A number of confluent factors in Chinese history relatively unrelated to colonialism account for the growing significance that we may attribute to popular cosmology in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), particularly the divinatory practices. First of all, in the long-term perspective divination lost some of its political functions after the Song dynasty (960–1279), and increasingly became a private practice during the Yuan (1271–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. It was privatized in a double sense: while it became open to individuals growing numbers of private diviners served the public as a means of subsistence. The Qing heterodoxy and anti-rebellion law bears witness to the intense state vigilance against popular divination and derived forms of ‘deluding the people’. Second, the destitution of increasingly large parts of the peasantry, particularly during the course of the Qing period, is a factor of intrinsic importance to the role that folk-religious practices may have played in local com-munities and to the number of rural specialists attempting to extract a living from such practices. Yet we must be aware that the relation-ship between poverty and beliefs in supernatural forces is a complex one. Third, and intimately connected with these other trends, was a sharply rising number of rebellions in the Qing, met with increasingly intolerant state power. While military operations in the early part of the dynasty were targeted at non-Chinese peoples, after the middle of the eighteenth century they were turned against internal religious rebellions. During this period nearly all rebellions had religious
gathering points and most were staged by blacklisted sectarian organizations with religious emblems (Yang C.K. 1970: 207, 219).
Much evidence points to divination becoming increasingly power-ful in late imperial China, particularly during the Qing. A massive Qing encyclopedia from 1726 devotes over 2,000 pages to fortune-tellers and mantic techniques,1 while another index is Yuan Shushan’s monumental Biographies of Diviners,2 of which about one-third are from the Qing period. Western sojourners constantly commented on the prevalence of divination in the Qing. Despite their hostility to all kinds of ‘superstition’ and possible exaggeration of the situation to justify their civilizing mission, the general picture may hold. Richard J.
Smith concludes, ‘where evidence exists from the Chinese side, whether in the form of official documents, letters, anecdotes, proverbs, popular fiction, or scholarly indictments of fortune-telling, it almost invariably confirms the accuracy of Western accounts’ (Smith R. 1991:
6). Taken together, Chinese and Western sources indicate that divin-ation was a social phenomenon of extraordinary importance.
The present chapter is concerned with historical change and its aims are twofold. One is to trace how the Western view of fengshui has changed radically through modern history, briefly looking at the early period from around 1600, but with an emphasis on the period after 1850. We shall see how Western scholars, missionaries, so-journers, travellers and imperial employees have accounted for fengshui, but also a number of Chinese sources will be consulted, indicating Chinese opinions and sentiments. The other aim is more complex: through these sources we catch glimpses of the changing orientation of the fengshui tradition itself over the historical period covered. I shall assemble these scattered fragments into a larger portrait, pursuing the argument that people’s images of the non-rational to a large extent reflect the vital political and social issues of their time: when the overall conditions of life change and new challenges occur, fengshui is among the important means for people to reflect upon everyday experiences, create meaning and attempt to manage the unknown. Yet increasing foreign presence in China and the growing attention that foreigners granted to fengshui through the 1860s is in itself a crucial factor in the formation of fengshui as a critical element of the Chinese national identity in the later part of the colonial era. While the most important conditions for a general growth of popular cosmology were found in the Qing dynasty – despotic state power, attempts to force uniformity and epidemic destitution among the lower classes – the ruling elite retained a
sceptical attitude to metaphysical speculation and mostly suppressed it in public. In the later colonial period, however, the Chinese im-perial government adopted fengshui as a means of fighting the colonial powers by playing on popular anti-foreign sentiments as well as taking note of the foreign respect for ‘native religion’.
