From Village Girl to Empress of Heaven

Over the centuries Mazu's worship spread far beyond her home island and rose through the ranks of the official pantheon. Successive Chinese dynasties, grateful for what were believed to be her interventions on behalf of fleets, envoys and coastal populations, granted her ever-higher titles, so that the drowned fisherman's daughter was elevated first to Tianfei, Heavenly Consort, and at last to Tianhou, the Empress of Heaven. Her temples multiplied along the trade routes and wherever coastal Chinese settled, carried across the sea by the very sailors and migrants who depended on her protection, so that today she is among the most widely worshipped deities of the Chinese world, with a particularly enormous following in Taiwan. Her great festivals and pilgrimages, above all the processions in which her image is carried between temples, draw immense crowds and are among the most vibrant expressions of popular religion in the Chinese cultural sphere. Mazu's rise from a compassionate local girl to the Empress of Heaven is a model instance of how Chinese folk religion elevates a virtuous human being, through the gratitude of the faithful and the recognition of the state, to the highest ranks of the gods.