The Production of Sacred Space at Linggu Monastery

Although there is no exact analog for "sacred" in China under the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the Linggu Monastery might qualify as a sacred space.  For Qing emperors, Buddhist monks, residents of the central-Chinese city of Nanjing, and even soldiers in regional armies, the monastery was variously a ritual center, an auspicious location for burial, a pilgrimage site, and home to a spring with the magical power to bring rain.  Over the course of the nineteenth century, each of these groups used different strategies to single out the monastery as important to social order, and in so doing each invoked an idealized polity.  Conflict over these different conceptions of the state distinguished politics of the period.
Even given this ongoing struggle over meaning, the Taiping War (1850-1864) stands as a watershed.  The monastery lay directly on the battlefield, and became a mass grave for thousands of soldiers.  Prior to the war, different political movements used the monastery to display their relationship to the emperors who had frequently visited the site.  After the war, emperors were absent, even as literary foils.  Instead different groups stressed particular shared virtues that defined their roles in the state. Each of their solutions to the problem of social order were articulated in ritual practices and inscribed in the layout of Linggu Monastery.