Book reviews - Jinhua Jia, Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China
★★★★
Ink, Incantation, and Independence: Tang Priestess-Poets Revisited
Among my many pet hobbies is a deep love for Classical Chinese poetry up to the Yuan Dynasty. I love it so much, in fact, that I’ve recorded several videos on my YouTube channel reading and commenting on poems from the 300 Tang Poets anthology and from other sources. Tang poetry was mostly a male domain: it demanded a serious educational investment, was largely a public and self-promotional pursuit, and much of the surviving corpus comes from Confucian scholar-officials, who were in fact required to present poems as part of their civil service examinations.
Still, a small but significant number of pieces by women survive, and their authors tend to fall into three categories. First, imperial relatives and their attendants, whose proximity to power granted them the education, resources, and social leeway to engage in literary arts. Second, upper-class courtesans, who (like Greek hetaerae or Japanese geisha) were expected to be cultured and well-read in order to better entertain aristocrats and literati. And third, Daoist priestesses, a group both intriguing and confusing. The confusion isn’t only mine..: contemporary Chinese writers -specially the more stuffy Confucians- were flabbergasted and incensed at the new and public roles of Daoist priestesses; as an example, check this fragment from Han Yu’s poem 华山女 (Huashan Nü, “The Woman of Mount Hua”):
In streets east, streets west, they expound the Buddhist canon, clanging bells, sounding conches, till the din invades the palace. The girl of Mount Hua, child of a Daoist home, longed to expel the foreign faith, win men back to the Immortals; she washed off her powder, wiped her face, put on cap and shawl. With white throat, crimson cheeks, long eyebrows of gray, she came at last to ascend the chair, unfolding the secrets of Truth
Unlike their Buddhist or Christian counterparts, Daoist priestesses in the Tang were far from cloistered ascetics. They enjoyed a high degree of freedom and economic independence, wore elegant and recognizably feminine clothing, and often moved through both public and romantic spheres with surprising latitude. Some of the most remarkable female poets of the Tang belonged to this last category. It was my desire to better understand who they were and how they lived that led me to read Jinhua Jia’s Gender, Power, and Talent.
Book summary
Jinhua Jia’s Gender, Power, and Talent offers a rigorous, source-based, and unapologetically corrective study of Daoist priestesses during the Tang dynasty. Rather than merely rediscovering female religious figures, Jia reconstructs an entire gendered religio-social class -Daoist priestesses- who operated as autonomous agents within both religious and secular spheres. The result is a systematic and historically grounded rebuttal of later Song and Qing-era slanders that reduced Tang priestesses to licentious courtesans or ornamental entertainers.
The book’s introduction lays out its methodological framework clearly. Jia relies on a gender-critical approach informed by both descriptive historical scholarship and feminist theoretical insights. She critiques prior reliance on hagiographic sources like Du Guangting’s Jixian lu, which she shows to be retrospective idealizations aligned with Song dynasty moralism. Instead, she foregrounds alternative sources, like epitaphs, Dunhuang manuscripts, official records, monastic inscriptions, and the priestesses’ own writings (forty epitaphs alone, many newly unearthed).
Chapter 1 contextualizes the emergence of Daoist priestesses by charting the Tang court’s support for Daoism, motivated by dynastic legitimation through Laozi, and the institutional maturation of Daoist monasticism, ordination systems, and scriptural canonization. Jia argues that the convergence of state sponsorship, Daoist integration, and shifting gender norms -especially under figures like Empress Wu and the literary salon culture of Chang’an- enabled priestesses to occupy roles of real power.
Chapter 2 focuses on ordained royal women, especially Princesses Jinxian and Yuzhen, who combined religious authority, cultural literacy, and political influence. Far from being cloistered, these princesses engaged with emperors, monks, and literati as performers of rituals, patrons of texts, calligraphy artists and subjects of literary admiration.
Chapter 3 turns to “ordinary” priestesses, drawing on thirty epitaphs to examine monastic life, convent management, ritual responsibilities, and social outreach. These women efficiently led cloistered communities, taught and preached to emperors and commoners alike, and were public religious figures in their own right.
Chapters 4 and 5 spotlight two intellectuals: Liu Moran and Hu Yin. Liu, possibly the true author or at least transmitter of the Zuowang lun, shaped Daoist meditation theory and eulogized other female adepts like Xue Yuanjun. Hu Yin, by contrast, was a medical theorist who produced a richly illustrated manual on visceral spirits and seasonal health practices, demonstrating that Daoist internal alchemy and traditional Chinese medicine were not exclusively male domains, and initiating trends that would would become milestones of Daoist thought, belief and practice.
Chapters 6 and 7 focus on priestess-poets, especially Li Jilan, Yuan Chun, Cui Zhongrong, and the extraordinary Yu Xuanji. Jia recovers their poetry, explores their gender awareness and literary strategies, and situates them within Tang romantic culture and the broader phenomenon of female poetic self-fashioning. Yu Xuanji, in particular, emerges as a complex subject: passionate, self-aware, and resistant to the gender constraints of her time.
Finally, the appendix dissects Du Guangting’s hagiographies, a less than reliable source from the Late Tang and Five Dynasties period, showing how Tang priestesses were retroactively recast into idealized or moralized forms that distorted their actual roles and voices.
What Jia accomplishes in Gender, Power, and Talent is both empirical and polemical: she rehabilitates a marginalized tradition and challenges entrenched historiographical bias. Rather than romanticizing priestesses as feminist icons avant la lettre, she presents them as historically situated agents negotiating power, ritual, belief, and social constraint.
This book is great not only for scholars of Daoism or Tang religion but for anyone interested in how gender, institutional change, and intellectual life intersect in premodern societies. It decisively reframes the historical narrative of women in Chinese religion, replacing caricature with complexity, and silence with voice.
Personal Appraisal
I really enjoyed this book. The poetry translations and commentary are consistently engaging, and the overall thesis is both compelling and eye-opening. Traditional Chinese society has often been deeply conservative and restrictive toward women - if anything, that’s putting it mildly. But the Tang Dynasty, which not coincidentally is also the most vibrant and intellectually rich period of pre-modern China, offered a rare window of opportunity. It stood between a more repressive past and a far more restrictive future, as the rise of Song-era Neo-Confucianism reasserted patriarchal orthodoxy, including tighter constraints on women’s public roles and the introduction of foot-binding.
Given how much I liked it, you might wonder why I’m only giving it four stars. The reason is simple, if a bit unfair: I just don’t care much about Daoist religion as such. From my own perspective, it feels almost unfortunate that Tang-era “girlbosses” had to turn to Daoism as their outlet for agency and creativity. The book contains a great deal of detail on Daoist theology, ritual, and institutional development—material that, while intellectually valuable, left me somewhat bored. The depth of technical scholarship is impressive, but for someone more interested in the women than in the religion, it occasionally feels like wading through a lot of material to get to the good parts.
