**2. Literature Review**

Much research has been conducted on local folk religions in rural North China in the past two decades. Somewhat different as these studies are in geographic focus and temporal scope, they tend towards adopting an ethnographic bottom-up approach, aligned with fieldwork-informed case studies, to cultic worship, ritual performance, community participation and socioreligious organisation, demonstrating a shift of focus in religious and cultural studies from elite culture to popular culture and from the organised religion to local cults, cult festivals and cult associations.

Most notable among them are Overmyer (2009) and Johnson (2009), both drawing on a wide range of sources from earlier studies in Chinese, Japanese and Western languages to dynastic and local histories to legendary and anecdotal accounts to fieldwork reports by local scholars to newly discovered, annotated liturgical texts. Significantly, Overmyer (2009, pp. 4–5) regards Chinese local religion as 'the mainstream of Chinese religion', which, he argues convincingly, 'has always been community-based, inclusive and nonsectarian' and which, he notices, has long been 'ignored or disparaged by both Chinese and Western scholars as a confused congeries of diffuse superstitions, a residual category without any integrity of its own, discussed only in relation to the better-known traditions of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism'. While both of them have focus on community rituals and festivals in North China, Overmyer (2009) aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the structure, organisation and institution of local community religions in the vast rural areas of Hebei, Henan, Shandong and Shanxi provinces in the twentieth century, thus covering a much broader geographic and thematic scope than Johnson (2009), who, in

contrast, is primarily concerned with 'temple-based liturgical rituals' or 'rituals in honor of the birthday of a local god' in pre-communist Shanxi that 'were very heart of the symbolic culture of the countryside, the bedrock of mainstream Chinese popular religion' (Johnson 2009, p. 145).

Particularly noteworthy is his study of 'The Great Temple Festivals of Southeastern Shanxi' (Johnson 2009, pp. 177–320). Selected for his case study are three temples—namely, the Temple of the Divine Mother of the Ninth Heaven (Jiutian shengmu miao 九 天 聖母廟) in Pingshun county (Johnson 2009, pp. 187–234), the Houyi 后 羿 Temple on Mount Longquan 龍 泉 (Johnson 2009, pp. 235–82) and the Houyi Temple of Big West Gate (Daxiguan 大 西 關), both in Zhangzi county (Johnson 2009, pp. 283–301). Through his fine-grained description and analysis, Johnson offers an excellent example of historical–empirical enquiries into village festivals in the Shangdang region.

Shangdang has attracted much attention of scholars of Chinese popular religion, culture and theatre since the 1980s when more than twenty liturgical manuscripts from the late imperial period were discovered in this area (Yang 2000; Yang 2006; Johnson 2009, pp. 180–84). Among them are *The Transmitted Records for Welcoming the Deities and Worshipping the Lord of Soil, with Forty Melodies in [Twenty-Eight] Keys* (*Yingshen saishe lijie chuanbu sishi qu [ershiba] gongdiao* 迎 神 賽 社 禮 節 傳 簿四十 曲[二 十 八]宮 調, hereafter *Lijie chuanbu)*, which is alternatively titled *The Diagram of the Musical Asterisms of the Zhou Dynasty* (*Zhou yuexing tu* 周 樂 星 圖) (Du 2011b, pp. 236–83); *The Diagram of the Musical Asterisms of the Tang Dynasty* (*Tang yuexing tu* 唐 樂 星 圖) (Li 1993a; Yang 2000, pp. 419–98); *The Exemplary Texts for Offering Sacrifices during Temple Festivals with a Catalogue of Melodies for Offering Cups* (*Yingshen saishe jisi wenfan ji gongzhan qumu* 迎 神 賽 社 祭 祀 文 範及供 盞 曲 目, hereafter *Jisi wenfan*) (Han et al. 1991a); and *Manuscripts from the Mound of the Locust Emperor for the Eight Big Village Worship Associations* (*Huanghuanggang badashe chaoben* 蝗 皇 崗 八 大 社 抄 本, hereafter *Huanghuanggang*).<sup>2</sup> They were compiled by and for ritualists as liturgical manuals and are therefore extremely valuable for the study of folk religion and temple theatre in Shangdang.

