It’d taken me almost an hour to cycle a sweltering 10 miles to Tianning Temple in south west Beijing, taking to the bike in a misguided attempt to trace the boundaries of the old Liao capital.
As I recovered in the shade of the 12th century brick pagoda, I fell into conversation with two fellow visitors. Making small talk I learnt they were railway engineers from Jilin, located down south by their state owned enterprise.
While we chewed the fat on our shared experiences of moving to the big city, another figure shuffled around the corner. He greeted the pair; a slightly hunched but otherwise sprightly older man, his age accentuated by a wizened beard and the blocky hat I vaguely recognised from Daoist temples. One hand clutched a gnarled stick; he wore a heavy woollen jacket over a grey tunic and baggy trousers. His accent was almost incomprehensible – a mishmash of strong vowels, palatalised consonants and dropped syllables testifying to a childhood isolated from the clipped and more gentle Mandarin of younger generations. The Jilin boys told me he was from Hebei – a friend from somewhere.
‘But do you know what he is?’ one of them asked. ‘He’s a wuxi.’
Puzzled – I’d never heard of a wuxi before – I let him slowly explain the characters.
‘Our friend is a 巫觋 wuxi – a wizard. He’s a Daoist and can do magic!’
The older man gave me a toothy grin and tipped his stick towards me.
‘He’s 120 years old and can predict the future. He doesn’t work here, but sometimes comes along to help people know what’s going to happen.
‘Do you have 信仰 xinyang?’ chipped in the second engineer, using a word more easily translated as ‘belief’ rather than the more formal 宗教 zongjiao ‘religion’.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘although my family are Christians.’
‘That’s not what I asked!’ he chuckled, ‘Do you have xinyang? Do you believe he can predict your future? Westerners and young people are so sceptical. But it’s real, believe us.’
Slightly over a year later: I had moved south to Guangzhou, and grabbed a quiet weekend to nip across to Chaoshan along the province’s eastern border. Speaking a unique language closer to Fujianese than Cantonese, and with a culture marked by a strong ethnolinguistic identity and entrepreneurial spirit which has resulted in Chaoshanese (‘Teochew’) being among the most prominent of emigre overseas Chinese, I had been looking forward to a relaxed weekend soaking in the smaller cities and countryside.
‘Do you have xinyang?’ I asked Mr Liu, who had invited me to share some of Chaoshan’s distinctive gongfu tea in his backstreet cafe. It was a warm morning, and he had been teaching me how to properly prepare the tea while proudly introducing his hometown of Chaozhou and its people to me.
‘It’s complicated,’ he replied, deftly twirling the tea cups between a pair of tweezers. ‘Us Chaoshanese aren’t like other Chinese; we’re more open. It’s not for me, but some Chaoshanese have churches, mosques, even in small towns – it isn’t an issue if someone has a foreign zongjiao.’
‘Not zongjiao,’ I politely rebuffed, ‘xinyang – your beliefs, traditions – is there something specifically Chaoshanese?’
‘Oh! Yes, of course,’ he grinned, ‘although now the young are forgetting them.’ This was a common remark I’d keep hearing on the trip. ‘We Chaoshanese are very traditional; we have lots of xinyang. Keep an eye out on the streets and the temples – you’ll see.’
Maybe his comments boosted my powers of observation, but after I left I started seeing things novelties almost immediately. Like many Chinese cities, Chaozhou has a large Buddhist temple – famed for its gilded hall and antique Tang Dynasty statuary. But what struck me were the local families busying themselves with temple rituals, laying candles, hanging banners, or busily collecting funds for their temple association looking to restore the main hall’s roof. And so to throughout the backstreets of cities and towns – small shrines stoked with incense, hunched elders paying obeisance, roughly hewn statues cloying with wax. In Chaozhou and other small villages to the south I saw some of the most intimate and quietly beautiful temples of my whole time in China – to 妈祖 Mazu / 天后 Tianhou, the Fujianese-born Empress of Heaven and protector of sailors, or to other local gods I’d never heard of.
