Xun Liu (2023, P) - Daoist Yao Aiyun and Modern Education and Other Reforms in Late Qing Nanyang - Project - Muse - 913657

Daoist Yao Aiyun and Modern Education and Other Reforms in
Late Qing Nanyang
Xun Liu
Journal of Chinese Religions, Volume 51, Number 2, December 2023, pp.

229-277 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jcr.2023.a913657
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/913657
DAOIST YAO AIYUN AND MODERN
EDUCATION AND OTHER REFORMS IN
LATE QING NANYANG
Xun Liu
Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
Abstract: This is a study of Daoist encounter with modernity. It reconstructs the history
of Quanzhen Daoist monastic activism in late Qing educational and other modern
reforms in Nanyang from the 1880s to the 1910s. Focusing on the life and career of the
Quanzhen Daoist cleric Yao Aiyun (1845–1912), this study examines the intense Daoist
activism carried out by prior Yao and the Monastery of Dark Mystery (Xuanmiao guan)
in establishing three new schools from 1905 to 1908. Using evidence developed from new
and previously underexplored primary sources, I show that prior Yao and his monastery
paid for and operated three new schools to support the Qing state’s push for modern
education reforms in rural jurisdictions, and more importantly to meet the educational
needs of the children in local communities in Nanyang. I further demonstrate that while
the threat of temple expropriation by the late Qing state may have been a factor driving
some Buddhist and Daoist temples to support to the state educational reforms, prior
Yao and his monastery’s efforts in establishing new schools must not be seen merely
as self-serving or opportunistic instincts at times of crisis. Instead, I argue that they
are best understood as a natural extension of the Quanzhen Daoist monastery’s long
and deep tradition of commitment and service to the local community in Nanyang. As
I have shown elsewhere, these efforts trace their roots or origins to at least the early
Qing re-construction of Nanyang in the mid-seventeenth century, and to the most recent
valiant defense of the city against the Nian-Taiping rebels in the 1860s. I further argue
that contrary to the Weberian thesis that religion would either wither under the impact
of modernity or oppose the proliferation of science and knowledge, prior Yao’s activism
shows that Daoism rather willingly pioneered in efforts to establish new western-style
schools for the sake of advancing modern education and science-based knowledge among
the local population. In the process, prior Yao and his Quanzhen Daoist temple gained
both official state recognition and popular respect, and grew stronger in both influence
and power in local society in late Qing Nanyang. Indeed, the case of prior Yao also
shows that Chinese traditional religions such as Daoism often found ingenious ways to
not only adapt to and engage with forces of modernity, but they also evolved themselves
Journal of Chinese Religions 51, no. 2, 229–277, December 2023

© 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions
230 Xun Liu
and advanced their own interests by immersing themselves deeply in various new social
and public institutions of the modernizing society in late Qing Nanyang.
Keywords: Yao Aiyun 姚藹雲 (Yao Xiangrui 姚祥瑞); Nanyang 南陽; Quanzhen Daoism
全真道; temples for schools or temple expropriation for schools 廟產興學; Xuanmiao
guan or Xuanmiao monastery 玄妙觀, also Yuanmiao guan 元妙觀; higher primary school
(gaodeng xiaoxuetang 高等小學堂); lower primary school (chudeng xiaoxuetang 初等小
學堂); Yuanmiao guan duli liangdeng xiaoxuetang 元妙觀獨立兩等小學堂; Yuanzong
liangdeng xiaoxuetang 元宗兩等小學堂; Sancui chudeng xiaoxuetang 三萃初等小學堂.
Introduction
On the sixth day of the eighth moon in 1906, the Guangxu emperor bestowed upon
Daoist cleric Yao Xiangrui 姚祥瑞 (Yao Aiyun 姚藹雲) a placard with the inscription
“Complete Perfection (Daoism) proliferates (new) Learning” (Quanzhen guangxue
全真廣學). The entry in the Veritable Record of the Qing Dynasty cites the Daoist cleric’s
“cash donations to establish schools” (juankuan xingxue 捐款興學) as the reason for the
imperial commendation.1 Though such commendations were a fairly routine imperial
act at the time, the inscribed placard nonetheless signaled the court’s appreciation of the
Daoist cleric and his monastery’s commitment to the late Qing state’s policy to expand
the new western-styled schools throughout the empire. Later that month, the Qing throne
issued another plaque of commendation to another Daoist cleric in Guangzhou for making
donations toward building new schools in the city.2 After all, the Qing court had launched
its new education reforms just the previous year when it formally ended its system of
civil examinations in 1905.
Until recently, this kind of Daoist activism in public areas such as modern public
education reforms may often have seemed odd, and even counterintuitive. Indeed, native
Chinese religious traditions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and local cults have long been
viewed as antitheses to modernity. Their beliefs, values, ritual repertoire, clergy, and lay
followers are often viewed as obsolete, conservative, and incongruent with processes
and forces of modernity. As such, they have tended to be seen either as an obstinate
institution ideologically committed to resisting all modern social and institutional change
and progress, or as helpless victims that invariably suffered decline and destruction
in the processes of secularization in modern times. Modernizing states’ anti-religious
suppressions and persecutions that devastated religious institutions, beliefs, and values
have undoubtedly helped form and consolidate such perceptions. But the fact remains
that until recently the wisdom of these long-held views about Chinese religion has seldom
been called into question or critically and vigorously cross-examined against the historical
reality of late imperial and modern China. This study seeks to follow and expand on recent
1
For details of the Qing court’s issuance of the placard, see Qingshilu 清實錄 (hereafter
QSL) at Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@4^71895761^803^^^
8021100100130567000100060001^P@@615964769#top.
2
For details of the imperial commendation to Daoist cleric Liang Peijing 梁佩經 (d.u.) of the
Palace of the Three Primes (Sanyuangong 三元宮) in Guangzhou, see QSL at Scripta Sinica, https://
hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@426^1326963254^809^^^0211001092914^@@450049543#top.
DAOIST YAO AIYUN IN LATE QING NANYANG 231
studies by historians of modern China and religion that have revealed the diversity and
richness of religious life and modern religious transformation in late imperial and early
Republican China.3
Through this and other case studies, we will not only be able to reconstruct a more
fact-based history of religion in modern China, but also provide answers to a range of
questions about the fate and conditions of Daoism. For instance, how did Daoism fare in
the processes of China’s modern transformation? Aside from the stereotypical resister or
the usual prey to modernity, did Daoism, its clergy and temples ever play any other roles
in those processes of social and political change? If it did, how did Daoism respond to
the challenges of a modernizing state and society? What can the way Daoism responded
to modernity tell us about the status, conditions, and capacities of Daoism as a religion
in late Qing and early Republican society in China?
This study intends to provide some answers to these questions by tracing and
examining the life and career of Daoist Yao Aiyun, the abbot of the universal Daoist
Monastery of Dark Mystery (Xuanmiao guan 玄妙觀) in Nanyang 南陽 from the late
nineteenth to early twentieth century. It focuses especially on abbot Yao’s public activism
as a case study in order to reconstruct and examine the history of Daoist responses to the
Qing state sponsored reforms in modern education and other areas in late Qing and early
Republican Nanyang. I define activism as purposeful, sustained, and often organized
actions by either an individual or an institution over time to effect change for the benefits
of a social or religious group or community. In the field of Chinese studies and history,
past scholarship by Mary Rankin, William Rowe, Joseph Esherick, and others has mainly
focused on the activism carried out by the Confucian social and merchant elite to effect
change in local society in the late imperial China.4
I hope to draw on these early studies of social elites and their functions and roles
in late imperial China to examine the history of activism by China’s religious elite to
respond to and even effect social and political transformations in the late Qing and the
early Republican periods. By uncovering and demonstrating the various dynamic roles
and functions of Daoist activism, I also hope to challenge and revise our long-held yet
often uncorroborated stereotypical views of Daoism in late imperial and modern China. I
show that contrary to the stereotypes of Daoism as a merely helpless victim to modernity,
Daoist monastic leaders and their temples were actively engaged with the social, political,
and cultural changes taking places in late imperial and early Republican China. I further
demonstrate that the Daoist religion asserted itself as a potent social and political force
3
For recent studies on Daoism and religion in late Qing and early Republican China, see Vincent
Goossaert, Taoists of Peking 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Asia Center, 2007); Paul Katz and Vincent Goossaert, The Fifty Years That Changed Chinese Religion,
1898–1948 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2021); Paul R. Katz, Religion in China and Its
Modern Fate (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014); and Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation,
Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Asia Center, 2009).
4
For studies of local Confucian social elites of the late imperial period, see Mary B. Rankin, Elite
Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865–1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1986); William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); and Joseph Esherick and Mary B. Rankin, eds., Chinese
Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
232 Xun Liu
that helped shape the development of modern educational, health, and public welfare
institutions in late Qing Nanyang. The Daoist activism in modern education reforms
questions our long-held views of Daoism as merely either the victim of or the opponent to
modernity. I argue that these Daoist engagements with modernity represent an innovative
process of Daoist socialization and expansion in local community at a time of social,
political and cultural transformation in late Qing Nanyang and beyond. It is ironic that
while being tolerated and even encouraged by the declining Qing state, such Daoist public
activism was first reduced and ultimately eliminated by the modernizing yet totalistic
KMT and CCP states by the mid-twentieth century.
The study of Daoist public activism in modern educational reforms in Nanyang is
part of the overall historical and social study of the dynamic relationship between Daoist
religion and local society. There have been a few studies that focus on Daoist involvement
in local modern reforms and social governance in late Qing and early Republican Nanyang.5
While these earlier studies have for the first time highlighted the Daoist public activism and
agency in the development of early modern education in Nanyang, we still do not know
enough about the specific details of how individual Daoist leaders such as Yao exercised
their agency and carried out their activism. We also lack full knowledge about how the
new schools established by the abbot Yao and his monastery actually operated, and if
the setup, curricula, personnel, and modes of operations of these new schools were any
different from those at other new schools operated by the local government and other social
elite groups in Nanyang. A more thorough study based on evidence and facts culled from
previously unexplored or underused government gazetteers and archival materials can
help fill in the gaps in our understanding of these Daoist sponsored and operated schools.
In addition, these details are crucial to our comprehensive understanding of the specific
Daoist roles, functions, and impacts in the development of early modern educational
institutions in Nanyang and beyond. Further, in performing these roles and functions, the
Daoist clerics like Yao Aiyun were also actively engaged in governance and management
of local society at a time when the late Qing and early Republican state power were at
a relatively low ebb, so much so that they could still tolerate, and even encourage such
public activism in governance and management of local society by religious clerics and
their organizations. The case of Yao Aiyun’s public activism also affords us a rare view of
how Daoist temples and clerics administered local governance by astutely understanding
and responding to the urgent agenda of the Qing state and the pressing needs of the local
communities at a time of uncertainty and change. For these reasons, abbot Yao Aiyun and
his monastery’s early activism in Nanyang’s modern education reforms deserve a more
thorough examination.
5
See Xun Liu, “Quanzhen Proliferates Learning: The Xuanmiao Temple, Clerical Activism, and
the Modern Reforms in Nanyang, 1880s-1940s,” in Quanzhen Daoists in Chinese Society and Culture,
1500–2010, ed. Xun Liu and Vincent Goossaert (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2013),
269–307; and “Proliferating Learning: Quanzhen Daoist Activism and Modern Education Reforms in
Nanyang, 1880s-1949,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident: Cahiers de recherches comparatives 33
(2011): 53–90. See also Lei Dandan 雷丹丹, “Qingdai Nanyang Xuanmiaoguan yu difang shehui yanjiu
清代南陽玄妙觀與地方社會研究” (M.A. thesis, Zhengzhou University, 2021), 47–50.
But the study of Daoist activism in local society faces several challenges, the biggest
of which is the scarcity of primary sources. The lack of sources itself is reflective of the
traditional Confucian historiographic bias and the modern scholarly negligence during the
late imperial and early Republican eras as evidenced in the near absence or bare minimum
of any biographic data on Yao Aiyun. For instance, the massive official draft history of the
Qing dynasty, Qingshigao 清史稿, contains a sketchy description of merely twenty-eight
words about Yao, and further this brief biography is appended as a side story to the full
biography of another historical person from the late Qing period!6
To make up for this scarcity, I rely on a combination of primary sources for this
study, from late Qing era government publications, temple histories, through elite writings,
newspapers, visual materials, to ritual texts and archival documents. With evidence culled
from these sources, I reconstruct a history of Yao’s life and career as a leading Quanzhen
cleric, a monastic activist, and a Daoist reformer, and place his monastic activism in the
context of the late Qing and early Republican political and institutional reforms, and social
and cultural transformation.
I hope that this history of Daoist activism will achieve the following goals. First,
it provides us with a new fact-based case study of Daoism and its conditions and roles
in local society in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Abbot Yao and his
monastery’s activism in modern educational reforms in Nanyang documented in this
study give us a close look at how some local Daoist leaders and their temples may have
actually fared in the political, social, and cultural transformations of the late Qing and early
Republican era. The daunting challenges which abbot Yao and his monastery faced as they
undertook their activism, and the impressive achievements they obtained in advancing the
local modern education in Nanyang demonstrate how resilient and resourceful Daoism
could be and was in late Qing Nanyang.
Second, this study of prior Yao’s public activism attests to Daoist agency and
empowerment at a critical time of deep social and political change in modern China.
There is no doubt that both elite and popular anti-clericalism and the persistent imperial
and modern state suppression of Daoism have conditioned our perceptions of Daoist
victimhood. But regardless of whether these perceptions are based on facts or not, they
must not blind our view of other possible roles, functions, and impacts which Daoism
was capable of in order to change and improve its lot and even to shape local society.
Indeed, abbot Yao and his monastery’s robust activism to establish and promote new
modern schools in Nanyang rather points to potent Daoist activism and agency in shaping
both its own fate and that of the local community. It also shows that in accordance with
their own long-established tradition of investing in and serving the local community and
collaborating with the imperial state, prior Yao and his monastery built several new schools
in the northern district of Nanyang and at the Bowang township (Bowangzhen 博望鎮)
northeast of Nanyang between 1904 and 1908. They did so not only in proactive response
Yao’s brief biographic sketch is found at the end of the full biography of his friend and erstwhile
6
fellow Qing Green Standard officer Xie Baosheng 謝寶勝 in Qingshigao 清史稿 (hereafter QSG).
See Xie and Yao’s biographies at https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@85^134011036^803^^^
702020250004025700070005^N@@968436104#top; https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@85
^134011036^803^^^702020250004025700070005^N@@968436104#top.
234 Xun Liu
to the Qing state’s call for new schools throughout the empire, but also in continued service
of the interests and needs of hundreds of ordinary residents and their children in Nanyang.
Last but not least, the case of abbot Yao and his monastery’s activism in starting
and maintaining new schools in Nanyang should be also a call to action for historians of
modern Chinese education: to pay more attention to the roles and functions which Daoism
and other religious traditions played in founding and developing modern educational
institutions in China. Through both their voluntary activism in establishing new schools
and the Qing state and local governments’ coercive expropriation of Daoist, Buddhist, and
local cult temples and properties, Daoism together with other religious institutions made
an invaluable contribution to the establishment of new modern schools in Nanyang and
other local communities throughout late Qing and early Republican China. Their voluntary
donations of cash, properties, and temple buildings together with the state-confiscated
temple lands and shrines were often the crucial starting capital for building and operating
the new schools in many cash-strapped Qing jurisdictions throughout late Qing empire.7
Yet, this prevalent and profound indebtedness to Daoism and other indigenous or
indigenized religious traditions remains largely unacknowledged even today. For that
reason alone, the story of abbot Yao and his monastery’s activism in modern education
in Nanyang deserves to be told.
Life and Early Career of Yao Aiyun

