The Flowing of the Sacred Space: How Reciprocal Exchanges with Deities Are Affected by Urbanization

Abstract

Although there is a consensus on religious revival in China, it must be noted that popular religion and institutional religions such as Buddhism and Daoism adopt different strategies to survive the state’s regulations. Many temples that used to facilitate the worship of local deities have to establish some form of intangible cultural heritage or emphasize the deity’s history and folklore to de-religionize. During this process, a temple may earn its lawful place to survive, but risks its communality in the village. Based on studies of rural and urban temples in Henan and Shandong provinces, in this paper, I attempt to understand people’s religiosity and how they conduct the human–deity exchange under social transformation. Popular religion is characterized by the pursuit of efficacy and its embeddedness in rural life. The traditional binary exchange with deities could be used to maintain a relationship with deities as well as offer urgent solutions, while three-party chains of exchange not only constitute a religious gift economy but also offer a religious agent to seek answers. I argue that temples are marginalized and excluded from village life, so people need to find new means by which to continue their religious practices beyond what the state sponsors, and this has led to the flowing of sacred places.

1. Introduction

A few years ago, I encountered an elderly woman at Mount Tai’s temple festival. Since Mount Tai is one of the Five Mountains in China, she curiously asked whether I knew of another one, Mount Heng, or Zhongyue (中岳), as locals call it. I nodded, “Yes, it is located near the capital of Henan province”. “No, that is not what I am talking about,” she corrected me, “you are too young to know. Even my daughter did not (know)”. Then, she told me the following story: “It was during the Cultural Revolution about half a century ago that so many temples were destroyed. My daughter and I took a bus home while passing through a village. I pointed my daughter toward where there was once a Zhongyue temple. There was no such thing as a deity, my daughter replied. Days later, she started to experience severe stomachache. I knew immediately it must be the deity. Later that night, I closed the door, praying in the middle of the yard. I couldn’t burn incense or (yellow) paper because it was not allowed. I begged the deity to forgive my daughter’s ignorance. The next day, she told me she was ok”.

Her story revealed a rural common perception that a deity is strongly linked with a specific location where a statue or a building has been destroyed, and also, it was and still is the mother who shoulders the spiritual responsibility on behalf of the whole family. The location is viewed as sacred because it was chosen. Therefore, when burning incense was resumed in the early 1980s, people chose to burn incense and yellow paper in the ruins of their temples. This shows that the sanctity of a place is relatively stable and people resort to mediums such as incense to reach the deity. In addition, even though the elderly woman could not burn incense at the time of her story, she still managed to communicate with the deity through the dual human–deity exchange system. However, decades later, when I visited a black dragon temple in the coastal city of Qingdao, it was hard not to notice the weird-looking incense burner: its four holes on each side were blocked with a stainless steaming rack. A sign had been set up near it, saying that, “This is a place of popular religion. No donation box is allowed. No religious activity is allowed”. On one pillar of the main hall, a notice stated, ”To answer to the government’s call, burning incense and paper is prohibited. Offenders will be fined 5000 RMB”. If popular religion is still religion, why is burning incense not allowed? This makes one wonder what is the true nature of religious revival under the state’s religious rules, and what makes a place sacred or not against such secular regulations. In this paper, I seek to understand people’s religiosity and their perception of being urbanized. I undertook an ethnographic study of a rural county in Henan province and a coastal city in Shandong province. These two places have both experienced a rapid trend of urbanization under the state’s agenda for civilization and modernity.

2. The Revival of Popular Religion

The religious resurgence in China, apparent since the 1980s, has been reported as “most dramatic and unexpected (by both officials and scholars)” (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, p. 234) and as one of the “the most ‘unexpected’ phenomena since the beginning of the Reform and Open-up policy” (Liang 2015). The religious resurgence is evidenced by the resumption of religious activities, the reconstructed temples and the flourishing temple business. In 2003, one-fifth of mainland Chinese were found to identify with or be affiliated with some sort of religious faith (Lai 2003), accompanied by a rise in the number of believers and the consumption of incense and ritual commodities. Liang (2015) proposed three explanatory models for religious revival in China: the invention of tradition, the state–society relationship and religious market theory and pointed out the limitations of each model. Chau warned that the invention of tradition “might lead one to assume that what existed before Maoist suppressions was a tradition that was more coherent and authentic” (Chau 2006, p. 6). Therefore, can we treat the resurgence as the following of tradition or, as Siu (1990) stated, is it a reinvention of tradition through symbols “recycled and diffused in everyday social living to create new meanings” (Siu 1990)?

The state–society relationship model often reduces complicated social interactions to a simple binary relation (Liang 2015, p. 165). It focuses on the economic stimulus or the elite effort but overlooks the individual believers’ initiatives. The fundamental defect of the religious market theory is that it is a theoretical projection from the perspective of Christianity (Ibid, p. 166). Take Yang’s triple-market model, for example. Yang argued that the gray market (religions with an ambiguous legal/illegal status) arose from heavy regulations so “more people practiced alternative forms of gray-market, such as popular religion and shamanism” (Yang 2006, p. 99). However, studies of popular religion such as the Dragon Tablet in Hebei province (Gao 2006; Yue 2014; Yue and Cai 2017), the Black Dragon in Shaanbei (Chau 2006) or the Bai ethnic group in Yunnan province (Cao 2014) all show that people turn to popular religion because this is the practice they find efficacious, not because they have no access to other religions.

The religious market theory does not apply to Chinese society because there is never a religious market where people can freely purchase or choose certain services. The story I mentioned earlier shows that most people do not care if what they perform is “religion” as the state recognizes it, because what they perform is a set of practices that has been proved to be efficacious by their ancestors and thus is passed on as tradition. Therefore, people do not choose from the market, they directly turn to the people, such as the fengshui (风水) master, the incense observer, the spirit medium or the (Daoist) priest, for certain rituals. It must be made clear that up to today, the concepts of Buddhism and Daoism are still imposed on people because they know that under religious regulations, and in the aftermath of previous political propaganda, Buddhism and Daoism are legal religions. However, in reality, what they practice is still popular religious practice. The Chinese religious landscape should best be understood as competitions between different modalities of practicing religion (Chau 2011, p. 548), and the real challenge is how they continue their practices under the state’s regulations.

The elderly woman to whom I spoke told me that she began to burn incense the moment it was allowed. However, when I asked whether she also went to a Buddhist temple, or only visited Daoist ones, she replied in confusion, “What is that?” As Chau (2011) put it, the Chinese people have engaged with these modalities of “doing religion” in real practices, whereas no one ever engages with “Buddhism” or “Daoism” because these exist more as conceptual aggregates. That is to say, what people practice is the act of making exchanges with deities through burning incense and paper to acquire instant efficacy. What is revived is not simply a religion, but various forms of religious practices. Thus, the real question is, why are various forms of religious practice and participation flourishing in the face of science and modernity (Kipnis 2001, p. 32)?

