For the workshop on “The Geometries of Polity: Exploring

Cosmological Orders Over the History of China and the South

Pacific”, University of Virginia, January 7-11

Quanzhou: territorial cults, officialdom, jianghu (rivers-lakes), and

shanlin (mountains-forests)

Wang Mingming

(Peking University)

I set out to revisit an ethnographic site, Quanzhou. The place is

situated to the North of the Northern end (maritime Southeast Asia)

of the long belt of cosmological transformations across the Americas

and the Pacific outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his wonderful piece

“Do dual organizations exist?”. But our site, instituted around the

year of 700 AD as one of the metropolitan centers of China’s coastal

frontier, is a much larger and more expansive place than any of the

1
villages examined by the anthropologist.

In a book published a decade ago (Empire and Local Worlds), using

some of the available archival data, I made an argument for

understanding the city’s geo-cosmic complexity in terms of the

changing space-times of different levels of “central places” (Skinner).

I will go back to this old argument and see how it can be related with

our current theme.

For sure, in the city plans of Quanzhou, the diametric, triadic, and

concentric principles Lévi-Strauss finds in his “anthropology of the

South” are also present. But these do not exist separately; rather they

are complexly related into a three dimensional “polity” akin to the

“archaic cosmos” - more or less Indian and Tibetan by origin -

considered by Mircea Eliade in terms of “quarters around the center”.

The Chinese version of this “cosmos” has been known as the

“magical squares” (Wheatley, Lyle, Feng Shi, Pankenier), but its older

“native” name is “fangyuan”. And it is not only a geometric pattern

but also an image of the universe, shaped with rectangular and

circular types.

2
The making of fangyuan was dependent upon a pair of measuring

instruments, gui or compasses, and ju or zigzag rules, applied to draw

circular and right angle lines.

These are so essential that a Chinese myth traces their origins to the

deepest past. It suggests that the first human ancestors, Fuxi and

Nvwa, two original mixtures of humans, divinities, and things, not

only gave birth to the humans but also mastered the method of

geometry. In the myth, Nvwa, the female and the yin, holds gui in her

hands, while Fuxi, the male and the yang holds ju, and the two,

intertwined, jointly gave shapes to the statics and the dynamics of the

world.

Long ago, Mencius said that “without applying compasses and zigzag

rules, one makes no square and circle”.

Gui and ju form a word composed of rich connotations. Since

Mencius’s age, it has referred to both the technical devices and all

kinds of rules (geo-cosmic, ceremonial, legal, regulative, or value) as

well as the proper ways of relating geo-cosmic and human motion.

3
Studying Quanzhou historical anthropologically, I have found the

“wisdom of the world” as expressed in the concept of fangyuan and

geo-cosmic technology of guiju fundamental. I regard the present

contribution as a demonstration of its ethnographic efficacy.

I will start from the lowest territorial units and then consider the

urban form as a organizational whole. Finally, I will go into the

dichotomy of city and hinterland where I hope to determine the

physical and “spiritual” roles jianghu (rivers and lakes) and shanlin

(mountains and forests) play in the formation of a “society” (Qian

Mu) in the interface between culture and nature.

In the city of Quanzhou, there are small and large ancestral halls

(some restored, others “conserved”, and still others waiting for

identification). But these are unlike those found in the countryside

outside the town. They do not belong to the corporate lineage villages

(Freedman) whose members live together and collectively own

“sacrificial fields” (ji tian) necessary for the ritual “public good” of

the communities. City people live in individual households distributed

4
in different neighborhoods. They contribute funds to maintain the

ancestral halls, and pay visits to these buildings on the special

occasions of annual worship.

The neighborhoods of Quanzhou are traditionally known as pu and

jing, centered around their local temples, situated in such localities as

what both absorbing vitality from the outside and withstanding any

inward-coming inauspicious powers like wild winds and water ghosts.

