Wuism

In China the wu and, for men, the xi, served as shamanic mediators between people and the spirits. The word wu is first recorded under the Shang dynasty, when dance and trance were a way of reaching the ancestors.

As Confucian thinking gained ground the wu lost their place at court and were pushed into popular religion, where Neo-Confucians branded their ecstatic rites as untutored and disorderly. In village and temple they lived on as healers and diviners, among them the tongji, youth mediums who in trance are possessed by a god to give oracles.

In the northeast a different shamanism took shape with the Tungusic peoples. In 1747 the Qianlong Emperor ordered the publication of a Shamanic Code to regulate rites he feared were being forgotten.