Praying for Rain: Drought, Rural Conflicts, and Religious Encounters in Qing China

This project examines drought and rainmaking rituals in Qing China and treats these rituals as a site where religious authority, political responsibility, and communal obligation intersected. Drawing on missionary records, Qing judicial archives, and local gazetteers, I reconstruct episodes of drought and religious responses between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when environmental crises brought officials, villagers, and Christian missionaries into direct competition over divine power. I argue that rainmaking functioned both as a political performance and as a communal practice, and that encounters between missionaries and local communities through rainmaking practices produced recurring tensions over ritual participation and communal obligation within village society. Through the lens of rainmaking, this study traces a longer genealogy of religious conflict surrounding natural disasters and reinterprets early modern religious encounters in China as a process rooted in local ritual practice and the rural moral economy.