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undeveloped reasons Liang believed that Yao religion only had the appearance of Daoism, but in its substance was really comprised of a mixture of more primitive elements: Spirit worship (jingling chongbai 
), Animism (youling chongbai 
), and Fetishism (yaowu chongbai 
).25
Six years earlier, writing in the same journal, Jiang Yingliang 
, provided what ter Haar has considered: “probably the first serious study of Yao religious life, including its Daoist aspects.”26 Although Jiang began his investigation of Yao in Northern Guangdong with the expectation that he would discover the religion of a primitive people (chumin 
) without writing or an advanced sociopolitical structure, and who worshipped a dog king, Jiang Yingliang soon discovered that Yao religion had been influenced by Han religion and culture:
Jiang went on to explore the multiple layers of Hanification (Hanhua) in Yao religion, and insisted that in every instance where Yao religion showed similarities with Han practices, it was due to Han influence on Yao society; thus, for Jiang, the aspects of Hanification that he recognized in the Yao religious context were not the real Yao religion.
Like Strickmann over forty years later, he discovered that Yao priests—who he referred to as shamans (wu 
)—used Chinese script; i.e., they used Han writing. However, he also saw that interspersed among the standard Han graphs were others that were clearly Yao inventions.29 These strange invented characters combined with