Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: The Handan Rain Shrine in Modern Chinese History

WATER TO IRON, WIDOWS TO WARLORDS: THE HANDAN RAIN SHRINE IN MODERN CHINESE HISTORY* Kenneth Pomeranz On September 22, 1867, Wan Qingli, the President of the Board of Rites, reported the completion of an unusual errand. In the midst of a severe drought, during which repeated prayers at Imperial shrines had been unavailing , Wan was dispatched to a well at Shengjinggang (Ridge of the Sacred Well) in Handan xian, 350 miles from Beijing. First, he performed sacrifices at a temple built over the well. Second, he ordered the removal of one of several iron tablets lying at the bottom of the well; he then escorted this tablet to Beijing, where it was placed on an altar in the Forbidden City. When rain fell within three days, the tablet was gratefully returned, along with a gold-plated one conferred by the emperor.1 For the next sixty years, officiais regularly "borrowed" tablets from this well when other rites had failed to end severe droughts, and always obtained rain shortly thereafter; they then returned both the borrowed tablet and an additional tablet. By the 1920s, the well was filled with scores, perhaps even hundreds, of tablets. Wan's pilgrimage marked the first time that any officiai higher than a county magistrate had ever paid attention to this shrine, though local people had been praying there for at least 700 years. Similar incorporations of long-standing popular cults into the system of state ritual occurred frequently throughout imperial history. Inevitably the move to state sponsorship changed the structure and context of local practices. When this transition was negotiated successfully, it strengthened the integration of state and society . The story of Handan is unusual because Shengjinggang was added to the imperially-sponsored canon so late. This allows us to use the accounts of newspapers and foreigners to supplement official records, enhancing our understanding of a long-lived pattern of state-society interaction. As an example *My thanks to Ann Anagnost, Maureen Graves, Robert Moeller, Susan Naquin, Timothy Tackett, Laurence G. Thompson, R. Bin Wong, three anonymous reviewers, and the participants in the Southern California China Colloquium session on "Popular Religion and the State in Late Imperial China," for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Joyce Madancy for her help in locating two crucial documents. 1 Handan xianzhi (Local History of Handan County) 1933, juan 3:25a. Late Imperial China Vol. 12, No. 1 (June 1991): 62-99© by the Society for Qing Studies 62 Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: The Handan Rain Shrine63 of unsuccessful incorporation it provides a new perspective on more successful cases, and on the disintegration of the imperial political and cosmological order in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After Wan Qingli's pilgrimage, the Shengjinggang shrine was officially "normalized." This process involved redefining who was being worshipped (from the Mother of the Dragon God to the Dragon God himself), and what agents produced rain. Efficacy was relocated both in social terms—from the massive exertions of the whole community to the virtue of a single official— and in physical terms—from the well's own water to the portable iron tablets given by worshippers. The transformation of the shrine clashed with numerous elements of local popular culture. Various aspects of local worship at Shengjinggang—particularly the prominent role that widows played in the local rites—had been subjects of elite disapproval for at least the previous 100 years. When the national government took an interest in the shrine, it actively attacked those elements of local worship which hostile gentry had previously simply disdained. Tracing these efforts allows us to look at relations between official and popular culture in the late Imperial period, and at changes in the state's use of "traditional" sacrifices in the twilight of empire. Eventually, the state's efforts killed off local popular interest in this shrine. Yet as officials pursued their appropriation and ideological offensive, they also compromised one of the notions that allegedly justified state actions: that ritual should be a display of the official virtue that ordered society. During its initial adoption of Shengjinggang (1867), the state compromised these ideas, as it often had in earlier crises...