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The Significance and Plan of the Present Work
The point of departure for the current project was Strickmann’s questions about how and when Yao became Daoists, and how Daoism functioned in Yao society, as opposed to its function in other mainstream Chinese traditions. What I discovered is that official sources prior to the Qing Dynasty are silent about the question of Yao Daoism. Moreover, no written Yao sources remain from the pre-Qing period, though most extant materials are copies of older documents, and there is frequent allusion in them to earlier times. In the case of Yao ritual manuals, many can be found in the Daoist Canon, and are known to have been extant during the Song period. However, the early provenance of a text is not necessarily an indication of the use of that text by a given community. Conversely, lack of concrete evidence from earlier periods does not prove that Yao Daoism is a Qing phenomenon—merely that it is difficult (if not impossible) to say when Daoist traditions were revealed to Yao societies.
Although pre-Qing sources do not shed much light on the question of Yao Daoism, or on any other aspects of Yao religion, they do contain a great deal of information about contacts between Yao and the Chinese state, as well as with other sociopolitical entities in what is now South China. By “Chinese state” I mean the administrative network that linked diverse regions with the capital, as well as the official bureaucrats and military commanders who, as representatives of the emperor, controlled individual administrative units and pacified autochthonous populations that threatened them. One of the central concerns of authors who we might now call geographers and ethnographers was the detailed documentation of this administrative network. What was important to them was determining exactly what counted as state/government territory—that is, what were the limits of the Emperor’s realm. Throughout this book I am interested in how the state was constructed, both as a physical, territorial entity, but also as a virtual one represented in various textual and visual media, and delineated by such terms as: the Central State (Zhongguo 
) and the Nine Continents (Jiuzhou 
)—terms which pre-figure