Conflicted Interests of Sacred Space in Contemporary China – Mt. Wudang as A Case Study

Shin-yi Chao
Rutgers University, Camden
Thank you Shin-Yi. I learned a lot in few minutes about the contemporary issues of chinese sacred places. I am not a specialist of China, in fact I nearly don’t know anything at all, but I feel that a lot of things you told us might be said about some sacred places in Japan, or can point out very significant differences. I will try to discuss your paper from this comparative point of view. 
I. 
The sacred place you choose for this presentation is Mt. Wudang, central China, which seems to have gain its sacredness through different ways and with different guarantees and guarants: legendly attested as a place to withdrew for early daoist hermits, designated as a sacred site by a eminent Daoist master in the 9th century, proved flourishing sacred place by the Daoism by the 11th century, it had been chosen headquarters for the worship of a powerful deity, the Perfected Warrior, or the Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven, one of the few deities in China that could claim a truly nationwide worship you explained, worshipped in Daoism and in the pantheon of popular religion as well, but also revered as one of the imperial patron saints since the thirteenth century. The sacredness of Mont Wudang will even more clearly and officially be proved when the third emperor of the Ming dynasty decreed the founding of a massive temple construction project on it, but won’t loose either local basis, since ordinary people of numerous villages nearby worshipped him as a tutelary god. Mount Wudang became a most famous pilgrimage center, long distance pilgrimages started with the 14th century, and since then, Mt. Wudang has maintained its reputation as a national pilgrimage site.
	What I have roughly summarized really occurs to be a perfect curriculum for a number one sacred place. If it were a Japanese place, it would be nearly too perfect to sound real. Because there are always paradoxes, and heterogeneity in a cult, at least in Japan. Unity is often build after, looking at the past to justify a present role. What I mean is, for example : is Mount Wudang the same sacred place for the local people and for the pilgrims ? for the monk living there ? The perfect warrior seems to be the main character today but which are the other cults ? Who said for the first time that Mount Wudang is nationwide? And when ? These questions somehow may build another history of the cult, with conflicts, reconstructions and individuals creating the cult. 
	Another point in Japan would be: why do people come? What kind of benefits are they looking for? Because a deity, or a sacred place, is always linked to a specific benefit, what we call genze riyaku in japanese, and a pilgrimage or a wide cult is always link with discourses about the specific spiritual power of the place. But these discourses again are often paradoxical, and differ with the regional or the social origin of the pilgrim. 
These are only few points I wanted to share with you about the historical panorama of a sacred place. Back to Mt Wudang now.

II.
  To enter modernity is difficult for a religious place, and Mt Wudang became a subject to discuss, a seed of conflict between ideologies : was Mt Wudang an indigenous superstitious place which should be erase in the name of modernization, or a part of China’s history which should be honored – and used for the sake of the new socialist order ? This ideological dispute has also been reflected by the controversy between the local government and higher administrative. What surprised me here, and might has no counterpart in Japan’s history, is that the most opposed group was constituted by local activists, who perceived Mt. Wudang as a counter-revolutionary threat.. From a japanese point of view, its seems quite strange that local people do not try to promote local specificities. And I can’t help but think that, however the weight of ideology might have been, it would be nice to know a little bite more about conflicts of powers in the specific local area. We can consider here the problem from 2 opposite angles : when does national protect local against the local? (and I would say when the nation is strong enough to interferes in every aspects of social life). But you can put it the other way : when does the local want to destruct the local against the national point of view, and I wonder if the answer would be automatically the same.

III. 
Later in the modernization process, when Deng Xiaoping policy changed to stimulate economic growth, the government was led to a new appreciation of the mountain, linking its spiritual assets to a financial capital. It is important to note that, while academic opinions regarding the impact of tourism on the local economy have varied, central and local governments are unified to believe in pecuniary benefits of tourism. You noted that, starting in 1981, “tourism has since entered into Chinese leaders’ discourses about economic progress and is omnipresent in official documentation”. Here the sacred local place become part of the national economic capital. 
The new national policy toward Mt Wudang has been enormously successful and interfered even in the most religious aspects of the sacred place: temples on the Mountain were allowed to offer ritual services to the public and recruit priests and priestesses as well as novices. But to reshape the territory in order to attract more pilgrims, or more consumers of what became an highly cultural product, induces to erase the old pilgrimage routes (and build instead two lane roads large enough for tourist buses to use), to erase the memory of the cliffs, hills, caves, water bodies, and other sceneries that made Mt Wudang a religious place. The state not only builds the infrastructure, you said, but also creates “the images and symbolic representations that shape tourist experiences.”. I wonder if it was not exactly the same process when Mt Wudang has been slowly constructed as a nationwide cult center, with its routes, cliffs, hills, caves and sceneries extracted from the natural material. But the scale and the speed of the reshaping is certainly different.
	I don’t want to discuss here the difference you made between pilgrimage and tourism to a religious place. We all know that the two have a lot of things in common. But I still believe that they have to be distinguished, even if I don’t really know how. Would you agree to say for example that pilgrimage map the mountain has a route to do, while tourism sumarized the mountain as a point to go?

Anyway, you said that the main conflict is now no more between local and national governments, but between what administration (both local and national) want to build and the “tradition” of the sacred place. I wondered who is supporting this “tradition”? Or who is building this tradition? You mentioned in your paper the chairman of the Association of the Study of Wudang Culture, and I though that the main actors of the conflict might be the economic power on one hand, and the scholars on the other. And I felt that the place of the scholars in deciding what is a sacred place is here very specific: I don’t how if it is “chinese”, or if it’s a characteristic of modernization, but I though it was very interesting that the sacred place was discussed between the economic and the academic powers, and that the religious authority’s point of view does not come into consideration.