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its pre-Hanified state. This may be true, but Yao worshipped Daoist deities; Jiang made little attempt to demonstrate when this later layer of practice altered traditional Yao ways. Moreover, the sanctification of rocks and mountains, rivers and lakes, trees, and other objects of nature has been a standard feature of Chinese religious history since very early times.
Jiang also pointed out that even though Yao worshipped Daoist deities, these deities were personified quite differently in the Yao context than in the Han one. For one, many Yao deities, he explained, were associated with specific professions, such as those administering ritual, wealth and property, fate, hunting, and farming. This in and of itself is not indicative of a distinction between Han and Yao views of divinity.
Jiang then argued that Yao embraced a negative characterization of several esteemed Han deities. For proof, he looked to the songs of deities in Yao ritual manuals, where the Earth God (Tudigong 
) and the Kitchen God (Zaojun 
) are portrayed as demons (mogui 
). In the Han context these deities also have their fearful sides; they judge human actions and report them to higher authorities, who then administer punishments, such as a decrease in lifespan.45 One might also ask if there really is indeed standardization of Han views of the same deities.
Why did Jiang react with such disappointment to the notion that Yao religion was indeed Daoism, or had been Daoized? As mentioned earlier, Jiang came to the Yao Mountains of northern Guangdong hoping to witness primitive religion, similar to a birdwatcher catching a glimpse of a rare species. As part of a larger international anthropological project, he was attempting to grasp the evolution of human society at an earlier stage of development—where did he as a civilized human being come from.46 Jiang and other anthropologists of the time viewed Yao people living in the mountainous regions of Guangdong and Guangxi as being permanently held in a changeless state, outside time, and beyond the laws of evolution. The signs of Hanification and Daoification they discovered, upon closer investigation, were in their understanding part and parcel of the influence of civilization on lower cultural forms—the forms they were ultimately attempting to grasp.