Date: 10 Dec 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm
Venue: LI-1601, 1/F, Li Dak Sum Yip Yio Chin Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Prof. Barend ter Haar
Language: English

Abstract

The offering of sacrifices to White Tiger during Awakening of Insects Day (jingzhe 驚蟄) has been declared part of the inventories of intangible cultural heritage in both Hong Kong and Macau, and “Beating Petty People” (da xiaoren 打小人) is often a part of this. This is a sign of the folklorization of the ritual practice of “Beating Petty People”, which is predicated on the belief that the target of the ritual is punished in real life by physical or other kinds of misfortune. The ritual is not limited to Hong Kong, but was and partially still is practiced in the larger Cantonese speaking world inside China, as well as Southeast Asia. It stems from a long Chinese tradition of cursing that can be traced back more than two millennia. The counterpart of this tradition is that people could also be afraid of people doing this kind of cursing and might blame their personal misfortune on someone’s evil rituals. Usually, this was not true, but the fear was an important motivator to gossip about or even attack people. In this talk, the speaker will trace how the custom of “Beating Petty People” and the fear of witches and witchcraft in Chinese history are closely interlinked.

Biography

Barend ter Haar taught Chinese studies at the University of Hamburg, with a strong focus on cultural and religious history, until his retirement in October 2024. He is now a Special Professor at Shanxi University. Although first and foremost a social and cultural historian, the religious dimension is so central to Chinese traditional life that much of his research has dealt with religious phenomena. In addition, he has worked extensively on issues of ethnic identity, violence and fear, and social organization. Amongst other things, he has published Practicing Scripture: A Lay Buddhist Movement in Late Imperial China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014); Guan Yu: The Religious Afterlife of a Failed Hero (Oxford University Press, 2017); and Religious Culture and Violence in Traditional China (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His most recent book, The Fear of Witchcraft and Witches in Imperial China: Figurines, Familiars and Demons, appeared in January 2025. He is currently preparing further projects on the social history of paper and a detailed social history of religious culture in traditional China.