The 1890s Shaker movement in Fujian and deity-possession rituals

Record summary

Late Qing local religious life in Fujian included spirit mediums, deity possession and ritual specialists who communicated diagnoses, instructions or moral judgments through altered bodily states. Ethnographic and administrative materials on temple networks and local sects describe shaking, trance and written revelations, sometimes in settings later associated with anti-Christian or anti-state activity. The material can support comparison with possession-based religious authority in Korea and Japan. It is not one universally named incident, however, and must be narrowed to a documented temple, medium, case record or published ethnography.