A little over four years ago, a book called A Fortune Teller Told Me was what convinced me to investigate meditation by going to Thailand for a 10-day retreat. The author was Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani, who died in 2004.
My original copy stayed with my then girlfriend when we split up, but I bought a second-hand copy last year, and I’m re-reading it now. I’m intrigued by something in one of the early chapters that meant very little to me before, but is rather more interesting now. Attending a meeting of the French École Française de l’Extreme Orient, he has this encounter:
One ethnologist gave a paper investigating the revival of occult Taoist practices in the Chinese province of Fukien. He told how one night, under a full moon, he had witnessed a ceremony in which a man immobilized by ropes had suddenly shot like an arrow across the rice fields, drawing after him the whole population of the village, including the local Communist Party secretary.
Since Terzani’s book was published in 1995, this event probably took place in the late 1980s. It must be about a tang-ki, whom I’ve encountered here in Singapore, and about whom I’m increasingly interested. Many of Singapore’s Chinese population have their family roots in Fujien province.
What is happening with this revival now, I wonder, twenty years after that ethnologist witnessed the ceremony he describes? Has it grown in strength, or vanished in the face of consumerism and rampant development? If anyone out there has any information, I would love to hear about it!
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