Abbot Yao Aiyun 姚藹雲 (Huashan lineage name 華山派名: Xiangrui 祥瑞, Longmen
lineage name 龍門派名: Mingrui 明瑞, 1845–1912) was a native of Weinan 渭南 county,
east of Xi’an 西安 in Shaanxi 陝西 province. In his youth, he was a stipendiary student
pursuing the civil service examination studies at the county school wherein he was said
to have made a name for himself (yousheng xiangxu 有聲庠序).8 He excelled in the study
of the Confucian classics, and was particularly known for his skills in calligraphy and
painting. During the Muslim rebellion (1862–1877) in Shaanxi, Yao’s parents and many of
his relatives were allegedly killed by the Hui rebels. To avenge their deaths, Yao joined the
Qing forces in his home region at the age of seventeen in 1862. He began his service under
the command of the famous Daur 達斡爾 bannerman and general Dorongga 多隆阿 (zi:
Litang 禮堂, 1818–1864).9 Having proven his bravery and combat skills on battlefields,
7
There has always been anecdotal evidence of Daoist and Buddhist activism in starting and
operating new schools in various places in China such as Wuhan, Xi’an, Shenyang, and Tianjin. One
evidence of such activism is often the name of the schools which are often named after the funding or
hosting temples. I personally have known since my youth that the Quanzhen Daoist Changchun Monas-
tery funded and operated the Changchun Monastery Primary School (Changchun guan xiaoxue 長春觀
小學) in Wuchang 武昌. Needless to say, such anecdotal evidence needs to be more critically vetted and
analyzed for any overall conclusion.
8
See the colophon by Dating Chengzhi 達廷成治 on Yao’s portrait in Li Xinjun 李信軍, Shuilu
shenquan: Beijing Baiyuanguan cang lidai Daojiao shuiluhua 水陸神全: 北京白雲觀藏歷代道教水
陸畫 (Hangzhou: Xiling yinshe, 2011), 401.
9
For a brief history of the causes of the Muslim uprising and the Qing campaigns against them
in northwestern provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi during the 1860s and 1870s, see Li Enhan 李恩涵,
Yao was soon appointed by general Dorongga to be the head of his personal bodyguards. In
dozens of actions, Yao fought courageously and avenged his parents’ deaths. His exploits
on the battlefield and his close ties with the general propelled him to the rank of a brigadier
(youji 游擊) in the Green Standard army under general Dorongga. But after the general
died of battle wounds at Zhouzhi 盩厔 in Shaanxi in May of 1864, Yao abandoned his
post in the Qing army out of his deep sense of gratitude to the general.10 He concealed his
identity by changing his names and entered the Daoist Temple of Fortune and Longevity
(Fushouguan 福壽觀) on Mount Bokeda 博克達山 in Dihua 迪化 in eastern Xinjiang to
become a Daoist cleric. Later, he journeyed to Mount Lao 嶗山 in Shandong where he
joined the Quanzhen Huashan lineage as one of its twenty-second generation clerics.11 Like
many of his fellow Quanzhen Daoists, Yao traveled to Daoist universal temples (conglin
叢林) in the Hu-Guang 湖廣 and the Jiangnan 江南 regions, and in Henan 河南 in central
China. He later sailed across the Bohai Bay 渤海灣 and journeyed to Fengtian 奉天 where
he sojourned at the Quanzhen Palace of Supreme Clarity (Taiqing gong 太清宮). He then
traveled to the capital and stayed at the White Cloud Monastery (Baiyunguan 白雲觀).12
At the Daoist monastery in the capital, Yao’s leadership talents, management skills,
and his close ties to the famous Daoist abbot Zhang Yuanxuan 張圓璿 (secular name:
Gengyun 耕雲, Quanzhen Huashan lineage 華山派 name: Zongxuan 宗璿, 1811–1887)
soon elevated him to the position of prior (jianyuan 監院), directing and supervising
“Tongzhi nianjian Shaan-Gan Huimin shibian zhong de zhuyao zhanyi 同治年間陝甘回民事變中的

主要戰役,” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 中央研究院近代史研究所集刊 7 (1978):
95–124. For Doronga’s life and career, see Li Yuandu 李元度, “Duo zhongyong gong bie zhuan 多忠勇
公別傳,” in Xubeizhuan ji 續碑傳集 (hereafter XBZJ), comp. Miao Quansun 繆荃孫 (Taipei: Wenhai
chubanshe, 1973), 67: 5b–12a.
10
Yao’s resignation follows a long-established pattern of the righteous conduct by loyal friends to
each other, social inferiors to their superiors, and by clients to their patrons. The archetypal relationship
of loyalty and righteousness is perhaps best typified by Boya 伯牙 (387–299 BCE), a noble and a zither
player at the Jin 晉 dukedom, toward his extremely perceptive and appreciative audience in Zhong Ziqi
鐘子期 (d.u), a scion from a lineage of court musical officials and musicians at the Chu 楚 court. When
Boya played a tune entitled “Flowing water from the high mountain” (gaoshan liushui 高山流水), Zhong
Ziqi with a perceptive ear and distinguishing taste immediately identified the various emotive tropes in
the tune. Extremely pleased as being perfectly understood and appreciated by Zhong, Boya regarded Ziqi
as “his bosom friend who knows his music” (zhiyin 知音). But after learning of Ziqi’s passing, Boya
quit playing the zither, convinced that his music would no longer by understood and appreciated by
anyone else in the world. For the story of Boya and Zhong Ziqi, see Lü Buwei 呂不韋, Lüshi Chunqiu
呂氏春秋, at Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@245^1535300298^803^^^
703100160002000200020003^P@@261056323#top.
11
The sequence of the Huashan lineage’s genealogical names may be found in Oyanagi Shikita
小柳司気太, Hakuunkan shi: tsuketari Tōgakubyō shi 白雲観志: 附東嶽廟志 (Tokyo: Tōhō Bunka
Gakuin Tōkyō Kenkyūjo: Hatsubaijo Bunkyūdō,1934), 100.
12
For a brief biography of Yao, see Yu Yinlin 于蔭霖, “Xibeiyuan ji 西北園記,” in Nanyang xianzhi
南陽縣志, comp. Pan Shoulian 潘守廉 (1904, hereafter NYXZ). Reprinted in Zhongguo fangzhi congshu
Huabei difangzhi di 457 hao 中國方志叢書華北地方誌第457號 (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1976),
12: 22b–24a; and see also the biographic entries on Gao Rentong and Chen Mingbin in Chen Mingbin
陳明霦, Taishang lümai Longmen zhengzong Longmen chuanjie puxi 太上律脈龍門正宗龍門傳戒譜系,
digital images of the handscroll of silk held at the White Cloud Monastery, Beijing (hereafter LMPX).
For Yao’s affiliation with the Huashan lineage, see Wuzi dengzhenlu 五子登真籙, digital images of the
original register held at Wudangshan 武當山, China.
236 Xun Liu
the monastery’s daily operations and overall planning. Though details are lacking, Yao
may have received the Longmen ordination (shoujie 受戒) under abbot Zhang at the
1871 ordination altar held at the monastery, and he became one of Zhang’s favorite
protégés. In the winter of 1884, a difficult situation evolved at the monastery that may
have involved a delicate rivalry for succession as the monastery’s next presiding abbot.
Though we have very few details, circumstantial evidence suggests that at the time,
prior Yao and the new abbot Gao Rentong 高仁峒 (1841–1907), who had just presided
over an ordination altar that year, may have found themselves in competition for the
leadership of the White Cloud Monastery. While both enjoyed popularity among fellow
clerics, Yao was in a somewhat delicate position. As the prior, he was second only to the
guest abbot Zhang Yuanxuan who also presided over the Monastery of Dark Mystery in
Nanyang, but was sojourning at the time at the White Cloud Monastery in the capital
where he remained highly revered because of his past contributions to the monastery as its
preeminent preceptor and ordination master (zhutan lüshi 主壇律師) in the two preceding
decades. So the senior abbot’s word or preference would count a great deal among the
resident clerics at the monastery as they weighed their choices of their new leader that
spring. Since both Yao and Gao were his favorite protégés, the senior abbot Zhang did
not seem willing to reveal his preference. As for the cause of the tense situation, it is my
personal view that abbot Zhang may have likely leaned toward prior Yao because of both
Yao’s literati background and Yao’s past record of leadership and political and social ties
as a former ranking military officer in the Qing army. The majority of the clerics, however,
may have been more impressed with Gao’s commoner background, personal charisma, and
accomplishments as the ordination master and preceptor at the White Cloud Monastery.
With the potential clash and division among the clerics, the senior abbot opted to keep
quiet his partiality toward Yao.
The senior abbot’s silence or seeming indecision may have been symbolic of his
reserved and graceful nature, but it seemed to have only intensified the already delicate
and touchy (jishou 棘手) situation, and left all the clerics at the monastery at a loss as
to what to do. Chen Mingbin 陳明霦, a disciple of Gao and the de facto compiler of
an authoritative genealogical register of all the Longmen preceptors (lüshi 律師) and
ordination masters at the White Cloud Monastery used the collective third person voice
to describe the general mood of the clergy at the time in the following way:
. . . At the time, Master Zhang Gengyun, the senior abbot, was sojourning at the monastery, and
Grand Master Yao Aiyun was serving as the prior, but the entire Daoist clergy at the monastery
did not know what to do. Only our master (Chen) vigorously held (the view) that we should
look for Master (Gao) Yunxi and bring him back to the monastery . . .
. . . 維時張耕雲老方丈在觀客居，姚藹雲大師為監院。闔觀道眾莫知所措，惟師力持
尋覓雲溪方丈回觀 . . .
Fortunately, the tense situation finally eased off when abbot Gao either voluntarily or under
persuasion chose to back out of the contest and withdraw to a retreat in the hills in the
western suburbs of the capital. But as revealed in Chen Mingbin’s subtle yet unmistakable
tone of criticism, he seems to have faulted both Zhang and Yao for having failed to resolve
the tension in time so as to have caused widespread confusion among the resident clergy
at the monastery.13
But Gao’s departure proved to be only temporary. Yao’s tenure as the prior of the
monastery lasted for only a few more months. The next spring, Chen Mingbin convinced
the majority of the resident clerics to invite Gao to return to assume the priorship at the
monastery. Meanwhile, Yao seemed to have accepted an arrangement probably made by
the senior abbot Zhang that he travel with the latter to Nanyang where he would assume
the priorship of the Monastery of Dark Mystery in the spring in 1885.
Pioneering Modern Education by

Funding New Schools in Nanyang
During his tenure at the monastery in Nanyang, prior Yao proved to be a vigorous and
disciplined monastic leader. Soon after his arrival, he devised and implemented a host of
monastic reforms. He first tightened the monastic rules and imposed the strict Quanzhen
code of conduct among more than a hundred or so resident clerics at the monastery. Visitors
to the monastery’s refectory were duly impressed by the orderly conduct of the monastic
clergy at meals.14 But the prior truly made his mark through his philanthropic activism in
pioneering modern education in local communities in Nanyang.
Yao’s tenure at the Daoist monastery coincided with the height of the Self-
Strengthening Movement (1861–1895) and the late Qing state reforms. In the aftermath
of the Opium War, new western-styled schools funded and operated by western missions
began to appear in the treaty-port cities and increasingly even in the hinterland of the
empire. During the Qing anti-Taiping war (1850–1865), Qing national and regional
officials such as Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811–1872) and Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–
1901), who had been exposed to superior western arms and other technologies, came to
realize the urgent necessity for the Qing state and society to change in order to match
the power and wealth of the west. So even before the anti-Taiping war was concluded,
they had begun massive efforts at restoring and consolidating the Qing polity through a
host of projects of rebuilding local moral and cosmic order, and revitalizing the local and
regional economy throughout the empire, resulting in what has since come to be known
as the Tongzhi Restoration (Tongzhi zhongxing 同治中興). In the four decades leading
up to the Republican Revolution in 1911, the Qing court successively adopted a host of
Confucian-inspired statecraft reforms in such areas as education, agriculture, finances,
military, law, and government. While these reforms were aimed at strengthening and
consolidating the Qing state and its political power and moral order, they also ushered
13
See the biography of Chen Mingbin in LMPX. Zhang Xuesong also notices the ascension crisis
at the White Cloud Monastery in the spring of 1884, but he does not offer any analysis of the possible
causes of the crisis, but speculates that Gao may have left because he felt that his term was over. See
Zhang Xuesong 張雪松, “Gao Rentong nianpu jianbian ji xiangguan kaozheng 高仁峒年譜簡編及相
關考證,” Quanzhendao yanjiu 全真道研究 5 (2016): 173–196.
14
Yu, “Xibei yuan ji,” in NYXZ 12: 24a.
238 Xun Liu
in the initial process of modernization by introducing western learning, technologies,