The reason why I distinguish popular religion (namely minjian Xinyang, 民间信仰) from religion (zongjiao, 宗教) is that the revival of religion, to an extent, is precisely the revival of institutional religions. The really tricky part is that, except for the social consensus on what the five religions are, there is no clear definition of religion and superstition. As a result, popular religion hovers on the edge of superstition. In addition, even though scholars have reached a consensus on “religious revival”, I argue that this might be a contradictory proposition for two reasons. First, the religious revival we talk about today refers to the trend observed after the opening-up policy. That is to say, we compare today’s religion with the time when religion was prohibited, at least in official life. However, just as the story of the Zhongyue deity indicates, common people have never ceased to believe in the efficacy of the deity. Second, although temples have been reconstructed and religious activities have been resumed, the diversity and quantity are on the decline. For example, there were over 100 temples in Lu County in 1743, including for the God of Longevity, the Three Immortals and the Mount Tai temple, and for deities with universal functions, such as the Stone Buddha temple, Auspicious Clouds temple, Manjushree Convent, Avalokitesvara temple, Jade Emperor temple and so on (County Gazetteer 1743, pp. 82–85). However, in 2005, there were only 18 Buddhist temples and 17 Daoist temples, and at least 4 Daoist temples are Zushi temples (祖师庙). To meet the state’s religious regulations, temples have to affiliate either with Buddhism or Daoism to survive. Those temples without a religious affiliation are either treated as sites of popular religion or places of superstition.

The religious revival is thus marked by the ambiguity of religion and popular religion. To burn incense in a temple is allowed because it is a religious act, but to do the same at a crossroad on the street is superstitious. Similarly, divination is only a religious act in the room of a temple. To do so in someone’s home could be regarded as feudalistic superstition. It is the state and its religious regulations that draw the line between religion and superstition, between sacred and uncivil. In other words, the state and its propaganda reshape people’s conception of space, especially spatial transformation.

I argue that the trend of urbanization and the construction of a “new socialist countryside” has narrowed the space of popular religion. Consequently, people’s perception of the sacred place, which is usually associated with a temple, is interrupted. I propose to follow the path of the gift market theory (Ji 2009; Liang 2015; Palmer 2011) and the “doing religion” model (Chau 2006, 2011) to analyze people’s religious practices. Unlike the incentives of the local government or official religions to make money out of the resumption of religious activities or redecorated temples, what people are seeking through religious acts is to make exchanges with a deity, regardless of his or her sects. The relational modality is centered on “social comings and goings” (laiwang 來往) and social relations (guanxi 關係), or connectedness (Chau 2011, p. 552).It is argued that social relations can be affected by the relation between the human and the deity (Li and Yang 2019; Zhao 2018).To win the deity’s favor, it is necessary to maintain a good and reciprocal relationship with the deity. This explains why people follow the Buddhist convention of burning incense in a temple twice a month (namely the first and the fifth day of every lunar month), although they do not acknowledge this convention as Buddhist. This is the same logic as following a tradition without tracing its origin.

Since “gift exchange is an elementary form of religious life” (Ji 2009), people make exchanges with deities because they recognize the importance of their gift in ensuring a return gift from the deity. Liang, however, emphasized that morality is central to social solidarity in the gift model. He suggested that reciprocity and the expectation of reciprocity underpin the moral foundation of society (Liang 2015). This raises new questions around the human–deity relationship: are deities obliged to respond to people’s wishes because of the gift, or do they grant blessings to reward moral behavior? In addition, how are these understandings impacting people’s return to religious practices?

Palmer expands on the human–deity exchange: in a religious gift economy, the god—or a spiritual reality or principle such as karma—is a third partner in the exchange that also involves the believer and a religious specialist (Palmer 2011). This brings a new dimension to religious revival because, by bringing gifts, believers are building on their human relationship with monks or incense interpreters. This highlights the role of religious specialists in the revival. Do they simply convey deities’ messages through burning incense, or do they lure believers to accept more orthodox approaches under their control through appeals to efficacy? Urbanization has a greater influence on popular religion because it has caused migration and thus resulted in “an irreconcilable contradiction between the mobility of people and the stable sacred location” (Liu 2018, p. 205). Some traditional sacred places such as temples or shines have either vanished or been secularized.

However, as a structure of social relations, popular religion is rooted in certain social spaces to orient people’s ethnic codes and relations (Li 2012). As Chau (2006, p. 7) theorized, popular religion has a temple-based form but without elaborate rituals, theological maneuvers or a priesthood. This means that under the trend of institutionalization, temples offer people a channel between the sacred and the secular, but whether or how the sacred is embodied by a physical space may undergo new changes.

This paper involves a comparative study of a Buddhist temple in rural Henan province and a (Daoist) temple located in a coastal city in Shandong province because they both went through the process of the same trend of urbanization and religious institutionalization, with people responding in different ways. With temples being torn down or reconstructed, people have to look for a sacred place to make their exchanges. In addition, both Shandong and Henan are deeply affected by the Confucian culture and share similarities in many religious practices. I conducted 10 months of fieldwork in rural Henan in 2017 and follow-up research in 2021 and 2022, and have studied popular religion in Qingdao since 2021.

My focus in rural Henan is centered on temple festivals and the revival strategies of the Huayan temple. In 2017, I attended at least 20 temple festivals from March to September to observe people’s practices and talk with villagers. I spent the rest of the time in the Huayan temple to explore the dynamics between the key believers and the monk who runs the temple. Later, in 2021 and 2022, I returned to the temple a few times to see how its revival strategy was performing but, due to COVID-19 policies, the temple barely held any large-scale rituals or temple festivals. In Qingdao, I conducted in-depth interviews with 12 inheritors of intangible cultural heritage and paid close attention to how temples, temple festivals and relevant legends are transformed into intangible cultural heritages. My findings accord with previous studies that middle-aged and elder women are dominant in popular religion. For women, religious practices are the extension of their household obligations. And women’s religious practices always rely on the family (Li and Zhong 2016). Though most religious participants are women, it is intriguing that the people who run the temple or the festival are often male.

