This panel examines how inherited claims of religious efficacy were materially and spatially re-secured in southeastern China between the Five Dynasties and the Southern Song (tenth–thirteenth centuries). Amid dynastic transition, maritime expansion, and demographic change, Buddhist cosmologies, deity cults, and geomantic doctrines asserted enduring authority, yet their efficacy had to be continually reestablished within new landscapes and communities. Drawing on approaches that foreground the emplacement of religion in material settings, the papers explore how efficacy was stabilized through construction, inscription, monumental translation, and environmental adaptation. Case studies range from pagoda surfaces bearing repeated Buddha images, and the transformation of Aśoka stupas, to inscriptional strategies that localized the cult of Mazu and geomantic burial practices recalibrated to southern hydrological conditions. Together, the papers show that efficacy was not simply inherited but materially grounded through textual, architectural, and environmental practices enabling religious traditions to take root within shifting terrains of coastal China.
An incised stone fragment excavated from the Leifeng Pagoda ruins depicts a multi-story pagoda elevation densely inscribed with repeated Buddha figures. Previous scholarship has proposed that it records Leifeng Pagoda's initial appearance completed in 977. Yet no sources describing the pagoda's exterior attest to such a program of repeated Buddha figures at the site. This study argues that the fragment can be approached simultaneously as a visualization of Leifeng Pagoda's miraculous efficacy and as evidence for an actual built program of repeated Buddha imagery on exterior architectural surfaces, a practice shared across multiple Wuyue pagoda sites and extended beyond Wuyue in later centuries. Rather than competing interpretations, these two readings reinforce each other: the repeated Buddha imagery on exterior pagoda surfaces, while representing the numinous claims of the Wuyue court, reflects a material and spatial program that local Buddhist communities had already established at pagoda sites across the region.
Amid the geopolitical volatility of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the Aśoka stūpa became an unusually adaptable relic technology for securing Buddhist efficacy across coastal East Asia. This paper traces the form’s spatial and material localization from the Wuyue kingdom to the Fujian littoral, then to Goryeo Korea and Kamakura Japan. In tenth-century Wuyue, state patrons mass-produced miniature metal stupas to project universal Buddhist kingship. In later centuries, coastal communities and local lineages appropriated and enlarged the same visual grammar to authorize local power and stabilize mobility, recasting the stupa in durable stone and public siting. Following the form’s further translation into Korea’s Bohyeopin seoktap and Japan’s Hōkyōintō, widely used as outdoor mortuary monuments, I show how sacred objects were recalibrated in medium, scale, and function to anchor memory and engineer karmic futures along a maritime frontier.
Mazu 媽祖 was a Fujianese shamaness who achieved apotheosis and whose cult subsequently spread posthumously across southern China. This paper engages with the earliest account of the cult's propagation outside Mazu’s hometown, titled Record of the Rebuilding of the Temple of Harmonious Deliverance or Ancestral Temple of Sacred Mound 聖墩祖廟重建順濟廟記, dated to 1150 in the coastal locality of Ninghai 寧海. I postulate that the primary purpose of Mazu's advocacy was to appropriate a non-local deity to legitimize a local merchant lineage. Foremost, I will demonstrate that the Record established the goddess Mazu as more efficacious than the original local deities. Then, I will showcase that the Record’s purposeful insertion of miracles and Confucian references to reinforce Mazu’s religious efficacy and further elevation. Finally, I demonstrate how ascribing Mazu with a regional identity bolsters the legitimacy of a plausible local merchant lineage or community based in Ninghai.
This paper examines geomantic (fengshui) burial practices in southeastern China during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), focusing on water as an emergent environmental problem. While geomantic theory long predated the Song, it was during this period that substantial archaeological and textual evidence for burial planning became available. In Northern Song practice, water rarely posed a serious technical concern. However, following the southward shift of political and demographic centers, Southern Song literati increasingly confronted saturated soils, high water tables, and flood-prone landscapes.Through three burial case studies—one archaeological and two textual—I analyze how elites implemented practical adjustments to mitigate hydrological risk while preserving geomantic legitimacy. I further show how repeated encounters with water-related constraints prompted subtle reinterpretations of geomantic doctrine. By historicizing “water” as a practical rather than purely cosmological category, this study illuminates the interaction between ritual theory, environmental condition, and social transformation in medieval China.