Huang Guanghui

01 · Lineage & Regional School

From 1982 he followed his father, Huang Tiansong, in learning traditional Daoist ritual. Within the regional tradition and school record of Folk Beliefs and Customs in Gutian, Fujian: In the course of these rites, the Taoist liturgical rites of the various schools, folk music, opera and dance, traditional martial arts, and folk performing arts from different places are all given full display. Linshui Temple in Gutian County, Fujian Province, is dedicated chiefly to Chen Jinggu, a goddess of Taoism. Worshipping Chen Jinggu and performing the rites of inviting incense and receiving fire are currently the most influential folk belief activities not only in Fujian Province but throughout the Jiangnan region, and their influence even extends to Southeast Asia and to Chinese communities around the world. The Chen Jinggu customs began in the Song dynasty and flourished in the Ming and Qing periods; the incense fire has been transmitted without interruption ever since. According to the Gutian County Gazetteer compiled in the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty, Chen Jinggu was born in the Tang dynasty. Legend has it that she was a native of Xiadu, Cangshan, Fuzhou. At the age of twenty-four, she underwent the rite of deliverance to pray for rain and gave up her young life in order to relieve the drought and save the common people. After death she was revered as the protective goddess of children and women, and an old wooden house near the Xu Zhenjun Temple in Xiachi, Cangshan, is also regarded by local people as Chen Jinggu's ancestral house and is worshipped as such. There are more than four hundred branch temples of Linshui Temple in Taiwan, and over the past twenty years or so, pilgrims from Taiwan to the ancestral Linshui Temple in Gutian have numbered more than four hundred thousand person-visits.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Born in July 1966, male, Han ethnicity, a native of Gutian County, Fujian Province. In 1991 he was elected vice president of the Gutian Daoist Association and abbot of the Linshui Palace, and he annually presides over the incense-inviting and flame-receiving ceremony of the Chen Jinggu belief custom. The ceremonies he presides over are solemn and dignified, orderly and well regulated; taking Daoist ritual as their vehicle, they incorporate diverse traditional culture and manifest the cultural connotations and folk characteristics of the Chen Jinggu belief custom. He has long devoted himself to transmitting and promoting the Chen Jinggu belief custom, and takes care to collect and collate documentary materials on the custom as well as ritual manuals and textual records such as Fazou (Submitting Memorials) and Zaolou (Constructing the Tower); he also keeps physical objects such as the Lushan ritual seal and the Five Thunder token. Within the documented technical tradition of Folk Beliefs and Customs in Gutian, Fujian: Folk customs (xinsu), also called "popular beliefs" (suxin), are a conventionally formed traditional idea that takes shape over the long course of people's productive and everyday lives. Under the governance of such an idea, the populace develops psychological and behavioral identification with a given folk phenomenon. The Chen Jinggu customs extend their influence to the provinces and regions of Fujian, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hubei, and Anhui, as well as to Chinese communities around the world. The faithful number more than eighty million, more than four thousand branch temples of Linshui have appeared, and the result is a distinctive folk cultural phenomenon. The rites of inviting incense and receiving fire are performed throughout the year, but the observances in the first lunar month, the month of Chen Jinggu's birthday, are the most solemn. At that time, the faithful from various places form "Madam Societies" and travel to Linshui Temple in Gutian to celebrate her birthday, inviting incense and receiving fire from the ancestral temple to carry home for the jiao offering rites of prayer to the gods. This reflects the widespread wish among the people to pray for blessings and seek peace. Using the rites of inviting incense and receiving fire as a medium, Taiwan compatriots, in ceremonies of shared belief where people share one ancestor and the gods share one bond, have deepened their emotional exchange with mainland compatriots and their identification with the national culture. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Drawing incense and carrying the flame home": Pilgrims draw incense and flame at the ancestral temple and carry it home, where each household receives its own stick in person. "The women's society pilgrimage in the first month": Women's societies travel to Gutian in the birthday month, each group with its own banner and drum line, marching up the mountain road in order. "The canonical order of the rite": The rite follows Daoist liturgy: incense, address, invocation, offerings, the burning of papers, and finally the handing out of blessed incense. "Hand-copied liturgical texts": Liturgical manuscripts such as the petitions and tower rites are copied by hand within temple lineages and are the written backbone of the rite.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

He is a national representative bearer of Folk Beliefs and Customs (the Chen Jinggu Belief Custom), a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Huang Guanghui · National Representative Bearer Archive