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Bavarian State Library in Munich (Germany), little to no work is being done on these materials.
Thanks to email and the Internet, Eli Alberts became aware of my own work in the late 1990s and before he knew it he was swept up into the study of the Yao. This book is the fruit of the conversation that followed, which he carried out in China, Thailand, the Netherlands, and the United States.
A major obstacle to initially pursuing work on the Yao ritual texts themselves was the lack of proper background research on the Yao from a social, cultural, and religious historical perspective. There is now a substantial amount of sound Western and Chinese ethnographical research, by Peter Kandre, Ralph Litzinger, and Hjorleifur Jonsson, as well as by Chinese scholars such as Pu Chaojun and Guo Zhu, to mention only a few. By contrast, serious research on the different historical dimensions of the Yao is virtually absent, except for an excellent 1970 dissertation—never published—by Richard Cushman. Until the present book by Eli Alberts, we were stuck with the impressionistic comments of Michel Strickmann on the possibly ancient roots of Yao religious culture in new Daoist traditions of the Song period. Despite early attempts to bring together international research at conferences devoted to Yao studies, actual research is still hampered by a serious language barrier (numerous Western ethnographers who do not use modern and/or classical Chinese resources, Chinese scholars ignoring Western research, and sufficient command of the Yao languages), as well as by a lack of expertise and sympathy among Chinese scholars with respect to the religious dimensions of Yao culture.
The present book by Eli Alberts is therefore the first in-depth survey in any language that is based on a broad survey of Chinese, Japanese, and Western research on issues of Yao identity and religious culture. Topics covered are the discovery of Yao Daoism (which antedates by decades the well-known comments by Michel Strick-mann, but was ignored by subsequent scholarship), the history of the Yao as a cultural and religious entity, the relationship between the Yao and older cultural groups in southern China, and the origins