There is evidence that temple festivals prevailed in the Shangdang area during the period of transition from the Northern Song (960–1127) to the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115– 1234).<sup>3</sup> Temple festivals that had been held for centuries since then were banned during the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945). The ban continued to be placed on them into the Maoist era (1949–1976) until after China started to reform and open up to the outside world in the 1980s. During the half-century ban, many ritualists and village elders who had been personally involved in performing or organising temple festivals died without passing on their knowledge and experience to younger generations. Had it not been for the discovery of these liturgical texts, it would have been hardly possible to revive and reconstruct Shangdang temple festival and temple theatre.

The newly discovered liturgical texts attracted immediate attention from local scholars. Some of them such as Han Sheng 寒 聲, Li Tiansheng 李 天 生 and Yang Mengheng 楊孟 衡 were also engaged in searching for and collecting these materials and editing them into readable form for research. Numerous punctuated, annotated ritual manuscripts, journal articles, book chapters and scholarly monographs have been published by local scholars since then as shown in Han et al. (1987a, 1987b, 1999), Li (1993b, 1993c), Zhang and Pu (1993), Yang (1992, 1997a, 2006), Feng (2000), Du (2011a, 2011b) and Wang (2012). These works are mostly ethnographically oriented and grounded in participant observation, personal interviews with locals, memories of old villagers, temple stone stelae inscriptions and liturgical manuscripts. Most noteworthy among them are Du (2011a, 2011b) and Wang (2012). The former, compiled by Du Tonghai 杜 同 海 (a local farmer–scholar and ritualist), is the most comprehensive collection available so far of primary sources on temples and temple festivals in Jiacun; the latter, written by Wang Xuefeng 王 學 鋒, a native of Shanxi, based on his PhD thesis completed in 2007 at the Chinese National Academy of Arts, is the first and also the hitherto most systematic study of Jiacun village temple festivals.

Of particular interest to the present study is that Wang (2012) provides a historical survey of the restoration, revival and reform of Jiacun temple festivals over a period of ten years from 1996 to 2006, followed by a close examination of various factors contributing to the modifications made to the ritual and theatrical performances over these years with special reference to the 'large-scale re-enactments of ancient temple festivals' (*fanggu biaoyan dasai* 仿 古 表 演 大 賽) held for 'outsiders', respectively, in May 1997 and August 2006 (Wang 2007, p. 69).<sup>4</sup> The outsiders are local governmen<sup>t</sup> officials, scholars, journalists and tourists, and they are so called because they are people from outside the local worship community or ritual association. Such re-enactments of temple festivals performed for outsiders, as commonly seen in the officially or semi-officially sponsored presentation of traditional performing arts and religious rituals in contemporary China (Mackerras 2011; Bruckermann 2015), are a double-edge sword: they help enhance the reputation of Jiacun as a centre for village temple festivals in Shangdang but at the same time inevitably spoil festival spontaneity and religiosity (Wang 2011; Yao 2019).

It is now difficult to pinpoint the distinction between what is original and what is not in Jiacun temple festivals, nor is it important or necessary, actually. What matters is that temple festivals, albeit reconstructed and modified in corporeal form, remain at the very heart of the spiritual life of village people, and more importantly, they still maintain their original dual functioning as a religious ceremony to offer sacrifices to local deities and as a sociocultural tie to bind villagers as a community (Du 2016; Song 2016a, ). A case in point is the Double-Fourth Temple Festival in Jiacun. Arguably the oldest surviving village festival in Shangdang, the Double-Fourth Temple Festival retains more of the original form and function of *shehuo* than any other village festivals in southeastern Shanxi, hence its reputation as 'the number one folk *shehuo* in North China'.
