Rural China remained heavily self-governed well into the twentieth century, and village religion was an important part of this style of governance. The management committee of a village temple often overlapped with the organization administering village affairs. Research on village governance and religion has focused largely on temple fairs, that is, how villagers host events in collaboration. Scholars are aware of the importance of organized pilgrimages in towns and villages. Yet the limited availability of sources beyond modern ethnography makes investigating collective rural pilgrimage in historical times difficult. Gazetteers, for example, tended to adopt a formulaic narrative when describing local religious practices. Early modern popular literature, another important source for studying ordinary people’s religious behavior, offers insights mostly from the prospective of urban dwellers since they were the targeted audience. Furthermore, pilgrims’ stelae on temple grounds were largely destroyed during the second half of the twentieth century, with the only exceptions being top-ranking sites such as Mt. Tai (see chapter 10 by Ye Tao, this volume). This essay, utilizing a manuscript from the turn of the twentieth century discovered at a villager’s home, will shed new light on collective pilgrimage in rural China in Qing times.

The deity at the center of this study, Lady Wei Huacun魏華存 (251–334), is by and large identified as a Daoist “transcendent” (xian 仙), an immortal who transcends the boundary between the human and divine realms.