factories, shipping, railroads, and arsenals to China.15
The crisis and the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 only further intensified
the already widely spread sense of pending crisis among the Qing elite over the decline
of the Qing state power. Many reform-minded court officials and intellectuals began to
advocate for wholesale reform projects aimed at revamping and modernizing the Qing state.
In 1895, with support and sponsorship from many court officials, Kang Youwei and other
leading intellectuals established the “Self-Strengthening Society” (Qiangxue hui 強學會)
in Shanghai, and actively promoted their reform agenda in their widely-read journals.
In response to the public call for reform, the court under the direction of the young
Guangxu emperor (1875–1908) began to devise and implement a host of reforms to
modernize its political, legal, military, and educational systems, even though the radical
reform programs under the Guangxu emperor and his ring of radical advisors such as Kang
Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) caused uproar among the conservative camp at the court.
In the spring of 1898, at the height of the One-Hundred Day reforms, Zhang Zhidong
張之洞 (zi: Xiaoda 孝達, hao: Xiangtao 香濤, 1837–1909), an early supporter of the
Shanghai Self-Strengthening Society and the powerful governor general of the Hu-Guang
region, as well as a skilled operator in Qing court politics, published an influential reform
proposal which sought a more moderate alternative to the radical reform plans by Kang
Youwei and others. In his “Appeal to Learning” (Quanxue pian 勸學篇), Zhang rejected
the radicalist call for more popular rights and the establishment of a parliament. While
insisting on preservation of the traditional Confucian moral and political order, Zhang
advocated for the introduction of the new Western learning, technologies, and institutions
as means to supplement and strengthen the Confucian core of his reform initiatives and
the Qing court.16 One of the key visions put forth by Zhang Zhidong in his memorial was
to use tens of thousands of existing Buddhist and Daoist temples and their properties for
establishing the new national education system.
While the more radical reform initiatives by Kang and others suffered a major
setback in the summer of 1898, Zhang’s reform proposals, especially his vision of
expropriating Buddhist and Daoist temples to build new schools, were embraced by the
Qing court, even after the 1898 coup. As part of its national reform programs, the Qing
court abolished its traditional civil service examination system and announced plans for
adopting a new educational system as means of training and recruiting its ruling elite in
1905. To accomplish its educational reforms, the Qing court followed Zhang Zhidong’s
earlier vision of developing the new national education system by commandeering or
confiscating temple properties, and developed a host of new policy initiatives that further
15
For the Tongzhi restoration and the ensuing “Self-Strengthening Movement,” see Mary C.
Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-chih Restoration, 1862–1874 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1957).
16
For Zhang and other conservatives’ efforts at defining the Qing education reform, see William
Ayers, Chang Chih-tung and Educational Reform in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1971); Su Yunfeng 蘇雲峰, Zhang Zhidong yu Hubei jiaoyu gaige 張之洞與湖北教育改革 (Taipei:
Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1976); Ye Ruixi 葉瑞晰, “Qingmo ‘Xinzheng’ jiaoyu
gaige zhong de ‘guoxue baocun’ jinlu tanxi 清末‘新政’教育改革中的“國學保存”進路探析,” Ruxue
pinglun 儒學評論 2 (2006). https://m.aisixiang.com/data/14378.html.
sanctioned the local and regional governments in expropriating temple properties for
building the new schools. Between 1902 and 1903, Zhang Zhidong and several of his
colleagues at the court devised a series of directives which set forth the procedures and
standards for establishing and managing the new national education system. As Zhang
and other court and regional officials continued to implement their reform agenda in their
respective jurisdictions, Zhang’s vision of “converting temples for schools” (miaochan
xingxue 廟產興學) also became the court-sanctioned informal policy for building the
new national education system from 1898 onward. This policy even continued to exert
influence on the Nationalist state policy toward religion and education after 1911.17
The new education reforms in Nanyang were part and parcel of an empire-wide Qing
state efforts to revamp and modernize its traditional education system. At the conclusion
of the Taiping war and with the rising Self-Strengthening Movement initiated by Qing
regional and local officials, many reform-minded elite officials and thinkers had begun to
advocate for state-funded new schools. Major scholar officials and writers such as Liang
Qichao 梁啟超 (1887–1929), Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1869–1936), Wang Kangnian 汪康年
(1860–1911), Zhang Zhidong, and others made influential proposals for opening up new
schools and introducing new curricula in order to upgrade the old education system and to
catch up with the west. With the decree to abolish the traditional civil service examination-
centered education system (keju 科舉) in 1905, the Qing state began earnestly to push for
the establishment of new schools throughout the empire.
But the Qing state drive ran into many obstacles as its local officials began to
implement the new education reforms. One of the insurmountable problems was the lack
of national and local funds for establishing the proposed new schools. Barely two years
into the reform, Sun Jianai 孫家鼐 (1827–1909), the grand councilor (daxueshi 大學士)
and minister of educational affairs (xuewu dachen 學務大臣) who was put in charge
of the Qing new education reforms, memorialized to the throne and the court about the
problem. In his memorial, Sun reported extensive shortage of funding for establishing the
new schools (choushe xuetang, jingfei bufu 籌設學堂經費不敷) throughout the empire.
He further warned the court that the overall state-funded education program may not be
expanded at all (jiaonan puji 較難普及). As solutions, Sun suggested that the number of
primary and middle schools at the county and prefecture level and colleges at national
level be limited, and that the enrolled students in schools pay for their tuitions. Local
officials and administrators responded to their own funding shortages by encouraging
and rewarding literati and merchants for their donations to establish local schools in their
17
On the temple expropriations of the late Qing and early Republican era, see Tai Shuangqiu
邰爽秋, Miaochan xingxue wenti 廟產興學問題 (Shanghai: Zhonghua shubao liutongshe, 1929); Wang
Leiquan 王雷泉, “Dui Zhongguo jindai liangci miaochan xingxue fengchao de fansi 對中國近代兩次廟
產興學風潮的反思,” Fayin 法音, 1994, no. 12: 14–19; Lin Zuojia 林作嘉, Qingmo Minchu miaochan
xingxue zhi yanjiu 清末民初廟產興學之研究 (M.A. thesis, Tunghai University, 2000); Vincent Goossaert,
“The Beginning of the End of Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006): 307–336; Xu
Yao 許遙, “Qingmo Sichuan miaochan xingxue ji youci chansheng de sengsu jiufen 清末四川廟產興學
及由此產生的僧俗糾紛,” Jindaishi yanjiu 近代史研究, 2008, no. 5: 75–88; and most recently, Shaoda
Wang and Boxiao Zhang, “Buddha’s Grace Illuminates All: Temple Destruction, School Construction,
and Modernization in 20th Century China,” Economica (London), published online July 12, 2023, https://
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecca.12487.
240 Xun Liu
jurisdictions.18 Even though it had always been part of the Qing educational reforms to
expropriate religious temple properties to pay for the new schools, local officials in these
early years of the reforms largely held back from their predatory instincts to rely on temple
confiscations as the means to fund their new schools.19
Yuanmiaoguan Independent Primary School

with T wo D ivisions 元妙觀獨立兩等小學堂
In Nanyang as elsewhere, local state officials, literati, and merchant guilds took action
in support of the Qing state initiative by establishing and operating new schools in local
communities. As early as 1902 when the Qing court first issued its regulations on the
new schools, the Nanyang magistrate converted the traditional prefectural Chongzheng
Academy (Chongzheng shuyuan 崇正書院) into the Chongzheng Higher Primary School
(Chongzheng gaodeng xiaoxuetang 崇正高等小學堂), and made sure that the converted
new school conformed to the new educational standards. That same year, a prominent
merchant set up a new primary school in the large town of Zijing Pass (Zijingguan 紫荊關)
in Xichuan 淅川 county, located eighty miles west of Nanyang city. Three years later in
1904, Zhang Jiamou 張嘉謀 (zi: Zhongfu 中孚, hao: Meixi diaotu 梅溪釣徒, 1874–1941),
a prominent literatus and educator from Nanyang, set up the Jingye Primary School 敬業小
學堂 in Nanyang. More new schools, including middle and high schools, and a normal
school were established in Nanyang by a range of sponsors from the county magistrates,
through local merchant guilds, elite literati members, and Buddhist temples in that same
year and the years to follow.
Amidst the early flurry to start new schools, the senior Daoist clerics at the Monastery
of Dark Mystery did not sit idly by either. Indeed, prior Yao and his monastery were among
the earliest in Nanyang to begin their public activism in response to the Qing state new
education program by establishing three new primary schools in Nanyang in a short spate
of three years from 1905 to 1908.
According to a contemporary government gazetteer, shortly after the Qing state
abolished the keju civil service examination system in 1905 prior Yao established a new
primary school within the compound of the Monastery of Dark Mystery in October of
1905. The new school was named Yuanmiaoguan Autonomous Primary School with
Two Divisions (Yuanmiaoguan duli liangdeng xiaoxuetang 元妙觀獨立兩等小學堂).
It consisted of the Senior Division (gaodeng xiaoxuetang 高等小學堂) which admitted
students aged from 12 to 17, and the Junior Division (chudeng xiaoxuetang 初等小學堂)
18
See Sun’s memorial in QSL in Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@65
^1204480134^809^^^0211001092909^@@1629918564#top.
19
For instance, instead of embracing an aggressive rush toward building more new schools by
appropriating temples or private schools, Sun seemed to still see the usefulness of private schools (yishu)
even as he oversaw the Qing state’s new education reforms, and cautiously recommended that these private
schools enroll those students who could not afford attending the Qing government funded schools. See
Sun’s memorial in QSL in Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@65^1204480134
^809^^^0211001092909^@@1629918564#top.
Fig. 1: Map of Nanyang with Nanyang prefectural seat and the Broadview township marked, by
Dai Guang’en 戴廣恩, 1892–1904, courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library of the Harvard College
Library, Harvard University.
242 Xun Liu
Fig. 2: Detail of the Nanyang Map with Xuanmiao Monastery marked, Dai, 1892–1894, courtesy
of the Harvard-Yenching Library of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University.
Fig. 3: Detail of the Nanyang map with the Palace of Three Primes marked, Dai, 1892–1894,
courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University.
which enrolled pupils aged from 7 to 12. With an annual budget of only 600 to 700 taels
of silver, the two divisions of the school managed to admit a total 117 students with 42 of
them enrolled in the senior division and 75 in the junior division in the first year. The next
year, the senior division admitted 40, whereas the junior division accepted 77 students.
The yearly enrollment at the Daoist-sponsored school for the two years was nearly twice
as high as the total enrollment at the state-funded and literati-run Chongzheng Higher
Primary School which enjoyed an annual budget of 1,000 taels of silver. The annual
enrollment figures of the Daoist-funded school also matched those at the literati-run
Wannan Middle School (Wannan zhongxuetang 宛南中學堂) which enrolled a total
120 students in 1906, but operated on an endowment of over 7540 taels of silver. The
Wannan Middle School was converted in 1906 from the old prestigious Southern Henan
Academy (Wannan shuyuan 宛南書院), funded by the Nanyang prefectural government.
Its endowment fund received donations from the Nanyang prefectural government, its
affiliated county and sub-prefectural yamens, and private donors including the Daoist
Monastery of Dark Mystery in Nanyang.20
For the new Daoist-funded school, prior Yao and his monastery retained Wang
Yanbin 王衍賓 (d.u.), a stipendiary student (linsheng 廩生) and prominent scholar in
Nanyang, to serve as its principal (xiaozhang 校長). Wu Xiangheng 吳湘蘅 (d.u.), a
supplementary stipendiary (fusheng 附生) from Nanyang, served as the academic
supervisor (jianxue監學), and Wang Bingwen 王炳文 (d.u.), a literatus from Huazhou
華州 of Shaanxi with the fifth rank (wupinxian 五品銜), served as the general manager
(guanli 管理) of the new school. The new school’s faculty was composed of six teachers.
Of these, Wu Xiangheng and Wang Bingwen were both listed as instructors. In addition,
Shi Tinghui 史庭蕙 (d.u.), a supplementary stipendiary, Liu Guanghan 劉廣漢 (d.u),
a graduate of Hubei Military Academy (Hubei wubei xuetang 湖北武備學堂), Yang
Dajing 楊大經 (d.u.), a graduate of the Physics and Chemistry Department of Hunan
Advanced College (Hunan gaodeng xuetang lihua zhuanke 湖南高等學堂理化專科),
and Zhang Tingying 張廷瑛 (d.u.), a prefectural expectant appointee (fenjun houbu
分郡候補), were retained to provide instruction in the courses as required by the Qing
state-stipulated curriculum. This curriculum typically included nine to eleven courses
ranging from traditional Confucian classics (jingxue 經學) through arithmetic (suanshu
算術) and science (gezhi 格致) or physics and chemistry (lihua 理化) to history and
geography. It was quite common for school administrators who had academic expertise
to perform double duties as instructional faculty at many of the new schools in Nanyang,
as is the case for Wu and Wang. Further, faculty members were also often concurrently
retained by several new schools for their specializations. For instance, Zhang Tingying,
the prefectural expectant appointee from Jiangsu, worked as the secretary, accountant,
and drawing instructor at the Nanyang county-funded Wannan Middle School while
offering instruction in drawing at the Senior Division at the Daoist-funded new school.
20
See “Diliulu shengshi xueyuan baogao: Nanyangfu zhongxuetang biao 第六路省視學員報告:
南陽府中學堂表,” in Henan jiaoyu guanbao 河南教育官報 (hereafter HNJYGB) 24: 220a–220b, in
Qingmo guanbao huibian 清末官報彙編 (QMGB), comp. Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi
zhongxin 全國圖書館文獻縮微複製中心 (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin,
2006), 28: 14172.
244 Xun Liu
Furthermore, many faculty members also routinely taught several subjects or courses at
different schools. For instance, Yang Dajing not only taught physics and chemistry or
natural science (bowu 博物) at the Wannan Middle School, but he also offered a course
in arithmetic (suanxue 算學) at Nanyang county-funded Chongzheng Higher Primary
School and the Daoist-funded new primary school. Based on the survey and the report
filed by the Education Inspector of the Sixth Circuit of Henan provincial government in
the winter of 1907, the Daoist-funded and run school offered the following list of courses
that were standard among its peers throughout Henan province:21
1. Self-cultivation (xiushen 修身)22

2. Classics (jiaojing 教經)
3. Chinese literature (guowen 國文)
4. Arithmetic (suanshu 算術)
5. History (lishi 歷史)
6. Geography (dili 地理)
7. Sciences (gezhi 格致)
8. Drawing (tuhua 圖畫)
9. Gymnastics (ticao 體操)23
Though full details of the specific daily operations of the first Daoist-funded new
school with the lower and higher divisions are still lacking, it seems that their curricula
at both the divisions were almost fully commensurate with the standard curriculum of
all officially established primary schools in the province. In comparison, the Henan
government-funded primary schools’ standard curriculum (Henan guanli xiaoxuetang
tingmo xiaxueqi kechengbiao 河南官立小學堂丁末下學期課程表) for the fall semester
21
See “Diliulu shengshi xueyuan baogaoshu: Nanyangxian guan-minli ge xuetang zongbiao
第六路省視學員報告書: 南陽縣官-民立各學堂總表,” in HNJYGB 24: 220b–222b, in QMGB 28:
14172–14173.
22
The course content was largely composed of moral education based mostly on classical Confucian
values during the late Qing era, but by early Republican years, the content evolved to include materials
aimed at inculcating the new republican values to make new citizens for the modern state. See Sun Fenghua
孫鳳華, “Qingmo Minchu Zhongguo xiushen jiaokeshu zhong de zhongxiao daodeguan 清末民初中國
修身教科書中的忠孝道德觀,” Jiaoyu xueshu yuekan 教育學術月刊, 2011, no. 4: 100–102; Bi Yuan
畢苑, “Cong xiushen dao gongmin: jindai jiaokeshu zhong de guomin suxing 從修身到公民: 近代教科
書中的國民塑形,” Jiaoyu xuebao 教育學報 1, no. 1 (2005): 90–95; Wang Yingxian 王應憲, “Zhizao
guomin: jindai xiushen jiaokeshu de zhengzhi suqiu 製造國民: 修身教科書的政治訴求 ,” Lishi jiaoxue
wenti歷史教學問題, 2012, no. 4: 93–98.
23
See “Diliulu shengshi xueyuan baogao: Nanyangfu zhongxuetang biao,” in HNJYGB 24:
220a–220b, in QMGB 28: 14172. See also Shi Zongrui 石宗瑞, “Xuanmiao guan xiaozhi 玄妙觀小志,”
Nanyangxian wenshi ziliao 南陽縣文史資料 (hereafter NYXWS) 7 (1993): 108–151. For the standard
curriculum offered at primary, middle, and normal schools through the Qing empire, see Zhang Baixi
張百熙 et al., Zouding xuetang zhangcheng 奏定學堂章程 (Wuchang: Hubei xuewuchu, 1903). For
early school reforms in the late Qing era, see also Ichiko Chūzō 市古宙三, “Educational Reform,” from
his “Political and Institutional Reforms, 1901–1911,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 11: Late
Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 2, ed. John King Fairbank and K.C. Liu (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 375–415.
of 1907 required that a total eleven courses would typically be offered at all new lower
primary schools in the province:
1. Self-cultivation (xiushen 修身)

3. Letters and lexicology (wenzi 文字)
7. Sciences (like 理科)
8. English (Yingyu 英語)
10. Music ( yuege 樂歌)
11. Physical education (tiyu 體育)
Comparing this Henan government-stipulated curriculum, the Daoist school’s

curriculum differed from it in that it did not offer the two classes in English and Music.
Further, while the standard curriculum table also lists specific textbooks and hours of
instruction for each of the courses, it remains unclear if the same textbooks were used at
the Daoist-funded school.24
For the state-funded and managed higher or senior primary schools, the Henan
standard curriculum often include nine courses. But there were exceptions. For instance,
the Zhengzhou Higher Primary School established in 1906 offered a curriculum of ten
courses as follows:
1. Self-cultivation (xiushen 修身)

3. Literature ( guowen 國文)
7. Sciences ( gezhi 格致)
8. Gymnastics (ticao 體操)
10. Music (yuege 樂歌)25
Yet most of the higher primary schools at the county or sub-prefectural levels in the
province typically offered nine courses in their curriculum. For instance, the Xinzheng
County Higher Primary School established in the year of 1904 and the Yuzhou Higher
See “Henan guanli xiaoxuetang dingmo xia xueqi kechengbiao 河南官立小學堂丁末下學期

24
課程表,” in HNJYGB 4: 30a–31b, in QMGB 28: 13847–13748.