THEPERIODUPTO1800: LITTLEAWARENESS
When the Portuguese settled in Malacca in 1537 as a result of Euro-pean seaborne expansion, direct and lasting contacts were estab-lished. In the following decades a host of missionaries from all the Roman Catholic countries of Europe flocked along the south China coast to convert the Chinese; as the German missionary and frontier scout Charles Gutzlaff later reported, these eager missionaries included a great variety of characters (1833: 318). It is illustrative, however, that Gutzlaff himself gladly worked as an interpreter on British opium boats in the 1830s, handing out religious tracts on one side of the boat while opium went out over the other (Fairbank 1969:
70). Surely the most able agents of the West were the Jesuits, deliberately schooled in the revolutionizing disciplines of mathe-matics, physics, and astronomy in order to penetrate a civilization obsessed with celestial analogies (Bernard 1935: Chapter 2). When they gained a foothold and established their missions in south China in the late sixteenth century, a long encounter between contesting cosmologies was initiated: an intolerant monotheism occupied with issues of absolute faith, although in practice showing a wealth of denominations, was confronted with a pragmatic state cult wor-shipping heaven, although simultaneously engaged in a holy battle against all spiritual deviation.
When the governor of Zhaoqing near Canton, perhaps just out of curiosity, violated the imperial edict not to introduce foreigners inland and invited the Jesuits in 1583, he was taking a great risk;
presumably he mistook them for Buddhist monks (Cameron 1976:
156). Moreover, when he later allotted them a piece of land near the public construction site for a pagoda on which to build their house and chapel, the general populace was intrigued by the Jesuits’ ap-pearance and their displayed paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary, but also doubtful about the effect of their presence. Right from the start there were fengshui-based objections to the Jesuits’ settlement, but under the 27-year-long leadership of Matteo Ricci (until 1610) the Jesuits themselves apparently knew little about the true nature of their interference. The committee in charge of the pagoda construction was
enraged, since the mission was believed to disturb the meticulously calculated fengshui effect of the pagoda. The committee soon engaged in an open confrontation, in which they were determined both to evict the foreigners and in practice oppose the governor. Ricci and his companion Ruggieri soon had to admit their defeat and move the buildings outside the pagoda limits (Cameron 1976: 154–157).
Ricci’s journals reveal that the Jesuits came into contact with countless diviners and other religious practitioners who, according to Ricci, abound everywhere: ‘This obnoxious class is a veritable pest in the capital cities and even in the court’. With reference to fengshui, for which he has no term but calls its practitioners ‘geologists’, he comments:
Many of their most distinguished men are interested in this recondite science and, when necessary, they are called in for consultation, even from a great distance. This might happen when some public building or monument is to be erected and the machines used for that purpose are to be placed so that public misfortune might be avoided. (Ricci 1953: 84–85)
The Jesuits’ intrusiveness and calculating use of the new sciences brought them closer to power than any other Westerners before or after. During several decades leading up to the anti-Christian movement of the Kangxi era (1662–1722) the Jesuits Adam Schall and Ferdinand Verbiest controlled the imperial Directorate of Astro-nomy, where their work brought them into the intricate political games relating to the interpretation of omens and divination. An important incident prior to the anti-Christian movement was the burial of an infant prince in 1658, on which occasion court officials erroneously translated the details of the burial divination into Manchu and thus had the prince buried at the wrong hour. Critics seized this opportunity to attack the Jesuits, both on grounds of the burial and the ‘Hong fan orthodox divination’ methods they used.
What is of major importance to us, however, is that when the Jesuits seized control over the Directorate they intro-duced modern European astronomy for the sake of precision, but they used it entirely for traditional purposes of divination for the imperial court in order to optimize their political influence (Huang Y. 1991: 1–20).
The Jesuits’ writings on China continued some of this knowledge in the following century; J.B. du Halde’s standard work on China from 1736 devoted one page to ‘Fong choui’, termed the ‘most ridiculous invention’ of an otherwise rationally disposed nation (du Halde 1736, vol. 3: 48–49).
1850–70: THEFORMATIVEPERIOD
After Westerners had been expelled from Chinese territory for more than a century leading up to the opium war and little first-hand knowledge of the country thus was available, it was the classical tradition and the ramifications of established society that were in focus. Many Europeans became acquainted with translations of the Confucian classics, from which China stood out as a rational and secular society, whereas popular travel literature presented a contrasting picture of a remote and fabled country. Descriptions of odd Chinese superstitions of everyday life, mostly by missionary writers, appeared in journals and magazines. The self-confidence and chauvinism that bolstered the new industrial-age European identity laid the ground for the contemporary view of China as backward, obscure and inaccessible. Revolutionary writers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels embodied this spirit when depicting China in terms of an ‘embalmed mummy at the end of the world’;
China had already long been used as a standard against which to measure the Western stature (Hamilton 1985: 187).
