Conversing with Spirits: Divine Communication in Qing-Conquest China

Conversing with Spirits examines local-metropolitan relations during the early years of the Qing conquest through spirit-writing—a form of automatic writing in which deities, including apotheosized government officials and cultural luminaries, descended to spirit-altars to communicate with the living. At its center is Peng Dingqiu (1645–1719), the scion of a wealthy Suzhou family who learned the art of spirit communication from his father. Dingqiu would become a celebrated literatus, editing the Complete Poetry of the Tang Dynasty at the Qing court’s behest, but first he was a curator of dialogues between prominent mortals, gods, and the dead.

Throughout his life, Dingqiu sought divine counsel for himself and on behalf of others who hoped to enhance their standing through his curated séances. His spirit-writing allowed him to intervene in personal and political matters that would otherwise have been beyond his reach. In showing how he did so, author Daniel Burton-Rose reveals the delicate negotiations—among family and friends and across generations—required to bring local Han elites into line with the ideological program of the young Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). By foregrounding Daoist methods for making spirits speak, Burton-Rose argues that such religious worldviews, and the conversations across space and time they enable, are essential to understanding how seventeenth-century Han Chinese of the Yangzi Delta experienced and responded to the Manchu conquest.

Conversing with Spirits will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Chinese religions and late imperial Chinese history and literature.

• Daniel Burton-Rose, Author

  Daniel Burton-Rose is Department Director of Humanities and Social Sciences and assistant professor of history at Wenzhou-Kean University.

• Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Series Editor

• Lai Chi Tim, Series Editor

• Conversing with Spirits is a fascinating account of the role spirit writing played in the lives of elite literati and in the politics and society of China in the wake of the Manchu conquest. Peng Dingqiu (1645–1719), scion of a prominent Suzhou lineage, initially engaged in spirit writing to negotiate examination success. But it became for him—and his fellow literati—many other things: a way to promote the conservative Confucian ideology of the new, foreign Qing dynasty; a tool for the creation of a philanthropic native-place community; and a mechanism for establishing a (divine) authority that weakened the harsh demands of filial obedience on the individual.
  —Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University
• This is a dazzling, highly innovative study of the role of spirit writing in the life of the towering statesman and intellectual Peng Dingqiu. It draws attention to an essential feature of spirit writing, which involved the exchange of not only discursive knowledge, but also affects: conversing with spirits was a highly emotionally charged part of Peng’s life and the lives of other literati. The book builds on the author’s impeccable command of all relevant primary materials. There is no comparable work in any language, and it will undoubtedly make a mark in the fields of late imperial Chinese religious, cultural, and intellectual history.
  —Vincent Goossaert, École Pratique des Hautes Études