25
See “Zhengzhou gaodeng xiaoxuetang diaochabiao 鄭州高等小學堂調查表,” in HNJYGB 6:
45b–46a, in QMGB 28: 13891–13892.
246 Xun Liu
Primary School both offered nine courses without the music class.26 The offering of eleven
courses published for the fall of 1907 for the officially sponsored lower primary schools
in Henan may be only a normative standard, as many lower primary schools’ offerings
would often fall short of this normative curriculum. So, all in all, the first Daoist-funded
school built by Yao Aiyun seemed to have been in compliance with the Henan officially
mandated standards and regulations, especially in terms of the curricula. As we will see,
the provincial educational commission in Henan conducted regular inspections to ensure
compliance. When and if any of the new schools’ setup or their curricula were found to be
lacking or not compliant with the officially mandated standard, the new schools would be
singled out in the inspection reports. No such findings were reported of the first Daoist-
funded school in Nanyang in the existing government reports.
Yuanzong Higher and Lower Primary

Schools 元宗高等/初等小學堂
In January of 1906, barely three months after the Yuanmiaoguan Independent Primary
School went into operation, prior Yao and his monastery bought some real estate properties
that contained twenty-four rooms from the Ye household in the neighborhood near the
north gate of Nanyang. Prior Yao expanded and consolidated the grounds of the purchased
property and renovated the buildings there completely. In this renovated building, the
Daoist prior established a senior primary school named Yuanzong Higher Primary School
(Yuanzong gaodeng xiaoxuetang 元宗高等小學堂). He then purchased textbooks, desks,
chairs, and other instructional supplies to outfit the new school. The total expenditure
amounted to more than 3,620 taels of silver. To ensure the long-term sustainable operations
of the new primary school, the Daoist prior donated 400 mu 畝 of farmlands as the
endowment for the new school. The land donation valued at 7,000 taels of silver came from
the Xuanmiao monastery’s own vast endowment landholdings acquired through donation,
purchase, and in some cases land trusts by its affiliate temples over several hundred years
since the late Ming era. The donation by the prior was estimated to generate an annual
revenue sufficient to sustain the daily operations of the new school. Additionally, prior
Yao donated 1,150 taels of silver to set up the Yuanzong lower primary school (Yuanzong
chudeng xiaoxuetang 元宗初等小學堂) there. The combined contributions for both the
higher and lower primary schools totaled 11,770 taels of silver. Further, prior Yao followed
the state rules and guidelines in hiring the faculty and in recruiting the students for the
new schools.27
26
See “Xinzheng xian gaodeng xiaoxuetang biao 新鄭縣高等小學堂表” and “Yuzhou guanli
gaodeng xiaoxuetang/chudeng xiaoxuetang/shifan chuanxisuo zongbiao 禹州官立兩等小學堂/師範傳
習所總表,” HNJYGB 8:57a–b and 57b–59b, in QMGB 28: 13930–13921.
27
See “Qian sheng fuyuan Zhang fuzou Nanyangxian Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao Xiangrui juankuan
xingxue qingjiang pian 前升撫院張附奏南陽元妙觀道士姚祥瑞捐款興學請獎片,” in HNJYGB 5:
57a–b and 6: 58a–b, in QMGB 28: 13861 and 13878. See also Nanyang shi zhi 南陽市志 (Zhengzhou:
Henan renmin chubanshe, 1989), 654–656.
As with the first school founded in 1905, the Daoist monastery’s second new school
operated on a small annual budget of 400 taels of silver generated from the monastic
landholding and real estate properties in the city. Like its sister school, it was also divided
into lower and higher divisions. With Ji Yongtai 姬永泰 (d.u.), a local literatus, serving
as its principal, the new school hired four other teachers to teach the courses of the new
curriculum as stipulated by the Qing court and the Henan provincial government. It
admitted ninety-six students in the same year when the school went into operation.28
While it is hard to ascertain the quality of instruction and daily operations of the
second Daoist funded new primary schools in Nanyang, we can glean some information
from the Qing government’s education gazetteers. In the winter of 1907, the educational
inspector of the Sixth Circuit of the province filed his report which gives us some sense
of how these Daoist funded new schools were operated. While criticizing two other Qing
local government funded schools as “both having been insufficiently managed and lacking
uniformity (guanli yiqie shangqian zhengqi 管理一切尚欠整齊),” the inspector singled
out the Daoist Yuanzong primary school as the best managed of all the schools in the Sixth
Circuit which covered the entire southwestern region of Henan province. His report reads:
All the classes at the Yuanzong school have met the requirements. Its management is extremely
strict, and its gymnastic course in particular tops all other schools in Nanyang.
元宗學堂年級合格，管理綦嚴，其體操嫻熟尤為南陽各學之冠。29
Indeed, as early as the late summer of 1906, words of prior Yao’s public activism
in establishing new schools in Nanyang had reached the Qing court. Local officials from
the current magistrates of Nanyang prefecture and county to a former governor of Henan
petitioned the throne to issue commendations for his good work, resulting in the imperial
bestowment of the inscribed placard in the late summer that year.30 It is hard to know what
kind of impact such an imperial commendation had on prior Yao and his monastery. What
we do know is that prior Yao and his monastery continued to further their public activism
in sponsoring new schools in Nanyang.
28
xingxue qingjiangpian,” in HNJYGB 5: 57a–b, in QMGB 28: 13861; and also Nanyang shi zhi 南陽市志
(Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1989), 654–656.
29
See “Diliulu shengshi xueyuan baogao shu: Nanyangxian guan-minli gexuexuetang biao,” in
HNJYGB 24: 222a–b, in QMGB 28: 14173. The two officially funded schools criticized by the inspector
are the Nanyang County Higher Primary School (Nanyangxian gaodeng xiaoxue 南陽縣高等小學) and
the Nanyang Normal Institute (Shifan chuanxisuo 師範傳習所).
30
xingxue qingjiang pian,” in HNJYGB 5: 57a–b, and 6: 58a–b, in QMGB 28: 13861 and 13878.
248 Xun Liu
Sancui Lower Primary School 三萃初等小學堂

Two years later, in January of 1908, Wang Tiling 王體陵 (d.u.), the magistrate of Nanyang
county filed a report to the governor of Henan. According to the report, prior Yao had just
established yet another new school named Trinity of Purity Lower Primary School (Sancui
chuji xiaoxuetang 三萃初級小學堂) at the historically famous Broadview Township, the
fiefdom of the celebrated Western Han official and emissary who pioneered the Silk Road
to central Asia, Zhang Qian 張騫 (164–114 BCE), located about twelve miles northeast
of Nanyang.31 There the Monastery of Dark Mystery owned an affiliate branch temple
(xiayuan 下院), named the Palace of Three Primes (Sanyuan gong 三元宮). The resident
Quanzhen Daoist clerics there managed the Daoist temple’s real estate and farmlands
located around the township. Prior Yao selected a plot adjacent to the west wing of the
Daoist temple, and prepared it for the construction of the new school buildings. To properly
outfit the new school still under construction with the necessary instructional equipment,
instruments, and materials, the Daoist prior purchased all the required books, desks, and
chairs. As with the two previously established schools in Nanyang, he followed the Qing
state stipulated rules and guidelines strictly in hiring faculty and recruiting students at the
new school. He recruited Dong Ruqin 董汝芹 (d.u.), a local literatus and a supplementary
stipendiary student, to serve as both the professor of Chinese and the principal. He then
hired Liu Shanpei 劉善培 (d.u.), a graduate of the Yuanzong Higher Primary School in
Nanyang who excelled in mathematics, as the instructor in mathematics and physical
education. Liu also served concurrently as the school’s general manager. Even before the
construction was completed, the new school had already enrolled a total number of forty
qualified students from the local families in the township. In order to ensure the timely
opening of the spring semester, prior Yao made available the east wing building of the
Sanyuan Palace as the temporary classroom for the spring semester.
When the construction was completed on the second day of the fourth month, the
new school boasted three large lecture halls, three meeting rooms, sixteen study chambers
and dormitory rooms, and three school gates. Additionally, a library, a mess hall, and
toilets were also built on the school compound. By the summer when the new school was
moved into the completed buildings, a total sum of 2,200 taels of silver had been expended
to cover the construction, desks and chairs, educational instruments and implements.
Additionally, a sum of 260 taels went to purchase all the required textbooks and books for
the school library. The Daoist prior donated additional 1,000 taels of silver as the ongoing
operational funds for the new school. He also pledged that his monastery was committed
to underwrite any financial shortfalls in the future operations of the new school.
In order to ensure that the new school funded and run by the Daoists conformed to
all the Qing state regulations and guidelines, magistrate Wang Tiling conducted an on-site
inspection some time after the school went into operations in April of that year. In his
report filed to the governor of Henan province, Wang wrote:
31
See “Zha Nanyangfu zun Yuan pizhuan chi Nanyangxian zhizhao Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao
Xiangrui juanzi shexue wen 札南陽府遵院批轉飭南陽縣知照元妙觀道士姚祥瑞捐資設學文,” in
HNJYGB 24: 213b–214a, in QMGB 28: 14166–14167.
I then went myself to the said school for an inspection. The scale of the school buildings is all
quite spacious. The outfittings are all appropriate for (instruction). My investigation reveals
that the said Daoist Yao Xiangrui has previously made generous donations to establish several
new schools. Now he has again made donations to construct buildings to house the new Junior
Primary School in Broadview Township. He has also set up a school operations fund with as
much as 3,300 taels of silver as its principal to generate interest (in order to underwrite the
daily operations of the school). For the ongoing annual expenses, (he has also made) a further
commitment that his monastery would raise the required funds to replenish any operational
shortfalls going forward.
卑職當親詣該學堂查勘，規模尚屬寬廠(敞)布置亦合機宜。查該道士姚祥瑞前曾慨捐
鉅款創設學堂數區。茲復在博望鎮捐建校舍設立初等小學堂開辦經費並籌生息本金計
銀三千三百餘兩之多。嗣後常平年經費如有不敷，仍由該觀籌備。32
In explaining the Daoist cleric’s motives in establishing the new school, the Nanyang
county magistrate reported that prior Yao intended to cultivate and educate the poor but
smart peasant children (wei peizhi hanjun xuetong qijian 為培植寒畯學童起見), but
dared not to seek any additional official commendation (bing bugan zaiyao jiangshang
並不敢再邀獎賞).33
Nonetheless, magistrate Wang pleaded with provincial governor Wu Chongxi
吳重憙 (1838–1918) to issue a special commendation in recognition of the Daoist’s long–
term commitment and his outstanding contribution to the Qing state education reforms. In
his response to the magistrate’s petition, governor Wu praised prior Yao for his valuable
donation totaling 3,300 taels in founding Sancui Lower Primary School. He stressed that
such a donation coming from a Daoist cleric who was supposed to have withdrawn from
the secular world deserved the highest commendation (liangkan jiashang 良堪嘉尚). To
encourage the prior’s and his monastery’s activism in local education and to boost the
morale of the new schools, the governor then approved the petition by magistrate Wang
to issue a commendation for the Daoist prior.34
Indeed, the Qing state and local officials had early realized the unique relevance
of prior Yao’s activism and generosity to its goal and needs to modernize its outmoded
traditional education system, given its concurrent lack of funds to pay for its ambitious
agenda for educational modernization. Such public philanthropic activism could directly
boost the Qing state drive to revamp and modernize its education system in all its local
territories. Not surprisingly, when prior Yao began his monastic activism with the initial
donations to establish the Yuanzong Higher and Lower Primary Schools in the northern
32
See Wang Tiling, “Nanyang zhixian Wang Tiling bin Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao Ruixiang juanzi
xingxue qingxing wen pifu 南陽知縣王體陵稟元妙觀道士姚祥瑞捐資興學情形文批附,” in HNJYGB
39: 338a–339a, in QMGB 29: 14454.
33
See “Zha Nanyangfu zun yuan pizhuanchi Nanyangxian zhizhao Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao
Xiangrui juanzi shexue wen,” in HNJYGB 24: 213b–214a, in QMGB 28: 14166–14167; and also
“Nanyang zhixian Wang Tiling bin Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao Xiangrui juanzi xingxue qingxing wen
pifu,” in HNJYGB 39: 338a–339a, in QMGB 29: 14454.
34
See “Nanyang zhixian Wang Tiling bin Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao Xiangrui juanzi xingxue
qingxing wen pifu,” in HNJYGB 39: 338b–339a, in QMGB 29: 14454.
250 Xun Liu
ward of Nanyang, Sa Qiyan 薩起巖 (active in the first decade of the twentieth century),
a jinshi 進士 degree holder from the 1903 metropolitan civil service examination and the
presiding magistrate of Nanyang county, immediately recognized the vital importance
of Yao’s public activism to the Qing state drive to establishing new schools throughout
Nanyang and the realm. Magistrate Sa first verified all the details of prior Yao’s donations
and his efforts to build the new schools. He then carefully reviewed the Qing state rules
regarding these private voluntary donations. As it turns out, the Qing state had stipulated
that when donations by local literati and commoners reached the level of one thousand taels
of sliver, local officials could petition the throne for decrees authorizing the constructions
of shrines to honor their public activism and philanthropic contributions. Shortly after
the Daoist prior founded the Yuanzong Primary School in early 1906, magistrate Sa filed
a memorial to Ruiliang 瑞良 (1862–1938), the provincial administration commissioner
(buzhengshi 布政使) and Kong Xianglin 孔祥霖 (1852–1917), the provincial education
commissioner (tixueshi 提學使) reporting on the details of the new school’s finances,
building facilities, instructional equipment, faculty hiring, and the Daoist prior’s and the
Xuanmiao Monastery’s history in public activism and service in Nanyang. Magistrate Sa’s
memorial was apparently forwarded up the Qing state bureaucratic chain of communication
to the Board of Rites and the throne.35 Meanwhile, the memorial also caught the eye of
Zhang Renjun 張人駿 (1847–1927), the governor of the province. In late summer of 1906,
governor Zhang prepared and filed his own petition to the throne to reward the Daoist
prior’s public activism in local education reform in Nanyang. In his petition memorial,
governor Zhang cited a comparable case which he had personally handled while serving
as the governor of Guangdong province between 1903 and 1905. The Guangdong case
involved the public donation of 20,000 taels of silver which the monk Tiechan 鐵禪和尚
(1865–1946) at the Monastery of Six Ficus Trees (Liurong si 六榕寺) had made towards
the operational funds of a military academy in the province.36 In that case, governor Zhang
together with Cen Chunxuan 岑春煊 (1861–1933), the then Governor-General of the
Guangdong and Guangxi provinces (Liang Guang zongdu 兩廣總督), jointly petitioned
the throne to issue an imperial placard in recognition of the Buddhist monk’s public
philanthropy and contribution to the Qing military modernization program.
In his petition, governor Zhang pleaded with the throne to consider his proposition
to reward prior Yao and his monastery. In the memorial, the governor recalled how the
past leading Daoist clerics at the Xuanmiao Monastery, like abbot Zhang Yuanxuan, had
collaborated with the Qing state by making huge donations to defend Nanyang against
the Nian 捻 rebels during the Taiping war (1851–1865), and then he likened prior Yao’s
35
Magistrate Sa’s memorial was quoted later extensively in the Henan governor’s own petition
memorial to the throne. See “Qian sheng fuyuan Zhang fuzou Nanyangxian Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao
Xiangrui juankuan xingxue qingjiang pian,” in HNJYGB 5: 57a–b and. 6: 58a–b, in QMGB 28: 13861
and 13878.
36
For the monk Tiechan’s activism in promoting new schools in his locale and his tragic end,
see the entry on him in Zhongguo jindai renming da cidian 中國近代人名大辭典 (Beijing: Zhongguo
guangbo chubanshe, 1989), 560; and also see the entry on him in QSG at Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi
.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@27^1760750644^809^^^0211001092065^@@1575482023#top.
public activism in support of the Qing new education reform to abbot Zhang’s valiant
efforts in support of the Qing court:
Now Yao Xiangrui can again deeply understand the supreme righteousness by managing the
(new) sphere of learning. His action is the same as Daoist cleric Zhang who resisted the rebels
in order to benefit the local community. As for his cash donations, the sums exceed tens of
thousands of taels. . . .”
今姚祥瑞復能大意深明經營學界，與張道士御賊出力同為有益地方。而捐款更數逾鉅
萬 . . .37
That the said Daoist Yao Xiangrui as a recluse outside this world can so enthusiastically put
his heart in establishing schools by making generous donations can by no means be compared
to a routine act of philanthropy. Even though he does not seek fame and fortune, his sincere
generosity and righteousness must not be forgotten lightly. Based on our verification, his
monastery has received an imperially bestowed Daoist Canon and placards. So as a venue of the
Perfected Immortals, (this monastery) has already received praises and awards from the court.
Why do we petition for His Majesty’s celestial grace again to bestow another placard upon Yao
Xiangrui, the Daoist of the Monastery of Dark Mystery? The crux is to use the prominence (of
the award) to stimulate and inspire, and it originates from his majesty’s magnanimity.
該道士姚祥瑞以方外緇流，獨能熱心興學慨出鉅資，洵非尋常善舉可比。雖其淡於榮
利，未便沒其慷慨好義之忱。照該觀歷蒙頒賜佛經匾額，棲真之地，固已早示褒榮。
合無仰懇天恩賜給元妙觀道士姚祥瑞匾額一方，用昭激勵之處，出自鴻施 . . .
At the end of his petition, governor Zhang pleaded with the throne to consider his
proposition to reward prior Yao and his monastery with an inscribed placard. Published
in the September issue of the Henan Education Gazetteer in 1907, the governor’s memorial
recorded a favorable imperial response. The emperor wrote in scarlet ink: “Do as he has
pleaded. Approved!” 照所請，欽此!38 However, the governor’s memorial dated the tenth
day of the eighth month, 1906, may have been moot, as the Veritable Record of the Qing
Dynasty records that on the sixth day of the eighth month, 1906, the emperor had already
granted the Daoist prior and his monastery a placard with the inscription “Complete
Perfection (Daoism) Proliferates Learning.”39 If so, the imperial commendation may have
been granted in response to the petition filed initially by magistrate Sa and forwarded by
commissioners Ruiliang and Kong earlier that year.
37
For details of abbot Zhang Zongxuan’s proactive defense of Nanyang against the siege laid
by the Nian-Taiping rebels in the early 1860s, see Xun Liu, “In Defense of the City and the Polity: The
Xuanmiao Monastery and the Qing Anti-Taiping Campaigns in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Nanyang,”
T’oung Pao 95, no. 4 (2009): 287–333.
38
See “Qian sheng fuyuan Zhang fuzhou Nanyangxian Yuanmiaoguan daoshi Yao Xiangrui
juankuan xingxue qingjiang pian,” in HNJYGB 5: 57a–b, and 6: 58a–b, in QMGB 28: 13861, 13877.
39
For details of the Qing court’s issuance of the placard, see the entry in QSL at Scripta Sinica,
https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@4^71895761^803^^^8021100100130567000100060001^P
@@615964769#top.
252 Xun Liu
Regardless, the inscribed placard is a clear sign of the Qing court’s approval of
prior Yao and his monastic activism in supporting the Qing state agenda for educational
reform and modernization. It also best captures prior Yao’s and his Daoist monastery’s
contribution to the Qing state drive to revamp and modernize its traditional educational
system that had centered on the study of Confucian classics for passing the civil service
examination. It is significant that of the total eleven western-styled new primary and
middle schools established in Nanyang from 1904 to 1911, prior Yao and the Monastery
of Dark Mystery were responsible for establishing and operating three. The unusual and
disproportionately large number of the Daoist-funded schools attested to the remarkably
large influence of prior Yao and his Daoist temple in the city of Nanyang during the late
Qing era.
Aiding and Promoting Agricultural Reforms

