For two millennia the Chinese state was itself a religious institution. The emperor, Son of Heaven, held the Mandate of Heaven and performed the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth; magistrates sacrificed to city gods; and the calendar of festivals bound empire, village and family into one ritual year. Derk Bodde's study of Han dynasty observances shows the New Year cycle already ancient two thousand years ago, and the year still turns on it: New Year with its firecrackers and family reunion, Qingming when graves are swept and offerings made, the Dragon Boat festival, the Ghost Festival of the seventh month, and Mid-Autumn under the full moon. Death ritual, as James Watson and Evelyn Rawski's collection demonstrates, was the great unifier of Chinese practice, its sequence of coffining, mourning grades and burial shared from Manchuria to Canton.
The twentieth century turned the state against the gods. Republican campaigns confiscated temples for schools, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 attacked temples, lineage halls, clergy and family altars alike as feudal superstition. Yet, as Fenggang Yang's study of religion under Communist rule documents, suppression thinned but did not end practice, and since 1979 temple religion, ancestor worship and pilgrimage have revived on an enormous scale.
Taiwan, Hong Kong and the diaspora, where Mazu processions and Guanyin temples never stopped, carried the traditions through the gap, and returning migrants helped rebuild the mainland's ritual life.