Counting the Monks: The 1736-1739 Census of the Chinese Clergy

Part 1. Ideology and Practice -- Good and bad clerics

The quantitative approach has, since the 1950s, deeply changed our knowledge of the history of religions in the West, especially for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, this methodology has barely been applied to the history of Chinese religions. Although this situation may be partly explained by sinological tradition, it should be observed that it is also the result of the nature of the currently available sources. Many of the quantitative studies done by Western historians were based upon archives. The archival situation in the West is very different from that in China: there was no Chinese equivalent of a bishop ordering reports on church attendance, and nothing comparable to parish registrars. Yet there was state control of the clergy, but the Chinese central archives have not yet yielded much serial data on religious institutions. Local archives--the next revolution--are slowly beginning to open. As for non-state archives, especially for monasteries, temples, and associations, they have either disappeared or are still unavailable. No scholar has yet had access to a substantial amount of such sources.

The treasure-trove for quantitative-minded China historians, the local gazetteers, are quite disappointing for the quantitative study of religions. They do include lists of temples ² but their demographic sections do not normally count the clerics, ³ nor do fiscal sections inform us about landholdings of the religious institutions. Gazetteers of religious institutions rarely include much quantitative material. In order to estimate the numerical importance of the religious institutions, one has to rely on guesswork based upon specific cases or to come by chance upon a specific documentation. It is also possible to venture quantitative analysis of non-quantitative data, which is usually very arduous. I plan to chart the state of the field and the possibilities in this regard in a forthcoming paper; I would like here to introduce and analyse one exceptional--and probably unique--document coming from imperial archives, namely the Yellow Registers (huangce) prepared by the Board of Rites (Libu) summarising the results of the census of all the clerics in the country during 1736-1739.

In the present preliminary study, it is not possible to give the complete data under discussion, nor to provide an overview of all the possible analyses that they afford. I will only deal cursorily with the data pertaining to the Buddhist clergy and go into deeper detail for the Taoist population. Some observations, however, will equally apply to both populations, most notably the general introduction to clergy control and to the registration procedures of the 1736-1739 campaign. These form the first part of the article. The discussion of the data themselves, in the second part, will revolve around three main questions, namely: (1) the reconstruction of the total figures at the national level, (2) the compared importance of the Buddhist and Taoist populations, and (3) the geographical distributions of the various Taoist orders. Because of the lack of comparable evidence for other periods, I will not try a diachronic approach, but will focus upon the clerical geography of the early Qianlong period.

Managing the monks

Bureaucratic control of the Chinese clergy has existed since the Six Dynasties period. The system grew in complexity over successive dynasties. Although many informative studies have been written about specific periods and specific institutions, ⁴ a comprehensive study concerning the whole early modern and late imperial periods remains to be done. This will have to go beyond the anecdotal evidence and look for long term strategies used by the state to reduce the independence of the religious institutions. Such a study should also balance out the theoretical injunctions in the main collections of jurisprudence ⁵ with the factual data contained in religious epigraphy and gazetteers.

The clerical (or rather anticlerical) laws of the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties all held in common some basic...