Aside from his activism in establishing new schools, prior Yao and his Quanzhen
monastery also actively participated in the Qing state-initiated programs at promoting
agricultural reforms by introducing and spreading modern agricultural knowledge and
farming techniques aimed at invigorating local agriculture, trade, and economy in the
aftermath of the Taiping war.40
The industrialist Zhang Jian 張謇 (1853–1926) was among the first reformers to
advocate for the importance of reforming traditional agriculture and farming practices
as a means of strengthening the Qing economy and society.41 As part of their plan for
agricultural reforms, Zhang and other reformers also pushed for vocational training
and education as a means for disseminating modern farming, industrial and technical
knowledge and skills among the rural population. In 1908, the Qing court stipulated the
establishment of vocational schools (shiye xuetang 實業學堂) alongside the new western
schools. In the Nanyang region, schools of sericulture (cansang xuetang 蠶桑學堂) were
set up in the counties of Dengzhou 鄧州 and Nanzhao 南召 in 1908, followed by similar
schools of agriculture and industry (nonggong shiye xuetang 農工實業學堂) and business
(shangye xuetang 商業學堂) in Xichuan 淅川, Neixiang 內鄉, Dengzhou 鄧州, Zhenping
鎮平, and other counties of the Nanyang prefecture toward the end of the first decade
of the twentieth century. At these two-year vocational schools, specialized courses in
sericulture, modern agriculture, soil sciences, farming technologies, and business skills
were taught, in addition to courses in Chinese, mathematics, geography, history, and arts.
40
Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, 153–195.
41
For Zhang’s life and career as a major late Qing reformer, see Samuel C. Chu, Reformer in
Modern China: Chang Chien, 1853–1926 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). For his role
in the late Qing agricultural reforms, see Xu Jingyu 徐靜玉, “Zhang Jian yu Qing mo nongye gaige
張謇與清末農業改革,” Hunan Nongye daxue xuebao 湖南農業大學學報, 2003, no. 1: 39–42; and Wu
Chunmei 吳君梅, “Qing mo Xinzheng shiqi de nongye gaige 清末新政時期的農業改革,” Zhongguo
nongshi 中國農史, 1999, no. 3: 43–47. For a recent study of Zhang’s role in shaping modern Chinese
society, see Zhang Kaiyuan 章開源 and Tian Tong 田彤, Zhang Jian yu jindai shehui 張謇與近代社會
(Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2001).
Zhang Jian’s proposed agricultural reform and the mission of the new agricultural
schools found a ready and enthusiastic supporter in prior Yao Aiyun. Like Zhang, the
Daoist prior considered dissemination of agricultural knowledge and farming techniques
vitally important for strengthening the agrarian society and economy. As the leading Daoist
in charge of one of the largest landholding temples in Nanyang, prior Yao took a special
interest in promoting the new agricultural learning among the tenant farmers who leased
and cultivated the monastery’s vast holdings of farmlands throughout the Nanyang region.
Yu Yinlin 于蔭霖 (1838–1904), who served as the governor of Henan briefly from
1900 to 1901, spent considerable time in Nanyang to recuperate from a chronic illness
after his tenure in Henan. During his sojourn there, Yu came to know prior Yao and the
Xuanmiao Monastery quite well. According to him, the Daoist prior had carefully studied
various new innovative farming methods from tilling and irrigation to fertilization and
well-drilling. He taught the monastery’s tenant farmers to plant fruit trees in the empty
spaces between the farmland plots to help retain moisture and improve the soil conditions.
When the farmers harvested fruits from the planted trees, the Daoist prior allowed the
tenants to profit from their sale and collected no extra rents from the fruit harvest. As
much of the Nanyang plain was criss-crossed by tributaries and streams of the Han and
Huai rivers, the farmlands were susceptible to floods in summer and drought in spring,
resulting in reduced or failed crops at harvest time. To prevent flooding, prior Yao was said
to have studied some ancient tilling and cropping techniques which involved furrowing
the growing fields and constructing dykes around the farmlands vulnerable to flooding.
He then instructed the monastery’s tenants on how to adopt these techniques and apply
them to farming their respective plots to ensure good harvests. He also drew up detailed
diagrams to illustrate the methods for drilling irrigation wells, for applying fertilizers to
the planted crops, and for raising live-stock. He then used these diagrams to teach most
of the illiterate tenant farmers who farmed the monastery’s endowment lands. In order to
disseminate the new farming techniques, the Daoist prior even paid for the printing and
distribution of the diagrams among the tenants and other local farmers so that they could
learn and implement these new farming methods and techniques to avoid the effects of
drought or floods, and ensure their harvest.42
Prior Yao’s efforts in educating the monastery’s tenant farmers by spreading new
efficient farming methods and techniques among them may have reflected an enlightened
and entrepreneurial landlord’s vision about productivity and profit. But his interest in
farming and disseminating agricultural learning and methods is also congruent with his
personal agrarian roots, and more importantly with the early Quanzhen Daoist tradition
of self-sufficiency and moral living through farming and ascetic self-cultivation practices
such as fasting, meditation without sleep, and seclusion that first began with the Quanzhen
founders from the mid-twelfth century onward.43
42
Yu, “Xibei yuan ji,” in NYXZ 12: 24a.
43
Self-sufficiency through farming and agrarian pursuits was widely practiced among earlier
patriarchs of the Quanzhen Daoism. See Gai Jianmin 蓋建民, “Quanzhen zi Chen Fu nongxue sixiang
kaoshu 全真子陳旉農學思想考述,” Zongjiaoxue yanjiu 宗教學研究, 2000, no. 4: 48–53. On the general
relationship between Daoist cosmology and ethics and agriculture in China, see Gai Jianmin and Yuan
Mingze 袁名澤, “Daojiao yu Zhongguo chuantong nongye 道教與中國傳統農業關係略考,” Fujian
254 Xun Liu
Cultivating Social and Cultural Ties

