Shanghai Sacred ― The Religious Landscape of a Global City

Shanghai, a dynamic world metropolis, is home to a multitude of religions, from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Baha’ism, to Hinduism and Daoism, and many more. In this city of 24 million inhabitants, new religious groups and older faiths together claim and reclaim spiritual space.

Shanghai Sacred explores the spaces, rituals, and daily practices that make up the religious landscape of the city, offering a new paradigm for the study of Chinese spirituality that reflects the global trends shaping Chinese culture and civil society.

Based on years of fieldwork, incorporating both comparative and methodological perspectives, Shanghai Sacred demonstrates how religions are lived, constructed, and thus inscribed into the social imaginary of the metropolis. Evocative photographs by Liz Hingley enrich and interact with the narrative, making the book an innovative contribution to religious visual ethnography.

Benoit Vermander is professor of religious studies and director of the Xu-Ricci Dialogue Institute at Fudan University, Shanghai. He is the author of Corporate Social Responsibility in China: A Vision, an Assessment and a Blueprint. Photographer and anthropologist Liz Hingley was a visiting scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (2013–2016). She is currently artist-in-residence at the Human Geography Department, University College London, and an honorary research fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Birmingham. Liang Zhang is research assistant in the Institute of Religious Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.