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worthies and locally deified ordinary people.
Before we go any further let us examine the term used by the Chinese for what we refer to as 'a god'. The word is 'shen' and it means different things to different people. To Christian missionaries the shen were 'the gods', usually represented by idols; to the conservative Confucian Chinese the shen were the good spirits, the divine; and to the Chinese man in the street they were the deities to whom they turned for protection, advice and assistance. Shen, as a word, in addition to meaning 'the soul' also has a sense of energy or force, and can be used in connexion with the inexplicably remarkable or supernatural. There is another word used by Chinese for 'spirits of the dead', kuei. This is often translated as ghost or demon. The spirit of humans when they die become kuei and at this point they either enter the Nether World for Judgement, Purgatory and finally to be reborn again, or if they have died a premature death, before the due date as laid down in the Book of Life, they remain roaming kuei, haunting the human world awaiting their due date of death. Complications arise when referring to one's own family. Their spirits on death are called 'shen' whilst other peoples' are 'kuei'. Thus it is said that whereas the locally deified are all said to be 'shen', in practice they should be called 'kuei'. This is, of course, a mere technicality and all deities on altars, be they local or national deities, are regarded as 'shen'.
Many of the comparatively minor deities worshipped in Chinese temples in rural areas of Taiwan and South-east Asia have only been created within the past three hundred or so years, and not a few have been placed on altars within living memory. The nineteenth century still saw the deification of many men who had performed unusual deeds, leading to the establishment of temples individually dedicated to them. This practice was less common in China during the Republican period, 1911-1949, but there were still then some stories of miracles which occasionally gave rise to the creation of new gods. In the 1920s, in Ting county in Hopei province, a tale was told of a sick man who had revealed to him in a dream that he should prepare himself a drink from the bark of a certain old tree at the edge of the village. He did as he had been advised and was cured. The tale quickly spread and soon others stricken down with every form of illness did the same. The tree became the site of a busy shrine dedicated to the spirit of the tree, bedecked with banners presented by grateful worshippers to