and E xpanding C lerical R anks
What enabled prior Yao and his monastery’s activism was not just his personal charisma
and moral authority, but also his own and his monastery’s record of commitment to local
communities in Nanyang. Prior Yao’s charisma and authority and the Daoist monastery’s
deep relationship with local elite and communities were cultivated over time through
cultural and social exchanges of their shared values and principles.
When prior Yao first arrived in Nanyang in 1885 with his mentor abbot Zhang
Yuanxuan, he inherited from the abbot a powerful Quanzhen universal temple with a long
history of local investments and a wide network of social and political ties with the Qing
officialdom and literati in both the capital and Nanyang. Through his former service in the
Qing army, the Daoist prior had also developed his own network of social and political ties
among the Qing officialdom and literati community. These social and political ties were
fostered through shared experiences in military service, as well as artistic and cultural
pursuits and exchanges.
Prior Yao’s tenure at the Nanyang monastery coincided with the post-Taiping long-
running Self-Strengthening Movement which aimed at reviving the devastated Qing state,
and restoring and consolidating its political institutions and social and moral order. To that
end, both national and local officials launched a host of reforms and initiatives throughout
the empire. In Nanyang, prior Yao also did his share by putting in place initiatives to
repair the symbolic universe and moral order, and to consolidate the Confucian literati
culture in Nanyang. At the monastery, he called for stricter monastic rules and clerical
disciple among fellow Daoists, and planned a series of major altars of consecration at the
Nanyang monastery to rapidly increase the Quanzhen clerical ranks throughout the realm.
He also acted to promote literati culture and arts and set an example by constructing a
retreat garden at the monastery and by practicing such literati art forms as painting and
zither-playing, hallmarks of literati artistic pursuits.
Indeed, prior Yao’s years of service in the Qing military did not seem to have erased
or even dulled his artistic temperament and talents. With his early training in classics, the
Daoist cleric, according to his literati friends, excelled in painting, especially the landscape
brushwork. Li Duanyu 李端遇 (zi: Xiaoxian 小峴, active in the 1880s), a close friend
and ranking Qing court scholar-official, enthused over Yao’s skills in painting landscapes
and considered prior Yao’s work worthy of being a disciple to the great late-Yuan master-
painter of landscapes, Huang Gongwang 黃公望 (1269–1354), who often signed his
brushwork with his self-deprecating style name “Big Crazy” (Dachi 大癡):
Aiyun’s forte is (painting) mountains and waters with a profound elan. (He is) truly a worthy
disciple to the Big Crazy.
shifan daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 福建師範大學學報(哲學社會科學版), 2009, no. 3:
137–142. For early Quanzhen Daoist efforts in agrarian self-sufficiency, see also Xue Youliang 薛友諒,
“Qiyun Wang zhenren kai Laoshui ji 棲雲王真人開澇水記,” in Daojia jinshi lüe 道家金石略, comp.
Chen Yuan 陳垣 and Chen Zhichao 陳智超 (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1988), 620–621.
藹雲精於山水，其魄多醇厚，入大癡之室。
In his colophon to a portrait of prior Yao (see figs. 4 and 5), Li mentioned specifically
that the prior had produced a painting entitled “The Snowy Mountain” (Xueshan tu
雪山圖) which depicts the journey over the snow-capped mountains near Samarkand
by the Quanzhen Daoist patriarch Qiu Chuji 丘處機 (1148–1227) for an audience with
Chingghis Khan 成吉思汗 (1162–1227), and that prior Yao had given him the painting
as a gift. In return, Li composed a long poem in the colophon to the portrait.44
A portrait of prior Yao was drawn by a literatus artist named Fu Zhen 傅潧 (d.u.)
probably sometime either before or in the twelfth moon of 1882. It contains two colophons,
one by Chengzhi 成治 (zi: Dating 達廷, hao: Yuanshan 元山 and Xiangchen 襄臣, active
in the 1870s to 1890s) on the left, and the other by Li Duanyu on the right margin of
the portrait. It is quite possible that someone close to prior Yao Aiyun, probably Li and
Chengzhi Dating, commissioned the portrait as a gesture of their adulation of the Quanzhen
adept.45 But even so, elements of the portrait would have to reflect the subject’s life and
character to be an authentic adulation or flattery to its intended recipient. In that sense, the
portrait must be read as representative of aspects of prior Yao’s inner character, personality,
as well as his outward appearance.
The flattering yet evocative title given to the portrait aims to project prior Yao as
a transcendent being of the realm of immortals: the Dark Capital (yuandu 元都). In the
portrait, the prior is portrayed as a culturally refined and spiritually transcendent man.
Robed in a blue Daoist gown and sitting leisurely on a rock, he casts a pensive look over
the garden railing at the flowing stream in the mountain in the distant background. A
close-up view to the left of the portrait reveals a zither half-covered by its cloth sheath
on the stone table, and a Daoist page in attendance is holding a stack of books behind the
abbot, ready to act at the abbot’s beckon. Clearly, the placement of the half-sheathed zither
on the stone table and the books held in the hands of the page are meant as mimetic icons
44
See Li Duanyu’s inscribed poem in the colophon on Yao’s portrait, see Li, Shuilu shenquan,
401.
45
Li Duanyu was a native of Anqiu county in Shandong. He achieved his jinshi degree in 1863.
He began his career initially as a lowly apprentice (xuexi 學習) at the court, but steadily rose through
the Qing officialdom, serving in many mid-level court offices such as the Court of State Ceremonies
(Honglu si 鴻廬寺) as its chief, the Office of Transmission (Tongzhengshi si 通政使司) as its deputy
chief, the Court of Imperial Entertainments (Guanglu si 光祿寺) as its chief minister, the Court of Imperial
Sacrifices (Taichang si 太常寺) as its chief minister. From 1889 onwards, Li served as the provincial
examiner (zhukao 主考) for several provincial examinations in Jiangnan (1889) and Zhejiang (1891).
From 1894, Li served as the commissioner of education (tidu xuezheng 提督學政) in Anhui, and then
as the vice minister of the Board of Rites in 1899. During the Boxer Rebellion, Li was appointed as one
of the Imperial Commissioners for Military Training in the Capital (jingshi tuanlian dachen 京師團練
大臣), responsible for raising, coordinating, and managing the local Boxers against western forces. See
his entries under the reign of Muzong, juan 66, and multiple entries under the reign of Dezong, juan
203–468, in QSL in Scripta Sinica. Little is known about Chengzhi. The way he identified himself in his
colophon suggests that he was most likely a bannerman well-versed in poetry, calligraphy, and painting.
Contemporary online dealers of Chinese paintings have also identified him as a connoisseur and collec-
tor of paintings active during the late Qing period. See following links: http://auction.artron.net/paimai
-art46411256/ and http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_7c3326200101gcnd.html.
256 Xun Liu
Fig. 4: Yuandu qingzhao 元都清照 (A Pure Vista of the Dark Metropolis) by Fu Zhen (1882) in
Li, Shuilu shenquan, 401.
of the prior’s two passionate pursuits and achievements: the zither and classical learning.
They conveyed to the audience an unmistaken message: prior Yao was a learned man and
an accomplished musician of the zither.46
Painted during Yao’s tenure as the prior at the Qing capital’s White Cloud Monastery,
the leading public Quanzhen temple in the empire, the portrait was clearly meant to project
to the public an image of prior Yao as a charismatic monastic leader in the secular world,
composed and refined inwardly, and yet accomplished and capable outwardly. Indeed,
from the mid-1880s when Yao began to serve as the prior of the Xuanmiao Monastery
in Nanyang, he had implemented various monastic reform measures. As described in
detail above, he tightened clerical discipline at the monastery and promoted new farming
methods among the local tenants of the monastery. And more relevant to this study, he
had established several free schools (yishu 義塾) from the mid-1880s to the 1890s in the
northern neighborhoods of Nanyang to offer free rudimentary education to the children of
the poor families in the district. To expand the ranks of the Quanzhen Daoist clergy, the
Daoist prior also made preparations to hold ordination altars at the monastery. For that
purpose, he selected a few Daoist novices and set up a seminary to study and practice the
Daoist precepts (xijie tang 習戒堂) in the Xuanmiao Monastery as early as 1894. There,
he held regular sessions to train the novices on Daoist precepts, rites, and procedures
for holding the Quanzhen Longmen altars of consecration. In August of 1909, prior Yao
staged the first ordination altar at the Five Cassia Hall (Wuguitang 五桂堂) of the Nanyang
monastery, and transmitted the Quanzhen Daoist precepts to five ordinands whom he
46
For details of the portrait, see Li, Shuilu shenquan, 401.
Fig. 5: Section details of Yuandu qingzhao, by Fu Zhen (1882), in Li, Shuilu shenquan, 401.
had handpicked from among three hundred or so Daoist clerics living and working at the
Xuanmiao Monastery. Subsequently, he held two additional consecration altars at the
monastery in the fall of 1910, and then again in the spring of 1911.47 As these ordination
altars were usually costly endeavors, the Nanyang monastery’s abilities to afford them
attested to the solid monastic economy and relative wealth achieved through prior Yao’s
decades of wise leadership, sound economic stewardship, and deep social and cultural ties
with the Qing state, local elite, and communities in Nanyang. As a result, Yao’s successful
holding of these ordination altars not only elevated the prior to the status of an abbot
(fangzhang 方丈) at the Daoist monastery in Nanyang, but they also greatly invigorated
47
See Xun Liu 劉迅, “Qingmo Nanyang Xuanmiaoguan chuanjie kaolüe 清末南陽玄妙觀傳戒
考略,” Zongjiaoxue yanjiu 宗教學研究, 2013, no. 3: 7–17. For the ordination altar held in the fall of
1910, see the Quanzhen consecration registers (1909 and 1910) and precepts issued to Xu Zhishan 徐至善
and Guan Zhiren關至仁 now held at Wudangshan Archives, digital photocopies in my collection.
258 Xun Liu
the Quanzhen clerical morale and enhanced the reputation and influence of the Xuanmiao
Monastery in Nanyang and beyond.48
Alongside these achievements, prior Yao also devoted his energy and monastic
resources to cultivating Daoist monastic culture at the monastery. One of his main efforts
was to transform the northwestern corner of the monastery’s compound into a beautiful
garden retreat which he named the Northwest Garden (Xibei yuan 西北園) shortly after
his arrival in Nanyang in 1886.
The new retreat garden was built on an old site of a small garden in the northwestern
corner of the Xuanmiao Monastery. During his stay at the White Cloud Monastery in
the capital, prior Yao had become intimately knowledgeable of the massive monastic
expansion, especially the construction of the magnificent rear garden under Gao Rentong,
his erstwhile co-ordinand and rival at the capital monastery. It is hard to know if prior
Yao was motivated by the rivalry as he set about building the Northwest Garden at the
Nanyang Monastery. Regardless, from 1886 to 1938 when it was destroyed by a Japanese
air raid bombing,49 the Northwest Garden was one of the most enchanted destinations
for both visitors and local residents in Nanyang. Much we now know about the garden
and its appeal comes from the writings by people who had visited it while growing up or
sojourning in Nanyang.
Former governor of Henan, Yu Yinlin frequented the garden at the invitation of
prior Yao during his sojourn in Nanyang. At the time, Yu was recovering from a chronic
illness. In his inscribed stele entitled “A Record of the Northwest Garden” and composed
at the behest of prior Yao, the former governor of Henan provided a detailed account of
the physical layout and architectural details of the garden, and highlighted many of its
scenic beauties. According to him, the Xuanmiao Monastery’s garden was constructed
by expanding on an old garden site located to the northwest of the monastic compound.
The new garden was comprised of several exquisitely built pavilions on and around a
large artificial mount in the middle of a lake connected by meandering roofed verandas,
bridges, and wooded walkways.
The entrance to the garden was a large hall surrounded by five large cassia trees
from which it derived the name “Five Cassia Hall.” The hall also served as the venue
where the monastery held its sacred ordination rite to initiate novices as full-fledged Daoist
clerics (chuanjie 傳戒). Before he held the first open consecration altar at the Xuanmiao
Monastery in the late summer of 1910, prior Yao had used the Five Cassia Hall as the
48
For abbot Yao’s efforts in monastic and modern reforms in Nanyang from the 1880s onward, see
Xun Liu, “Proliferating Learning”; Xun Liu, “Quanzhen Proliferates Learning: The Xuanmiao Temple,
Clerical Activism, and the Modern Reforms in Nanyang,1880s–1940s”; and Xun Liu 劉迅, “Quanzhen
guangxue: Qingmo Minchu Nanyang Xuanmiaoguan daoshi xingdong yu xiandai gaige 全真廣學: 清末民
初南陽玄妙觀、道士行動與現代改革,” in Shijiu shiji yilai Zhongguo difang daojiao bianqian 十九世
紀以來中國地方道教變遷, ed. Lai Chi-tim 黎志添 (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 2013), 383–416.
49
According to the recollection by the zither player Lü Foting 呂佛庭, who visited the garden
during his sojourn at the monastery, the garden was severely damaged by bombs dropped during the first
rounds of Japanese air raids of Nanyang in 1938. See Lü Foting, “Guqin shike Wolong gang 古琴石刻
臥龍崗,” Nanyang wenxian 南陽文獻 (hereafter NYWX) 9 (1994): 85–89. For a general account of the
events during the anti-Japanese war, see Hui Wuzhang 惠武章 and Zhou Dianjun 周殿君, “Nanyang
xian kangri douzheng dashi ji 南陽縣抗日斗爭大事記,” NYXWS 3 (1989): 1–15.
Fig. 6: A view of the famed Northwest Garden at the Xuanmiao Monastery in the 1930s before
the Japanese air bombing, in Yin Dejie 殷德傑, Lao Nanyang: jiushi cangmang 老南陽: 舊事蒼芒
(2005), 183.
training ground for his five carefully selected novices to study all the required scriptures
and rehearse all the rituals of the consecration altar. Behind the hall was a pond several
square mu in size. The shoals of the large pond were planted with patches of blooming
lotus, and the pond was stocked with fish. Surrounding the pond was a circular meandering
roofed veranda and pathways. Along the edges of the pond were groves of trees where
birds nested. In the middle of the pond was an artificial mount made of the expensive
Taihu Lake 太湖 limestone rocks. Atop the mount was a small pavilion named “Lotus
Fragrance” (Wanxiang ting 浣香亭). Across the water eastward from the island mount and
perched over the edge of the pond was another pavilion named “Lotus Bloom” (Ouhua
xie 藕花榭). Descending westward from the artificial mount and crossing a stone-inlaid
pathway and a wooden bridge over the water, one would arrive at a three-chambered
hamlet with a scenic view, which was renamed from its old name “Cottage of Surrounding
Flowers” (Huancui jingshe 環翠精舍) by Governor Yu as “Brilliant Sunshine Cottage”
(Qinghui jingshe 清暉精舍). Extending southward from the cottage and swerving east
was a roofed stone walkway with scenic views over the pond on both sides. The walk over
the pond was appropriately entitled “Over the Pond” (Haoshang 濠上). Several stone’s
throws away further south was a giant rock rising out of the pond named “Moon Altar”
(Yuetai 月臺), on which perched a small chamber with a scenic view over the pond. For
its commanding view of shimmering pond and the spreading patches of lotus leaves and
260 Xun Liu
flowers, the chamber was named “Painted Float amidst Autumn Fragrance” (Qiuxiang
huafang 秋香畫舫). From the back of the float was a flight of stone steps led up the
artificial mount in the pond to the thatched “Hut of Acquiring the Moon” (Deyue zuoting
得月坐亭), so named because it overlooked the Moon Altar below the mount. As Nanyang
is situated in a basin of the same name, the elevated Lotus Fragrance Pavilion and the Hut
atop the artificial mount in the pond offered a commanding panoramic view of the nearby
surrounding farm fields, city streets, rivers, highways, and soaring peaks of the Funiu
Ranges 伏牛山 to the west and the Tongbo Ranges 桐柏山 to the east in the distance.50
Before the emergence of modern public parks in Nanyang, the monastic garden
with its elevated panoramic vista and the breathtaking scenery around offered not only
meditative retreat for the monastery’s clerics, but it also provided one of the few public
spaces of leisure and entertainment for local residents, sojourners, and visitors. On festivals
celebrating the birth and ascension dates of Daoist deities throughout each year, the garden
regaled the revelers, pilgrims, and residents with beautiful vistas and sights. Its beautifully
decorated pavilions and huts provided spaces for visitors to rest and chat when they
swarmed the monastery to offer their prayers and watch theatrical plays and parades there.
Perhaps more importantly, the garden provided a physical venue where leading
clerics of the Xuanmiao Monastery such as prior Yao could play host to their official and
literati friends, and entertain them with music performances and the monastery’s unique
vegetarian cuisine. Governor Yu Yinlin, who visited the garden several times as an invited
guest of prior Yao, left a vivid account of what he experienced at the beautiful garden:
In the summer of 1901, I sojourned in Nanyang to recuperate from a chronic illness after I
resigned from the Henan governorship. I learned that the Xuanmiao Monastery located outside
the North Gate was a grand and solemn venue, and the largest Daoist monastery in central and
southwestern Henan. So I picked a day and went with my friend Hu Jing’an, my son Handu, and
my grandson Chongxi for a visit. At our arrival, Daoist cleric Yao Aiyun, whose style name is
Xiangrui, invited us to see and tour the monastery’s Northwest Garden. At the time, lotus was
in full bloom; birds chirped and fish swarmed up to the surface. As I toured the garden, I took
great delight in it. Later, I came back several times for additional visits there. The Daoist was
a considerate host. On these visits, he would often bring out the rich collection of calligraphic
works and paintings held at his monastery for me to view and enjoy. He was also elegantly
versed at playing the zither. It was scorching-hot high summer day at the pavilion where we
sat. But after he played a couple of tunes for me on the zither, I felt chills upon chills as the
musical notes lingered on the strings of his zither.
光緒辛丑夏。余罷豫撫養痾南陽。聞府城北關元妙觀規模宏肅。為豫中西南一大道院。
暇日攜友人胡敬菴、子翰篤、孫重熙往游。姚靄雲道士祥瑞延余於觀之西北園。時荷
花盛開。魚鳥親人。余游而樂之。前後凡數至。道士款洽甚殷。出其所藏古今名人字
畫甚富。又雅善鼓琴。當盛暑亭午。為余鼓一二曲。泠泠然有弦外之音。51
50
The description of the garden is based on Yu’s first-hand account. See Yu, “Xibeiyuan ji,” in
NYXZ (1904), 12: 22b–24a.
51
See Yu, “Xibeiyuan ji,” in NYXZ (1904), 12: 22b–24a.
Loyalism and Martyrdom in the 1911 Revolution

