Making ingenious use of a wide variety of sources, and old as well as modern technical resources, Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman here set a new standard for an histoire totale for a coherently well-defined cultural region in China.At the same time it deals in-depth with the ongoing negotiation of modernity in Chinese village rituals. Over the past thirty years, local popular religion has been revived and re-invented in the villages of the irrigated alluvial plain of Putian, Fujian, China. Volume 1 provides a historical introduction to the formation of 153 regional ritual alliances made up of...

The history of Singapore s Chinese community has been carved in stone and wood throughout the country. This book looks specifically at sixty-two temples, native-place associations, and guildhalls where epigraphs made between 1819 and 1911 are still found today. These early inscriptions provide first-hand historical information on the aspirations and contributions of the early generation of Chinese settlers in Singapore and reveal the many ways that the epigraph s chosen structures and the institutions they represent have evolved over the years. These epigraphs, newly translated into English,...