Sincerity, Reverent Offering, and Reciprocity in Chinese Folk Religion: A Case Study of Qinglong Temple in the Chaozhou Region

Abstract

By analyzing the devotional practices at Qinglong Temple in Chaozhou, this article illuminates a symbolic circuit in Chinese folk religion wherein sincerity is materialized through reverent offerings to secure divine reciprocity. It further explores the ethical logic, symbolic mechanisms, and processes of social construction underlying the pattern. More broadly, the vibrant ritual life at Qinglong Temple demonstrates that far from being a relic of the past, such economies of sincere exchange are a vital and adaptive mechanism through which folk traditions negotiate their place and thrive within the complexities of modern China. The study reveals that Chinese folk religion operates as a dynamic system of practices embedded in everyday rituals, emotional ethics, and social relationships. Its legitimacy arises not from abstract doctrine but from ritual performance, moral expression, and affective interaction. The article elucidates how monetary offerings, when grounded in sincerity, are reinterpreted as symbolic gifts and subsequently transformed into symbolic capital through practices such as temple donations and vow fulfillment. While resisting full assimilation into market rationality, folk religion simultaneously engages official structures to construct a hybrid religious economy that reinforces communal ethics and sustains transcendent relationships through public ritual and collective devotion.

1. Introduction

In the early theorization of religion, Durkheim (1912) proposed that the defining feature of religious systems lies in the ideal-typical dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. Yet, empirical religious practices often reveal a more dynamic permeability, symbolic flexibility, and interchangeability of social roles. Weller’s (1987) concept of “religion without a center” in Chinese society exemplifies the fusion of the sacred and the secular. This entanglement underpins the ongoing interaction between folk religion and modern structures shaped by state and market logics, an issue that has become central to contemporary theories of religion. Within the cultural context of China, the fluidity of boundaries is particularly evident in the sphere of folk religion. Rather than existing as an autonomous doctrinal system detached from daily life, folk religion is deeply interwoven with ritual structures and habitual social practices. Life-cycle events such as weddings, funerals, and seasonal festivals serve as key moments in which the sacred is continuously reactivated within the rhythms of ordinary experience. These rituals function both as social markers of personal transition and as mechanisms through which belief is cultivated, embodied, and reaffirmed over time. The affirmation of belief thus arises not from assent to abstract doctrines but through the repetitive enactment of rituals and the expression of emotion, a process of “doing religion” (Chau 2008; McGuire 2008, pp. 13–16; Ammerman 2021, p. 4). Within the framework, the integration of ritual, custom, and experiential belief constitutes a defining feature of Chinese folk religion, where sacrality emerges through its continual embedding in social relationships, moral values, and embodied everyday practices.

Situated within the complex matrix, the Chaozhou region1 provides a particularly illustrative ethnographic setting. It has long been shaped by a dense sacrificial tradition in which ritual life is intertwined with household ethics, community order, and regional social networks. Historically, as a peripheral region within the imperial polity, Chaozhou often experienced a gap between the reach of grassroots governance and the uncertainties of everyday life (Chen 2001). Within this experiential world, deities were commonly understood through bureaucratic idioms and imagined as quasi-official authorities. They were treated as “half officials” who could address what state agents did not, could not, or could not address in time. This included territorial protection, disaster-averting rites, the securing of peace, and the mediation of disputes. Such a configuration was reinforced by recurrent environmental risks in the past. The area suffered repeated earthquakes, windstorms, and flooding in earlier periods, while hydraulic infrastructure, medical provision, and disaster-prevention capacity remained limited. Under conditions of uncertainty, safety became a scarce public concern, and deities were entrusted with responsibilities of relief and protection. When crises eased or decisive turning points occurred, the experiences were often incorporated into narratives of divine efficacy and collectively endorsed, gradually converting lived contingencies into reputational authority and the accumulation of temple “incense fire2” (Xianghuo 香火).

Qinglong Temple is significant because it concentrates and historically extends this conjuncture of risk, order, and efficacy. Its ritual genealogy underwent a process of grafting and reconfiguration, moving from earlier protective traditions centered on the Green Snake (an animal deity associated with water-disaster protection) to the later veneration of Wang Kang (王伉), a deified human figure. Through the transformation, the temple’s sacred functions expanded from guarding against local floods to encompassing a moral–political imaginary of loyalty, protection of the city, and the safeguarding of territory and community order. In the modern era, China’s grassroots administration, public health system, and disaster-governance infrastructures have become increasingly consolidated. Deities are therefore not mobilized in the same quasi-governmental way as before, yet efficacy has not disappeared. Instead, its evaluative scale has shifted from collective tests centered on calamity and public safety to narrative confirmations anchored in individual life-course contingencies.