Classic studies of Chinese religion tend either to focus on the clans in southeast China or typical cities such as Wenzhou. In contrast, Henan and Shandong, or the representatives of northern China, seem to be less distinct in terms of religious practices. Popular religion in northern China is almost invisible against urbanization and social transformation. The studies of Wenzhou have signified the roles of ancestral clans and social wealth, resulting in “ritual expenditure” (Yang 2000) and the industrial use of ancestral temples (Chen 2016), and the role of religious networks as Wenzhou migrants overlap their faith in Christianity with business communities (Cao 2016). Compared with that, there is no significant clan or ancestor worship—except the worship of Confucius—in Henan or Shandong, nor religious organizations to borrow the state’s discourses to resume local tradition. Even the temples and religious rituals are quite conventional: there is no grand ritual such as the worship of Matsu in Fujian province or the dramatic performance of a deity’s procession. Thus, I have reviewed these individualized and private religious practices, as well as how people practice religion in their daily lives while facing social transformation and coping with the change in being labeled as an urban people and living life in a corresponding way.

3. The Rural Path to Civilization

It is argued that Christianity is thriving in northern China, such as in Henan province, due to the absence of popular religion, which was destroyed during previous political movements, while in southern China, because ancestor worship is intact, popular religion is still actively involved in people’s daily lives (Yang 2014). It is the case in Lu County that popular religion suffered tremendously before the 1980s, with the destruction of temples and a decline in ritual specialist numbers, which meant that people had no temples or religious specialists to turn to when they needed help. Christians took this opportunity to fill the gap in people’s lives (Zhang 2014) created by the disappearance of popular religion and ”what peasants experienced as the deficiency of traditional beliefs” (Wu and Zhang 2010). This means that after the 1980s, the rural religious ecology was reshaped, as religious regulations have taken a heavy toll on popular religion.

As argued earlier, popular religion comprises a set of practices that are different from the systematic teachings or rigorous liturgies of institutional religions such as Buddhism or Protestantism. Most deities in temples do not have clear religious identities and Buddhism and Daoism are the results of temple registration. To be legally registered, temple monks or committees apply for a license and there is cooperation between temples and local authorities for economic benefit (Chau 2006; Fan 2010; Gao 2006). In consequence, some temples that used to worship local deities have had to resort to other means. One village in Hebei province has made use of Chinese people’s faith in dragons and transformed their ancestral hall into a museum, demonstrating the art of double-naming (Gao 2006). In other cases, temples are preserved when they qualify as a cultural relic (Fan 2010) or the myth of a certain deity is viewed as intangible cultural heritage (Gao 2021; Sato 2018).

However, what does that mean for the people? A registered temple is no different from an unregistered one in terms of individual needs. People in Lu County mainly pay a visit to the temple for two purposes: a regular visit (twice a month) to show piety and a temporary visit in emergencies. A monk or a temple keeper fulfil people’s needs without their registration being a necessity; it is their ability that counts, not their academic background or their official status. Meanwhile, for the temple keeper, a license or religious registration is vital to the temple’s long-term survival, for it means that the temple no longer faces the threat of being labeled as superstitious and illegal. It is the rural tradition that affects people’s religious choices, not the state’s approval. In the worship of Emperor Yan in Shanxi province, although the local authority has allowed official worship in the Mausoleum for the sake of publicity and tourism, local people prefer to attend the rural temple festival in the relics for religious benefits (Zhao and Li 2014). Similarly, to promote local tourism, sponsored by a company, a grand Buddha statue with a total height of 108 meters was constructed about 100 km away from the county seat and, allegedly, the cost was 0.28 billion RMB. However, with the ticket fee amounting to 140 RMB since its opening, people in Lu County rarely visit this magnificent Buddhist icon. The annual income was merely around 5 million RMB in 2005 (County Gazetteer 2014, p. 460). This shows that people prefer to choose the temple they regard as efficacious. Still, although no one would question the role of the temple in people’s lives, what I found was that it is hard to define religion in people’s lives. Deities, fengshui or temples are like the elephant in the room. People avoid directly mentioning anything slightly related to the supernatural sphere or are reluctant to admit to resorting to spiritual forces.

This is the aftermath of decades of religious regulation. My interviewees frequently talked about burning incense as “feudalist superstition” and “not allowed in the past”. Sato (2018) discovered the same tendency in the lower Yangtze delta, when people treat their practice as superstitious. Apart from being rejected by the main narratives, temples were gradually moved out of the center of the village, as well as people’s lives, during the state’s pursuit of civilization. There was a separation of time and space concerning religion and village life. When I frequently attended sermons in the Huayan temple, some elderly women asked about me, “Why is she here? What is her problem?“ It is the perception that it is women’s (especially elderly women’s) role to shoulder spiritual responsibilities on behalf of the family. Thus, a young person such as me would not, or should not, appear in the temple unless she is in desperate need of help; for example, to cure some disease or ward off evil1. In other words, practicality triumphs. Following that logic, there is no need to understand Buddhism and Daoism. Local people seldom use these terms. They choose the term “burning incense” to refer to the practice. “Burning incense” is understood to encompass related religious activities and the people who conduct such practices. Apart from Christians, almost every household in rural areas burns incense in the temple, at home shrines or in the graveyard. Although the official data on Buddhists and Daoists indicate they only comprise a small proportion of the population, my fieldwork data suggest that most rural people are engaging with popular religion in one way or another.

In Lu County’s dialect, the frequently used word miao (庙) refers to any type of temple. However, the religious registration starts to create differentiation: miao is Daoist while si (寺) is Buddhist. When I asked a woman who claimed she started burning incense after she became married twenty years previously, after hesitation, she replied, “miao and si are different. Monks in si are bald, but in miao they wear their hair in a bun”. Only those devout lay Buddhists who have already converted to Buddhism stress the difference between miao and si to highlight the superiority of Buddhism. For the majority, there is no need to understand the difference because both miao and si are sacred places at which to conduct the act of burning incense.

I singled out the Huayan temple because it illustrates a successful case of transformation into a Buddhist temple relying on people’s practical orientation. It exploited some believers’ evangelical fever and introduced new teachings to offer ”new religious experiences as extravaganza and marketable goods” (Qian and Kong 2017, p. 15). According to the elderly in Shang village, the Huayan temple was once the village temple, so every household would celebrate the temple festival. It became an elementary school during the 1970s and 1980s so the whole structure was preserved. In the 1990s, a “cuckoo” woman—she was never married—started to run the temple. She did not know how to cure people or have professional Buddhist training, so she simply kept the temple tidy. Although she had the ambition to rebuild the temple to its historical glory, people said, “She is a woman. How can she appear in public and raise donations?2” The 83-year-old woman who sells incense explained to me that it was not until master Feng took over the temple a few years ago that the temple started to flourish.

