Recent Chinese Scholarship on the History of Chinese Secret Societies

Abstract

The 1990s witnessed a wave of English-language studies of Chinese secret society history, 2 building on and surpassing the foundations established by the Jean Chesneaux-edited volumes of the 1970s. 3 Dian Murray's The Origins of the Tiandihui 4 provided a comprehensive overview of the historiography and history of the Tiandihui, bringing order especially to the complex and confusing Chinese historiography since the Republican period, and making it possible for other scholars to work on the Triads without having to take on the entire weight of that tradition. Essays in "Secret Societies" Reconsidered, 5 edited by Mary Somers Heidhues and myself, brought together case studies of Chinese secret societies in South China and Southeast Asia, thus beginning the task of reconstituting the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world of Chinese secret societies, in many ways international from very early on. My solo volume, Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and Mid-Qing China, 6 sought to apply a local history approach to the study of the early history of the [End Page 139] Triads in Fujian and Taiwan, and to examine the links between brotherhoods, secret societies, and local popular and religious culture. Barend ter Haar, in his brilliant work, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads, 7 took this approach much further, exploring the meaning of Triad rituals in the context of the popular religious culture of South China. 8