In this article, “folk religious practice” refers to locally embedded, temple-centered worship through which devotees “do religion” in everyday life. Rather than privileging doctrine, it foregrounds devotional action and evaluations of efficacy, including incense offering, divination, petitioning and vow repayment, and reverent giving. This working definition is operationalized through the case of Qinglong Temple, where the practices are repeatedly enacted and publicly evaluated in a dense ritual environment. Qinglong Temple remains a key node in the local folk–religious network, marked by high-density gatherings and sustained ritual patronage since Qing dynasty. Chaozhou people visit the temple especially on the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month, on deities’ birthdays, and during processional events, bringing elaborate offerings and donating money. At the temple, worship is governed by detailed ritual protocols that render devotional interaction highly structured and publicly legible. The protocols include a hierarchical incense-offering sequence involving thirteen deities, divination through shengbei3 (聖杯), personalized offerings to functionally differentiated gods, and oil-money contributions guided by the locally shared principle that “sincerity brings efficacy.” Locally, the giving is often glossed as “reverent offering” (喜敬), a term that foregrounds the moralization and symbolic transformation of money rather than a simple transactional purchase of efficacy. Qinglong Temple therefore provides an analytically powerful site for examining how the linked logic of sincerity–reverent offering–reciprocity continues to sustain human–divine relations and the social legitimacy of belief in contemporary settings. As Katz (2008, pp. 58–60) suggests, divine justice operates not only as a personal psychological anchor but also as a mechanism for regulating collective emotion and social perception. Temples thus serve as spaces of belief, emotional governance, and public morality. Through repayment rituals, monetary contributions, and religious performances, devotees pursue personal fulfillment while simultaneously addressing collective anxieties and reaffirming shared moral order.

2. Literature Review

2.1. State–Local and Society–Individual: Multiple Dimensions in the Study of Folk Religion

A review of existing scholarship reveals that Chinese folk religion, positioned at the intersection of institutional structures and everyday practices, demonstrates its complexity through the multilayered interactions among the state, local society, and individuals. At the macro-institutional level, prior to 19114, China’s imperial regimes incorporated folk religion into the governance apparatus through the symbolic canonization of deities, the political embedding of cosmological narratives, and the integration of ritual and symbolic resources. These measures aimed to consolidate political legitimacy and promote cultural unity (Watson 1985; Duara 1988). At the same time, local societies were not passive recipients of state-imposed norms. Rather, they actively reinterpreted and transformed official discourses at the symbolic level by imitating state rituals, reconfiguring divine iconography, and elaborating indigenous religious systems to construct distinct political identities and cultural boundaries. Feuchtwang (2003) introduces the concept of imperial metaphorical mimesis, suggesting that practices such as the burning of spirit money, Stove God worship, and City God reverence function as symbolic reenactments of imperial ritual logic. Ahern (1981, pp. 16–30) similarly emphasizes the bureaucratic mimicry embedded in Chinese religious practice: worshippers act as plaintiffs submitting petitions, while deities are conceived as bureaucratic officials, a symbolic enactment of hierarchical social order. Extending the symbolic perspective, Dell’Orto (2003), in her study of the Earth God (土地公) in Taiwan, argues that local deities serve simultaneously as protectors of the community and as symbolic agents of social transformation and local identity. The dual role performed by these deities forges dynamic relationships among place, collective identity, and political authority. As embodiments of shared sentiment, local deities occupy a central position in mediating tensions between ongoing modernization and enduring attachments to local traditions. Religious figures in village life thus contribute both to maintaining cultural continuity and to negotiating the transformations of contemporary social reality.

At the micro level of religious practice, scholars focus on how devotees construct experiences of faith and the legitimacy of the sacred through concrete actions. Hansen (1990, pp. 160–64), drawing on historical materials from the Song dynasty, contends that the formation of ling arises through an interactive process involving temple construction, official canonization, and the performance of miracles. The perceived efficacy of deities, therefore, is shaped through social and ritual practices. Local communities create divine images through statues and temples; the state confers authority through canonization; and worshippers perpetuate divine efficacy through ritual performance and narrative transmission. Within the triangular structure of institution, practice, and dissemination, efficacy emerges as a socially and institutionally constructed symbolic resource. Complementing this perspective, Sangren (1993) introduces the concept of ling (efficacy or potency), arguing that Chinese religion is not grounded in formal doctrine but centers on experiential judgments of a deity’s responsiveness. He highlights the cyclical logic of “crowds signify efficacy”: deities attract worshippers by demonstrating power, while the presence of worshippers in turn reinforces perceptions of their ling, creating a self-reinforcing structure of belief. The mechanism sustains the rationality of religious experience and reflects a dynamic process in which state and local actors engage in symbolic exchange and mutual recognition through divine intermediaries.

2.2. Reciprocity and the Religious Market Economy in Chinese Folk Religion

As a symbolic exchange mechanism embedded within social structures, religious gifting in Chinese folk religion transcends material offering, functioning as a vital means of constructing religious order and moral norms. In The Gift, Mauss (1925, pp. 13–23) posits that the triadic obligations of giving, receiving, and reciprocating constitute the foundational structure of exchange, animated by a mysterious force, hau, that exerts moral compulsion. He emphasizes that gifts express social obligation and symbolic meaning through systems of reciprocity that govern their circulation and interpretation. Building on it, Sahlins (1974, pp. 134–67) argues that the essence of gift exchange lies in the continual creation of social bonds, wherein value is produced within relational processes sustained by continuity and obligation. Within kinship and familial contexts, gift exchanges often exhibit delayed reciprocity, asymmetry, and moral openness, diverging from the precise calculation characteristic of market logic. The perspective illuminates the interaction between devotees and deities in Chinese religious life. The structure of “vowing and fulfilling vows” exemplifies symbolic reciprocity: individuals articulate sincere wishes with the expectation of divine response, and upon the manifestation of miracles, the act of fulfilling vows becomes a crucial link that sustains the human–divine relationship. Such a non-equivalent, delayed, and highly ritualized form of reciprocity demonstrates the deep applicability of Mauss’s theory within religious contexts. Further, Godelier (1996, pp. 121–33) highlights that money, even as it circulates within economic systems, acquires symbolic significance in religious settings that far exceeds its material value. In temple offerings, the religious meaning of an identical monetary donation varies according to the donor’s identity, motivation, and degree of public participation, revealing the inherently social and moral dimensions of religious giving. Harris (1989) proposes that societies often operate within dual exchange systems: one grounded in ancestor worship, cosmology, and moral order, emphasizing religiosity, symbolic meaning, and reproduction; the other oriented toward immediate utilitarian return and personal interest. In Chinese folk religion, practices such as “vowing and fulfilling vows” and “thanksgiving performances” navigate between these two systems, addressing practical needs while embedding action within moral norms and ritual logic. Through these mechanisms, religious gift-giving maintains the ethical foundation and social legitimacy of folk religious practice.