A temple is a “palace” (gong) for the chief patron deity and the

associates. The patron deity is usually a real historical figure whose

scholarly, military, moral, medical, magical, theatrical, or commercial

achievement was extraordinary. A deity is seen as having moral-

magical power (sheng) essential for the maintenance of peace and

security as well as prosperity of the neighborhood. He or she has a

birth or rebirth day which renders a definition of the local time of

annual festivity. On the deity’s birth or rebirth day, other deities from

different levels of Heaven and Earth and from different directions are

invited by the ritual masters to join the deity’s banquets - offerings

made by local households to the patron deities - and adding vitality to

the local gods. Also, on a selected day of the first Lunar month once a

year, the statues of the patron deity are taken by local pilgrimage

5
troupes to his or her “root temple” or a greater monastery where it

regains its efficacy via reunion with its source of origin.

The neighborhood “public spaces”, their gods’ birthdays, and their

ritual activities named after pu and jing, or pujing, can be seen as

“territorial cults”. In anthropology, these have been examined from

the perspective of “folk religion” (Feuchtwang, Sangren), a

terminology roughly referring to peasant domestic and communal

worship (Feuchtwang), contrasted with the “imagined community” of

the “great tradition”.

Reviewing many of the theories concerning the aspect, I have found

them not too suitable for the analysis of the cults and activities I

encountered in Quanzhou. Those practicing the same kind of

“religion” in the city of Quanzhou are not “peasant” and not

restricted to local isolates, politicizable as “weapons of the weak”

(Scott). More than in the countryside, are the urban territorial cults

“partial” (Redfield). They are perceived as needing to be “scaled up”

onto higher planes of locality.

The larger world with different levels of territoriality is the city itself.

It comprises a collection of neighborhoods officially designated as 36

6
pu (wards) and 72 jing (precincts).

In imperial times, a jing was a lowest level local unit, included in a pu

which ideally had 2 jing. As local historians have told us, in fact more

than 36 pu and 72 jing can be found (Chen Chuicheng, Lin Shengli).

Some pu were not further divided into jing, some overlapped with

jing, some had more than 2 jing. But one thing is certain: pu and jing

or what we call neighborhoods here, initially were not territorial units

of “folk cults”; rather, they were parts of the whole of the system of

local administrative places.

This does not mean that when the migrants first established their

households in the city they did not develop their own “vernacular”

kind of “communities of gods”; it merely means that these earlier

communal cults were not the later neighborhoods of 36 pu and 72

jing.

Above the basic level of pu and jing, there were higher level units, the

4 yu (corners, districts) and the municipal city as a single “high

place”.

7
3

The “hierarchy of central places” in the old city of Quanzhou could

thus be seen as comprising the following:

municipal city

districts

pu and jing

Obviously, these formed a certain triadic order, a part of an “invented

tradition” instead of a product of the “natural history of central

places” (Skinner). It has been clearly indicated that this “tradition”

only got fully “accomplished” by the 17th century during the Shunzhi

Reign (1638-61).

Before then, there were pu and jing, but in the previous dynasties of

Yuan and Ming, i.e., between the 13th and 17th century, the number of

the higher level units, Yu, was 3 instead of 4 and the numbers of pu

and jing were not 36 and 72 either. The yu to the North of the

government complex situated immediately to the North of the central

point of the town (the cross-road where the North-South and the

East-West Streets met), the official core of the city, was later added.

8
Before Yuan, in Song (960-1279), both urban and rural places were

classified in terms of xiang and li. The town was divided into 5 xiang,

each of which was further divided into several fang.

The system of yu, pu, and jing as we see now was a “late middle age”

construct. It was devised to facilitate urban control by early Qing

officials who were assigned by Shunzhi emperor (1638-61) to the

mission of implementing direct rule over the urban neighborhoods

within the confines of the wall-city. The mission was also a “cosmo-

political” one, because it had the goal of adding more force to the

model of “quarters around the center”.

Let me explain.

In the beginning of the 8th century, during Tang, the core of

Quanzhou city was shaped as square-like walled complex, called

“zicheng” or “son city”. It was a compound of offices protected by

solid walls, having four gates in four directions, facilitating the

radiation of the power of officialdom to the outside and allowing in

9
the vitality from four directions to come into the “magical square”.