As a registered monk, he likes to publicize his academic training and healing powers. He soon raised money to build several main halls and new statues for Buddha and Boddhisatva by traveling around and mingling with entrepreneurs. He invited many famous monks and nuns to host public sermons and elaborate rituals for the public good. However, even he cannot stand against the trend of urbanization. Firstly, due to administrative divisions, the Shang village was divided up and some villagers moved as the village sold many farmlands for industrial use. Secondly, with the main road coming into service behind what is left of the village, the Huayan temple no longer occupied the center of the village, nor was it the center of village life. Sitting at the back corner near a dumpsite, the grand buildings in bright yellow stand in sharp contrast to the bleak farmland.

Without the village’s financial support, the Huayan temple has to shoulder the responsibility to host the annual temple festival to boost its reputation with sophisticated rituals and fancy operas3. A line is thus drawn that separates the temple’s sacrality from people’s mundane life, to separate the temple’s tranquility from the rituals’ chaos. Even though the temple festival is still an important occasion on which to celebrate the main deity Buddha’s birthday, it is not a communal ritual aiming to consolidate the Shang village’s solidarity, but instead, it is intended to enhance the tie between the people who expect to be blessed and the deity. When Feuchtwang described the deity-tour in Taipei in the 1960s, he described the deity as the ”territorial guardian god” who would ”protect the place marked out by the procession of the god-image against threats”, and, most important of all, the tour was intended “to celebrate the ling (efficacy) of protection against the ling of danger to the settlement from the invasion of its boundaries” (Feuchtwang 2001, p. 24). A similar sentiment is associated with the worship of the black dragon in Shaanbei, when each household shares a piece of sacrificial meat to confirm their place in the village (Chau 2006).

In the case of the Huayan temple, once it was separated from the village’s communal life, the temple had to turn to serving people’s private needs as a survival strategy. The sacrificial circle (jisi quan 祭祀圈), where people from the same region shoulder the obligation of communal worship, becomes invisible and less significant as temples are no longer central to a certain region. What is celebrated today in the temple festival is not the village as a community, but the religious community centered on the communal belief of the deity. What I found in today’s Huayan temple is close to Yue’s findings, i.e., that the Goddess does not illuminate what is near (Yue 2016, p. 254). A large proportion of Shang villagers have converted to Protestantism and master Feng’s key followers come from other parts of the county. The religious ecology is disturbed; the sacred boundary that was marked by the communal deity is now torn apart when some people choose a different religion.

Now, as master of an orthodox Buddhist temple, master Feng has the authority to circle the sacred domain. He never ceases to exploit that. He reminds people that studying at one’s home without Buddha’s aid is not as fruitful as in the temple. In addition, studying in a group involves legal issues and a temple is a sacred place so no evil can enter, relieving people’s burdens. He exploits the popular religion’s efficacy and practical orientation to offer people a Buddhist disguised practice. With him constantly promoting the power of following disciplines and learning scriptures, he adopts the configuration of liturgical and scriptural modalities pursuing dharma-based religiosity (Chau 2011). He often makes a long speech before performing the ritual. However, the majority of the temple-goers stick to the configuration of the immediate-practical modality and the relational modality, for that is the continuation of popular religion.

Because the location is rural, certain “superstitious” practices linger, with many people attached to them. The state’s propaganda of a “civil” tomb-sweeping never appears in Lu County. On certain days, people still burn incense in the graveyard, and, during the spring festival, they burn incense in the yard. Thus, temples, houses and tombs constitute a rather stable acknowledgement of the sacred, and each place maintains a unique exchange: with ancestors, with deities and with spirits. The exchange is revealed as binary because no medium is required. When people make a wish in front of the deity, they know it is the deity that brings blessings. Though there are no written rules, local people follow certain customs regarding making wishes to a deity. Most importantly, a wish or an exchange with the deity should be reciprocal. It means that if people make a wish to the deity, they must keep their promises and return the favor in certain ways. The most common approach in Lu County is to return to the temple for three years once the wish is granted. Or there will be undesired consequences. The exchange should also follow the principle of equal value so no one should take advantage of the deity. I argue that the binary exchange relies heavily on personal experience to sense whether the deity is efficacious or the wish is granted or not.

However, in a religious gift economy, the god—or a spiritual reality or principle such as karma—is a third partner in the exchange, which also involves the believer and a religious specialist (Palmer 2011). This brings a new dimension to religious revival because, by bringing gifts, believers are building on their human relationship with monks or incense interpreters as well. It is the deity or karma that affects one’s fate, but it is the human agent who interprets the deity’s message. This expands people’s understanding of the human–deity relationships as the agent can interpret them in his own way. People seek advice from master Feng or other spirit mediums only when the usual burning incense routine does not work. For example, one woman in her fifties often carries her sick son to attend sermons. It was advised by the master that someone in her family has some karmic debt, resulting in her son’s suffering. As well as burning incense in the temple and attending sermons to accumulate merits, she made a vow to chant the Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha Sutra and made sacrificial meat twice a month for three years to redeem the sins. This was her effort to make an exchange with the deity for her son’s health. Her practice is “the material embodiment of the gifting relation” (Ibid, p. 579), and her devotedness has secured her alliance within the temple’s members. After each sermon or ritual, when all the attendees perform the Dedication of Merits (gongde huixiang 功德回向), some members often dedicate the merit and virtue of their cultivation to her and her son.

The influence of urbanization on the rural religious landscape goes both ways. On the one hand, temples give way to rural development, so temples such as the Mount Tai or Monkey King temples have been relocated in the corner of the village and more temples such as Zhongyue were never given the chance to be restored. The religious diversity in terms of deities and legends is on the decline. On the other hand, migrant workers or their family members bring back new religious practices. The teaching that master Feng adapted was introduced by some female lay Buddhists who learned it in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. The experience of living or working in a city helps people in “acquiring new goals and means for self-fulfillment” (Feuchtwang 2012, p. 124). What I found is a competition between modalities; as Chau (2011) suggested, some people stick to the traditional way of acquiring efficacy through the binary exchange of burning incense and paper, while others adopt the personal-cultivational modality for the meaning of life. Master Feng deployed all the modalities to consolidate his ruling over the temple and religious authority. However, most of the time, the binary exchange stood out as people rushed into the temple to burn incense and rushed out to go back to their daily lives, leaving the devoted ones attending the rituals. Efficacy-based religiosity fits rural people’s religious orientation in terms of instant results at minimum cost. Thus, even someone as strict as master Feng has had to make compromises. He was strongly against people burning incense in the temple because this is not in accord with the orthodoxy of Buddhist disciplines, so he refused to build an incense burner in the yard. Years later, the back wall was blackened by smoke. Finally, he admitted in one sermon, ”people are still not on the path of true Buddhism. They are still superstitious. But to make the masses happy, I will build one.“ This illustrates the victory of popular religion over orthodox Buddhism and the immediate/relational modality over the liturgical/scriptural modality.

