The man who put religion back into Chinese history has passed away.

Kristofer Schipper put religion back into Chinese cultural history after years of secular denial.

For centuries, imperial traditionalists and then the Communists tried to deny the religious roots of Chinese culture. Religion was considered too dangerous to the state. Imperial China created the myth that China was not religious but secular humanistic. They feared that local religious leaders would spark a revolution among the common people. The Communists were also fearful of religion and forced Chinese scholars to ignore its presence in history and culture. All of this secularizing myth came tumbling down with the work of Kristofer Schipper and his disciples, starting with Paris, spreading through Europe and America, and finally back to China.

Schipper died at 86 on February 18 in Amsterdam after developing a blood clot in his stomach, said a friend and former student, Vincent Goossaert, according to The New York Times.

Schipper somehow became disaffected with his parents’ deep Mennonite Christian faith and became an opponent of Christianity. But he didn’t leave without a religious interest. His parents were famous for hiding Jewish children from the Nazis. His father died early from poor health contracted during the war years. The son developed a deep aversion to large ideological national narratives, which included the Christian tradition. Instead, he came to champion local Daoist temples as the true representatives of the people of China.

Schipper did fieldwork at temples in Taiwan and mainland China and was a thorough reading of the classical texts. He began studying with a Taoist master, Chen Rongsheng, in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan and was ordained a priest of the Way of Orthodox Unity, or Zhengyidao, school. Schipper became the director of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Collège de France, from 1987 to 1992 professor of Chinese History at the University of Leiden and professor in the History of Daoism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris,

He is best known for his book The Taoist Body published in 1984, which was written for the general reader. It shows how many elements of Chinese culture — martial arts, art, cuisine, rituals, holidays, medicine, and much local religious life — are imbued with Taoist concepts. In making this argument, Schipper was identifying Taoism and religion in general as important elements in Chinese cultural history.

Schipper’s work was known for its huge ambitions and multitude of co-workers. His magnum opus was a monumental three-volume work, The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang, co-edited with co-editor Franciscus Verellen. Totaling 1,800 pages, it was the first time that the 1,500 core texts of Taoism had been systemically arranged and described. The project lasted nearly 30 years and involved dozens of scholars from around the world.

More recently, he was embarked on a journey through all Taosit religious sites in China. Before he died, he was methodically listing all the written material of about all 108 holy Taoist locations in China and planning to conduct exhaustive interviews with people inhabiting them.

You cannot imagine how large his role was in shifting the focus of understanding of Chinese tradition toward the inclusion of religion as one of the foundation stones. Every religious believer and nonreligious person should be aware of how this historian changed a whole field and self-understanding of a nation. His disciples in China are pushing his legacy to new heights. Ju Xi, an anthropologist at Beijing Normal University, recalled her mentor’s view: “So, we have to understand how these [local] temples organized people; then we can understand Chinese society.”

Perhaps, it is ironic to Schipper’s legacy that its picture of Chinese society is now most true when it includes the local religious traditions of China found in its tens of thousands of local churches, which the Chinese government fears even more than it does Daoist temples. And the government also fears Islam. So, there is another revolution going through Chinese history that accommodates yet more religious foundations.

Schipper is survived by his wife, Yuan Bingling, and their daughter, Maya, as well as two daughters from a previous marriage, Esther and Johanna.

Two of his disciples have written a good introduction to the Schipperian viewpoint: Vincent Goosaert and David A Plamer, The Religious Question in Modern China (2011).

In Schipper’s spirit, you might want to read the first hand report on The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson (2017).