In popular lore Shangqing Palace (上清宫), a formerly important Daoist temple at Longhu Shan (Dragon-Tiger Mountain) in Jiangxi province, is probably best-known for the opening chapters of Shi Nai’an’s fourteenth-century novel Outlaws of the Marsh – aka The Water Margin – a heroic account of renegades defying the corrupt Song court. According to the novel, 108 malignant spirits are imprisoned …
Qixi: Double Seventh Festival
The letter accompanying this print was written at Shanghai by the Reverend Hallock on 8 August 1929, and this picture was made for Qixi, the Double Seventh Festival (held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month – 11 August in 1929). Like Valentine’s day in the West, the festival celebrates romance. The story goes that a cowherd fell …
Pan Gu: Humans from Parasites
A while back I posted about the Reverend Henry Galloway Comingo Hallock, who in the late 1920s sent stacks of woodblock prints of Chinese gods, bought in Shanghai, back to the US, along with letters describing the deities and seeking funds for his various Church-led causes. I’ve picked these prints up here and there but recently received a cache of …
Hallock’s Gods
It’s unusual to be able to date old Chinese woodblock prints – the same designs were often used for decades, and the cheap paper that they’re printed on ages badly (I’ve got a sun-bleached stove god print with a calendar for 1989, which looks at least a century older). However, I do know that the three prints below all date …