Ruling the Dead: Rulership, Spirit Pacification, and the Water-Land Retreat in Fourteenth-Century East Asia

Spirit pacification is the practice of neutralising, through conciliatory or coercive means, the potentially malevolent spirits of the dead, thereby restoring peace and stability to the realm of the living. Catastrophes such as warfare, famine, or epidemic generated mass casualties. Political struggles resulted in the deaths of powerful individuals, or groups of individuals. On these occasions, it was rulers who were responsible for conducting large-scale versions of spirit pacification, usually for the dead en masse. When three new regimes were established in the fourteenth century in East Asia, the Ashikaga shogunate in 1336, the Ming dynasty in 1368, and the Joseon dynasty in 1392, the respective founders engaged in traditional measures of mass spirit pacification. They constructed temples, commissioned scripture-copying and scripture-recital, and sponsored rituals for the dead. Historically, these general patterns in practice had manifested in each polity in specific ways. And yet, against the background of the decline and collapse of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), and the reverberations this had across East Asia, we see the rise to one measure to regional significance. This was the ritual known as the Water-Land Retreat, the performance of which had reached unprecedented scale and grandeur under the Yuan court. Where previous research has centred on individual polities, this dissertation takes a broader perspective, asking: why did all three of these fledgling regimes adopt this same rite, in the same half-century, for the same purpose; and what does this tell us about rulership at a regional level? In investigating these questions, this dissertation first establishes that spirit pacification was a paradigm, shared across East Asia, for understanding the relationship between the living and the dead, and specifically how ruling figures related to their dead subjects. Chapter One explores the regional factors that set the stage for widespread adoption of the ritual. Chapters Two to Four present case studies on why each regime adopted (and in one case, quickly abandoned) the Water-Land Retreat, facilitating full consideration of local and translocal factors. Within each case study, the focus is on the narratives that ruling figures constructed around their sponsored performances of the Water-Land Retreat. This maintains the focus on why ruling figures employed the ritual, distinguishing between them and the broader base of elites that helped them to govern. The conclusion draws attention to the common themes across the three case studies, to make the overall argument for what regional factors were at play, and what we can learn about competing visions of rulership in fourteenth-century East Asia.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Tham, Chui Jun

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Adolphson, Mikael

• China
• East Asia
• history
• Japan
• Korea
• religion
• spirit pacification
• Water-Land Retreat

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0e7210a8-66ea-4c5e-ac90-8845bc00b836/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.127468

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/398650