At the societal level, gift exchange profoundly reflects asymmetrical power relations and hierarchical social structures. Yan (1993, pp. 148–52) observes that in northern Chinese villages, gift-giving embodies a logic of filial respect, directed from subordinates to superiors, with reciprocation often taking the form of non-material and non-equivalent emotional responses. The moral logic both reveals underlying power dynamics and legitimizes social order through moral imagination. M. Yang (2005, p. 200) further emphasizes that the inalienability of gifts renders them crucial vehicles for the accumulation of symbolic capital. Through acts of offering, religious participants engage simultaneously in supplication and ethical performance, thereby shaping their positions within the community’s symbolic hierarchy.

Having elucidated how gift exchange constructs human–divine relationships and religious communities through symbolic and moral reciprocity, the subsequent inquiry becomes: how do these non-market forms of giving survive, transform, and even expand within contemporary China’s highly institutionalized and marketized religious environment? Addressing the question requires adopting the perspective of the religious market economy to examine how religious practices dynamically negotiate the intersecting forces of state regulation, local strategy, and market mechanism. Chau (2011) proposes that China’s religious economy functions as a ritual market, in which religious specialists compete to provide services such as blessings, funerals, and disaster relief, activities where efficacy, symbolic tension, and expressive power are key factors attracting devotees. Palmer (2011) critically revises traditional religious market theories by highlighting the influence of non-market social relations on religious organizations and practices. He distinguishes between client-based religions, which primarily sell goods and services, and gift-based religions, which rely on non-commercial reciprocal networks. The latter, Palmer argues, constitute a religious gift economy. Within the framework, religious interaction forms a triadic structure of reciprocity: the fulfillment of human wishes, interpersonal mutual aid, and the extension of favors to others in anticipation of symbolic reciprocation from deities. He further notes that the gift-based religion model challenges the classic Western sociological paradigm of market–contract–salvation by emphasizing the cultural foundations of gift ethics, emotional reciprocity, and community formation. Despite the intensifying marketization of Chinese religion, Palmer observes the parallel rise of anti-marketization movements that stress moral restoration and communal ethics. The movements frequently involve rebuilding temples, reviving traditional festivals, and organizing collective rituals to create de-institutionalized yet non-commercialized religious communities, where participation and symbolic identification are structured around the ethics of gifting. F. Yang (2006) advances the tripartite model of red, black, gray market model of China’s religious economy, offering a framework for understanding its structural tensions. Within the gray market, devotees frequently invoke cultural legitimacy discourses, such as tradition, folk custom, and intangible cultural heritage, to circumvent institutional constraints, allowing religious practices to persist within legally and culturally ambiguous zones. Liang (2014) observes that local elites often advocate for the inclusion of “superstitious customs” in intangible cultural heritage lists, thereby reframing folk religion as “local culture.” Through such process, religious practices not only gain legitimacy outside institutional frameworks but also become integrated into local governance and economic development strategies, following the model of religion as a platform, economy as the performance (Gao 2014; Xu and Tao 2022). Local governments, seeking to attract tourism and investment, frequently participate in or tacitly endorse such religious projects, inadvertently deepening the coupling between the religious gift economy and local market logic. Against the backdrop of stringent state regulation and growing religious demand, the gray market has not diminished and has evolved into the primary space for religious practice. It operates through adaptive strategies that respond to regulatory pressures, sustain informal religious activity beyond institutional control, and articulate local cultural identities. In Chinese religious practice, monetary offerings are interpreted through ritual logic rather than market valuation. Their significance derives from their role in affirming sincerity, obligation, and spiritual intent (Ahern 1981, pp. 39–41). The logic of gift exchange thus upholds the moral legitimacy of individual religious behavior while simultaneously reinforcing communal cohesion and reconstructing social bonds.

In summary, gift exchange and the religious market economy in Chinese folk religious practices do not constitute mutually exclusive or binary structures. Instead, they form a hybrid religious–economic system shaped by the interweaving of symbolic ethics, ritual performance, and institutional boundaries. The system simultaneously addresses utilitarian demands and fulfills symbolic functions, maintaining social order and public morality. It does so by translating practical concerns into morally legible action while keeping sacred value incommensurable with market price. It is deeply embedded in the cultural governance strategies of local elites and navigates the gray zones between state regulation and social autonomy with considerable flexibility. It therefore operates as an adaptive arrangement that persists under regulation while remaining rooted in local moral expectations. Within the process, the logic of gifting, religious reciprocity, and institutional adaptation collectively constitute three linked pathways that sustain the ongoing operation of religious practice. Nevertheless, some studies risk a one-sided simplification. They isolate a single dimension of religious action—whether morality, emotion, or the intersection of utility and reciprocity—and in doing so neglect the totality and hybridity inherent in gift exchange. As Mauss emphasizes, gift behavior represents a complex interplay of multiple motivations and cannot be reduced to a single impulse. In the context of folk religious practices, the coexistence of multiple motivations lies at the heart of their cultural vitality. Although existing research has sufficiently illuminated the institutional arrangements and cultural functions of religious behavior from a structural perspective, it has relatively overlooked the internal construction of efficacy and sincerity within the subjective experiences of devotees. More attention is needed to how devotees make efficacy and sincerity plausible, durable, and socially shareable in everyday life. When divine efficacy becomes the premise for the continuity of faith, how do devotees rationalize, sustain, and continually reproduce the seemingly circular mechanism of verification? How do they construct a set of symbolically coherent, socially recognized, and culturally rational behavioral logics linking wishing and reciprocation, sincerity and reverent offering? These questions remain critical gaps in current scholarship.

