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has formed the primary textual medium of politico-religious life in Yao society.
I am interested in the position of Chinese texts and other ritual objects in Yao politico-religious traditions, and ask the question: How do Chinese script and “Daoist” imagery—both evidence of imperial authority—function in the creation and maintenance of Yao identities? I argue that their function is similar to that of texts and other patterns (wen 
) in Chinese official religion, going back at least to the Han Dynasty. Just as revealed scriptures, or treasures (bao 
), served to legitimate the authority of the emperor and the dynastic line through their symbolic expression of the Mandate of Heaven, so too do Yao Chinese texts serve to legitimate the authority of village leaders and clan lines, as well as to create and maintain local and extra-local Yao identities. In this way center and periphery resemble each other.
To elaborate, the larger research theme yields such specific questions as: How did mountain-dwelling, swiddening agriculturalists moonlighting as ritual specialists, obtain these heavenly treasures, originally granted solely to the emperor? When and by what means did Yao become Daoists, and how did the reception of this imperial (and textual) religion serve to mediate relations between Yao and non-Yao communities, between Yao and local Chinese officials, and finally, between Yao and the state—both the Chinese and other states into whose domains Yao entered? How did literacy in the Chinese script, a requisite to participating in Daoist ritual culture, help to cement a Yao sense of identity in contradistinction to non-literate societies in their midst?
The Dao Among the Yao Revisited
Contemporary discourse concerning the practice of Daoism in Yao societies often credits Michel Strickmann as being the first scholar to apprehend Daoist elements in Yao ritual culture. In his brief article “The Tao Among the Yao: Taoism and the Sinification of South China,” published in 1979, Strickmann detected what Shiratori Yoshiro—the compiler of the Yao Documents,5 “600 pages of manuscripts in Chinese characters” collected by Shiratori and his colleagues—had not.