It was a drizzly day in early April when I caught a high-speed train from Shanghai to the nearby city of Suzhou to participate in the sixth “Seven-Day Ritual of Ascension” for Kristofer Schipper, the ...

It was an unseasonably hot spring day on Wudang Mountain, but my host, a Taoist priest surnamed Liu, seemed unbothered. “I don’t like having the air on,” he explained as he set to brewing a pot of ...