Guan Yunchang, Marquis of Houting, Lord Guan, Emperor Guan. Despite his many names and guises, Guan Yu is known to most as the red-faced god of wealth, with his lush beard; his green and golden robes; and his signature blade, the Black Dragon Crescent Halberd. As one of the most popular gods in the Chinese pantheon, he is found in countless temples scattered across the globe, worshipped by “Confucians,” Buddhists, and Taoists equally. Little statues devoted to the god show up in in small shrines in Chinese restaurants, Hong Kong police stations, and triad headquarters alike. Asked what the god represents, most will answer that, in addition to bringing wealth and fortune, he serves as a paragon of noble virtues. As an invincible hero and immortal god, he fights for transcendent morals of righteousness and loyalty.
Though attractive, this image of a loyal man is also, according to Barend ter Haar's latest book, Guan Yu: The Religious Afterlife of a Failed Hero, mistaken. As ter Haar points out in nine, remarkably well-researched, and at times painstakingly dense chapters, Guan Yu's noble virtues merely serve to hide the true core of his identity, that is, brutal and at times horrific violence. In Chinese popular religion, as opposed to the elite, literati, and literary texts that scholars often have taken at face value, violence, not virtue, defines him. The religious afterlife of Guan Yu, ter Haar argues, originated in a cult that called for bloody sacrifice to appease a vengeful spirit. Even though hundreds of years of histories, poems, operas, and of course the fifteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms sought to cover those origins, some of these atavistic tendencies can still be found in much later religious practices. It is not coincidental that Guan Yu is worshipped by policemen and gangsters both. His face, after all, is red, washed in blood.
To build his argument, ter Haar follows a roughly chronological path. This not only makes for a clear overall structure, but also allows him to open, after an introductory first chapter, with the violent origins of the Guan Yu Cult. As ter Haar's investigation of the earliest religious anecdotes from the mid-seventh through tenth centuries shows, Guan Yu most likely started out as a violent demon and only later, under the influence of Buddhist belief systems, was transformed into a more benevolent anthropomorphic deity. The early worship of Guan Yu is often associated with the Buddhist Yuquan Monastery in Dangyang, yet ter Haar convincingly argues that the monastery actually was separate from an earlier shrine, where bloody victuals were offered to appease the hungry spirit of the warlord executed after he had lost one too many battles. As such, the subtitle of ter Haar's study, “the religious afterlife of a failed hero” (emphasis mine), does not simply serve as an iconoclastic flourish intended to shock. It also highlights a central tenet of ter Haar's argument. The bloody sacrifices Guan Yu demanded early on served to keep the violence of his wronged spirit and the memory of one hundred years of internecine warfare at bay.
The following chapters chart the ways in which the cult spread, literary and elite sources often covering up the brutality that marked the more popular cult of Guan Yu. The third chapter, for instance, explores the mostly Taoist twelfth- and thirteenth-century appropriations of the man's cult centered around the god's birthplace, the North China salt planes of Xie. As ter Haar points out, these later religious texts actually find their origins in the bloody exorcism rituals that took place there in the eleventh century. Chapter 6 introduces some of the main purposes for which people worshipped Guan Yu in the late-imperial period: to pray for rain amid drought; to secure financial blessings when faced with economic insecurity; to find relief from illness amid pestilence; or to seek protection from roving bandits, invading barbarians, and haunting demons. Though to a modern individual this list of sundry items may seem random, ter Haar argues that in a premodern context they represent an overarching belief in a world plagued by malevolent spirits and forces against whom the god, if properly worshipped, offered protection, often by slaying the offending spirits in savage fashion. Chapter 7 introduces the interaction between the late-imperial lettered elite and the preexisting popular beliefs in the god by investigating the prevalent use of spirit-writing and the transformation of Guan Yu from a violent martial god to a more scholarly spirit whose knowledge of the Spring and Autumn classic qualified him to serve as a patron saint for those seeking help in the imperial examinations. Finally, chapter 8 deals with Guan Yu as the muscular upholder of sworn oaths and ethical standards in an age that was regarded as plagued by widespread moral decline. Even though this late-imperial use of Lord Guan as an empire-wide champion of moral values may seem a far cry from the vengeful local demon spirit ter Haar introduced as the first divine manifestation of Guan Yu, he argues that some central characteristics can be found in both early and late incarnations of the god, most notably his tendency toward physical violence.
In making his argument, ter Haar reads against the grain of the long textual history in which Guan Yu is often represented as a stern, but still upright and moral, figure. Guan Yu as the invincible general, unfailingly devoted to his master Liu Bei, has been documented in an early third-century history, Chen Shou's Record of the Three Kingdoms. Guan Yu's morals have been lauded in song in Tang dynasty poetry and are central to Yuan-dynasty operas such as The Single Sword Meeting. Most memorably, of course, this emphasis on loyalty and righteousness is the image presented in the fifteenth-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, often attributed to Luo Guanzhong. In this text, Guan Yu repeatedly refuses the rich gifts offered to him by the warlord Cao and fights his way across five passes to be reunited with his one true lord, Liu Bei. The message of these written sources seems unmistakable: Guan Yu is a true hero—inevitably invincible, unflinchingly loyal.
