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Monday, January 4, 1999 ZHENCHUAN, China—Wang Ahbei, 14 years old and all elbows and knees, knelt on the wood floor, placed her fortune in a flaming urn, knocked her head once on the varnished planks and prayed to the Niang Niang god. "I believe," said the coltish teenager, the conviction of her words emerging strangely from a girl half hiding behind her mother's skirt. "The Niang Niang god and the Black Dragon King are strong spirits. They will help me find a good husband one day. They will help me bear a son."In the scraggly line behind her, scores of farmers, farmers' daughters, mothers, nephews and nieces clustered close to the god -- the image of a woman hewn from wood, festooned in prayer shawls and painted in primary colors. Incense and the honest sweat of working men and women filled the room. Outside, a crowd of 15,000 people thronged through this isolated valley in that vast expanse known as "western China." Snake oil salesmen vied with three opera troupes and a traditional dance company for their attention. Thirty-three fortunetellers, 55 watermelon sellers, 47 billiard table operators, countless noodle stalls and a half dozen gambling tables lined the road to the shrine. "The birthday of the Black Dragon King," read a sign. What a birthday it was. A recent journey to this village, 400 miles and another world from Beijing, was a journey to a new China -- one rarely seen in recent accounts of this vast country that have stressed its urban-led economic boom, its mobile-phone wielding middle class. Twenty years ago, the activities at this month's Black Dragon Pool Temple fair would have been branded "feudal superstitions" and suppressed. But today, even though the Chinese Communist Party officially condemns many of the exotic pastimes here -- the ritual sacrifices of a goat and a pig, the fortunetellers -- there is little it can do to stop them. China's farmers are asserting their rights to traditional beliefs as never before. In doing so, these farmers who account for 75 percent of the country's 1.2 billion people are changing China. The challenges farmers pose to the Chinese state are not openly hostile ones. But in many ways they are as significant as the challenges posed to China's Communist Party by the explosion of wealth and new freedoms in its cities. The renaissance of traditional culture in the villages means that socialist values have failed to make inroads into the lives of most Chinese people, Western scholars studying the phenomenon say. The Communist Party took over China by winning the support of the peasantry. What will happen to the party if it loses the farmers' support? "Maoist thought didn't improve people's nature very much," said Wang Kehua, 57, the head of the Black Dragon Pool Temple. "Basically, it's not too dependable." Around Yulin, a city of about 1 million people in northern Shaanxi province where the remnants of the Great Wall dominate windswept bluffs, more than 50 major temples, 500 medium-sized temples and thousands of smaller temples have been built or repaired in the last 20 years, according to Western anthropologists who have worked in the region. In the southern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, ancestor worship halls, which are not popular in the north, have sprung up in almost every town, many of them funded by money from overseas Chinese. Shamans and yinyang masters, who pick propitious sites for buildings and appropriate days for weddings and investments, are popular again in rural China. So are traditional weddings and funerals, complete with cacophonous fireworks, bands and girls dancing with umbrellas. "The growth of popular religion since the so-called reforms is really the resumed expression of something that was never destroyed even though it was terribly repressed," said Myron Cohen, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University and one of the world's leading experts on China's popular religions. The Black Dragon Pool Temple, built during the Ming Dynasty around a natural spring, claims a history of almost 500 years. An introduction to the temple says it was built by villagers seeking divine respite from the droughts that ravage this area. But in Zhenchuan, the story of the temple's founding is tied to another tale -- an immaculate conception and the birth of dragon kings resembling elements of Christianity and Greek mythology. A maiden, the story goes, was washing clothes by a creek when she spied a peach bobbing downstream. She ate it, discovered she was pregnant and was banished by her angry father. Ultimately, she gave birth to five dragons -- black, green, yellow, red and white -- which emerged from her mouth, nostrils and ears. The maiden was proclaimed a god -- the Niang Niang god -- and became a symbol of fertility. The Black Dragon made his home in the valley that ultimately took his name. The temple was small during China's imperial days. Temple fairs drew scant attendance from local farmers. Gambling was the main source of the temple's income. China's Communist revolution of 1949 did not immediately bring big changes to the Black Dragon King. But things worsened during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, an ultra-leftist period when the party sought to destroy all that was traditional in Chinese culture. Villagers from the surrounding People's Commune dismantled the Black Dragon Pool Temple and used its stones and wood to build other structures. The villagers say the spring that fed the temple, spouting waters with allegedly curative properties, dried up and the Black Dragon King went away. The spring returned in 1980, after the Cultural Revolution, the story goes. A year later, an enterprising former schoolteacher, Wang Kehua, decided to leave a mark on the world by rebuilding the home of the Black Dragon King. While not strictly illegal, his activities were protected by no law. He and bands of peasants from the local People's Commune built a little; the government said nothing, so they built a little more. In 1982, nine villages formally decided to rebuild the temple. Wang, a skilled bricklayer, carpenter, stone mason, roofer, painter and metal worker, designed the buildings. By 1996, his team had constructed a 100-foot-long open air stage, a stone amphitheater that can seat 8,000 people, a drum tower, a bell tower, a temple for the Black Dragon King and a temple housing his four dragon brothers and his mother, Niang Niang. In a significant change from China's Communist past, Wang accomplished these and other changes without government money -- and no party support. He relied solely on donations of cash and labor by local farmers. In 1994, Wang was elected mayor of Zhenchuan. Rural elections have been instituted by the Communist Party in recent years to increase its control over the countryside. But Wang is not a party member. "I won because I helped get things done in the village," he said. "It's very simple." The temple plays a key role in village society -- as a market center and a place to air grievances and search for answers. Chen Yusheng, 62, interprets the fortunes that are handed out near the donation bowl to the Black Dragon King under the temple's central pagoda. Now the temple is bigger than it ever was in imperial times, a fact that is of some concern to Communist authorities. For that reason, the authorities recently pressured the temple to join one of China's five recognized religions -- Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism. Wang picked Taoism but scoffed at party rules that a Taoist priest had to be dispatched to the temple to ensure that superstitious practices were banned. The increasing popularity of the temple -- and the growth of traditional religions in China -- defies notions of modernity embraced by the Communist Party. The party's theory is that development and openness to the outside world will rid China of what it feels is the retarding influence of traditional beliefs. Two years ago, National Highway 201 was completed -- connecting Yulin and Xian, the capital of Shaanxi province, 300 miles to the south. This connection to the outside world has actually spurred the temple's growth. A key to the success of the Black Dragon Pool Temple is its kitchen, an efficient enterprise guided sternly by Chen Shenxiao, a wiry cook and a Communist Party member. "Yeah, I know, party members aren't supposed to believe this stuff, but I do," said Chen, who has belonged to the party since the 1950s. "Look, my wife has a nervous disorder. I have to find somewhere to pray. So I pray here. And the Black Dragon King works. No kidding!" |
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This article appears courtesy of The Washington Post
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