ABSTRACT
The saga of Fotang town provides the opportunity of observing how newly refurbished temples have recently “opened [their deity’s] eyes,” to resume providing the appropriate popular religious context to fairs authorized by the state for the sake of commerce. Thus the narrative runs: reviving the commercial fairs has provided a setting in which popular religious rituals and symbols that were part of the traditional context in which the fairs were imbedded have reemerged, resacralizing the fair, and adding fuel to the revival of popular religion and the recycling of popular religious symbols which the Communist state seems prepared to tolerate.