The gate buildings also served as drum towers functioning to render

official time for the society of “four kinds of civilians”, shi (scholars,

and scholar-officials), nong (farmers), gong (workmen), and shang

(traders). Like the Forbidden City, as an enclosure, from the

beginning, zicheng, situated in the superior part to the North of the

central point, had been designed to be surrounded by a much larger

circle of urban places in the “lower directions” - East, West, and

South. This was later named “luocheng” during Baoda Reign of the

regional kingdom of South Tang (943-957) ruled by Liu Congxiao. It

was a much less upright enclosure, with 7 gates instead of 4.

Both the scale and the shape of zicheng remained unchanged; by

contrast, luocheng kept changing and expanding. Its shape was

ladder-typed before the 13th century. This changed into scalene

triangle kind in Yuan, whose sides further extended outward in Qing.

Its size was 3 square kilometers in Tang, 5 in Wudai Shiguo (907-

960), 6.2 in South Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) and Ming

(1368-1644), 6.8 in Qing (1636-1912).

Luocheng, the outer parts of the town, did not really form a circular

shape contrasted with the rectangular core. But when compared with

10
zicheng, it became more like the circular and dynamic.

According to the myth we mentioned, Fuxi and Nvwa, the male and

female holding the magics of the square and circle, got intertwined

and gave birth to four children who generated the four seasons and

the living surroundings.

Zicheng and luocheng were conceivable as two convivial parts, one

nested in the other in the concentric manner, just like the fang and

yuan produced by Fuxi and Nvwa.

The functions of officialdom centered in zicheng had been multiple -

administrative, civilizational, military, and politico-economic, made

explicit in a system of several sacred compounds in luocheng. These

were imperial cult temples including City God Temple in the North,

Confucian and War God Temples to the Southeast, and the palace for

the officially recognized popular patron god of trade shifting between

the Northwest to the South.

These sacred compounds distinctively stood out from the

neighborhoods whose spatial designs were much less regular, and they

were designed to function as the official intermediaries between the

11
contraries of inner and outer.

But tension between the contraries was constant.

Zicheng and luocheng renders a proper definition of the Chinese city,

chengshi, a word composed of the characters for garrison (cheng) and

and for market (shi) (Fei). The relation between the contraries of

cheng and shi varied in different periods, and their forces were never

balanced.

The old Chinese character luo, as applied in the official description of

luocheng, the outer city, is composed of two parts, the upper part is an

image of net, the lower part is an image of a flying bird. One may

straightforwardly translate the character into “bird-catching net”.

But the character luo is also an ideograph meaning inclusion.

The character luo says a lot about the oscillation between inclusion

and control in Quanzhou’s imperial past.

During the Song and the Yuan, the officialdom depended upon the

benefits from the movement of people and things, and it allowed

12
luocheng and its included neighborhoods to expand. As is well-

documented, among the included neighborhoods, some were even

Indian, Moslem, Southeast Asian, and European, each erecting its

own sacred architecture, and together they made Quanzhou culturally

“super-diverse”.

Nonetheless, it was in such situations that the necessity for the

extension of the model of order and steadiness into the outer quarters

of the city was strongly felt. Hence, during Yuan, the dynasty in

which Quanzhou reached its heyday of commercial expansion, the

system of pu was invented.

Following Yuan, a political response from the early Ming officialdom

to the danger of over-liveliness - commercial over-prosperity and

cultural over-plurality - in the previous dynasties had tended to result

in the further force growth of orderliness and steadiness. And after

Shunzhi emperor’s “reformation”, the tendency became even

stronger. While both modes of “geometric politics” remained active,

the order-minded officials seemed ever more dissatisfied with all the

“chaos” in the coast city. They sought to perfect the pre-existent order

of the neighborhood system by means of extending the model on

which zicheng was based into the them.

13
To a great extent, the historical motion of Quanzhou was the

movement between chaos and order, described by traditional

historians in terms of shengsheng zhuang (mood of constant growth)

and tiaoli zhuang (mood of patterning reason) (Luo). The Song-Yuan

boom was a manifestation of the mood of constant growth which

resulted in the “chaos” to the first Ming emperor, and he imposed on

Quanzhou a new cycle of order. In both periods, the core kept its

mood of “patterning reason” and steadiness, but the outer realms of

the city had dramatically different landscapes. In the former period,

they continued to expand, in the latter, they were restricted.

