Guan Yu
The Religious Afterlife of a Failed Hero, by Barend J. ter Haar
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9739580 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Burton-Rose (0000-0002-7852-1872, Northern Arizona University), Daniel Burton‐Rose (Northern Arizona University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 134 |
| Issue | 569 |
| Pages | 942-943 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-10 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/cez142 |
| OpenAlex | W2954797028 |
| Language | EN |
Guan Yu is one of the most pervasive deities of the Chinese cultural realm. Burly, glowering, and often armed with a halberd, it is no accident that nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries dubbed him ‘the God of War’. His icon can serve as the Sinitic corollary of the belligerent American ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag, as with the 2017 erection of a 100-foot Guan Yu statue by a Chinese community in Indonesia in response to ethno-religious tensions. The image of ‘Thearch Guan’ (Guandi) is so widespread that it has done duty as a synecdoche for Chinese culture itself, as with his crude likeness in early twentieth-century Hollywood depictions of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Writing the biography of a deity is not an easy task. It is a demanding subset of reception history, in which the agency of each new cohort of the faithful dynamically engages with past elements of a distinctive persona, eliding
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Chinatown · Guan · HERO · Humanities · Literature · Pilgrimage · Protestantism · Asian Studies and History · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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