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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to too many people to list in one or two pages—many of whom I never had a chance to meet, but only know through written works, which have enriched this book in countless ways. Among them, I owe a great deal to Richard Cushman’s dissertation, Rebel Haunts and Lotus Huts, which he was completing about the same time I was born. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1991, so there is no way for me to return the favor.
While time limitations have made it impossible to contact past scholars, those based on space are now easily overcome thanks to email. It is because of email that I first met Barend ter Haar. As he mentions in the Foreword to this book, I contacted him in the late 1990s with myriad questions about Yao religion and culture, and that initial email led to a conversation that eventually brought me to Leiden, where we collaborated for almost a year. During that time, ter Haar exposed me to most of the secondary literature on Yao in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. He also helped me to grasp the significance of Yao culture, formulate questions about it, and chart the course of my dissertation, which has resulted in this book.