Starting in the year 2001, while teaching at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes (EPHE), I organized a group of twelve French scholars to work on a
multi-disciplinary history of Chinese religion and culture in ancient and early
medieval China. This group in turn became the core for a seven-day conference
in Paris in December 2006 that covered the same periods. In 2009, a French
volume was published (Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale) and,
shortly thereafter, in 2009 and 2010, the results of the Paris conference: Early
Chinese Religion I: Shang through Han (1250 BC–220 AD) and Early Chinese Religion II: The Period of Division (220–589 AD). In fall of the year 2010, having
moved to the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
(CUHK), I began to teach a course called “A Critical Cultural History of China,”
the first semester of which was entirely based on these two two-volume sets.
At the same time, I began planning, with colleagues from CUHK and the EPHE,
two further sets on modern Chinese religion. The relevant conferences were
held at CUHK in June and December 2012 and led to the publication, in 2014, of
Modern Chinese Religion I: Song-Liao-Jin-Yuan (960–1368) and, in 2015, of Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850–2015.1 I began using the Song-Yuan set in the spring
semester of 2015 and the contemporary set in the spring semester of 2016. The
present book is a précis of my lectures.
The goal of this overview is to make these eight bulky volumes user-friendly
for students (and professors) who have never read a word about Chinese religion, and who may well share still widespread prejudices about it, even that
there is no such thing or, if there is, that it is called Buddhism and is not Chinese. These eight volumes show clearly that religion is just as integral a part of
Chinese history as it is of any other civilization, not something to be stuck in a
corner or put as an afterthought in the last chapter of a general history. Rather,
it is the heart of the story, reflecting and propelling change in the political, social, economic, medical, philosophical, and aesthetic realms.