4. The Urban Response to Religious Regulation

As a “feudalist superstition” such as burning incense, worshipping deities is often seen as the obstacle to the construction of a new socialist countryside (Liu 2021). This is the case in the rural areas of Qingdao, a coastal city in Shandong province. There are heavy regulations in respect of the public area as well as religious sites. For instance, according to Regulations on Prohibiting Burning or Scattering Sacrificial Offerings in Qindao (2020), burning paper on the street could result in a fine of not less than 200 RMB, or more than 1000 RMB. Because the state is the producer and vindicator of knowledge and social norms, and also the source of rationality and legitimacy (Gao 2001, p. 45), unregistered temples in Qingdao’s rural areas face the same challenge of acquiring legitimacy. Popular religion has no foothold in urban life because it does not fit into the modernized lifestyle that the urban communities and commodity housing support. Even Christians are aware of their political advantage and claim that their act of believing in Jesus is legal and protected, while believers of popular religion are superstitious (Li 2008). In Qingdao, temples are either affiliated to Buddhism or Daoism, or reformed as an element of the intangible cultural heritage. For instance, the black dragon temple was secured after the myth of the black dragon was listed as an intangible cultural heritage. Popular religion seems to disappear in people’s lives and temples vanish in the concrete forest of the city.

Li (2008) noted that there has been a shift from feudalist superstition to cultural heritage in folk culture and Gao (2021) argued that that shift aims to solve the issue of legitimacy. After all, in a modern society, every public act must possess full legitimacy (Gao 2000). This is the strategy that the Lady Chen (chengu 陈姑) temple applied. The Lady Chen temple is located on a peninsula of Qingdao. Allegedly, the Lady Chen temple was built in the late Song dynasty when the Gu family made a living by fishing, and it is favored by the five villages scattered around the peninsula. The statues were destroyed in 1965, and the then-priest made a living by farming. The temple survived because it was used as a school, just like the Huayan temple. This indicates that religious properties only survive when they offer some atheist functions. In 2001, the Lady Chen temple was listed for a key cultural relics protection unit at the district level, and, in 2018, the Legend of Lady Chen was ranked as an intangible cultural heritage at the city level. The temple has thus secured its rightful place.

However, this temple is not registered in the religious bureau so it is not a legally recognized religious site. Another hit took place in 2017, when the nearby villages were relocated due to urban construction and administrative planning. The Lady Chen temple was left alone with an empty village. The temple now sits quietly near the dock and an unfinished landscape lane. In 2019, a fengshui master suggested bringing the fox spirit from the nearby mountain to this temple since there are constructions all over the hills. To boost the economy, there are newly built hotels, cafés and art galleries. There is no room left even for the temple’s deity under the urbanization agenda. The traditional segregation of the sacred and the secular is now under new scrutiny. The link between the deity and the people was forced to take new forms, especially after the village deity was cutting the ties with her people. Since moving, the temple has lost its authority over the community or a certain region, and the Lady Chen temple has stopped hosting temple festivals because of insufficient funding and audiences. The temple keeper, the eighty-year-old grandpa Gu, can only describe the common scene of temple festivals held in the past: crowded villagers, loud operas and bustling stalls. This was nostalgia for rural life no longer in existence. A beautiful and well-maintained temple and a “red and fiery” (honghuo) temple festival reflect well the strength and state of blessedness of the community (Chau 2006, p. 21).

As local gentry who used to be the Gu village’s party secretary, his interest in restoring the temple is more ancestrally and culturally oriented. He still considered this temple as the Gu family’s temple and he knew all the stories associated with their family’s history. However, he did not have the power to perform divination or cure diseases. The Lady Chen temple is only a place for individuals to perform their binary exchange since there is no agent to intervene, nor are public rituals allowed. During the interview, grandpa Gu carefully showed me a delicate divination book handwritten in 1943. He envisaged that in the future, there would be divination lots and a book for people to implement self-service. After all, popular religion is essentially a religion of efficacious response (Ibid, p. 64). People expect to receive responsiveness from the deity, whether it is in the shape of the burning incense or the words they write. This is a daily practice of the deity–human exchange by donating money or bringing gifts, once the incense is lit, the deity should offer believers some guidance. Practices such as this contribute to the deity’s efficacy which enables the elite or medium spirit to carry forward their ambitions. Through the patronage of cults such as that of Guandi, the elite were able to express their identification with the values of the state and the gentry (Duara 1988a, p. 148). For the same reason, grandpa Gu compiled a pamphlet to record Lady Chen’s good deeds and all the names of local sponsors for the temple’s reconstruction. He held it as the gentry’s cultural obligation.

Although the state’s atheist agenda is unwavering, local governments, however, react differently. For example, Hunan province has issued the Regulations on Popular Religion’s Sites [2022 No. 51]. In Article 1, popular religion’s sites are defined as temples for people to conduct popular religious activities, but excluding the Confucian temple (wenmiao文庙) and ancestral halls. This continues the imperial state’s practice of labeling temples as illicit/improper locations for sacrifices or officially registered for sacrifices. The problem is, it is never made clear why a popular religion’s site is different from a Confucian temple. People in Shandong worship Confucius as any other deity. This ambiguity of religion or its nature has been accompanied by the national pursuit of science and modernity since the 1900s. Katz (2014) discussed the same dilemma in the policies of the Government of the Republic China when the Standards to Determine Temples to Be Destroyed or Maintained was enacted in 1927. Temples dedicated to former sages and deities of the five state-recognized religions were to be preserved, but temples encompassing local cults were to be eradicated. Hansen reviewed the Song dynasty’s religious regulations and he suggested that “one could view the register of sacrifices as a means of co-optation or manipulation, but the sources do not encourage this reading (Hansen 1990, p. 86)”. In Article 6, it is stated that in principle there should be no newly built or rebuilt popular religion sites. This is different from the intense competition between religious groups over the restricted supply of land for religious purposes (Woods 2018), but there are various strategies for those existing religious sites to gain legitimacy. In Article 16, it is stated that no organization or individual should take advantage of popular religion to conduct feudalist superstitious activities such as warding off diseases and ghosts, or performing sorcerer’s dances and criminal activities such as swindling and propagating cults.

