Nationalizing the Sacred: Mount Tai as Sacred Space and National Symbol in Republican Era China

This paper explores the interstices between sacred space, society and nationalism during the Chinese Republican era.  Mount Tai is one of China’s most renowned sacred sites.  It was the goal of a popular pilgrimage during the late imperial era.  Peasants, seeking to fulfill filial duties, prayed to a regional fertility goddess for sons.  In addition, elite, Confucian-educated men climbed its slopes in an attempt to link themselves to a lineage of past scholars and leaders.  The mountain is an excellent subject for an examination of the artificial lines, but very real links between secular and sacred. By the Republican era (1912-1949), while a few elite saw the mountain as a cultural symbol for all of China, the majority of visitors were still drawn to it as a regional pilgrimage center.

During the Republican era many intellectuals consciously sought to construct a modern identity for China.  Many believed that nationalism required secularization and therefore needed secular symbols as one means to unite a fractured community.  Many of these intellectuals also had strong anti-superstition tendencies.  During the 1920s and 1930s numerous scholars attempted to use Mount Tai as a symbol for evolving Chinese nationalism.  They published their ideas in travelogues, local histories and national textbooks.  They emphasized the mountain’s important links to famous individuals and cultural practices from China’s long and storied past, de-emphasizing religious associations. However, the shift of Mount Tai as predominantly a regional pilgrimage site to a signifier for a modern nation-state was not purely one of secularization.  Religious pilgrimage continued unabated during the Republican era and thrives today under the Communists.  In addition, the meanings of the mountain as a focal point for national identity would not have resonated so strongly if they had not tied into the already existing layers of sacrality associated with the peak.