final section traces the reception of the Palace texts among the people of Yongle and its environs. Here Katz examines the ways in which patrons tried to impose their representations of the Palace’s history and the cult of Lu Dongbin on other members of the community and assesses the extent to which these efforts succeeded. Images of the Immortal is richly informed by a wide reading in social, cultural, and literary theory as well as a thorough awareness of previous work in comparative and Chinese religion. Scholars of Taoism, Chinese popular religion, and art history will find it especially rewarding for its thought-provoking reinterpretation of an important religious figure and his cult.

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN" meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org" History and art come together in this definitive discussion of the Chinese woodblock print form of nianhua, literally "New Year pictures." James Flath analyzes the role of nianhua in the home and later in the theatre and relates these artworks to the social, cultural, and political milieu of North China as it was between the late Qing dynasty and the early 1950s. Among the first studies in any field to treat folk art as historical text, this extraordinary account offers original insight into popular conceptions of domesticity, morality, gender, society, modernity, and the transformation of the genre as a propaganda tool under communism.

At the intersection of art and religious history, Susan Naquin’s richly illustrated history presents a fresh method for studying Chinese gods and sacred places as it tells the full story of Mount Tai and the premier female deity of North China.