‘Who do you worship here?’ I asked the attendant at the temple of 青龙 Qinglong south of the city centre. I was interested; but also trying to distract him from incessantly petting my arm, enraptured as he was with its paleness and blond hair.
‘This is Qinglong – it’s special to us Chaoshanese.’
‘So this is a type of zongjiao?’ I replied. ‘Like Daoism or Buddhism?’
‘No,’ he rolled his eyes, thankfully loosening his grip, ‘it’s our xinyang. He protects sailors, like Mazu in Fujian. I suppose you could call it Daoist. Or maybe Buddhist. I’ve never really thought about it. It’s complicated.’
The previous Spring Festival – Chinese New Year – a colleague had invited me, stuck alone in Guangzhou, to celebrate the festival with her family in Shantou, a city south of Chaozhou. ‘I’ve got to warn you though, it will be really boring. If you want to see traditions you’re out of luck – we just sit around and ignore each other.’
Braced as I was for a quiet weekend, albeit with company other than my own, I grew increasingly puzzled when I was told we would accompany the extended Shantou clan to visit the ancestors.
‘We’re going to a cemetery?’ I asked, thinking back to Christmas wreath laying at grandparents’ graves as a child.
We congregated in an unlit backstreet, where the family owned an unoccupied tenement building. Cousins, aunts, uncles drew up in cars; bags of fruit, dried food, an unplugged rice cooker full of fresh rice appeared from boots and backseats. We traipsed up four stories of the empty building to the top floor, where. a bare concrete room was furnished only with a high wooden altar surmounted by three incense-filled bowls and a series of jars.
‘These are the ashes,’ my colleague wearily commented, ‘We keep this building for them to live in. Sorry, this will be over quick.’
One by one the family set out their food on the altar before praying in sequence to the ancestors – incense stick in hands, a few words, a set number of bows. And then they gathered around to chat – needling my colleague with an interrogation about her plans to get married, buy a house, have children.
‘It’s so awkward,’ she told me on the way back for dinner, ‘every year we have to go through the same questions so the ancestors can join in. It’s the one day of the year we get to talk to them, and the older generation are obsessed with these things.’
‘I thought you weren’t religious?’ I asked in surprise – my colleague was a pragmatic, self-avowedly rational and overtly atheistic young Chinese urbanite.
‘I’m not!’ she replied. ‘But this is xinyang. It’s complicated.’
My final evening of the Chaoshan trip, I had ended up again having tea with an old local – an antiquarian who carefully tended a collection of Song Dynasty porcelain he and friends had dredged from the local estuary.
We had just gone through a bruising political conversation, me quietly nodding along to his regurgitation of the more extreme views currently in vogue in state media: on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the American trade war. In a bid to turn things back to safer ground, I fell back on the question still puzzling me.
‘What is xinyang, Mr Chen? I keep hearing that the Chaoshanese are traditional people, and I see the difference with the Cantonese – but how do you view it?’
‘Hmm, xinyang,‘ he mused, refilling his tea cup. ‘Obviously the young don’t have it; they just care about science, work, making money. It’s more something for my generation.’
‘I suppose that gets to the root of the problems we’ve been talking about,’ he continued. ‘The youth today – without xinyang, what do they have? I suppose you could call it 道德 daode [ethics] – without the link to who we are and what we believe, how do they know how to behave?’
‘So that’s to say your generation still believe in the gods – in Mazu and Tianhou, or the Daoist sages?’
‘Not at all!’ he replied, slightly annoyed. ‘Next you’ll be saying the world is flat. I know there’s no afterlife, no hell underground. We know why it rains – we don’t need to pretend there’s a supernatural force controlling it like the olden days. No, that’s not xinyang. What I mean is the link to the past – where you came from, who you are, and the way you act. Some concept beyond buying a house, indebting yourself to a mortgage. I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong. We need xinyang to keep us rooted and put it in perspective.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ I pleaded. ‘If it’s just tradition and not zongjiao, why do people bow at shrines, pray for luck before exams, host the spirits of ancestors at Spring Festival? Don’t the people in the temples believe in the gods?’
‘Hmm.’ he conceded. ‘I suppose it’s complicated.’
Antiokhos in the East 