These two different types of relation were also useful to our

understanding of the history of the relation between the land and the

sea.

In classical China, there were intellectuals like Zhuangzi who desired

a fantastic bird which he thought could take him to the clouds above

the sea where he hopefully could reach the gate of Heaven, but there

were also other thinkers in the Central Plains who saw the sea as a

nothing like where Earth and Heaven met. Some non-Daoist thinkers

considered the sea to be a dangerous part of the world, a “hui” or

14
vague and dark part, some (e.g., Chinese Buddhist thinkers) saw it as

a “ku” or bitter part, and some holding both contradicting viewpoints.

The four kinds of min who made the society of Quanzhou were

mostly migrants from the Central Plains in the North. When their

ancestors first arrived in South Fujian, they had to get adapted to the

ocean. Many expert historians of maritime communication history

believe that the phenomenal expansion of maritime trade in the

Songyuan period in Quanzhou was made possible by the “ethos” of

those “taking the sea as the soil” (yihai weitian), or in fact, those who

changed from farming on land to “hunting their subsistence on the

sea”. But in a major period of late imperial times, the fear of the

danger of the dynamics (chaos) of the sea came hand in hand with

the official negative attitude toward maritime trade.

Pu and jing temples were barracks during the Mongolian Yuan,

neighborhood offices and “stations of Confucian civilization” during

the Chinese Ming, and “palaces for gods” in the later periods of Ming

and of the whole of Qing. Thus, in the case of the city of Quanzhou,

the so-called “folk religious temples” were not “vernacular” in their

15
beginnings; rather, they originated in the stations of imperial power

whose “degradation” resulted in the revitalization of the “little

tradition”, the “pre-official” and “pre-imperial” ways of leading

domestic and communal/public life which, by the time of late empire,

had to derive its force by means of mimesis of imperial bureaucracy

(Ahern).

I have described such interactive transformations in terms of the

relation between and forth growth and decline of the “vernacular”

and the officialdom.

I have also suggested that whatever happened in between the higher

and lower places, the hierarchy of “levels” was not only established

along the vertical line, it was but also achieved on the horizontal

concentric plane.

Now, as I must emphasize, the concentric plane was not restricted to

the “union of contraries” of zicheng and luocheng; rather, it was

extended into a larger region, into what compounded of the city and

its hinterland.

16
6

The place where the city was constructed was originally an extensive

piece of wetland between two rivers, later named by the Han migrants

with two place names from the Central Plains, respectively as

Luoyang Jiang (to the Northeast) and Jinjiang (to the Southwest and

South), and between the range of mountains to the Northwest and the

sea to the Southeast. The wetland was full of streams, lakes, grass,

trees, birds, fish, wild beasts including tigers, and other beings, living

under the sky together with the fishing, hunting, and rice farming Yue,

the aboriginal groups. Beyond the place surrounded by the rivers and

mountains, there were several pieces of flatland. These were likewise

surrounded by rivers and mountains. In 221 BCE, the First Emperor

inaugurated his empire, the Yue, Austronesian speakers, as our

ethnological pioneers indicated long ago, were allowed to be governed

by their own kings. But in the first post-imperial “War and Split”

period (between the 3rd and the 7th century) (Ji Chaoding), more and

more Han people, especially the gentry families, escaping from the

“chaos” in the North, headed South, and settled in the region.

Those who gradually paved the way for the growth of the Chinese

“hierarchy of central places” (Skinner) initially lived in the area close

17
to the Northwest of the wetland. At later stages, they participated in

the construction of a number of complexes of garrison-market towns

(county seats) in each of the pieces of flatland in the hinterland.

These formed a system of middle level central places under the

prefecture of Quanzhou.

Below the municipal, apart from these towns, there were other “lower

places”, xiang, li, and the “natural villages”.

Between the city and the hinterland, the relation was hierarchical: the

city “ruled over” the hinterland. Nonetheless, the relation was also

reciprocal or even convivial because the city was badly dependent

upon a diversity of “local things” (fangwu) for its own flourishing.

Apart from movable things, these also involved the non-movable,

jianghu (rivers-lakes) and shanlin (mountains-lakes).

These categories of things are physical and “cosmological” as well as

social.

