Chinese Cultural Unity as Seen from the Wuyuan Code of Sacrifice

Principal Investigator

PUK Wing Kin

Total Fund Awarded

HK$164,980

Funding Source

RGC General Research Fund
(2017/2018)

Abstract of Project

        This project explores the religious and social landscape of Wuyuan of Huizhou. Its major historical archives is the Huangshe Chuanyuan Sidian隍社川源祀典( The Code of sacrifice to cities, shrines, valleys and rivers), a Daoist text containing not only names of well-known Daoist deities, but also names of many villages, shrines, temples and bridges of Wuyuan. This text therefore provides us with a rare opportunity to locate the practice of popular Daoist practices within the specific landscape of Wuyuan. This project demonstrates how this Daoist text appropriates the official Confucian ideology of the imperial Chinese state to bring all the “obedient” and unruly deities into the grand religious universe of Wuyuan, thereby realizing cultural unity through “orthopraxy”.