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115 C H A P T E R 5 Tales from the Jianghu The Taidong Lantern Festival procession winds a tightening spiral through the city’s Japanese-era grid of downtown streets and alleys. The center of the spiral, the procession’s endpoint, is the courtyard of the city’s oldest and largest temple, the Tianhou Gong. As the gods and their retinues arrive, they are ushered, two by two, into the spacious courtyard to pay obeisance to the temple’s patron, the goddess Mazu.1 Each troupe tries to upstage the others in energetic displays of ritual zeal. Groups of young, barefoot trance performers, called “sorcerer’s troupes” (H. hoat-a tin), act out wild, animated possessions, lacerating head and back with spike balls (ci qiu), swords, and ice saws; the martial troupes execute complex, spectacular routines; and finally, the gods themselves are carried forward in their carved hardwood sedan chairs, the bearers bouncing and bobbing through a continuous barrage of exploding firecrackers. After the visiting god salutes Mazu, the troupes next in line, who have been waiting impatiently to make their own grand entrance, begin to push their way in. Their performances concluded , the troupes at the front file out into the street through the side gates. Clear of the crowds and commotion, assistants wipe the blood and sweat from detranced mediums, and the whole entourage begins a quiet, exhausted trek back to the home temple. Returning to their familiar confines, the nearly spent performers must regroup one more time for the festival’s final act: the homecoming of the patron god. At martial deity temples fielding troupes of spirit soldiers, the ritual is especially dramatic. Summoning the last of their energy and inspiration, the performers line up and run through one more sequence of drills and stances. Fanning out to the sides of the temple courtyard, they clear a path and stand guard as scores of devotees queue up to crawl, one by one, under the god’s palanquin (H. ng kio-khah). Over the two days of the procession, the god in his palanquin has accepted thousands of sacrificial offerings, been hailed by dozens of other gods, and vanquished innumerable demons and ghosts. At this moment, then, the god, the conveyance, and all the sub- 116 gods, ghosts, and gangsters sidiary deities and objects carried on it, have acquired an unusual but temporary bounty of efficacious power. By crawling underneath, devotees may absorb some of this momentarily enhanced power, hoping for protection against ill fortune and the attacks of baleful forces. At last, men of the temple’s core group gather to unbind and lift the god’s image from the sedan chair, pass it through the smoke of the main incense burner, and ceremoniously reinstall it on the main altar. The assembly follows the god into the main hall to make a final offering , as the spirit soldiers retire to a side chapel, where they are ritually “decommissioned.” They shed their costumes, wash off the face paint, and change back into street clothes. One by one, they drift back into the courtyard to join the others on benches or at the round tables set out for the feast to come. There is rice, meat, vegetables, soups, and chilled, if not quite cold, liter bottles of beer. Like the biweekly propitiatory feeding of ghostly soldiers and generals, this feast is a rewarding of the troupes, set outside in an open, public space. In graphic confirmation of the allusion, many of the ritual actors sport vivid tattoos of demon heads, tigers, and dragons, badges of toughness and comradeship. These telltale marks identify the bearers as daoshang xiongdi, “brothers of the [dark] way.”2 For much of Chinese history, tattoos were marks of deviance, associated with outcast, subaltern status (C. Reed 2000:361). Facial tattoos were stipulated as punishment for certain crimes, a stigma that permanently marked a convict as a social pariah. Often tattooing was combined with exile or military conscription. But within Chinese military culture, tattoos came to mark membership in a fraternity of marginalized men that included hardened warriors and righteous hero-bandits, as well as bullying government runners and street toughs (ibid.:368 passim). Men from the margins of society were already the most likely to find themselves in the military’s lower ranks; the jianghu was, in turn, a natural refuge for demobilized soldiers. Circulating through the imperial military system, among prison guards and state enforcers , rural bandits and urban gangs, tattoos became...

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