As physical things, they are simply rivers, lakes, mountains, and

forests, each of which is a place with great bio-diversity, full of

different kings of living things, fish, birds, grass, trees, snakes, tigers,

18
and so on, and is rendered a great name in local chronicles.

These sites are cosmological in the sense that they are, in most cases,

classified in terms of the contraries of inner and outer, higher and

lower, and soil and water, often doubled into quarters around the

center, and are applied to “contextualize” the life worlds of the

humans. Equally importantly, because these things are outside the

human world, they are seen as closer to Heaven, and they often

become more or less remote exteriorities where Confucian hermits or

Daoist masters or Buddhist monks “hide” to cultivate their spiritual or

physical virtues.

In the hinterland of Quanzhou, regional cults were mostly born in or

nearby places in or nearby jianghu and shanlin. This is not an

accident. For, many of the cults are respected as virtuous persons like

hermits, masters of methods, and monks.

Jianghu and shanlin also form a different pair of “contraries”.

“Jianghu” is mobile, shanlin is steady, just like luocheng and zicheng;

while “jianghu” is chaotic and has alternative rules of righteousness

(yiqi), different from Confucian philanthropy, shanlin is orderly,

philanthropic, and “transcendental”. From the geo-cosmic

19
perspective, these “contraries” can be associated with the contraries of

yin and yang. But they are also full of sociological implications.

Jianghu often also refers to secret brotherhoods, bandits, merchants,

gangs, robbers, warlords, and the like, whereas shanlin often also

points to the plane of high learning associated with the persons

known as “shi”.

Rivers, lakes, mountains, and forests are perceived as more fertile - for

the reason that, as I said, they are closer to Heaven than the city. So

the hinterland where they are is seen as superior to the city and

usually has a higher position than the city in local chronicles. Full

volumes on the mountains and “waters” follow the volumes on the

“fields of stars” (xingye), a chapter rendering an astronomic

definition of the place inscribed.

The city has its gates and topography designed as oriented to the

hinterland. The definition of the mother-model - quarters surrounding

the center - as the son-city (zicheng) is significant: to asserts the center

and extends its ordering impact into the neighborhoods, it reorient the

dichotomy of mother/son. When the city was first built, the inner

core was constructed as if it was the son of the mother, luocheng, the

orderly derivative of the less orderly but more fertile body of the

20
mother-matrix. The late imperial redefinition was a reversal. But there

was “reversal of reversal”. Throughout the imperial times, the

officialdom continued to perform ceremonies at the suburban altars

for annual sacrifice to the sun and moon, the stars, wind, rain,

mountain, rivers, thunder, and ghosts, to annually affirm the cosmo-

logic that its “square” complex could not be the “mother model”, it

could only be a “son” of the “motherland”, the body of the

surrounding rivers, lakes, mountains, and forests, the living

environment.

The city itself was a patterned in such a way that this living

environment got “internalized”, situated inside the urban form itself.

The small streams and rivers in the land on which the city was built

were kept and channeled into the system of brooks named after

bagua, the Eight Diagrams. Bigger rivers were combined with

constructed moats which were also “veins” (mai) linking the inside

and the outside. The East Lake outside of Eastern Gate was well

preserved and it was perceived as the pear of fortune the city, played

with by the energetic carp fish. The five sacred mountains all find

their local microcosmic versions, and can be actually specified: the

Eastern Peak is the mountain where city people bury their dead

parents, the Western Peace is where the popular Buddhist monastery

21
Longshan Si is situated, the Northern Peace can be located to the

North of zicheng, the compound for the officialdom, the South Peak

is a much lower hill close to Tianhou Temple, and the Central Peak

has a legendary base in the temple for Riyue Taibao, the two

reincarnated South Song baby emperors. There are other smaller

mountains such as Xiaoshan (the Little Hill) distributed in various

parts of the town and they are made famous by the Confucian

academies built beside them. Most of the tutors of the academies had

spent lengthy periods in proper shanlin, mountains and forests. The

three greatest Buddhists monasteries - Kaiyuan Si, Chengtian Si, and

Chongfu Si - are known as conglin, forests, and they are indeed not

only “holy places” but also forests of banyan trees.