Despite the fact that the Shandong province has not issued such regulations, the sign posted on the black dragon temple to remind people not to burn incense indicates similar strictness. Gods are popularly believed to occupy the clouds and to register and respond to the scented smoke as it reaches them there (Byrne 2019, pp. 8–9). However, after the reform of cultural heritage or institutionalization, the temples took a cultural or orthodox turn to fit the state’s standards with confined sites, activities and worship. The register of deities was intended “to harness the power of the gods for the purpose of the state” (Hansen 1990, p. 28) and that is why the Confucian temple is not regarded as a religious or popular religion site, for it carries the state’s idea of civilization. Feuchtwang (2012) pointed out that the Party-state adopts the rule of sage or sage leadership to promote “an ideal of morally trustworthy leaders” as well the “universal principles (the dao) of responsiveness (ren)” (Ibid, p. 121).

The use of religion to control the common people may have been legitimatized by the state cult, but in manipulating the masses, the managers of the society necessarily looked to religious arenas outside the strict confines of official religion (Feuchtwang 1977, p. 581). Now, even those alternatives to religion are affected by the trend of urbanization. Take the spirit medium, for example. It is noted that some fengshui masters or fortune tellers who once resided in the temple now disguise themselves with professional skills or membership in an academy studying traditional culture, and the identities of “experts” of one sort or another are now frequently used to validate authority (Li 2015). Liu (2018) found similar traits in Shanghai, where those agents could not perform systematic rituals in the urban residential area so they had to modernize their management and working style and equip themselves with cultural knowledge. Under the trend of urbanization, the stability of the location becomes highly unpredictable since religious sites are not included as part of the civilized urban lifestyle. In consequence, people have to make meanings out of spaces and open new channels to communicate with the spiritual realm.

Sato (2018) worried that there might be a huge gap between the folklore recognized by the authority and experts, and the folklore envisaged by the people. He argued that temple festivals and other religious rituals offer rural elder women a chance to form their social network to not only heal but make a living (Sato 2018, p. 49). Underneath the cultural heritage, it is imperative to find the people’s voice in the main narratives. Only then can we observe the resilience of rural religious practices and how the binary exchange between humans and deities supports people’s efficacy-based religiosity. The Longquan temple festival and the Mount Guolao temple festival are listed as part of the intangible cultural heritage at the district level in Qingdao, but they take different paths. The Longquan temple festival originated from the worship of Guandi, the god of loyalty, in 1828, but the temple was destroyed in 1966 and never rebuilt. Without the worship of a deity, the local government initiated the revival of the temple festival as a combination of commodities fairs and folklore exhibitions. This was a success for years until the village was urbanized and no one has taken the responsibility to host the temple festival since 2013. With the untimely death of a few crucial religious leaders or specialists, or the lost memory of communal rituals, some villages never re-establish their cults (Goossaert and Palmer 2011). Conversely, although the temple in Mount Guolao is long gone, people have found a sacred place with a stone pillar that was regarded as the location where the deity performed his miracles. Every year on the night of the fourteenth day of the first lunar month, people rush there to burn incense, despite the fact that the next day is the festival. It is astonishing to see tens of thousands of people crowed on a small hill up to 39 meters. The Mount Guolao temple festival is still regarded as an auspicious occasion and is favored especially by entrepreneurs praying for fortune.

This is how people “do religion”, in that they focus on the practices or certain perceptions of the sacred. It is a hybrid of mixed religious traditions. For instance, the Longquan temple festival was dedicated to the main deity Guandi, but according to local legends, the temple festival falls on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month because this was the dragon king’s birthday. The temple is a hybrid as well because local people built it in 1828 hoping to stop drought, ward off hail and protect fishermen. Guandi is once again superscribed by the local people to convey their expectations, which creates “a lively arena where rival versions jostle, negotiate, and compete for position (Duara 1988b, p. 780)”. By attending temple festivals with a sacred place, people are performing the relational modality because, as Chau (2011) suggested, “the making and maintaining of relations and the production and consumption of sociality” (Chau 2011, p. 552) are the foundations of people’s religious practices.

The sanctity of a space is characterized by the construction and transmission of meanings, and the relative stability of the spatial position (Liu 2018). Deities that are treated as efficacious have all completed the process of deification and they utilize symbolic stories to gain legitimacy (Chen 2001). Most importantly, as Liang (2018) revealed in a gift exchange with a local deity, the local villager not only sacrificed his house for the temple to be restored, but he applied with the local morality. Because popular religion is diffused in every aspect of rural life, it is treated “as a religion having its theology, culture, and personnel so intimately diffused into one or more secular social institutions that they become a part of the concept, rituals, and structure of the latter, thus having no significant independent existence” (Yang 1961, p. 295). This is the communal part of human–deity interaction: through the gift exchange with the deity, the deity’s efficacy and responsiveness are confirmed, as well as the public good.

Thus, a sacred place could enhance people’s faith in the deity and consolidate the tie. That is why master Feng made efforts to host a grand temple festival, for it is an occasion by which “to bring individuals together, to put the masses into motion, and thus induce a state of effervescence—sometimes even delirium—which is not without kinship to the religious state” (Durkheim 1995, pp. 386–87). Each part of a temple festival symbolizes the deities’ power and people’s gratitude for blessings and protection. The elderly, who have experience of living in the rural environment, especially like attending temple festivals because, for them, the chaos or the bustling scene serve as a reminder of the past and an earlier lifestyle, providing a rare occasion for people to talk freely about their lives, especially in their deity-related stories, and to facilitate the experience of communal effervescence that arises from watching morality-orientated operas. Rather than considering their orthodoxy or legitimacy, rural people feel more attachment to temples that have already undergone the process of localization (Chen 1999).

However, under the urbanization, temples such as Lady Chen temple face a new dilemma: when the temple no longer hosts communal rituals and only preserves an intangible cultural heritage, does it still function as a religious place? I argue that the binary exchange between human and deity preserves a channel for people to directly communicate with a deity when the religious places either become cultural heritage sites or standardized institutions. The decline of religion is a reflection of the state’s secularization goal. When Yang (1945) wrote about Taitou village in 1946, he discussed how all non-Christian families performed ancestor worship, dedication to the stove god in the kitchen or burned incense in the ancestral hall and the earth god temple during the spring festival. However, in today’s Taitou, under Qingdao’s urbanization process, there is no ancestral hall or earth deity temple in the whole neighborhood. To post an effigy of the stove god is treated as an outdated or backward rural practice that no longer fits the urban lifestyle.

In other words, in Qingdao, there is no buffer between the state’s religious regulations and rural religious practices. It is either the institutional temple or the culturalized temple. In contrast, in Shantou city, on the southeast coast of China, religious organizations such as charity halls offer a middle path. Registered as a social organization, the charity hall can function as a charity association for charitable relief, but also a religious site at which to host rituals, funerals and other services. Because the temple belongs to the charity hall, it utilizes partial legitimacy to strive for full development (Gao 2000, p. 104). Spirit mediums or jitong (乩童) are stationed in the temple to perform planchette writing (fuji扶乩) to respond to people’s private needs, while the chairman of the charity hall, as the abbot of the temple, has the permission and legitimacy to host the annual ritual. Thus, in cities such as Qingdao, another new form of human–deity interaction has been facilitated to cope with urbanization.