The intimate knowledge of Chinese divination that the Jesuits had acquired appeared to be forgotten, although it might have proved advantageous to later colonizers of a Protestant persuasion.3 Charles Gutzlaff, writing in 1838, described only the established religions of China (Gutzlaff 1833: 299), as did his contemporaries. Those very few individuals who stayed in China long enough to learn the language became aquainted with odd Chinese beliefs. In a careful account of Chinese religion from 1848 Wells Williams4 mentions how burial places are selected by geomancers according to the ‘doctrines of the fung shwui, ... as ridiculous a farrago of nonsense, superstition, and craft, as have ever held sway over the human mind in any country or age’ (Williams 1848: 264). Other short refences to the use of geo-mancers or necrogeo-mancers in funerals are found in contemporary literature on China (for instance Davis, J. 1845; Fortune 1847).
The Chinese Repository was the first missionary journal established in China, exploring every aspect of this new ground for Christendom.
During its 20 years of existence (1832–52), fengshui is only mentioned a couple of times in connection with burials and pagodas, mainly with reference to the works of Davis and Fortune (CR vol. 6, 1837: 190; vol.
17, 1848: 537; vol. 18, 1849: 372).5 In the 1837 volume, the editors refer to the superstitions of ‘fung-shuy, fully to elucidate which will require much more information than we can now command.’
Around 1850, in connection with preparations for the burial of the Daoguang emperor (reigned 1821–50), we find another early re-ference to divination when Gutzlaff describes ‘Fung-Shwey’ pro-fessors, ‘whose sole business it is to find out the propitious piece of ground desired’ (Gutzlaff [1852] 1972: 92). Otherwise, strikingly few foreigners sojourning in China before 1865 paid any attention to fengshui or were even aware of its existence, but the relatively small population and the commercial outlook of their communities partly explain this. It is still a striking fact that fengshui was never mentioned as an ingredient in Chinese foreign relations during the time of the opium war and subsequent establishment of Treaty ports.6
Depicting native Chinese customs was largely left to missionaries.
The missionary outstations that were slowly spreading inland in the late 1840s and early 1850s as a result of the opium war had neverthe-less encountered fengshui related resistance as one among many obstacles. In 1850 an American mission was denied a particular site to build on in Nantai in Fuzhou on account of the undesirable effect it would have on a family graveyard (Carlson 1974: 14). In a widely reported case in 1851, a Methodist mission in Nantai was met with both popular and official opposition when attempting to build an extension on a newly acquired plot. Popular opinion was that the presence of foreigners had already increased the number of deaths in the neighbourhood and that having more foreigners in the area would cause disturbance since the ‘good luck’ of people would be adversely affected. From detailed accounts of the case, however, it seems likely that some locals who wanted to extort money from the foreigners played a leading role in staging the protest (ibid.: 38–39).
These experiences from Fuzhou were to be repeated in many other provinces as anti-foreign sentiments increasingly surfaced, for in-stance in placards stating that foreigners and Chinese could not live together, that Chinese who rented to foreigners would be treated as traitors, or threatening foreigners with death if entering certain cities (ibid.: 38, 117).
Though fengshui had not yet become a dominant theme in the encounter of the Chinese with foreigners, the seeds of popular protest on these grounds had been sown. The popular hostility and official obstruction to all foreign enterprise was often coupled with local opportunists’ attempts to extort money from the intruders. On the missionary front, anger and frustration were building up when every single step forward was countered by official Chinese ob-structionism, while simultaneously missionaries were being criticized
at home. Many contemporary accounts reveal how controversial the missionary question really was. G.W. Cooke, a British correspondent in China in the late 1850s, challenged the missionaries’ monopoly on depicting the ‘superstitious’ character of the Chinese; he comments that despite the ‘glaring inconsistencies’ of the Chinese mind, ‘in their universities and in their public examinations ... they teach no superstition’ (Cooke 1972: viii).
