Acknowledgments
This book has taken many years to complete, and we have accumulated many debts of gratitude. We benefited greatly from the assistance and encouragement of the following scholars at different stages, and hope we responded to at least some of their suggestions: Adam Chau, Huang Shu-min, Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Vincent Goossaert, Robert Langer, Liu Jiacheng, Liu Xun, James L. (Woody) Watson and Ying Zhang all gave feedback on earlier drafts or presentations. Melissa Brown, Carolyn Cartier, Chuang Ying-chang, Thomas Dubois, Paul Katz, Dan McMahon, Richard Maddox, Susan Naquin, Tim Oakes, Paul Pickowicz and Rubie Watson each prepared formal written comments for conference sessions. Siyen Fei (Ch. 1), Chen Yung-fa (Chs. 3 and 5), and Françoise Robin (Ch. 5) sent us meticulous critiques; and Katy Carlitz (Ch. 1), and Benno Weiner (Ch. 5), Ho Ts’ui-p’ing and Luca Zan (Chs. 6 and 7), and Tobie Meyer-Fong (Ch. 8) made many valuable suggestions. Paul Katz kindly read the whole manuscript and raised a great number of thoughtful and constructive questions at the last stage of preparation. We are also grateful to Shin-yi Chao, who brought Xiaofei into the project in 2003, to Chen Xia, Peng Wenbin, Teng Xing and Zhuoma who helped make initial contacts in Songpan; to Yeshe Wodsal Atsok, Pema Wangyal, Ai Junchuan, Ma Xinmin, Liu Xinming for their generous help with Chinese and Tibetan sources and terms; the botanist Holger Perner who described his work at Huanglong in a long interview. We are also much indebted to Qin Higley, Victoria Menson and Maria Baluch at Brill for bringing this book to publication. All errors, of course, remain our own.
We must offer our special thanks to the many people whom we spent time with at Songpan. They ranged from pilgrims, monks, priests, temple and mosque managers to taxi drivers, business owners, tour guides, office workers, school teachers as well as ordinary villagers from Han Chinese, Hui, Tibetan and Qiang communities. Their stories have been a constant source of inspiration. We are particularly grateful to the entire He family, who provided a comfortable home for Xiaofei during her visits in one spring break and several summers from 2004 to 2009, and they treated both Xiaofei and Donald with wonderful hospitality. We are also very grateful to the elderly Songpan men and women who warmly shared with us their religious worlds and their life stories: He Popo, Dong Popo, Dengpei, Liu Qirong, Ma Qixiang, Ren Yongxiang, Tsabtsa lama, Wang Tianfu, Wang Youcai, Zhang Zeming, and Zou Xiaochu. Some of them have already passed away, and our book keeps alive our fond memories of them. We also benefited greatly from the help of our local Sichuanese and Tibetan interpreters: Li Quan, Li Li, Suolangta and family, Gengsemu and Badengcuo. We also thank Cheng Jinxiu for making arrangements for our stay at Huanglong in 2003 and Ma Delong for discussing the compilers’ work on the 1999 Songpan gazetteer.
We would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the following institutions: two collaborative research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2004–5 and 2006–7), a Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship (2006), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2007), and faculty development grants from Carnegie Mellon University and St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
This book would not have been possible without the unfailing support of our families. Xiaofei expresses her deepest appreciation to Wang Wei and Alex and to her family and Wang Wei’s in Beijing; special thanks to Alex, who tagged along on field work and produced maps and technical support whenever needed. Donald gives his deepest thanks to Mei-yu and to Jeremy, who imperceptibly transformed into a software engineer during the book’s preparation, and to Mark and Fiona, who married and parented Kiana and Tyler before we were finished.
We presented earlier drafts or offshoots from the manuscript at a number of conferences and are grateful for comments from panelists and other participants: Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, 2005; Workshop on “Casting Faiths,” National University of Singapore, 2005; Fifth International Conference on Diversities in Organizations, Communities, Nations, Beijing, 2005; Chinese Association for the Sociology of Religion, Minorities University, Kunming, 2005; Conference on [Im]permanence: Cultures in/out of Time, Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005; Annual Meeting of the Academy of American Religion, Philadelphia, 2005; 35th Annual Mid-Atlantic Regional Association for Asian Studies (MAR/AAS) Conference, Seton Hall University, 2006; Annual Conference of the Association for Social Anthropology, London Metropolitan University, 2007; Conference on the Anthropology of Southwest China, Dali, China, 2007; International Symposium on Quanzhen Daoism in Modern Chinese Society and Culture, Center for Chinese Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 2007; Workshop on “Women and Faith-Based Development: Mixing Money and Morality,” International Gender Studies Centre, University of Oxford, 2007; Conference on Ritual Dynamics, Ruprecht-Karls Universität, 2008; Critical Han Studies Conference, Stanford, 2008; Southeast Region Association for Asian Studies, Hilton Head (SC), 2008; 15th Provincial China Workshop, Macau, China, November 2010; Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, 2012; Fourth International Conference on Sinology, Academia Sinica, 2012; and Fu-jen Catholic University, Taipei, 2014.
One or other of us also presented invited papers at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh (2007); Wuhan University (2007), Guizhou University, Guiyang (2007), Harvard East Asia Center (2007); Ohio State University, Columbus (2011); Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei (2013); Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei (2013) and we thank the organizers and those who commented.
Several chapters (chiefly 5, 8 and 9) contain passages revised from previously published materials: Kang and Sutton, “Purity and Pollution: From Pilgrimage Center to World Heritage Park,” in (Im)permanence in Art and Cultural History, eds. Stephen Brockmann and Judith Schachter (Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State University Press, 2008); Kang, “Two Temples, Three Religions, and a Tourist Attraction: Contesting Sacred Space on China’s Ethnic Frontier,” Modern China 35.3 (2009); Sutton and Kang, “Recasting Religion and Ethnicity: Tourism and Socialism in Northern Sichuan, 1992–2005,” in Thomas Dubois, ed., Casting Faiths: The Construction of Religion in East and Southeast Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sutton and Kang, “Making Tourists and Remaking Locals: Religion, Ethnicity, and Patriotism on Display in Northern Sichuan,” in Tim Oakes and Donald Sutton, eds., Faiths on Display: Religion, Tourism, and the Chinese State (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Sutton, “Transfers of a Ritual at a Northern Sichuan Site: Tibetan and Han Chinese Pilgrims, and Han Chinese Tourists,” in Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, vol. V, I: Transfer and Spaces: Ritual Transfer, eds. Gita Dharampal-Frick and Robert Langer (Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2010); Sutton, “Ngaba in the 1950s: From United Front to Democratic Reform on the Pastoral Frontier,” in Bianqu lishi yu zhutixing xingsu 邊區歷史與主題性形塑 (Shaping Frontier History and Its Subjectivity), ed. 謝國興 Kuo-hsing Hsieh (Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei). We thank the publishers or editors for permission to republish parts of the above works.
We are grateful for assistance at many libraries and archives: In the PRC, the Beijing Library, the National Library of Beijing, the Shanghai Library, the Sichuan University Library, the Sichuan Archives at Chengdu and the Second Historical Archives, Nanjing; in Taiwan, the Fu Ssu-nien Library and those of the Institute of Modern History and the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taiwan; in the U.S., the Harvard-Yenching Institute Library and the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh (notably Zhang Haihui and Zou Xiuying of the East Asian division), the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution Archives; and in Europe, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Cambridge, UK; and the UNESCO Archives, Paris.