The Divine Nature of Power: Chinese Ritual Architecture at the Sacred Site of Jinci (review)

Tracy Miller’s expansive study of the Jinci temple complex at Jinyang, near Taiyuan, in Shanxi Province has the flavor of an archeological exploration, with each chapter revealing a different layer of the formal structures of the site and offering a contextualized reading of the reconstructed remains. The book, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 2000), traces the history of this site over 1500 years. The oldest extant buildings date to the Song period, and the chapters on the Song and Yuan periods (chapters 4–6) will be of most interest to the readers of this journal; however, the greatest strength of the study is its wide historical sweep. Miller begins with the premise that modern interpretations of the site derive from “a specific early-Qing-dynasty elite bias” and thus fail to account for the rich and contentious ritual and architectural history here (p. 14). Using a multi-disciplinary approach that calls on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Miller deconstructs the multiple and sometimes conflicting narratives of the site and its resident deities. She shows that competition between different constituencies led to the changing fortunes of two primary shrines, one dedicated to a local nature spirit (The Sage Mother, or Spirit of Jin Springs) and one honoring the ancestral spirit of the founder of a Zhou Dynasty fiefdom in this region (Shu Yu of Tang).

The first two chapters introduce the site and the interpretive difficulties presented by its unusual layout and complicated history. The author first sets up the central conundrums that have puzzled architectural historians: why does Jinci not conform to the standard rectilinear north-south configuration of most ritual compounds in China? Who are the two primary deities resident at this site and how can we understand the differing social and political forces that brought them together at this place? How are changing ritual practices expressed in the architectural form? In the heavily illustrated second chapter, Miller walks the reader through the site. Much of this chapter reads like a traditional gazetteer, as the author deftly catalogues each building and topographical feature, describes its appearance, and provides a history of name changes and repairs. She then turns to a philological review of the site’s name, exploring the alternate meanings of Jin (晉) and ci (祠), thereby demonstrating that the name itself encodes the ambiguity of the site as “an ancestral temple to the Jin rulers [the descendents of Shu Yu] or a temple dedicated to a powerful Jin nature spirit” (p. 34). Chapters 3–6 elaborate on these two contending identifications of the divine power emanating from this sacred precinct.

In Chapter Three, Miller painstakingly explores the biography of Shu Yu, the exact location of his fief in Shanxi, and the geo-political history of this region from the Zhou through the Ming. Her materials range impressively from the earliest textual references in Zuozhuan and Lüshi chunqiu to the most recent archeological literature, imperial histories, and local gazetteers. Her investigation shows that Shu Yu’s domain was most likely located to the south of the present site of Jinci, but that Jinyang later became an important political center and outpost of Chinese authority in this border region. This in turn allowed Han Dynasty historians to assert that Jinyang was “the location of the Shang fief of Tang that had been given to Shu Yu” at the beginning of the Western Zhou (p. 56), thus providing the historical impetus for locating Shu Yu’s ancestral shrine here. Although some of this chapter’s detailed investigation seems tedious to this reader, the importance of its findings becomes apparent in Chapter Four, when Miller reconstructs the earliest shrines to Shu Yu at this site from Northern Wei, Tang, and Song textual records. From this evidence, she asserts that Shu Yu’s...