3. Methodology

Ethnography is famously reoriented away from merely being a set of procedures. Its goal is redefined, moving it beyond practices like “establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on” and toward the meticulously planned pursuit of this interpretive ideal (Geertz 1973, pp. 6–10). Instead of deriving causal laws of explanation, the interpretation of meaning becomes positioned as the central task of cultural history—a role analogous to the one Geertz defined for cultural anthropology (Biersack 1989). According to Darnton (2009, p. 410), while acknowledging its ambiguities, anthropology offers history a distinct methodology: it uses a seemingly inscrutable ritual or text as an entry point into another culture, adheres to a process of seeing things “from the native’s point of view,” and operates on a conceptualization of culture as a symbolic world. To extend on the theoretical framework, this study adopts a qualitative ethnographic approach, combining long-term fieldwork with textual analysis. It follows the methodological orientation of thick description, aiming to capture not only the observable dimensions of ritual practice but also the layered symbolic meanings embedded in everyday religious behavior. Rather than documenting surface acts, the research seeks to interpret the moral logic, cultural structures, and relational dynamics that underlie the practices of sincerity, reverent offering, and reciprocity.

Fieldwork was conducted at Qinglong Temple in Chaozhou, a major urban folk religious site in the Chaoshan region. The temple was selected as the primary field site due to its central role in contemporary ritual mobilization, public religiosity, and practices of sincerity and reverent offering. Materials and data were collected through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations with devotees, ritual specialists, temple staff, and local elites. Fieldwork was carried out between 2023 and 2024, with repeated participation in major festivals, routine incense offering rituals, and vow fulfillment events. In addition to oral data, the research draws on temple inscriptions, donation records, ritual manuals, and locally circulated narratives. Following the analytical trajectory, this article demonstrates how the Chaozhou religious system preserves its cultural vitality in modern times and how folk religion, as a non-institutional form, resists market rationality while reconstructing social cohesion and moral order.

4. Sincerity: The Ethical Foundation and Emotional Practice of Belief

Regarding the temple’s founding, local scholars tend to situate Qinglong Temple within the broader historical backdrop of the flourishing of water-deity worship in Chaozhou since the Song period (R. Wu 2015). What is clearer is the idiom through which the temple’s prominence has long been understood. It is repeatedly tied to disaster relief and the securing of communal safety, and this linkage anchors a stable repertoire of efficacy narratives in Qing gazetteers and local elite writings.

The Kangxi Chaozhou Prefecture Gazetteer records that “when villagers prayed, a green snake repeatedly appeared on the beam joints… yet it harmed no one.” 鄉人祈禱時，青蛇屢見梁節上，飲酒食肉，獨不傷人。 (Lin [1684] 2003, p. 103) The line makes efficacy perceptible through an observable sign. It also encodes protection through the emphasis on “harming no one.” The Qianlong Chaozhou Prefecture Gazetteer offers a fuller formulation: “a numinous creature often winds its way between the shrine niche and the incense table; it is green in color and is called the ‘Green Dragon’… In the late Ming, an official from Yunnan brought the deity’s image to Chaozhou, the Qing court conferred on the deity the imperial title “Anji Shengwang (安濟聖王)”, built a temple to suppress flooding, and thereby secured calm waters.” 常有靈物蜿蜒憑龕次香案間，其色青，是曰青龍… 前明滇人有官於潮者，奉神像至此，號安濟靈王，立廟鎮水患，遂獲安瀾。 (Zhou [1762] 1967, pp. 178, 453). In this account, efficacy is a shared rule of interpretation. Seeing the “Green Dragon” is treated as an auspicious omen, and reverent devotion is folded into that interpretive logic. At the same time, the gazetteer frames the deity’s work in terms of public order, and notes that the title Anji Shengwang also received official recognition. By the Guangxu Haiyang County Gazetteer, efficacy is further inserted into the moral memory of collective honor and disgrace. It notes that “When Chaozhou people carried its incense-fire to war, whenever a green snake appeared, they were certain to win and return in triumph; thus, the Chaozhou people all revered it as divine.” 相傳潮人帶其香火出征，遇青蛇至，必奏捷班師，故潮人皆神之。 (D. Wu [1900] 1967, p. 453) Such formulations provide efficacy with a historically situated narrative grammar. Natural hazards, military outcomes, and local order become legible within a single explanatory frame. Efficacy is thereby made portable across events, and durable across time.