5. The Core of the Human–Deity Exchange

It has been argued that studying religious conceptions “will only yield a bewildering diversity” (Chau 2006, p. 76), but I argue that the core of these conceptions is efficacy. Efficacy (ling灵) signifies deities’ responsiveness and is always regarded as the center of popular religion (Feuchtwang 2001; Chau 2006; Katz 2014). All the deities, including Buddha and Boddhisatva, that are worshipped in the temple are known as efficacious, because they have completed the process of deification. Chau made six basic postulates regarding Shaanbei people’s religious beliefs and practices, and the first one is as follows: “That there are gods (or that it does not hurt to assume that there are gods)” (Chau 2006, p. 66). I agree that this postulate fits almost everyone’s religious mentality. Since a deity is efficacious because he/she has established efficacy, we do not need to question—if one dares to—the deity’s efficacy, but all we should do is facilitate the exchange so the deity can present his/her efficacy. This makes the human–deity exchange a highly individualized experience, but also subject to traditional perceptions.

In rural areas, when people live in a single house, they often burn incense and offerings in the yard during the spring festival to renew their relationship with ancestors. One’s house is proved to be a sacred place for a family to conduct their religious act. A few years ago, when I conducted fieldwork in Zhejiang province, I found it is a common approach to lay a sacrificial table outside the door for the hungry ghosts during the Qingming festival. This is a gesture meaning that one can feed the hungry ghosts as well as keeping them outside one’s sacred domain. The family is defined by the sharing of the same stove (Duara 1988a, pp. 89–90) and, during each festival, “an atmosphere of sacredness and reverence pervaded every aspect of traditional Chinese family life, and the home became a complex center of religious worship” (Yang 1961, p. 29). Therefore, each family needs to share the incense from the village temple, and, by doing so, “Its burners mark the central points of households and the temple of that territory” (Feuchtwang 2001, p. 24). Thus, under urbanization, the first impact for the family is the tie between them and the tie is cut when there is no temple or temple festival to mark deities’ territory. Secondly, burning incense does not seem to fit in with the lifestyle in cities. The 1962-born Han is the inheritor of the craft of incense-making, which also represents intangible cultural heritage at the district level. He admitted that his handmade incense does not attract urban consumers for they are after something fancy, with a unique smell or special materials to create an exquisite atmosphere, while his incense only caters to the rural elderly women’s needs of making offerings in the yard.

Therefore, even though burning incense is a crucial way to maintain relations, there are more restrictions in respect of urban life. In addition, spirit mediums may advise not to burn incense at one’s house twice a month. A woman in her sixties, the wife of a local incense interpreter, warned her husband’s followers to only burn incense in the temple. She explained that every time incense is burnt, deities will descend from heaven; however, (ordinary) people cannot see them, and they cannot communicate with them. “This will make the deity angry and the house restless”, she concluded in an unregistered temple in Lu County. She emphasized the role of a third party partly because interpreting incense is their means of living, but also because it is widely accepted that not everyone is bestowed with such a talent. To be chosen by the deity to serve for a great cause only confirms these people’s morality: deities only choose the good ones.

Either reformed temples or one’s house are relatively stable sacred places, but because the other party in the binary exchange remains invisible, it relies on people to interpret the message. This relates to the practice of burning incense in the street, mostly seen in Qingdao and Zhengzhou. Drawing a circle with chalk involves marking the boundary of the sacred, which is the same logic for burning incense and paper money in one’s yard: only the spirits of the loved ones or those being invited can enter to claim their offerings. Although burning incense is discouraged by the authorities for the reasons of civilized worship or posing a fire hazard, “it is the community that determines convention and affirms that a funeral has been performed properly” (Watson 1988, p. 6). In this case, the community confirms the efficacy of burning incense at the crossroad. Although the forms and sites of religion are regulated by the state, the core of religion cannot be altered easily. People practice religion in their conventional ways.

With the help of a piece of chalk, by drawing a circle, they create a sacred place, which is temporary but effective. This space ensures the burnt paper money and other offerings can only be received by the designated ancestor or spirit. On the one hand, it is the relational modality so people practice this at least twice a year to maintain a connection with their ancestors, in the name of filial piety. On the other hand, it is also a practice of the immediate modality, so people burn incense for something urgent. When the unexpected happens, people burn incense on the site to express their gratitude for whoever aids their loved ones in surviving an incident, or ”bribe” whoever is responsible for the incident in the first place. This is a direct and reciprocal exchange that saves the trouble of a middle person to mediate. It relies on the person to self-verify their experience as efficacious or not. People do not need an agent to explain whether it is a deity or spirit that is accountable, they only need to conduct the exchange to fulfil their goal. Thus, the sacred place has become more flexible, deepening people’s religious perception.

Most people are content with this efficacy-based religiosity because it is practical and embedded in one’s daily life. For instance, it is a popular practice to dedicate a red banner with the words “Sincerity brings efficacy” (xin cheng ze ling 心诚则灵) to the deity after one’s wish is granted, but it is never made clear what constitutes “sincerity”. In other words, it is hard to quantify one’s sincerity in popular religion when there are no classics or doctrines. People can treat the idea of being sincere as either being moral or being pious through the invested money or time. When converting to a religion, Buddhism or Protestantism require extra levels of religious commitment. Threatened by the rising Christianization in nearby villages, master Feng started to host monthly sermons or summer camps focused on martial arts and medical treatment. The majority of the participants were lured by the advertisement and wished to be cured by the master, but were less keen to learn the karma teachings or Buddhist sutras that support the cure. To follow master Feng’s path, one must sit in the summer heat and listen to sermons for at least six hours a day, and to be an orthodox Buddhist means to abstain from eating meat. This is not their everyday routine. However, there is something that only the three-chain exchange can provide: a religious agent with sufficient knowledge or answers.