This was indeed a formative period in the encounter between Chinese pragmatism and Christian reformist devotion. Some material shows that in the following period fengshui gradually became a convenient weapon in the struggle against foreign penetration and in particular what was seen as the rebellious activity of the intruding foreign missions. In his two-volume work on ‘The Social Life of the Chinese’ published in 1865, the American missionary Justus Doolittle briefly describes ‘geomancy’ as one out of the six distinguishable methods of fortune-telling among the Chinese, albeit the ‘dearest and most tedious’ (Doolittle 1865: 339). While using the English term geomancy, he identifies it as divination ‘by an inspection of the earth and scenery, in order to fix upon a fortunate burial-place’. What is of key concern to us is that out of the hundreds of pages of Doolittle’s reporting on the immense arsenal of Chinese customs and super-stitions of everyday life, he devotes only a few pages to the subject. It is also a remarkable fact that Doolittle, despite just having returned from fourteen years as a missionary in Fuzhou and having been involved in the 1850 incident mentioned above, does not seem to be aware of the fact that fengshui may relate to houses as well as to graves. How can this be? Chinese local sources tend to indicate that the most important application of fengshui during the Qing was for identifying proper places for burial, and for reburial7 in south China (Smith R. 1991: 151). After devoting two pages to describing the geomancer’s work and consideration as to determine a good site for a grave, Doolittle comments: ‘The above remarks ... show how willing the people are to deceive and delude themselves, and at their own expense. All of these kinds of fortune-tellers are very fluent in speech ... They all have a very patronizing manner’ (Doolittle 1865: 339).
Not much foreign attention seemed to be paid to fengshui. A straightforward answer would be that very few foreigners really had intimate relations with the Chinese as only a handful of them had knowledge of the language and most contacts went through the mandarins. In other matters, however, the inquisitive Western mind left few stones unturned. In 1850 the weekly North-China Herald was
founded to serve the Shanghai foreign community (it was published almost continuously until 1941). The journal probed into Chinese administration by translating and commenting on the official Chinese organ, ‘The Peking Gazette’; it commented on Chinese foreign policy and brought news about all matters relating to foreign sojourners; it broadcasted independently gathered information about political affairs in China and the numerous popular uprisings through the 1850s and 1860s; and it published small series on Chinese history, culture, religion and so forth. But it is striking that during the journal’s first eighteen years of existence fengshui was not found to be a noteworthy matter. We can only assume that it simply was not yet a matter of any significance in Chinese–foreign relations, at least not from the perspective of the Shanghai community. We get the overall impression that although fengshui was obviously im-portant, and many incidents were reported in Chinese local gazet-teers, apparently it was not a concern so central in Chinese society that it merited foreign attention. It was not until the foreign oc-cupation of Beijing (Peking) in 1860–62 and the concurrent foreign interest in opening the Chinese interior that fengshui became an issue in the Chinese–foreign encounter.
The revolutionary impact of steam power in Europe served as a model for the foreigners’ vision of progress for China, but another great invention of the day which was about to revolutionize long-distance communication, the telegraph, had changed the prospects for enterprise in the Chinese interior. It was exactly this potential for irreversible and foreign-dominated change throughout China that many Chinese reformers and intellectuals sensed and attempted to counter by internal mobilization. Fengshui was inflated in the tense field between the foreign drive for the interior and the Chinese self-strengthening movement, searching for new national symbols that were easy to read for the general populace.
An early reference to the subject is found in the journals of Robert Hart, who, shortly after he had joined the Chinese imperial customs service in 1863, reported that in private conversations members of the foreign community in Beijing express that they see the ‘fung-shway superstition’ as their greatest obstacle as regards plans of introducing telegraphs and railways, without the matter seemingly being discussed in any detail (Smith R. et al. 1991: 198). We shall return to this issue later. Little by little, as the cultural interface broadened, fengshui became a component in the demarcation of difference between foreigners and Chinese, until someone eventually
expressed in public his wonder about the strong Chinese
expressed in public his wonder about the strong Chinese