**8. Conclusions**

This paper on Jiacun temples and temple festivals provides an eyewitness account of the *sai* ritual and *xi* performance presented in May 2016 during the Double-Fourth Temple Festival, covering a whole series of heightened activities of the 'number one folk *shehuo* in North China'—the standard tripartite *saishe* programme of welcoming, entertaining and seeing off deities in general and the dramatic shows on stage and street, grand processions of divine images and carriages, and sacrificial offerings of food, fruit and wine in every particular. Moreover, this paper also conducts a careful enquiry into the origins of *saishe* and the historical links of ritual and theatrical performance in Shangdang *saishe* with Song-Jin court ritual and variety show and an extensive survey of temples and shrines that house gods and goddesses in the Jiacun pantheon—together with a general introduction to *saishe* organisers and ritual specialists such as the Chief Community Head, Chief Master of Ceremonials, Masters of Ceremonials, Leader of Entertainers, Entertainers, Incense Elders, Ritual Chefs and Mapi, the spiritual medium, and their respective functions and responsibilities in the temple festival.

All this shows that Jiacun *sheshuo* is not simply a country funfair with loads of sideshows and roadside stalls but a deep-rooted, highly structured, sophisticated religious festival. The annual celebration in honour of the birthday of Bixia yuanjun, the principal deity of the Double-Fourth Temple Festival, which has come to represent the heart and soul of the social and spiritual life of Jiacun, presents to us a symbolic world of local religions at work in contemporary China—a world that is created through a dazzling array of deities and demigods and a series of seemingly seamlessly connected ritual and theatrical performances, demonstrating an elaborate structure and an exceptionally high level of sophistication that are on a par with and no less favourable a comparison to state and court rituals recorded in dynastic histories.

Widely known as the oldest surviving village festival in Shangdang, Jiacun *shehuo* retains more than any other village festival in southeastern Shanxi the form and function of court and country ritual and theatrical performances from the Song-Ming era that would have otherwise sunk into oblivion but for the rediscovery in the 1980s of the Ming-Qing liturgical texts. With an intriguing mixture of ritual performance and musical/theatrical entertainment, Jiacun village festival features a wide variety of traditional Chinese performing arts—from folk and ritual dance to dance drama, from mime to music, from farce skit to comedy sketch, from street performance to stage performance and from dramatic ritual to ritual drama to full-length historical drama. The festival allows us an opportunity to see how religious ritual is performed in association with music, dance and drama and how ritual, music, dance and drama interact and integrate with each other into a form of total theatre that involves masking; face painting; costuming; drumming; singing; speaking; chanting; dancing; miming; impersonating animals, immortals and human characters; and astounding displays of martial arts and acrobatics, for which xiqu is best known. The festival also allows us an opportunity to watch some early forms of Chinese theatre, such as *duixi*, *zaju* and *yuanben*, which had long been considered extinct, ye<sup>t</sup> are found well preserved in the repertoire of Jiacun temple theatre.

The integration of various elements and various forms of Chinese theatre as we have seen in the festival are significant to research on Chinese theatre history, and particularly to the present study, which comes as part of the author's continuing efforts to explore the origins of Chinese theatre and examine the dynamic, interactive relationships between temple and theatre and between religious ritual and theatrical performance (e.g., Zhao 2019, 2020, 2022a, 2002b). Jiacun temple festival adds fresh evidence for the ritual origin of Chinese theatre, showcasing the pivotal role played by temple festival and temple theatre

in the historical development of Chinese theatre from ritual to ritual drama and from ritual drama to drama.

**Funding:** This research was graciously funded by the One Hundred Talent Scheme of Shanxi Province (*Shanxisheng bairen jihua* 山西省 百 人 計 畫) 2015–2018.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** I wish to express gratitude to Che Wenming, Du Tonghai, Duan Jianhong, Song Huaizhi, Song Yusheng, Wang Luwei, Wang Jinzhi and Wang Xuefeng, among others, for providing materials and assisting me in my fieldwork in Jiacun in 2016. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and offering their comments and suggestions.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