The neighborhood cults are “divided incense” of their regional root

temples (Sangren). These root temples are mostly outside the city,

situated in the living environment of the hinterland. Territorial cult

temples get connected with them through annual rituals of paying

incense tribute pilgrimage (jinxiang). For the past three centuries, they

have also grouped into the binary organization of Eastern and

Western Buddhas. On the basis of the organization, they have

engaged in the activities ritual contests including feuding. It is evident

that these became most “chaotic” when those groups known as

22
jianghu - especially secret brotherhoods - developed into hidden great

powers driving the motor of urban public life.

In the past decade, while doing other things in other areas (e.g.,

ethnological study of Tibetan-Ti Corridor in Southwest China), I have

found such a mystery in the Southeast fascinating: the original Yue

source of the “wild histories” (yeshi) of Pingmin Shibadong, “18

Caves during the Pacification of Fujian”. These legends tell stories of

the “aboriginal groups” hiding in all mythical sorts of grotto in the

mountains and on the cliffs beside the sea, “fighting for the survival”

by every means, war or love, when their “cold society” encountered

the “hot” dynamics from the North.

In the above, we have focused our attention on the “geometries of

polity” but not on the ethno-history of the kind. Nonetheless, I have

regarded it as fruitful to relate what we have done to the “wild

histories”. The consideration is simply this: these “geometries”

emerged in the “post-Yue age” as the South-expanding Han’s

reconfigurations of the “supra-societal system” of the Pacific Rim.

23
In his “do dual organizations exist?”, Lévi-Strauss’s compares all the

ethnographically available “village plans” from North American,

Melanesian, and Amazonian “tribes”. He argues that dual

organizations can be varied but they are all complex. Along the part

of the Pacific Rim, anthropologists have found diametric or balanced

and symmetrical dichotomy, triadic hierarchy, and the combination of

the two in the concentric mode. However, to find their Einstein, by the

icon of which, Lévi-Strauss offers a metaphor for relational

complexity, and he insists that anthropologists ought to do more

ethnography of the compounded geometric systems, the wholes in

which all the dual organizations are integrated.

In terms of theory of structure, we have added little to Levi-Strauss’s

achievement. But as we can hope, our emphases upon the geo-cosmic

distinctions and relations in history and on local “cosmological

methods” of spacing and timing are not redundant.

One can imagine that before they moved into the caves, the Yue had

organized their villages in similar ways to what in which the

“primitives” in Winneboga, Omarakana, Bororo, and other villages

patterned out their home places. If the Yue and Levi-Strauss’s tribal

24
peoples owned similar instruments to gui and ju held in Fuxi and

Nvwa’s hands has remained a mystery. But it is evident that they also

sketched the contours of their “village plans” with their own

“instruments”. In understanding the models they created with such

techniques, the “etic” geometric approach as applied by

ethnographers has proven to be effective. However, it is better if we

can try to find the combinations of the so-called “etic” is also “emic”

- this is after all Levi-Strauss’s point. To me, without it, it is

particularly difficult for us to adequately explain the importance of

those measuring and shaping techniques to the “civilization” of the

part of Eurasia in which find our case. In Eurasia, long before

anthropology was born, the etic and emic perspectives had existed

“locally” in great and little traditions.

We have “scaled” from bottom up. To conclude, let us say that we can

scale from top down. Scaling from the whole to the parts, we can find

each of “micro-cosmos”, each pu, or each jing, is organized with the

same logic of fangyuan and guiju. Between the contrasted, the

relation is hierarchical, vertically affirmed as in the case of the triadic

sequence of pu-jing, yu, and city, or inversely transformed as in the

case of the reversed concentric mode of the dichotomy of the city and

the hinterland, the polity or life world as interior and the living

25
environment of rivers, lakes, mountains, and forests as superior in

which the spirits of the ancients including the Yue (who were not only

the fishermen, hunters, and rice farmers but also the architects of the

earliest sacrificial altars and cities of Liangzhu civilization, those

nearby Qiantangjiang River and Taihu Lake 5300-4300 to date, and

they contributed a great deal to the growth of Chinese geo-cosmic

models), together with their archaic geometric techniques, are still

roaming.

26