To counter the dominant image offered by these written sources, ter Haar seeks evidence in alternative records. In chapter 5, for instance, ter Haar introduces the various folk media through which the cult spread among the majority of the populace. Since most people were illiterate, these media were predominantly nontextual, consisting of iconic imagery, theatrical performance, and oral narrative. In chapter 4, ter Haar takes another approach, creating an extensive database of temple inscriptions, which, though textual, still open up an avenue for investigating the spread of the cult through the material traces of architectural structures and traveling merchants, soldiers, bureaucrats, and commoners. For later periods, ter Haar similarly relies on records that are, from the view of the Chinese textual elite, peripheral or suspect: anthropological surveys by early twentieth-century Japanese scholars, the eighteenth-century travelogues of Korean ambassadors, or the records of folktales as documented by eccentric Chinese and Japanese scholars. Together, these various sources not only help substantiate ter Haar's argument: they also provide a very good example of how to read around and against the textual record and belief systems bequeathed to us by the literary and literate elite.
While ter Haar's critical spirit is to be lauded, the tendency to question each preexisting narrative and doubt every textual source can also lead to problems. For one, we should wonder whether questioning the importance of texts such as the relatively late novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the much earlier history The Records of the Three Kingdoms is not pushing things too far. Of course, the majority of the population in premodern China could not read, but that does not diminish the iconic value of the text as the authenticating core of a set of popular beliefs. In medieval Europe, the majority of the people had little access to the Holy Scriptures, but few would argue that as a result the Bible played no role in the spread of Christianity. Text and orality inevitably, indeed one is tempted to say promiscuously, interact. Semi-literate readers orally informed their nonliterate audience about what the text, supposedly, said, even while popular practices and oral elements penetrated the textual record in return. Elite textuality and popular, oral, and theatrical narratives are better understood as mutually enforcing media, as opposed to exclusive realms of cultural practice. Ter Haar knows this, of course, but is so engaged in breaking down the textual record left to us that he sometimes overshoots his aim in his enthusiasm.
Perhaps more importantly, ter Haar spends so much time on the task of debunking earlier myths that the study at times threatens to be more successful in discrediting previous ideas than in carefully theorizing its own central concepts. Violence is found throughout the study, and ter Haar is excellent at unearthing, amid a sea of literati values, the kernels of popular and bloodthirsty beliefs he argues are both earlier and more prevalent. As such, we find constant references to beheaded dragons, blood-red faces, blood-soaked salt ponds, furious thunderstorms, and contagious pestilence. This may well prove the prevalence of violence, but it does not, in the end, offer us a strong theoretical set of tools to think through the way such violence works. Is violence transubstantiating? Is it contagious or alternatively cauterizing? Is it physical, martial, symbolic, or psychological? Ter Haar hints at many of these possibilities and has written more fully about the subject elsewhere. In this book, however, violence, despite the central role it plays in the argument, is never fully fleshed out conceptually.
Finally, the prose of Guan Yu: The Afterlife of a Failed God is uneven and weighs down what, given its colorful subject matter and strong argument, could have been a potentially much lighter and more convincing read. Some of the prose problems could probably have been solved with more forceful copy editing. No matter how long and complex the textual and nontextual record on Guan Yu may be, unnecessary repetitions could still have been elided, and some of the overwhelming detail cut down. That said, it is mostly ter Haar's iconoclastic mode of reading that easily becomes cumbersome. Since ter Haar's goal is to read against the textual record, he questions every source, doubts each date, and undercuts each and every narrative. For a reader not paying careful attention, this can easily lead not to clarity but confusion. Did that particular ritual take place in 1105 or in 1120? Was the emperor supposedly involved in it Huizong or Zhenzong?
Though we can thus find fault in ter Haar's book, it remains a remarkable and truly important piece of scholarship. It is original in spirit, meticulously researched, and careful in its historical methodology, and it ultimately offers a very strong and necessary antidote to obsolete but persistent ideas about Chinese religious values in general and Guan Yu's supposed morality more specifically. If the prose is at times blunt, the argument itself is strikingly sharp. While not every scholar of premodern China will want to pay the roughly one hundred dollars needed to purchase this book, they should still make sure that they pay careful attention to its message and methodology. The popular Chinese god we believe we know may not be quite as benevolent a presence as we may have thought at first, and the transcendent moral values propagated by the literary elite may well have served to hide a much more pervasive, dark, and violent world.
