In this well conceived, elegantly written, generously illustrated and beautifully produced book, Tracy Miller offers a multifaceted analysis of the evolution of the Jinci (Memorial Shrines of Jin), a ritual complex in Shanxi Province that was first recorded in historical texts some 1500 years ago. Never losing sight of the shrine's architectural and artistic features, she brings to bear a wealth of insights from recent scholarship, not only in art history but also anthropology, religious studies, and social, economic and intellectual history. The book is divided into eight chapters and has two appendices, one cataloguing each of the Jinci's extant buildings and the other providing a useful glossary of architectural terms.

Miller makes a convincing argument that the Jinci, located above the springs of the Jin River near Taiyuan, originally was a place for worshiping the goddess of the springs, whose waters were crucial to livelihood in this dry region. However, Shu Yu of Tang, the deified younger brother of Zhou King Cheng, also came to be worshiped at the Jinci. Venerated both as a Confucian moral exemplar and as the founding ancestor of the state of Jin (formerly called Tang), Shu Yu was registered early on in the statutes of official sacrifices. He also symbolized political power over the Taiyuan basin, even though his fief actually had been located further south. As Miller details, early historical documents focused on this canonically attested male and rarely mentioned the nameless water goddess, but the opposite was true in poetry and travel literature. In 1077, the female spirit of the Jin springs was added to the official pantheon of deities as Sage Mother (Shengmu), in recognition of her efficacy as a provider of life-giving water and her sustained popular appeal among local inhabitants. The eleventh-century Sage Mother Hall (Shengmu dian), which has survived as the Jinci's main building, contains lifelike sculptures of the enthroned goddess and 42 female courtiers. Eight dragons, symbolic of rainmaking, coil around the pillars of the facade.

After the Jin conquest of North China, the Taiyuan region lost its strategic importance, and the Ming founding emperor's ritual reforms demoted Shu Yu from a king to a mere spirit. However, late Ming local elites and officials revived his cult and restored his shrine to assert Confucian social ideals and rituals against the ascendance of popular customs and mercantile influence. To co-opt the Sage Mother's power, they re-cast her as Yi Jiang, the mother of Shu Yu and paragon of female virtue, and altered the shrine's layout to instantiate this interpretation. Gazetteers and other textual production during the early Qing promoted this literati conceptualization, greatly influencing modern (mis)understandings of the site.

In addition to tracing the Jinci cults through textual sources, Miller closely examines the physical evidence preserved at the Jinci site, as well as assorted records of construction and repair. She analyzes the unusual configuration of buildings and compares them with other structures in southern Shanxi. Having unraveled the ritual puzzles, she is able to offer a convincing explanation of the rationale behind seemingly oddly oriented halls and courtyards, which are set perpendicular to the adjacent waters instead of following a conventional north-south axial layout. To understand the social background of various building campaigns at the shrine, she plunges into the arcana of canal and irrigation management and land taxation. Reading all these kinds of evidence together, she reconstructs the shrine's evolution as the product of competing patrons' efforts to glorify the different deities they worshiped there. Government officials, members of the local scholar-elite, canal bosses, and farmers held very divergent understandings of the Jinci's significance and of the identity of the spirit who was to be venerated.

Although challenging to read because of the mass of diverse but relevant detail she brings to bear, Miller's book is well organized, its arguments are clearly formulated, and the reasoning is rigorously logical. In refuting the conclusions of earlier scholars and presenting her own, she is gracious. For example, she presents a persuasive case for abandoning the hypothesis that the Sage Mother's cult at Jinci rose to importance in the early eleventh century with imperial patronage from the powerful and ambitious Empress Liu (969–1033), who had come from the area; instead, Miller places its rise nearer the end of that century and relates it to the New Policies of Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and his successors. As she observes, the study of Chinese architecture is a recent and shallowly rooted discipline, whose broad generalizations need critical analysis and refinement. Her book is a nuanced and valuable contribution to that effort, as well as to our larger understanding of the interaction of society, politics, religion, and art in China over the whole imperial era.