In the final chapter of this exploration of the place of religion in Chinese legal culture, Paul Katz describes a case he documented recently at a popular temple in Taiwan. It began when a woman he calls ‘Miss A’ slapped a friend hard across the face, accusing her of spreading rumours about her love life. The woman who had been slapped went to the police and filed a court case asking for the equivalent of roughly £4,000 in damages. In response, Miss A went to the local temple imploring a temple official to write a petition to be submitted to the temple god, who she hoped would agree to settle the dispute in her favour.

Katz demonstrates just how common cases like this are, not just for contemporary Taiwan, but in the Chinese diaspora and in contemporary and pre-modern China as well. And the case of Miss A, like the dozens of cases Katz analyses, raises a series of intriguing questions: if a formal, reasonably reliable legal system is already in place for dealing with disputes, why should Miss A turn to the gods for a mundane matter that, on the surface, has nothing to do with them? What exactly does she expect the gods to do? And what role in such disputes do temple officials play? In this case, the temple official encouraged Miss A to first file a countersuit for slander and to file a case with the gods only after the legal suit had run its course. But in other cases Katz cites, temple officials actively solicit immediate divine intervention.

Drawing on a wide variety of historical documents and contemporary observation, Katz, a leading scholar of Chinese religion known for combining meticulous historical research with fieldwork in contemporary Taiwan and China, documents all manner of legal cases in which the plaintiffs invoke divine intervention. It was until recently common practice to take oaths of innocence either at a temple or even in court, by chopping off the head of a chicken while declaring that if found to be lying, one would accept the same fate at the hands of the gods. Katz documents an event in 2007 in Taiwan in which close to a thousand people, dressed as criminals with paper cangues around their necks, participated in a temple procession, in this way serving time for crimes that they feared had been recorded in the netherworld. Mental illness was at times thought to be the punishment meted out by officials of the underworld, and remediable through formal appeal at the local temple. Detectives in contemporary Taiwan have appealed to the gods for assistance in tracking down criminals, and working-class supporters of one temple just outside of Taipei turn to both the local police and the local gods for help when a car or motorcycle is stolen.

Why choose the temple in place of the courthouse? In some instances, the dispute falls outside the jurisdiction of the local judge. Katz traces the very ancient belief in China that the afterlife was governed by a bureaucracy, and that the vengeful dead could file suit against those who harmed them when they were alive, or even against the ancestors of those who wronged them, resulting in sickness, misfortune or any number of mysterious difficulties suffered in the realm of the living by those convicted in absentia in the courts of the underworld. But even in cases dealing with this-worldly matters like fraud, theft and slander, appealing to the gods in ‘rituals of indictments’ was often seen to be easier than filing a case in the courts of this world: the documents required were shorter and did not have to accord with the letter of the law – in some cases, the indictments could even be submitted orally. Katz uncovers a wealth of stories, from medieval miracle tales to contemporary newspaper accounts, that enthusiastically trumpet the efficacy of divine intervention for resolving legal disputes (a literature that at once fulfills fantasies of justice and provides sharp criticism of the secular legal system). Just as important, whether in imperial or modern times, Chinese legal culture has allowed great flexibility in determining which problems are suitable for the courts, which for the temples and which should be taken to both.

Throughout, the focus of the book is on China, but Katz provides enough comparative material – from medieval Christianity, colonial history and even contemporary debates on the incorporation of Sharia law in Britain – to provoke speculation on the role of religion in legal culture elsewhere both in the distant past and in the present.