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Foreword
Writing a foreword to a book that one would have loved to write oneself is something of a challenge. Let me begin by telling something of the string of coincidences which led up to this book.
In 1992, a Dutch tourist guide who regularly visited Thailand came to me with a pile of Chinese manuscripts that turned out to be Yao ritual texts. My response was one of tremendous excitement. In the following months, we succeeded in persuading the Leiden Ethnographic Museum (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde) to buy roughly half of the complete set of manuscripts, and two complete sets of ritual paintings from one single Yao priest who had lived and worked in Laos. The other half of the manuscripts was later acquired by the Sinological Seminar at Heidelberg University. The importance of the collection is that it all stemmed from one and the same ritual specialist, unlike most of the other material available for scholarly inspection. This discovery sparked my interest in Yao culture in a way that would have been impossible without such artifacts, although I never got around to studying them in real depth. Similar collections of texts exist at other places in Europe and no doubt elsewhere, but apart from a voluminous catalogue of the material preserved at the