De Jiao - A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas: Purple Qi from the East

PREFACE

PREFACE M y interest in De Jiao arose in 1993. At the time, I was doing ethnographic fieldwork amongst Chinese traders of a small town in northeast Thailand, and was led to the temples of this religious movement by the important services its priests provided locally, which included the organization of funerals in accordance with Chinese “tradition”. During the next decade, I occasionally visited De Jiao associations in other parts of Thailand and attended some of their rituals. I collected, however, most of the materials for the present book between 2003 and 2005, thanks to a Senior Fellowship from the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France) and a Research Grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation also granted publication subsidy to the present book. I am grateful to both institutions for their support, as well as to De Jiao leaders, mediums, and followers for their cooperation. Their answers to what must have seemed to them my incongruous and sometimes irrelevant questions required great patience. Finally, the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore , through a three-month Senior Research Fellowship in 2007, helped me a lot with the editing work. xv ...