Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000 by Susan Naquin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000 by Susan Naquin Vincent Goossaert Susan Naquin, Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xv, 538 pp. US$305 (hb). 978-90-04-51641-0 Mount Tai 泰山 (Taishan) and its gods deserve a monumental study. Naquin's book, in the making for some fifteen years and long awaited by the scholarly community, is as towering, rock-solid, impressive, and memorable as its subject. At a length that most presses would not even want to hear about, printed in a large format with two columns per page, and luxuriously illustrated—138 images in-text, most of them in color, not to mention maps, graphs, and tables—this is nothing short of an amazing book. The writing is as beautiful as the visual object: Naquin's renowned prose—utterly devoid of jargon and fashionable terms, surgically precise, and ever critical of any assumption (whether in the sources, in her own writing, or in our reading)—is at the same time elegant and attempts to tell the story from the perspective of ordinary Chinese. For the book tells a story: that of the Jade Maiden (Yunü 玉女), a broken stone statue found atop Taishan (then barren and devoid of any built structure) during the preparations for the fengshan 封禪 sacrifices performed on the mountain by Song emperor Zhenzong 宋真宗 in 1008. The hazily-defined deity was modestly enshrined there and survived [End Page 162] for a few centuries, honored by occasional visitors. She was adopted by a combination of court members, Daoist clerics, and pilgrims, and started to gain a foothold at the foot of the mountain, and then in villages ever further away. The cult grew steadily from the fifteenth century onwards and soon her temples were found throughout the north China plain. She was then called by a variety of names and titles including Holy mother (Shengmu 聖母), Heavenly immortal (Tianxian 天仙), Master of the Azure Cloud (Bixia yuanjun 碧霞元君), and My Lady (niangniang 娘娘), assigned various stories—daughter of the Great Sovereign of the Eastern Peak 東嶽大帝, female alchemical virtuoso, flying bird-like fairy—and represented in forms varying from the alluring young woman, over stern matron and smiling granny, to an almost androgynous figure of authority. Naquin describes with unflinching attention to detail and context these variations in time, space, and medium. Then, by the mid-Qing, this phase of expansion gives way to consolidation; new temples and images keep appearing, but the goddess is now part of the landscape—both figuratively and literally speaking—and finds herself ever more conflated and even confused within a larger mass of female protective deities, found everywhere but with few individual traits. To tell this story of the slow emergence, spectacular success, and then routinization of the goddess both at her original home, Taishan, and in thousands of villages, neighborhoods, and hills, Naquin uses the framework of material culture and the concept of familiarity. This concept, which would deserve to be more fully developed and explored, is based on the idea that people could accept a new deity—the Taishan goddess—on the condition that she seemed familiar enough and was thus represented in media and in demeanors that made sense to them. From this perspective, religious change, such as the success story of a goddess, is not one of bold innovation but rather slow adaptation to the material conditions that prevail locally and remain very stable over the longue durée. For this reason an important part of the book is devoted to describing the physical architecture of her temples and the materials for her images: stone, wood, clay, bronze, and iron for her statues, and canvas and paper for painting and woodblock printing. For each of these materials, Naquin details with great care their sources and local availability, their cost, the presence of technical skills, and the market. In so doing, she offers a lesson in methodology, never taking anything for granted, and constantly asking fundamental questions—who? where? how much? Measuring surviving images of the goddess, for instance, allows her to argue that bronze was mostly used for small...