The tradition of the Quanzhen Daoist activism to change and benefit local society pioneered
by early Daoist priors such as Zhang Zongxuan was further continued and even expanded
under prior Yao at the Xuanmiao Monastery in the late Qing era. By cultivating and
expanding deep social and cultural ties with the local literati and the Qing state officials,
prior Yao was able to wage his public activism successfully in the late Qing state-directed
local reforms from establishing new schools to disseminating new farming techniques
in Nanyang. His pioneering efforts not only earned the Qing court’s recognition and the
popularity in the local community, but they also helped shape modern educational and
other public institutions in Nanyang.
But if prior Yao’s close ties with the Qing state and officialdom initially enabled
his public activism to bring about positive changes and benefits to the local community
in Nanyang, they also became a fatal political liability for him when the Republican
revolution toppled the Qing dynasty in 1911. It turns out that after his arrival in Nanyang
in 1885, prior Yao had revived a close working relationship with both the local social and
political elite in Nanyang. His friends in the Qing officialdom included such dignitaries as
Yu Yinlin, the ex-governor of Henan province, and general Xie Baosheng 謝寶勝 (literary
style: Zhilan 芝蘭, ?–1912), the Regional Military Commander of Nanyang (Nanyang
zongbing 南陽總兵) in charge of all the Qing new army stationed in southern Henan. The
Daoist prior and the Qing general had served together in the Qing Green Standard army
during the Qing campaigns against the Hui rebel forces in Northwestern region in the
1860s.52 The two also shared their interest in Daoism. General Xie hailed from Shouzhou
壽州 of Anhui province in the Huai River valley. He grew up in an impoverished family
and became a Daoist novice in his youth. Because of his early conversion to Daoism,
he was widely known among his friends and Qing army colleagues as “Xie, the Old
Daoist (Xie laodao 謝老道).” Like prior Yao, he had participated in the Qing military
suppression of the Hui rebellion in the 1860s in China’s northwestern region and rose to
the rank of regional vice commander (dusi 都司) due to his exploits on the battlefields
in the Qing Green Standard army. But due to his strong disagreement with his superior
officer, Xie resigned his post and resumed his Daoist life at a Daoist cloister on Mt.
Bokeda in Xinjiang. In 1889, when Ma Yukun 馬玉崑 (1838–1908), his old commanding
officer and now the military superintendent of the capital (tidu jifu 提督畿輔) recalled
him for service, Xie left the Daoist monastery to rejoin the Qing army at the capital. He
commanded a unit of the Qing expeditionary forces to defend the Korean court between
1894 and 1895. There he fought valiantly against the Japanese forces. But he was so
dismayed at the humiliating peace treaty which the Qing state reached with Japan in the
spring of 1895 that he again abandoned his post and sojourned in secret as a resident
cleric at the White Cloud Monastery in the capital. He was later recalled again out of his
self-imposed retirement at the Daoist monastery at the time of the Boxer Rebellion to
serve as the military circuit superintendent in charge of bandit suppression in northern and
52
See the entry on Xie Baosheng in QSG at Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji
?@94^1536967448^803^^^702020250004025700070001^P@@1698467706#top.
262 Xun Liu
western Henan. He distinguished himself as a skilled tactician and led a host of successful
campaigns that largely pacified the bandit-ridden northern Henan. Soon he was promoted
to the post of regional military commander of the Qing new army north of the Yellow River
in Henan (Hebei zongbing 河北總兵) in 1909. The following year, he was reassigned to
serve as the regional military commander of Nanyang, but he was still allowed to retain
the command of all the Qing new army forces stationed in northern Henan. In his new
posts, general Xie excelled in bandit suppression and earned wide respect both at the court
and among the local elite and commoners in western and southern Henan.53
It was sometime in 1909 when prior Yao and general Xie were reunited in Nanyang
and their close relationship resumed. But this close tie also proved to be the ruination of
the Daoist prior. When news of the Republican uprising in Wuchang reached Nanyang,
the Qing civil and military officials were all shocked. Shortly afterwards, word began to
circulate in Nanyang that an armed Republican column had just taken Xiangyang, the
portal city on the upper stream of the Han River south of Nanyang and was advancing
northward towards Nanyang. In Nanyang, as general Xie received intelligence reports that
some Nanyang literati members had been in secret alliance with the Republican rebels
and were plotting an uprising against the Qing state, many of his officers became alarmed
while others grew despondent. Meanwhile, the provincial governor of Henan and other
leading Qing military and political officials all telegraphed their commands ordering
Xie not to take any rash military actions. Before long, the magistrate of Nanyang county
and the prefect of Nanyang prefecture abandoned their respective posts and fled the city
as the news of the advancing Republican voluntary force led by Ma Yunqing 馬雲卿
(1877–1915) spread in the city. Amidst the chaos and panic, abbot Yao, the former vice
regional commander, alone stood firm by general Xie, and valiantly vowed to follow him
to battle (wei dusi Yao Aiyun kangkai yuan congzhan 惟都司姚靄雲慷慨願從戰).54 By
the Chinese lunar New Year’s eve in early 1912, as the Republican forces approached
Nanyang, the cable of the Qing emperor’s abdication also reached general Xie and the
Daoist abbot in Nanyang. Faced with massive loss of morale and mutinous troops, general
Xie had no choice but to retreat northward to a foothill village northeast of Fangcheng
方城, hoping to regroup and wait for the next move. While there, circumstantial evidence
suggests that the Republican national government based in Nanjing tried to reach out
to the loyalist general to arrange for his cooperation with the Republican government.
Between January and early February of 1912, the Nanjing Republican government even
listed general Xie as being among the former Qing military leaders who had expressed
their consent to supporting the new Republican government.55 But by early March, as his
53
For Xie’s life and career, see his entry in QSG at Scripta Sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu
.tw/ihpc/hanji?@94^1536967448^803^^^702020250004025700070001^P@@1698467706#top.
54
For details of Yao’s collaboration with Xie, see their entries in QSG at Scripta Sinica, https://
hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@261^582446277^803^^^702020250004025700070004^P@@
90573740#top.
55
See the news reports about the developing situation in Shishi xinbao 時事新報, Feb 4, 1912:
2; Feb 5, 1912: 5.
rations and supplies ran out and more of his troops were either in disarray and deserting,
general Xie committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.56
Meanwhile, Yao Aiyun, now the abbot of Xuanmiao Monastery after the earlier
ordination altars he had presided over at the monastery, had also resisted capitulating to the
Republican forces when they took over Nanyang. He went into hiding in an undisclosed
location outside the city. To pacify the newly conquered Nanyang and to win over the
hearts and mind of the city residents, the Republican regime posted public notices calling
for peace and calm throughout the city. As abbot Yao persisted in his refusal to submit
to and cooperate with the new Republican regime in Nanyang, the Republican leaders
put out words calling for him to return to Nanyang and even offered guarantee of his
personal safety. Through a third-party intermediary, they arranged for the Daoist abbot
to return to Nanyang. But when the Daoist abbot emerged from his hideout and came
back to the Xuanmiao Monastery, he was immediately arrested and charged with a list
of alleged crimes. According to contemporary local gazetteers, they included “having
wasted monastic wealth in dining and wining wantonly” and “having fraternized with
the Qing local military and political officials and lording it over the local community.”
But the Daoist abbot’s relationship with the Qing local authorities had clearly extended
beyond the banquet table to encompass a whole range of close cooperations with the Qing
state and public activism in local society. For instance, at the height of the Boxer uprising
in 1900, abbot Yao mobilized his monastic resources to provide active support to Qing
local officials and literati in fortifying the Nanyang city wall and training local militia
to ensure the security of the city to guard against any Boxer riots or incursions. Abbot
Yao’s cooperation with the Qing state during the Boxer crisis rather closely resembles
what his predecessor and patron abbot Zhang Zongxuan had done during the siege of
Nanyang against the Taiping-Nian rebels four decades earlier in that they both defended
and served the local community.57 Not to mention the abbot’s public activism in the new
schools that were expressly in service of the children of the local residents in Nanyang. Yet
in the immediate aftermath of the Republican revolution, abbot Yao and his monastery’s
acts of close ties with the Qing establishment and the local elites were now viewed by
both the anti-Qing revolutionaries and contemporary gazetteers as signs of Quanzhen
clerical venality, corruption, and anti-modern conservatism. His close ties with the state
and his public activism in local society all became a political liability and even outright
incriminating evidence against his alleged corruption. So despite the fact that abbot Yao
refuted all the allegations against him, his assertion of innocence was completely ignored
by the hastily scrambled Republican court in Nanyang. After a show trial that affirmed
all the charges, the Daoist abbot was sentenced to death. He was immediately taken to
the deserted shore of the White River in the western suburbs of Nanyang. According to
some witness accounts, as he stood there, abbot Yao turned his face upward toward the
56
See the news report on Xie’s suicide in Shishi xinbao, March 10, 1912: 5; and also entries on
Xie and Yao in QSG at Scripta sinica, https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@9^768313823^803^
^^702020250004025700070004^N@@957281516#top. See also “Ji Xie Baosheng ziqiangshi 記謝寶勝
自戕事,” Shishi xinbao, March 10, 1912: 5; and Wang Pengzhou 王鵬洲, “Xie laodao qicheng ziqiang
ji 謝老道棄城自戕記,” NYXWS 6 (1992): 59–64.
57
See Xun Liu, “In Defense of the City and the Polity.”
264 Xun Liu
sky and repeatedly proclaimed his innocence: “Oh, my heavens almighty! I am wronged!
I am wronged!” 老天啊! 我冤枉，我冤枉啊！ But his outcries of grievance and protest
were soon silenced by the bullets fired by the execution squad.58
Reflections
It is impossible to ascertain what abbot Yao’s last words really were, but the Daoist’s
supposed outcry of being wronged is painfully ironic on several levels. First, abbot Yao’s
public activism in modern education reforms in service of the local community was
congruent with the goals and political agenda of the new modernizing Republican state. As
both shared in their goals to modernize local education and to benefit the local community
by establishing new schools, the abbot’s execution by the Republican regime in Nanyang
becomes somewhat an enigma. At least, such treatment of the Daoist abbot seems both
inexplicably unjust and outrageously unfair. Indeed, abbot Yao’s death may have resulted
from a complex set of causes and circumstances. On a superficial and direct level, the
Daoist abbot’s death may have been the result of a political and personal vendetta in the
immediate aftermath of the 1911 revolution. In the days leading up to the fall of Nanyang,
General Ma Yunqing, the commander of the Republican forces that took Nanyang, had
clearly found the Daoist abbot openly defiant of his order for the latter to submit to him
and the new Republican regime by persisting in his hiding outside the city. Given the
Daoist abbot’s stature and influence in Nanyang, his continued refusal to submit may
have posed some political or symbolic humiliation or threat to the new regime. Hence
the Republican general’s unscrupulous ruse to lure the Daoist abbot out of his hiding with
a false guarantee of safety, and then to execute him after a show trial. So abbot Yao’s
execution demonstrates general Ma and the new Republican regime’s intolerance of the
Daoist’s acts of moral loyalism and political or personal defiance. As it turns out, general
Ma may have had more than a personal or political axe to grind against abbot Yao. Indeed,
four years after the 1911 Revolution, general Ma himself was found by the Republican
national regime’s Supreme Military Tribunal (Gaodeng junshi fating 高等軍事法庭) to
have committed embezzlements of public funds, racketeering for profit, and tax and levy
frauds when he took over control of Nanyang since early 1912. The court found that his
favorite racketeering scheme was first to charge his hapless but rich victims for having
secret liaisons with local bandits, and then squeeze them for huge sum of fines. He would
then pocket these fines as his personal wealth. Additionally, he also imposed huge illegal
sums of taxes and levies on the local population, especially on rich land owners and
businessmen in the name of provisioning the Republican forces under his command in
Nanyang. For these crimes, the Republican national supreme military tribunal sentenced
the general to death in the fall of 1915.59
58
For the last days and execution of abbot Yao by the Republican forces, see Wang Baoqing
王保卿, “Xuanmiao guan zhuchi Yao Aiyun fufa de jingguo 玄妙觀住持姚藹伏法的經過,” NYWS 2
(1986): 25–27; and also Wang, “Xie laodao qicheng ziqiang ji,” NYXWS 6 (1992): 59–64.
59
See “Ma Yunqing panchu sixing zhi yuanyin 馬雲卿判處死刑之原因,” Shishi xinbao, March
10, 1912: 5.
Though we have no direct evidence if abbot Yao was ever one of the targets of
general Ma’s horrendous racketeering scheme for wealth, we do know that at the time of
his arrest, the Daoist abbot directly controlled and managed the Xuanmiao Monastery. As
one of the wealthiest monasteries in Nanyang and beyond, abbot Yao’s monastery held a
total of seventy-seven qing 頃 of endowment farmlands and numerous rental properties
in Nanyang at the time of the Republican Revolution. Indeed, shortly after 1911, the
monastery was subject to massive land appropriation by the local Republican regime in
Nanyang. As much as half of the monastery’s landholding were seized and redistributed
by the Republican regime as public endowment lands to the state-funded local schools
in Nanyang.60 It is hard to believe that there is no connection between the removal and
execution of the Xuanmiao Monastery’s powerful abbot and the subsequent seizure and
confiscation of its massive landholdings, as both actions were carried out by the same
Republican regime in Nanyang. For this reason, it is not at all unreasonable to consider
that abbot Yao’s death may have indeed resulted from general Ma and the Republican
regime’s economically acquisitive instincts for gains in both Ma’s own purse and the new
Republican regime’s public coffer.
Either way, abbot Yao’s execution and the subsequent deprivation of the Xuanmiao
Monastery reveal that the new Republican regime in Nanyang had adopted a much more
draconian version of the “temples for schools” policy initiative which even the Qing
state never fully implemented at the local level. Indeed, the Nanyang Republican regime
actually carried out such a policy as it executed the Daoist abbot and then seized half
of the monastery’s landholdings. Ultimately, abbot Yao’s execution and the subsequent
deprivation of the Xuanmiao Monastery reveal the modernizing Republican state’s and
its elite’s disregard and distrust of Daoism as a religion and a social force in local society.
Secondly, abbot Yao’s alleged last outcry of grievance is far more than merely
a personal plea for fairness and justice. Indeed, the Daoist’s last words must also be
understood as a call for a proper understanding of the Daoist encounter with modernity
through a proper re-examination of the roles and functions of Daoism in the social,
political, and cultural transformations that have ultimately shaped modern China. The
traditional narrative that portrays Daoism as either a hapless victim or an obstinate resister
to the forces of modernity no longer obtains in light of the abbot Yao Aiyun’s public
activism to advance modern education and local reforms, as documented in this study.
Contrary to the Weberian thesis that religion would wane and decline under the impact
of modernity from the proliferation of science and knowledge, the case of abbot Yao’s
public activism shows that the Daoist religion rather willingly and voluntarily pioneered
in establishing new western-styled schools for the sake of advancing scientific as well
as classical education among the local population. In the process, abbot Yao and his
Quanzhen Daoist temple gained both official state recognition and popular respect, and
grew stronger in both influence and power as a religious institution in local society in late
Qing Nanyang. Indeed, the Nanyang case also shows that Chinese traditional religious
traditions such as Daoism often found ingenious ways to not only adapt to and engage
with forces of modernity, but they also evolved by taking roots or immersing themselves
60
1 Chinese qing equals 247.1 acres.
266 Xun Liu
deeply in various traditional and new public institutions in local secular society. Indeed,
out of the altogether nine new primary schools founded between 1902 and 1910 within
the city limits of Nanyang, five appeared to have been established and funded either
entirely or partially by religious institutions such as Daoist or Buddhist temples. Of
these, two new schools were exclusively funded and operated by prior Yao and his Daoist
monastery, not to mention the third such new school which they operated at the Daoist
complex of the Palace of Three Primes in Broadview Township outside the city.61 It was
by investing in local new schools, cultivating cultural and ideological alliances with the
local elites through arts, and fostering moral economic ties with its tenants that abbot
Yao and the Daoist monastery became deeply integrated as an intimate part of Nanyang
society. While this integration of Daoism is by no means entirely new, as evidenced in
the Daoist monastery’s earlier close ties with local social elite, abbot Yao did however
create new venues and formats of such social integration in Nanyang with his advocacy
and activism in modern education in Nanyang.
Thirdly, abbot Yao’s activism in modern education reforms in Nanyang must be
understood in the context of Daoist monastic engagement with and service to local society.
As this study shows, the late Qing state and its local officials often adopted a dual approach
to building new schools as part of its plan to modernize education. On one hand, they
sometimes resorted to expropriating temples and their properties to pay for the new
schools. On the other hand, they also sought to encourage private sector donations and
investment in new schools by rewarding the latter with court-issued special awards and
commendations. In light of the dual pressures, it is understandable and even reasonable to
adopt the cynical view that abbot Yao’s public activism in new education was motivated
by self-interest in self-preservation and in fame and glory. Operating under the threat
of state expropriation of its temples for new school, it is only understandable that abbot
Yao and his monastery chose to engage in building new schools to preempt any Qing
state or local officials’ efforts to seize the monastery’s rich landholdings and properties.
Reasonable and even compelling as it may seem, this interpretation assumes that abbot
Yao and his monastery pursued their activism out of fear and cynicism to circumvent the
Qing state’s policy of seizing temples for new schools. In the case of Nanyang, such an
interpretation fails to account for the long tradition and record of Daoist public activism
in the interest of local society by abbot Yao’s monastery. Indeed, as I have shown, long
before the advent of the late Qing state drive for new schools, the Xuanmiao Monastery
had built and run a private school for the children of the poor households living in the
neighborhoods near the north gate of Nanyang from the mid-1880s onward. So it is not so
much fear or cynical self-interest that inspired abbot Yao’s public activism in building new
schools. Rather, as I have shown in several other studies, the Daoist monastery had a long
and established tradition of service to and investment in local community in Nanyang.62
It is the monastery’s well-established tradition of local engagement and service since at
61
See the list of the Nanyang government established and privately funded primary schools in the
Appendix.
62
See Xun Liu, “General Zhang Buries the Bones: Early Qing Reconstruction and Quanzhen Daoist
Collaboration in Mid-Seventeenth Century Nanyang,” Late Imperial China 27, no. 2 (2006): 67–98; Liu,
“In Defense of the City and the Polity.”
least the early Qing era that inspired and drove abbot Yao and his monastery’s public
activism in pioneering new schools in late Qing Nanyang.
Last but not least, abbot Yao’s last cry of grievance at the hands of early Republican
radicals also calls for a re-examination of the lens through which we have been so used
to viewing Daoism’s success or decline in exclusive terms of its ascendance, influence,
or access to power in imperial court politics. As the case of abbot Yao’s public activism
shows, when we can focus more on the quotidian dimensions of Daoist monastic life and
activities in local society, we can truly gain a much deeper and more realistic understanding
of Daoism, its conditions, and its impact in its encounter with various processes of
modernity in late nineteenth to early twentieth-century China.
Acknowledgements
I presented earlier drafts of this article at the Center for Daoist Studies at Central China
Normal University, Wuhan, and at the Steles Inscriptions and Quanzhen Daoist Studies
Symposium in the summer of 2023. I would like to thank Professors Ma Min, Liu Gusheng,
Fu Haiyan, Wei Wenxiang, Feng Yurong, Liu Qinghua, Xiao Haiyan, and Wang Chuang
of CCNU, and Zhao Weidong of Shandong University, Wang Guiping of the Chinese
Academy of Social Science, Liu Ping of Fudan University, Qin Guoshuai of Qilu Industrial
University, and Yin Zhihua of Minzu University of China for their encouragements and
helpful comments. I also presented a revised version at Seoul National University’s
Institute of East Asian Studies on July 5, 2023. I am grateful to Professors Kim Jihyun,
Koo Bum-jin, and Kim Byung-Joon, Professor Daniel Burton-Rose of Wenzhou-Kean
University, and Professor Kim Youn-Gyeon of National Incheon University for their
useful comments and suggestions. To Vincent Goossaert of EPHE and Philip Clart of
the University of Leipzig, and to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, I
also express my gratitude to their thoughtful critiques which have helped me improve
the original manuscript significantly. I am alone responsible for any errors in the article.
Appendix: A List of Government and Privately