The logic continues in the present, though it often operates through a more everyday register. Chaozhou people now commonly confirm efficacy through narrative evaluations of personal life events, including recovery from illness, livelihood turning points, educational progress, career mobility, and family well-being. Yet across periods, the central mode of human–divine interaction remains worship. At Qinglong Temple, worship is not an undifferentiated expression of piety. It is formalized, repeatable, and open to social evaluation. Missing a step, or performing it out of sequence, is frequently read as “ritual impropriety” and, crucially, as “insufficient sincerity.” In local terms, this affects whether sincerity is understood to have been fully conveyed to the deity.

Devotees typically follow four linked stages that render sincerity publicly legible. First is incense offering. A “complete set” consists of twenty-six sticks, delivered in a fixed sequence. Three sticks are offered to most deities, and two to the gate gods. The sequence includes Heaven (Tiangong 天公), Anji Shengwang and his two consorts, the Great and Second Attendant Lords (Da Sheren Ye, Er Sheren Ye 大舍人爺, 二舍人爺)5, the Earth God (Fude Laoye 福德老爺)6 and his consort, Huagong and Huama (花公花媽)7, the Third Immortal Master and Wan Niangniang (三仙師公, 挽娘娘)8, and the Jinshi and Juren Lords (Jinshi Ye, Juren Ye 進士爺, 舉人爺)9. Second is lot-drawing and divination. Petitioners kneel before Anji Shengwang and cast shengbei. They silently report their name and address, state the matter at issue, make a vow, and then offer thanks. They also place “oil money10” in the merit box. A common maxim is that “the deity’s grace is boundless; the amount does not matter; efficacy follows from sincerity.” The phrase deliberately de-prices money and makes sincerity the decisive criterion. Third is specialized worship. Devotees can visit other deities according to specific needs: pray to the First Consort for a daughter and to the Second Consort for a son; to the Earth God for safety; to Huagong and Huama for children’s well-being; to the Third Immortal Master for protection against malign forces; to the Jinshi and Juren Lords for academic success; and to the two Attendant Lords for assistance from benefactors. Fourth is offerings and oil-money contributions. Meats11, fruit12, incense, candles, oil, guo (粿)13, and spirit money may all be presented. Devotees stress effort within one’s means, and treat visible enactment as social proof of sincerity.

Although historical sources cannot determine whether these ritual regulations preceded practice or crystallized from it, interviews at Qinglong Temple consistently present sincerity as the ethical core of efficacy. Devotees also describe sincerity as something that is made legible through action. It is expressed through speech and petition, through offerings, and through routine bodily labor within the temple space. When material offerings are limited, embodied effort becomes a salient idiom for demonstrating devotion.

A 56-year-old devotee, who comes on the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month and during major festivals, explained:

“Efficacy depends on sincerity. Our Anji Shengwang is the most powerful and responsive deity in all of Chaozhou. Whether you are sincere in worship, the deity knows. If you are not sincere, your wishes will not be granted. The deity knows everything, so you must be sincere; you cannot deceive him.” 心誠則靈，我們的安吉聖王是整個潮州最靈驗的神。你是否誠心，神都知道。如果你不誠心，你的願望不會被實現。神什麼都知道，所以你必須誠心，不能欺騙他。

She then described how sincerity is sustained in everyday practice:

“I do not speak much, but I talk to the deity from my heart every day. I always clean the incense burner and light the lamps with my own hands. The deity will know that my reverence is genuine.” 我話不多，但我每天都從心裡與神明说话。我總是親手清潔香爐、點燈。神明會知道我的敬意是诚心的。

In religious contexts, sincerity is enacted through codified performances encompassing speech, gesture, material exchange, and relational dynamics, with meaning constituted through visible action. In Chaozhou, such ideal is rooted in migration history and environmental precarity, where deities function as bridges between homeland identity and new locales (Huang 2002). Reverence toward gods mirrors bureaucratic hierarchy: deities are addressed as laoye (老爺), while the city’s chief deity is dalaoye (大老爺) terms drawn from Qing-era officialdom. Chaozhou’s temples served as substitutes for absent state authority, performing “administrative” rituals such as household registration (bao hutou 報戶頭) to align divine protection with life-cycle events. In Chinese religious practice, sincerity is judged less by internal emotion than by conformity to ritual order. Deviations, such as skipped offerings or incorrect sequences, are interpreted as disrespect. Thus, sincerity is performed rather than possessed, constituting a socially defined symbolic system (Seligman et al. 2008, pp. 103–30). Worship (bai) functions as a public enactment of religious affiliation: through bows, prostrations, and offerings, devotees express reverence, signal social alignment, and affirm participation within a shared ritual community. As Peng (2021) observes, such embodied actions reflect symbolic hierarchies that underpin emotional religious life. Respect is enacted through bodily deference, sustained by sincerity, and evaluated collectively. Jia (2021) conceptualizes sincerity as fourfold: verbal integrity, emotional devotion, material honesty, and spiritual receptivity. Field observations confirm that phrases such as “the gods look at your sincerity” operate as moral metrics. Sincerity mediates tensions between money, morality, and ritual, ensuring that offerings remain ethical rather than purely transactional (Moskowitz 2001, pp. 66–69). When divine efficacy falters, devotees often attribute the failure to their own lack of sincerity, prompting intensified ritual devotion to reactivate the divine response, which reinforces a cyclical logic of “sincerity–resonance–efficacy” (Osburg 2020).

