Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000-2000.

• Author: Ma, Zhujun

Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000-2000. By SUSAN NAQUIN. Leiden: BRILL, 2022. Pp. xv + 538. $305.

As the axis mundi of the political cosmography crucially associated with the legitimacy of the imperial regime throughout premodern Chinese history, Mount Tai deserves more book-length attention from Western scholars beyond Edouard Chavannes (1910) and Brian Dott (2004). Susan Naquin's Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000-2000 is a groundbreaking work that shifts the paradigm to locate Mount Tai in the regional materiality of everyday culture in the Greater North China plain (hereafter North China). The chosen subject of this everyday culture is the female principal god of Mount Tai, best known as the Master of the Azure Clouds (Bixia Yuanjun [phrase omitted], hereafter Yuanjun), and other gods. From her beginnings as a little-known god on Mount Tai in 1008, Yuanjun has grown to become one of the most popular gods in North China today. She has attracted countless pilgrims from across North China, including the imperial families of the Ming and Qing dynasties and commoners alike. Her cult expanded across North China with her temples being gradually constructed and rooted in local communities.

Naquin's book is a comprehensive history and an unprecedented contribution to our knowledge of Mount Tai and its gods from the perspective of material culture in North China. In addition to the introductory chapter and the appendices noting her primary sources, Naquin arranges the remaining fourteen chapters into four parts in a chronological framework. Part 1 traces Yuanjun's under-researched early history from the Song until the late Ming. Naquin zooms out to situate Yuanjun in the shifting religious landscape of the Song dynasty and beyond. She makes excellent use of material evidence to fill the gaps left by limited textual sources. Part 2 begins by presenting graphic visualizations of the quantitative data of the geographic expansion of Yuanjun temples in the Ming dynasty based on gazetteers. Naquin lays out the diverse, unsystematic efforts by different social groups to spread Yuanjun's popularity and gives sojourning pilgrims most of the credit. Part 3 further demonstrates how Yuanjun's iconography of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries might have been recognized, understood, mediated, and replicated by pilgrims traveling between Mount Tai and their local...