VMPEA: Sylvia Wu
“Inventing Lingshan’s Ritual Environments: Muslim Devotional Practices in Little Ice Age Quanzhou”
Recent scholarship in eco art history has revealed that the Islamic built environment has always responded to climate imperatives. This holds true, too, in the built world of Muslim diasporas. The Lingshan Mountain located in the city of Quanzhou, China, houses the tombs of two Muslim saints, whose tombs, according to several 17th-century accounts, were glowing at night, leaving the locals amazed. Past scholarship has largely centered on the validity of the story and inferred the burial of the migrants turned Lingshan into a sacred site. This paper, however, reverses the standard scholarly account, refocuses on the agency of Quanzhou’s natural resources, and offers an ecological explanation of the invention of the saint tomb narrative in the 17th century. The paper frames the deliberate organization of Lingshan’s ritual environments in the geoaesthetics of the Little Ice Age, a period of regional cooling more extensively studied in European and American contexts but called for increased attention to its socioeconomic impacts on 13th- to 17th-century China. This paper argues that, in an age of coldness, drought, and erratic harvests, it was Lingshan’s trees, springs, and stones that granted the site agentive qualities. This revered landscape allowed the diasporic Muslim community in Quanzhou to claim its natural resources and carve out a ritual space of their own in a non-Islamic society. Lingshan’s agreeable environment not only nurtured Quanzhou’s Muslim devotional practices but also lent credence to the phenomenal Islamic burial site—the legend about the glowing tombs and them responding favorably to prayers against natural disasters appeared repeatedly in 17th-century gazetteers, which coincides with the environmental perils that confronted the collapsing Ming dynasty. By foregrounding nature’s role in shaping the relations between the diasporic Muslim communities and their hostland, the paper intellectualizes Quanzhou Muslims’ construction of the sacred Lingshan Mountain and their weaving Islamic devotional practices into the city’s textured landscape.
Sylvia Wu is a PhD candidate focusing on medieval Islamic art and architecture. Her research interests include Muslim architecture and devotional art of the Indian Ocean world, mosque and shrine architecture in China, and the intersection of urban governance and social engineering. Sylvia's dissertation, "Mosques on the Edge: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Coastal China," is a close study of Quanzhou's Qingjing Mosque, a site with contested histories, cultural identities, and complex visual reference. Sylvia's essay on the Shirazi mosques on the East African coast appears in the special issue "Islamicate Fictionalities" of the journal postmedieval. She also contributed to Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online. Sylvia received her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She held positions in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in Arts of Asia at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Please note that this workshop will be held on Zoom from 4.45pm - 6.45pm.