Sincerity becomes publicly legible through ritual acts and communal discourse. Katz (2008, pp. 3–5) emphasizes that deities respond to morally legitimate behavior rather than mere requests. Because sincerity is inherently unquantifiable, temple experts function as arbiters of its authenticity, shaping both ritual outcomes and social evaluations. In such way, sincerity anchors divine judgment and community ethics simultaneously. Folk religion also perpetuates karmic models of “rewarding good and punishing evil,” embedded in stories, rituals, and daily moral awareness. Material offerings and ethical behavior serve to express intention and cultivate relationships with the divine. Although gift-giving may superficially resemble market exchange, it fundamentally differs in being grounded in moral assumptions and affective consensus. Reciprocity in gifting reinforces symbolic capital and supports social reproduction (Weller and Wu 2017), embedding faith in everyday life while imbuing it with transcendent significance.

5. The External Expression of Sincerity: ‘Reverent Offering’ and the Symbolic Transformation of Money in Folk Religious Practice

The term, often translated as “reverent offering” or “offering with joyful reverence” (喜敬), carries rich cultural connotations in the Chinese context. It refers not merely to the act of giving but also to the embodied attitudes of respect, caution, politeness, and ritual propriety expressed toward deities. In religious offerings, monetary contributions must be morally and symbolically reframed to prevent them from being perceived as purely transactional. Money is never neutral; it actively shapes relationships between humans and deities, as well as among worshippers themselves, particularly within the frameworks of ritual culture and moral judgment. As a symbolic practice, offering with reverence transforms money from a secular medium of equivalent exchange into a vehicle of moral intention, imbuing acts of giving with religious meaning that transcends economic rationality. As Graeber (2001, pp. 47–51) observes, “Money is a symbolic form of action, and it reflects how a society projects meaning onto the act of exchange.” Such offerings do not follow fixed pricing or promise guaranteed a return. They establish a symbolic relationship between worshippers and deities, grounded in sincerity instead of monetary amount. Although Qinglong is ostensibly nonprofit institutions, their operations often resemble those of enterprises: they manage budgets, plan expansions, secure income (e.g., from incense offerings), and innovate their “services.” The structural pursuit of both efficacy and revenue exemplifies what Chau (2008) terms the economy of efficacy. At Qinglong Temple, for instance, the preparation of offerings is elaborate, and incense-burning is central. A counter inside the temple provides incense bundles, typically sticks and candles for offerings to the deities. Unlike fixed-price commodities, incense has no set price. When queried, temple staff respond with phrases such as “as you wish” or “offer with reverence,” directing worshippers to the donation box and emphasizing that the amount should reflect one’s heart and financial capacity rather than a predetermined price. Within such symbolic exchange, money ceases to function as a quantifiable transactional medium and instead becomes an “expression of sincerity,” governed by subjective emotion, moral intention, and symbolic value.

When interviewees were presented with a more market-like proposition—“Does it mean that the more money people give, the more the deity will bless them?”—many devotees immediately became serious. Some responded with a pointed counter-question: “How is that any different from doing business?” In their view, drawing a direct, linear link between donation size and divine response treats worship as a transaction. It is understood as an affront to the deity’s authority, and even as an act of desecration. They emphasize that divine responsiveness is determined by sincerity and moral conduct rather than by material wealth. Within this logic, the monetary value of incense or offerings is treated as irrelevant to ritual efficacy. This perspective draws a clear distinction between sacred intention and secular transaction, and between symbolic gifting and commercial exchange. Religious giving is understood as a moralized symbolic practice, an act of repaying ancestral or divine grace rather than a method of purchasing intervention. Motivations for donation lie in fulfilling ethical responsibility, not personal gain. The concept of “giving within one’s means” functions as an ethical balancing mechanism: it allows for the demonstration of generosity while avoiding ostentation or coercive display (Oxfeld 2010, pp. 198–219).

In Chaozhou folk religious practice, the use of money does not follow a single utilitarian logic. It undergoes ethical and symbolic transformation across different stages of faith. Before the fulfillment of wishes, monetary contributions are deliberately downplayed, reflecting their phased symbolic function within the faith process. Within the belief chain of sincerity → petition → divine response → reciprocal offering, sincerity serves as the initiating condition and ethical prerequisite for human–divine interaction. At this stage, using money to secure divine response is considered an affront to the sacred. Douglas (1984, pp. 35–40) notes that the core of taboo systems lies in preserving symbolic order and classificatory integrity. Accordingly, during petition or divination, devotees emphasize that “the gods see sincerity,” not the abundance of offerings. Measuring divine favor by monetary contributions is widely regarded as transgressive, undermining the mystery and moral hierarchy of the divine–human relationship. This deliberate ambiguity preserves a symbolic order rooted in sacred hierarchy, reverence, and moral uncertainty, preventing money from being reduced to market logic at the outset of faith. However, once a wish is fulfilled, monetary offerings acquire symbolic significance, serving as gestures of appreciation that acknowledge divine benevolence and moral reciprocity. Making a wish constitutes the establishment of an ethical debt, whereas fulfilling a vow represents a primary means of honoring the moral obligation through material and bodily investment, thereby reconstructing ethical subjectivity (Shen 2023). Devotees may respond with more generous tributes, elaborate repayment ceremonies, or contributions to temple renovations, plaque engravings, or opera sponsorships, all acts of thanks and reverence. In this context, giving after fulfillment is understood as a moral practice rather than a utilitarian exchange, affirming divine efficacy and justice following the appearance of miracles. Underlying this transformation is a logic that safeguards sacredness: exchange implies control over outcomes, whereas reverential offering accepts divine response as uncertain and transcendent. Before fulfillment, money functions as an accessory to sincerity; afterward, it becomes a vessel of symbolic capital. This shift, from taboo to legitimacy, constitutes the core mechanism by which reverent offering sustains its religious validity and social moral significance. What may appear logically contradictory instead reflects the nuanced distinction folk religion draws between transaction and reciprocity. Such visible, action-oriented enactment of sincerity aligns closely with the “subjunctive world” described by Seligman et al. (2008, pp. 25–30), a virtual consensus space in which normative performance allows participants to collectively maintain moral and social order, even if inner sentiment is variable. Within this framework, money transcends its role as a simple offering to function as a social signal, marking one’s willingness to engage in a shared system of ethics, order, and divine protection through material sacrifice. Moreover, the belief structure provides a localized response to academic critiques that have characterized Chinese folk religion as utilitarian (Dean 1998; Li 2004, pp. 81–85; Jin 2001, pp. 230–31), which interpret instances of discontinued devotion as evidence of unstable belief and instrumental rationality. Such interpretations are rejected by local practitioners as deeply disrespectful to the deities. Consequently, religious practice in Chaozhou privileges a moral framework of sincerity, the symbolic interaction of reverential offerings, and transcendent trust in divine efficacy over principles of economic rationality and equivalent exchange. These dimensions collectively constitute a non-utilitarian yet highly normative structure of divine–human reciprocity, offering insight into the localized form of gift logic in Chinese folk religion.

