Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage: The Confucian Transformation of Popular Culture in Late Imperial Huizhou (review)

Qitao Guo's most recent book is a fascinating study of the complex interplay between elite and popular and commercial and religious forces shaping the society of the Huizhou region (southern Anhui and northeastern Jiangxi) in late imperial China, an area that produced extraordinarily wealthy merchants and an impressively high percentage of successful scholars within the imperial examination system. Guo first describes the socioeconomic circumstances surrounding the development of what he calls "mercantile lineages," the "gentry-guided and merchant-based kinship communities that dominated the Huizhou social landscape" during the period (p. 3). He then explores how the Indie Buddhist myth Mulian Rescues His Mother from Hell, first introduced in China around the third century C.E., had by the sixteenth century been transformed into a Confucian ritual opera that served as a focal point of major lineage ritual practices in Huizhou. Guo argues persuasively that in both content and ritual structure and context, the popular Mulian opera was manipulated by mercantile lineage elites (both gentry and merchant) to express Neo-Confucian values that had been modified to embrace the commercialism of the ethically motivated merchants who produced the wealth on which the lineage organizations thrived. Exploring two chief questions, "How did Huizhou local society and popular Mulian performance interact, and what were the characteristics of traditional Chinese popular culture as revealed in Huizhou Mulian" (p. 1), Guo adopts a polyvalent strategy within a localized approach: he draws on primary sources such as gazetteers, genealogies, and private journals, as well as both elite and "popular" scripted versions of the Mulian opera to investigate social, cultural, economic, gender-related, and ethicoreligious forces at work in the construction of local Huizhou society.

Guo's expertise in the Huizhou culture of the Ming-Qing era, and in particular the elite "remodeling" of popular ritual elements, was clearly established in his previous work Exorcism and Money: The Symbolic World of the Five-Fury Spirits in Late Imperial China.¹ His new book covers some of the same territory, offering a greatly expanded discussion of the interplay of gentry and merchant elements of Huizhou society (chapters 1 and 2) and a condensed (but still fascinating) reprise of his discussion of the mid-Ming transformation of the Wuchang , or FiveFury Spirits, into gods of wealth that were subservient to Huizhou-lineage tutelary deities and charged with policing the chastity of lineage females (chapter 6). Guo's new work breaks ground in two major areas. First, he situates his investigation of Huizhou mercantile lineage popular culture within a framework that directly implicates the late imperial paradigms of gentry society and Confucian values, paradigms avoided as "outdated" by most current scholarship on Chinese popular culture. This current study is proof that Guo's more integrated approach can be extremely fruitful. Second, Guo's focus on Mulian ritual opera as an effective vehicle for furthering the gentry dominance of local lineage society and the merchant acquisition of lineage cultural capital vastly expands current understanding beyond the exorcistic and dramatic functions that have been the primary focus of previous Mulian research.

The book is divided into three parts: "The Setting," "The Script," and "The Performance." Relying on previously published Chinese-language works as well as his own extensive review of primary sources, Guo presents in part 1 some of the most dense, challenging, and broad-ranging material of the book. Chapter 1 establishes Huizhou as an important center of Song dynasty Neo-Confucian thought, focusing on the teachings of famous Huizhou native Zhu Xi (1130-1200) (pp. 12-19), then traces the establishment of important Huizhou lineage institutions including the composition of genealogies, the setting up of corporate lands, and the building of increasingly lavish freestanding ancestral halls that supported this strong, gentry-led mercantile lineage society. Guo discusses several genealogies (and their extensive litanies of lineage rules and ideology) in detail but somewhat...