Through a third party, people acquire knowledge not only about karma, but also about the deity. The sense of familiarity can consolidate one’s ties with the deity. This is the long-lasting influence of the society of acquaintance (Fei 1992). Through a third party, especially a monk or a priest, what people find is not only intimacy, but also a belonging to the religious community, either centered on the deity or the agent. When the Monkey King temple in Lu County was about to be torn down due to village planning, the village head selected a location to build a new temple for the deity. That new location was near a dumpsite. “The monkey king is not happy,” the incense interpreter in that village warned them, “he said he would leave us and move back to the mountain”. Some devout believers were deeply worried, they kneeled and begged him to stay, to keep blessing the village. It was made clear that the deity is engaged with village life. The deity has a say in the village’s management. It is argued that the revival of registered temples and churches signaled a tendency to not only revive religion but also pursue “a modernist future, intended to overcome ‘backward’ superstitious practices” (Liang 2014, p. 418). In other words, if the village shares a common belief, that belief determines the communal morality, namely what is in the public good. Being granted wishes also confirms one’s morality: he/she is rewarded for being good and moral. After all, popular religion is constructed in this dualism: moral stories/efficacious legends, memorial sacrifice/purposeful sacrifice and upholding morals/rewarding merits (Wang 2005).

According to legend, Lady Chen is benevolent and compassionate. A famous story suggests that when parents were occupied with farming hundreds of years ago, they left their young children in the temple as daycare. The children were safe and sound under the deity’s care so villagers made it a routine. After a while, the children started crying in the temple. The elderly explained to the young parents, “the children are making a mess. Lady Chen is offended”. The parents then cleaned the temple and prayed for her forgiveness and kindness. After a while, everything went back to normal. What is revealed here is the common value of serving the community. Religion not only encourages moral action but also links individuals to communities (Meagher 2019, p. 19). It is a public manifestation of the communal good. Temples or deities being marginalized means that this role is handed over to the atheist state. Without temples hosting communal rituals, deities are deprived of the role of participating in rural life and supervising moral teachings.

The persistence of worshipping deities supports Duara’s argument that the imperial state was impotent in controlling the rural sector; for example, villagers worshipping the same deity became mobilized through their incense association to build an irrigation system for the public good (Duara 1988a). However, when temples are no longer the center of the village, it is the religious communities that step in. Famous temples make donations in times of natural disaster or do volunteer work. The Party-state rules localities and their own civilizational institutions for the creation of public good through different kinds of control; that is, through the Bureaux of Culture and Tourism, or through law enforcement by treating popular cults and ritual practices of self-cultivation as criminally sectarian or superstitious (Feuchtwang 2012, p. 125). This means that popular religion is always entangled in various power relations. Once converted to Buddhism or Protestantism, popular religion faces the same fate: being treated as a superstitious practice. Buddhism claims to be orthodox and superior to any other (Daoist) deities, while for protestants, any deity other than God is demonic. Moreover, with systematic teachings and strict disciplines, institutional religions standardize people’s religious outlooks. A protestant house is blessed because they are the sheep of the Lord, while Buddha’s teaching can be dedicated to everyone in the family.

Hansen described an intriguing story in which a ghost possesses someone in a house when there are many deities enshrined there, and it is the lowest of gods, the stove god—not the distant Buddha, not the wandering Zhenwu (真武), not the dozing earth god—who tries to protect the Hong household from the intrusive ghost (Hansen 1990, p. 31). Now, even the worship of the stove god starts to transform into a folklore activity: with cultural memorial, not religious sacrifice. This makes one wonder, is burning incense at the crossroad so different from posting an effigy on the kitchen wall?

I argue that it is the state’s years of infiltration into rural life and promotion of atheist discourses that imperceptibly reshape people’s religious perceptions, resulting in a similar urban–rural dualism. Religion is built into the token of urban civilization. Converting to Buddhism surpasses the practice of popular religion; taking the Buddhist precepts surpasses only burning incense in the temple. This is because the former stresses the understanding of the belief, not simply acting. Burning incense at the crossroad is less favorable for it is a random act and is less controllable. Every year near the Qingming festival, there will be the government’s initiative of conducting “civil” ancestor worship to replace feudalist superstition.

Cohen (1993) pointed out that the idea of the peasant as comprising a distinct and backward cultural category shows no sign of losing its force (Cohen 1993, p. 166). This is still the case today. Rural practices are easily associated with superstition or backwardness. Therefore, rural people use this as a weapon to carry forward their superstitious practices. When the state pushes forward cremation, they are forced to accept this practice but then they bury the cinerary casket in a normal-sized coffin to imitate the traditional burial. As a medium, a space reveals the physical presence of religion (Woods 2018, p. 532), so people take the freedom of choosing what is sacred for them. This is their private interaction with a deity, one’s ancestor or some ghosts.

6. Conclusions

By reviewing rural and urban temples’ revival strategies, I have argued that religious regulations and urbanization are part of the state’s expectation of civilization. The rapid trend of urbanization has narrowed the space for popular religion to fulfil its goals as it used to; thus, it has had to make a private shift and relinquish its communal roles. Now, religious institutions seize this opportunity to aid people in the religious realm as well as facilitating the belonging of a community. Diversity and practical orientation help popular religion to bypass the state’s regulations. Although some temples and deities may never be restored, related practices and stories are preserved. The binary exchange remains valid as it opens a direct channel and people have more freedom in choosing the modalities of “doing religion” to either maximize the efficacy (Chau 2011), or find the most practical one. Although religious sites are confined, practitioners can stick to the immediate-practical modality to burn incense at a crossroad or use the liturgy modality to host a funeral in the temple to enable the deceased to make their transition. This does not mean they are simply following tradition, because, as my data show, when they conduct an exchange, they are actively seeking a solution or an answer. This gives new meaning to burning incense for the deceased or setting off firecrackers to welcome the fortune god, because it shows how people review their daily practices and the places they believe to be sacred. Through the gift exchange, the principle of mutual reciprocity is confirmed, and so is the reward of being moral.

Beyond these contributions, I also observed some intriguing points to be further studied. First, the simplification of rituals and religious knowledge. What I found is a tendency of local deities giving way to regional deities such as Buddha or Guanyin. The imperial hierarchy and the distinction between deities and ghosts through the golden/silver paper offerings, as Feuchtwang (2001, 2010) discovered, seems to fade away. Second, the regional differentiation in religious worship. In the Lady Chen temple, there is another statue of LaoMu (老母), which is normally linked with a certain mountain, and, in this case, it is Mount Tai since it is the most prestigious mountain in the north. The temple keeper believes this reflects a regional difference: the worship of Lady Chen is similar to Matsu (妈祖), which is linked with the sea, while the worship of Laomu is linked with mountain worship derived from the agricultural civilization. However, despite this layout being preserved, no one knows exactly why this cultural collision occurs here. As a counterpart of Matsu, Lady Chen inherits the same core of blessing as the fishermen but never reaches the same level. Third, the influence of urban–rural dualism over people’s religiosity. Urbanization does not necessarily mean people shift to a new identity, but it means people need to adapt to the new lifestyle. This might inspire people’s conversion to an entirely new religion for the support of community.