6. The Reconfiguration of Reverent Offering: Symbolic Capital and the Prestige Mechanism of Belief

Like many temples across China, Qinglong Temple has experienced a cyclical history of prosperity, destruction, and reconstruction. Its most recent rebuilding, initiated in the 1980s with funding from the Chaozhou Association of Hong Kong and support from the local government, established a public, enduring, and symbolically charged system of religious prestige. Donors’ names are engraved on the stone walls of the temple’s Pavilion of Honorable Names, organized by surname and donation amount. This practice transforms the public display of devotional acts into a mechanism for fostering identification both between devotees and deities and among community members, operating at a level that extends beyond simple utilitarian exchange.

Within Chaozhou culture, acts of donation framed in terms of “moral integrity” and “giving back to one’s native place” are no longer perceived as mere financial transactions. Instead, they are transformed into ritual performances that manifest personal virtue. In this sense, the spiritual pursuit of merit-making functions as a core mechanism for the cyclical reproduction of cultural capital, social structures, and power relations. The publicization of merit renders charitable giving both a form of individual cultivation and a means of constructing social prestige and displaying status (Borchert et al. 2018, pp. 92–97). The transformative logic is especially evident among overseas Chaozhou merchants returning to invest in their hometowns. Public discourse often frames acts of temple reconstruction and local development support within the Confucian ideal of the “virtuous merchant,” who balances morality with profit. In contexts lacking reliable legal contracts or stable institutional trust, religious spaces provide a platform for moral image-making, compensating for market deficits. Donations to religious institutions thus become informal “reputation investments,” with public opinion portraying generous donors as ethical and conscientious, thereby enhancing their perceived trustworthiness among business partners. Within this context, giving more evolves into a social obligation that builds upon its initial interpretation as an act of sincerity (Wank 1999, p. 122). The pathway to symbolic capital accumulation also underscores the importance of “clean capital” in the religious sphere. Local narratives emphasize that temple donations must originate from legitimate, ethically “clean” sources; funds associated with immoral or illicit activities are considered inappropriate. Accordingly, the character of the donor and the origins of their wealth are subject to ongoing social scrutiny. Legitimacy is not granted automatically by economic capacity but is continuously constructed and reinforced through moral discourse and cultural imagination. Beyond the construction of social prestige, reverential offerings serve as long-term strategies for maintaining ties with deities and securing familial fortune (Hu 2014). Even when wishes go unfulfilled, worshippers often interpret outcomes as the deity “silently dispelling misfortune” or “accumulating merit for descendants,” rather than questioning divine efficacy. The deferred interpretive logic provides a stabilizing psychological foundation for the continuity of belief and reinforces the deity’s role as an unquestionable moral adjudicator. Within such a framework, devotees generally persist in fulfilling vows and continuing devotions, as failure to do so is considered a serious act of disrespect that may bring future misfortune.

In folk religious practice, monetary devotion is not limited to the wealthy (Chang and Chang 2006). Even those with modest means in the Chaozhou region often adhere to the principle of “offering the best to the deity” while upholding an ethic of “poverty without stinginess.” This attitude reflects a sacrificial ethic grounded in the logic of “sincerity yields response.” In societies marked by scarcity yet rich in religious fervor, voluntary “extraordinary offerings” serve as a vital strategy for navigating existential uncertainty and seeking divine protection. Through active participation in temple reconstruction, gilding of statues, or funding theatrical rituals, individuals transform personal sincerity into public recognition, demonstrating how moral will can shape the allocation of economic resources in religious practice. The ideal of donation thus fosters a “sentimental form of social security,” particularly crucial in areas lacking formal welfare provisions. From a structural perspective, devotees’ willingness to dedicate substantial resources to religious rituals, even amid economic scarcity, can be understood as a historically embedded strategy to construct a symbolic order that mitigates radical uncertainty and compensates for limited institutional support. Religious engagement enables individuals to formulate a spiritual “pre-booking” of the future. In this context, the frequency of rituals and the visibility of sincerity function primarily as strategies to make an unpredictable future more bearable, transcending mere expressions of piety. Reverent gifting thus emerges as a pivotal mechanism that converts money into symbolic capital, performing a dual function: it demonstrates the intensity of belief while advancing a broader cultural project of legitimizing life trajectory, emotional belonging, and moral positioning outside formal institutions.