Established Schools in Nanyang County, compiled
from 南陽縣官/民立各學堂表 (1911), HNJYGB,
85: 11b, 86: 112a–114b, and 88: 125a.
School Names School Date of Curriculum School School Faculty Enrollment Funding and Notes:
校別 Address Establishment 學科課程 Management 教員學生名額 Sources
校址開辦年月管理員經費
南陽縣官立崇正城內府文廟光緒二十八年修身—教科書

268 Xun Liu
--校長 -修身/經學/圖畫乙班 Class 共入銀一千三 HNJYGB,

高等小學堂東偏八月八日經學---詩經 Headmaster: 胡壽榮: 信陽州附貢生/ B: 54名百二十九兩第85期,
Nanyang county- Eastside of Sep 9, 1902 國文---教科書朱霞省優級師範畢業五錢 111B
established the Confucius 歷史---教科書南陽縣舉人 -國文/經學 Total income of
Chongzheng Temple in the 地理---中國地理法政學堂畢袁啟瑞: 唐縣舉人/法政 1,329.5 taels of
Senior Primary prefectural 算術---筆算業，直隸補用學堂/直隸補用知縣 silver
School city 格致---教科書知縣
體操---教科書
音樂---教科書
圖畫---毛筆
南陽縣公立勸忠郡城西關二光緒三十一年經學---書經 --校長李東華: 南陽縣增生高小學歲出銀三百一

高初兩等小學堂忠祠內 1905 修身---教科書 Headmaster: 王鵬舉: 南陽縣恩貢/上生Senior 十兩
Nanyang county- Inside the 格致---教科書張友軫海理科畢業 Primary Annual outlay
established Shrine of Two 地理---教科書南陽縣附貢田百揆: 新野縣廩生 School of 310 taels of
Quanzhong Loyalists at 歷史---教科書 --司事兼教員胡秉毅: 南陽縣人師範 students: silver
Senior Primary the Westgate 算術---教科書 Executive and 畢業 65名
School with Two ward 國文---教科書 faculty: 張德焜: 南陽縣人崇正學
Sections 圖畫---毛筆張德靜堂肆業
體操---柔軟南陽縣人, 自治張鵬摶: 南陽縣附生, 法
研究所畢業政學堂畢業
金貞祥: 南陽縣人, 南洋
陸軍下士官
南陽縣元妙觀獨縣城北關光緒三十一年高等: --校長兼教員 --算術: --吳湘蘅, 見上四年級 4th 歲出銀一千一 HNJYGB
立元宗兩等小大街十月修身—教科書 Headmaster and --修身/經學/國文/歷史: -- graders: 百零, 由廟產第86期,
學堂 At the Big Oct–Nov, 1905 經學---詩/書靜 faculty: 胡景川, 南陽縣增生 12名撥給 112A–114B
Nanyang county Street at the 國文---古文吳湘蘅 --修身/經學/國文/歷史: - 三年級 3rd Annual outlay
Yuanmiaoguan Northgate 算術---教科書南陽縣附生張紹府, 南陽縣附生 graders: of 1,100
Autonomous ward 歷史---教科書 --監學兼教員 --算術/格致: --楊大經: 16名 taels of silver
Primary School 地理---教科書 Provost and 湖南灃州人湖南明德學二年級 2nd donated from
with Two 格致---教科書 faculty: 堂畢業 graders: the Monastery
Sections 圖畫---教科書王炳文 --圖畫:--張廷瑛江蘇江寧 21名 funds
體操---教科書陜西華州人, 五縣人, 南陽縣右堂一年級 1st
音樂---教科書品銜 --地理: 王炳文: 見上 graders:
圖畫---毛筆 --格致/地理: 醫景河: 南 23名
陽縣人, 本學堂畢業; 初等 Junior
-體操: 亦鳳陽: 南陽縣人, Primary
河南陸軍臨營學堂畢業 School
students:
21名
南陽縣佛教公立城內西北隅就光緒三十四年高等: 國文／歷史鄭瑞璋高等班本期共用銀238

270 Xun Liu
--董事
樂賓兩等小學堂臥佛寺舊址三月修身—教科書 Governing 南陽縣拔貢 Advanced 兩6錢
Nanyang county 改建 Apr, 1908 經學---詩經 trustee: 算數／圖畫溫緒章 class of 20名; The total
Buddhist Public At the 國文---教科書熙樂: 南陽府僧南陽縣人師範傳習初等班 Junior expenses of
Lebing Primary converted old 歷史---教科書綱司所畢業 class of 35 名 this semester is
School with Two temple site of 地理---教科書 --會計經學安漢章共計 Total 238.6 taels of
Sections the Reclining 算術---教科書 Accountant: 南陽縣人 of 55 silver.
Buddha Temple 格致---理科教如道: 南陽縣僧體操丁禮
in northwestern 科書會司南陽縣人，湖北陸軍
ward 圖畫---鉛筆 --庶務學堂畢業
體操---柔軟 General 修身，地理，格致，
初等: manager 國文李德焜
修身---教科書慧悟: 臥佛寺住南陽縣人，師範傳
經學---論語持充副僧長習畢業
國文---教科書修身，經學，算數
算術---教科書皇甫庠
體操---柔軟南陽縣人，教育講習
科畢業
南陽縣民立淯陽府城大南關淯宣統二年二月甲班: 校長兼教員 --國文，修身，手甲班 Class A: 開辦費銀圓二

商業初級學堂陽寨局內 Mar–Apr, 1910 修身—修身課本 Headmaster and 工，歷史姬永泰 30 名; 百元, 由淯陽
Nanyang county Inside the 國文---國文課本 faculty: --國文，經學，地理乙班 Class B: 局捐
Privately- Yuyang Bureau 算術---教科書 --姬永泰: 向銘堂 24 名; Founding
established Yuyang of Ramparts at 圖畫---毛筆南陽縣廩生 --習字／認字王共計 Total of donation of 200
Commercial the Southgate 體操---普通監學兼教員殿權 54 名 taels donated
Primary School ward of the city 手工---手工課本 Provost and --算學馮樹翰 by the Yuyang
地理---中國地理 faculty: 南陽縣人，南洋公學 Ramparts
歷史---中國史 --向銘堂算學專科畢業 Bureau.
乙班: 南陽縣附生 --體操常雲漢
修身—修身課本 --王殿權唐縣人，南洋體育專
國文---教科書南陽縣人，自校畢業
算術---教科書治研究所畢業 --圖畫姚昱
圖畫---毛筆庶務南陽縣人，省優級師
體操---普通 General 範畢業
手工---手工課本 manager:
地理---中國地理楊廷愷
歷史---中國史南陽縣人
School Names School Address Date of Curriculum School School Faculty Enrollment Funding and Notes:
校別校址 Establishment 學科課程 Management 教員學生名額 Sources
開辦年月管理員經費
南陽縣公立端關縣城西北三里宣統元年七月修身—教科書總理兼教員修身張拱斗李張氏捐銀一

272 Xun Liu
20 名
兩等女子小學堂白莊張宅 Aug–Sep, 1909 國文---教科書 Executive and 國文－算數－手千兩
Nanyang county In the Zhang 算術---教科書 faculty 工 Ms. Zhang of
government- Mansion in the 歷史－教科書張拱斗體操－音樂 the Li household
established Bai Village a li 地理－教科書南陽縣附勝朱秀松湖北江 donation of 1,000
Primary School northwest of the 格致－教科書監學 Provost 陵縣人，日本實 taels of silver
with Two Sections city 圖畫---毛筆周學象踐女校修業悅盛厚捐銀三
手工---絨線編織南陽縣人地理－格致百兩
體操－遊戲書記喬佩蘭 The Yue Sheng
音樂－唱歌 Secretary 戴天津人 Hou Store
廣恩歷史－圖畫 donation of 300
鎮平縣人楊學蓮 taels
鄧州人賈世周捐銀三
百兩
The donation by
Jia Shihou of 300
taels
X收學費銀六十兩
Annual tuition of
60 taels
官立模範初等小附設勸學所內光緒三十四年修身-國文-經學張聯田 33 名田XX捐給

學堂 Inside the 二月算術-體操周鳴琴 Donations by Tian
Government- Bureau of Mar, 1908 XX
established Junior Educational
Primary School Advocacy next
door in the city
School Names School Address Date of Curriculum School School Faculty Enrollment Funding and Notes:
校別校址 Establishment 學科課程 Management 教員學生名額 Sources
開辦年月管理員經費
公立勸忠兩等西關二忠祠三十二年二月修身經學格致李東肇王鵬舉田 129 名常款X銀50兩

小學 At the Shrine Feb–Mar, 1906 地理歷史算術德揆學費歲收554兩
Government- to the Two 圖畫國文體操張德靜常雲漢胡 Annual donations
established Loyalists in 秉毅 of 50 taels of silver
Quanzhong Westgate ward 張德焜 and annual tuition
Primary School of the city of 554 taels of
with Two Sections silver
私立元宗兩等小城北關三十二年正月修身經學格致胡景川吳湘蘅 95 名田四百畝, 每歲入

學堂 In the Northgate Jan–Feb, 1906 地理歷史算術張紹甫楊大經錢四百餘兩
Privately- ward of the city 圖畫國文體操 400 mu of
established endowment land
Yuanzong Primary with an annual rent
School with Two of 400 and more
Sections taels of silver
私立三萃初等小博望鎮光緒三十四年修身經學國文王玉衡 30 名三元宮捐款 HBJYGB,

學堂 At the 正月歷史格致算術劉善培 Donations from 第88期,
Privately- Broadview Feb–Mar, 1908 地理圖畫體操 the Palace of Three 125a
established Sancui Township Primes
Junior Primary
School
274 Xun Liu
Bibliography
list of abbreviations
HNJYGB: Henan jiaoyu guanbao 河南教育官報.

LMPX: Taishang lümai Longmen zhengzong Longmen chuanjie puxi 太上律脈龍門正宗龍門傳
戒譜系.
NYWS: Nanyang wenshi ziliao 南陽文史資料.
NYXWS: Nanyangxian wenshi ziliao 南陽縣文史資料.
NYXZ: Nanyang xianzhi 南陽縣志.
QMGB: Qingmo guanbao huibian 清末官報彙編.
QSG: Qingshigao 清史稿.
QSL: Qingshilu 清實錄.
XBZJ: Xu Beizhuanji 續碑專集.
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Notes on the Contributor

Xun Liu 劉迅 is associate professor of late imperial and modern China at Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, New Jersey. His research focuses on the history of Daoism, the social
history of medicine, Daoist body cosmology, and inner alchemic self-cultivation practices
in late imperial and modern China. He is the author of Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay
Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (2009), and has
published many articles on Daoism and state and local society, Daoism and local gentry,
and elite culture of the late imperial period.
Correspondence to: Xun Liu. Email: xunliu@history.rutgers.edu.

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Daoist Yao Aiyun and Modern Education and Other Reforms in

Late Qing Nanyang

Journal of Chinese Religions, Volume 51, Number 2, December 2023, pp.

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Journal of Chinese Religions 51, no. 2, 229–277, December 2023

Life and Early Career of Yao Aiyun

“Tongzhi nianjian Shaan-Gan Huimin shibian zhong de zhuyao zhanyi 同治年間陝甘回民事變中的

Pioneering Modern Education by

in the initial process of modernization by introducing western learning, technologies,

Yuanmiaoguan Independent Primary School

1. Self-cultivation (xiushen 修身)22

1. Self-cultivation (xiushen 修身)

Comparing this Henan government-stipulated curriculum, the Daoist school’s

1. Self-cultivation (xiushen 修身)

See “Henan guanli xiaoxuetang dingmo xia xueqi kechengbiao 河南官立小學堂丁末下學期

課程表,” in HNJYGB 4: 30a–31b, in QMGB 28: 13847–13748.

Yuanzong Higher and Lower Primary

Sancui Lower Primary School 三萃初等小學堂

Aiding and Promoting Agricultural Reforms

Cultivating Social and Cultural Ties

Loyalism and Martyrdom in the 1911 Revolution

Appendix: A List of Government and Privately

南陽縣官立崇正 城內府文廟 光緒二十八年 修身—教科書

--校長 -修身/經學/圖畫 乙班 Class 共入銀一千三 HNJYGB,

南陽縣公立勸忠 郡城西關二 光緒三十一年 經學---書經 --校長 李東華: 南陽縣增生 高小學 歲出銀三百一

南陽縣佛教公立 城內西北隅就 光緒三十四年 高等: 國文／歷史 鄭瑞璋 高等班 本期共用銀238

南陽縣民立淯陽 府城大南關淯 宣統二年二月 甲班: 校長兼教員 --國文，修身，手 甲班 Class A: 開辦費銀圓二

南陽縣公立端關 縣城西北三里 宣統元年七月 修身—教科書 總理兼教員 修身 張拱斗 李張氏捐銀一

官立模範初等小 附設勸學所內 光緒三十四年 修身-國文-經學 張聯田 33 名 田XX捐給

公立勸忠兩等 西關二忠祠 三十二年二月 修身 經學 格致 李東肇 王鵬舉 田 129 名 常款X銀50兩

私立元宗兩等小 城北關 三十二年正月 修身 經學 格致 胡景川 吳湘蘅 95 名 田四百畝, 每歲入

私立三萃初等小 博望鎮 光緒三十四年 修身 經學 國文 王玉衡 30 名 三元宮捐款 HBJYGB,

HNJYGB: Henan jiaoyu guanbao 河南教育官報.

Qingshigao 清史稿 at Scripta Sinica. https://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/ihpc/hanji?@46^1905556005​

Notes on the Contributor

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