Maintaining Gods in Medieval China

Maintaining Gods in Medieval China:Temple Worship and Local Governance in North China under the Jin and Yuan Iiyama Tomoyasu and Iiyama Tomoyasu 飯山知保 Translated by Macabe Keliher Appreciation by Jinping Wang Translated by Macabe Keliher New Appreciation Iiyama Tomoyasu, "Maintaining Gods in Medieval China: Temple Worship and Local Governance in North China under the Jin and Yuan," trans. Macabe Keliher, JSYS 40 (2010): 71–102. Iiyama Tomoyasu's article exemplifies two decades of scholarly efforts to use abundant local steles and inscriptions to study the history of north China in the middle period. The Jin conquest of the Northern Song dynasty in 1127 ushered in two centuries of foreign rule in north China, first by the Jurchen and then by the Mongols. This tumultuous backdrop in the north partly accounted for the easier survival of sources on stone than on paper. The availability of sources offers a methodological challenge to scholars working on this period in north China. How does one construct a clear and coherent narrative about long-term social change out of inscriptional materials that are often scattered and fragmentary? This article epitomizes one effective approach, which involves investigating specific types of public events in order to illuminate change and continuity across dynastic divides. The article focuses on the public ritual event of local officials offering prayers and sacrifices to efficacious deities when faced with natural disasters or crises. In analyzing inscriptions about thirteen officially recognized shrines in Shanxi province, Iiyama advances two original and insightful arguments. First, the north and the south developed opposite patterns of deity worship and enshrinement after 1127; second, the governing strategies of local administrators were consistent from the Northern Song into the Jin and Yuan. The article title "Maintaining Gods in Medieval China" catches the major difference in the development of popular religion between the north and the south. The south was characterized by what Valerie Hansen has shrewdly termed "changing gods," which refers to flourishing new local deities that local magnates sponsored to apply for honors and titles granted by the Southern Song dynasty. In contrast, the north was marked by "maintaining gods," which was coined by the article's translator, Macabe Keliher. It means that local deities that had received honors and titles from the Northern Song sustained their authority in local society with the support of the Jin and Yuan dynasties, while no new local deities and temples were added into official registers. The comparison laid out in Iiyama's article casts an important light on the absence [End Page 185] in the north of the southern-style localist turn, in which literati-led local elites dominated social arrangements after the twelfth century. Instead, the state remained steadfast as the predominant source of authority and legitimation for local society in north China. In a detailed case study of local officials who adhered to the precedent of temple rituals established in the Northern Song, Iiyama's article, for the first time, underscores continuity in the social and political control of north China between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. This continuity derived from the consistency of local administrations in addressing specific local concerns—such as offering rain prayers in a locality lacking sufficient water resources—regardless of dynastic changes or wartime ruptures. In practice, local officials of the Jin and Yuan treated the historical precedents established by their Northern Song predecessors as a useful repertory for drawing legitimacy, displaying authority, and exerting control. The article is representative of a new wave of social-historical work on north China that is transforming our understanding of the middle period. In addition to highlighting the north-south divergence in social and political changes after 1127, this new wave of scholarship also makes methodological contribution to the field by discovering local materials through fieldwork and working closer to the ground. jinping wang national university of singapore [End Page 186] Despite the wealth of recent research on China's middle period, local society and state control in North China under the Jin and Yuan remain unexamined.1 Work to date on middle-period history has given us a greater understanding of the economy and demographics of the Song, but it is confined to trends in the

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