For wealthy overseas Chinese or local elites, societal expectations dictate generous giving; failure to do so is often interpreted as “ungrateful” or “lacking proper decorum” (Oxfeld 2010, pp. 198–219). Donation, therefore, functions not merely as charity but as a public enactment of responsibility tied to social identity. Religious belief, in such context, is defined by demonstrable acts of loyalty, reverence, and communal belonging, rather than by transactional calculations. Consequently, money assumes a clear social meaning, linking individual devotion with the public expression of moral identity. As Jones (1999, pp. 70–74) cautions, while reverential giving has positive dimensions, it also carries the potential for simplification and commercialization: donations risk being quantified, managed, and absorbed into organized religious or social services as a form of “religious capital.” Importantly, the formation of symbolic capital is not entirely determined by internal temple dynamics. Since the reform era, many overseas Chaozhou migrants have returned to their hometowns, bringing financial support, religious artifacts, and symbolic goods, and actively participating in temple restoration projects. Diasporic associations and individuals have leveraged temple reconstruction to reinforce ties to their ancestral homeland. Sponsorship of major heritage restoration initiatives by groups such as the Hong Kong Chaozhou Association, for example, functions as a key mechanism for gaining prestige in their ancestral society. The mode of translocal religious participation simultaneously facilitates the symbolic transformation of money within the religious domain and catalyzes adaptive interactions between local religious structures and global capital networks (Chu 2010, pp. 171–75). In a cultural landscape saturated with religious meaning, acts of offering generate symbolic capital that extends beyond the religious sphere, becoming embedded in the social fabric and influencing status recognition, local politics, and cultural order. As Bourdieu (1977, pp. 80–86) emphasizes, the efficacy of symbolic capital depends on social visibility and public acknowledgment, necessitating ritualized acts to be materially and socially manifested. The donation-and-name-inscription mechanism at Qinglong Temple exemplifies this process, illustrating how devotees convert economic resources into moral symbolism and construct social identities through active participation in religious life.

7. Conclusions: From Structural Tensions to the Reconfiguration of Practice

Against the historical background of China’s triadic structure, comprising the state, local society, and individual actors, folk religion has long operated under a dual tension between disciplinary power and cultural generation. Historically, imperial rule sought to impose a controllable logic of religious governance through the canonization of deities, integration of symbolic resources, and regulation of religious expression. In response, local communities exercised remarkable cultural agency, absorbing, transforming, and rearticulating these symbolic frameworks. Through sustained practices such as ritual bureaucratization, hierarchical reconstruction of divine offices, and the reproduction of temple networks, communities not only internalized state discourses but also actively reshaped local identities and social order. Situated within the structural field, the present study foregrounds the subjective logic and symbolic mechanisms of religious practice. By tracing the pathway of “sincerity → reverent gifting → reciprocity,” it demonstrates how ordinary devotees construct a system of symbolic exchange that resists market rationality while skillfully navigating institutional interstices, thereby engaging with broader processes of institutional compression and cultural restructuring.

Sincerity functions as a pivotal ethical practice in Chinese folk religion, navigating the tensions between individual piety and communal evaluation. It serves both as the affective starting point for divine–human interaction and as a socially legible performance, whose primary expression is the act of reverent offering. Through such practice, money is transformed from a secular medium of exchange into a symbolic gift, articulating a form of sincerity whose value is measured by moral intent rather than monetary price. The strategic logic of sincerity becomes most apparent when contrasting moments of hope and fulfillment. Before a prayer is answered, devotees emphasize that “the deity sees one’s sincerity,” deliberately avoiding a linear calculation between payment and efficacy to preserve the incommensurability of the sacred. Once a wish is granted, however, donations are reframed as symbolic expressions of gratitude and moral reciprocity, constituting a non-market ethic of exchange. This dynamic extends from the individual to the communal level. Public acts of patronage, such as funding temple restorations—convert financial offerings into symbolic capital, constructing a religious economy of honor centered on merit. The accumulation of capital is thus deeply intertwined with a devotee’s moral identity, communal reputation, and the constitution of the temple community itself. In Chaozhou society, the ethical ideal of “giving the best to the deity” compels even less affluent individuals to participate actively in temple life, translating personal piety into local cultural representation and moral prestige. The center of gravity in Chinese folk religion, therefore, lies in the enactment of faith through ritual, offering, and communal participation, taking precedence over abstract doctrine. Such orientation toward “doing religion” rather than “believing in religion” positions faith as a cultural practice embedded in the rhythms of everyday life, supplanting internalized doctrinal affirmation as the primary mode of religious being. In conclusion, the interplay between gift exchange and religious market dynamics in Chinese folk religion does not constitute a binary opposition. Rather, these forces converge to form a complex, hybrid religious economy structured by symbolic, economic, and ethical logics. Through these practices, folk religion becomes both an ethical dimension of daily life and a resilient structure of meaning, continuously reconstructing its social legitimacy and symbolic vitality within the fissures of institutional and cultural tension. In this way, folk religion endures not despite modern transformation but precisely through its adaptive capacity to render the sacred legible in everyday life.