As it is with most academic books, this one will not be to be the final word on its subject—that is, witches and witchcraft in China. It is also not the first word, though research on the fear of witches and witchcraft in Chinese culture is surprisingly limited. This is in part because the lack of sufficiently detailed sources makes historical research on this topic difficult, but also because very few academics have engaged in substantial fieldwork on this brand of fear in the Chinese context. The few times that Western ethnographers did delve into this topic, they limited themselves to so-called ethnic minorities. Chinese researchers rarely use the analytical categories of witches and witchcraft, but subsume such practices and practitioners in the ambiguous category of wu
I try to point to my intellectual debts in my annotations, but as always by far the most significant debts that I have accrued over the years are to my former students. They were perhaps not always aware of their crucial role in my own academic endeavors, but without them as my “laboratory” I could not have written this book. Especially significant for this project were Yves Menheere (as always and especially gratefully), Gabe van Beijeren Bergen en Henegouwen, Suzanne Burdorf, Gao Yu, Lincoln (Lik Hang) Tsui, Wu Junqing, Yuan Ai, Zhang Qingren, Christine Liu-Kundt and many others. The final version was edited for style and English by Nelson Landry, whose efforts have greatly improved my argumentation as well.
Over the past few years, I have presented (very) early versions of my thinking in academic lectures all over the place and received valuable feedback from the audience. Since I do not keep tabs on my listeners and often integrate these comments unaware of their source, I apologize to my colleagues for leaving many of them unnamed. The following is therefore a most incomplete selection of acknowledgements. Wilt Idema led me to the tracks of the Cat Demon that now forms the subject of Chapter 8. I hope he likes what this book has now become. Wolfgang Behringer invited me to a workshop in 2006 that dealt with the fear of witches on a global scale. At the time I was extremely hesitant to continue with my project, since I saw no path forwards through the scattered and fragmentary sources. Henrietta Harrison and Justin Winslett asked just the right questions when I gave a talk on the subject in the early 2010s at the University of Oxford, when I had started thinking again about this topic as a book project. In 2013, Lyndall Roper invited me for a talk that opened my eyes to a breadth of British scholarship on the topic that would prove to be crucial to my own understanding.
Over the past years I have used the Chinese studies libraries in Oxford, Leiden, Heidelberg, and Hamburg, meeting helpful librarians everywhere. I am also grateful for the digital facilities (CrossAsia) maintained by the State Library of Berlin and the rapid assistance whenever I had some kind of request. Thanks to my Oxford graduate students Dongsob Ahn, Li Na and Lincoln Tsui, I was able to build a digital library that now travels with me wherever I go. During the academic vacations, in the evenings when libraries were usually closed, and more recently during the recurring Covid 19 lockdowns, having so many sources directly available on an external hard disk (now backed up three times) has proven to be very useful.
Regarding editorial procedures, some readers will note that I publish this book in a series wherein I am also one of the editors. In this particular case, I effectively stepped down and the peer-review procedure was managed directly by Albert Hoffstädt at Brill. I kept out of it and fretted as much as any other author about the final result of the procedure. Obviously, I am also grateful to the two readers for approving the publication of my book and suggesting improvements and corrections. Needless to say, any mistakes or errors of interpretation, translation and my use of the English language remain my own.
This book was written and largely researched in the late 2010s. It was completed in the course of 2021, with a final rewrite in the summer of 2023 and more editing in the spring of 2024. During the decade in question, I did not live “at home” during large parts of the year. While meeting people in person and sharing food and drinks with them at the same table is infinitely better, I am most grateful to the developers of various methods for long distance communication, ranging from email to Skype, Zoom, Whatsapp and more. They enabled me to stay in touch with my significant others, colleagues and students even when I was hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and many time zones ahead—or behind. To Laurens and Merijn, I can only say that this book is another child of mine and I look forward to your own academic “babies” in the near future. To the women in my life, I want to express my deepest felt gratitude for their companionship and apologize for being a research fanatic.