ABSTRACT
To a resident the calendar of festivals presents four different possibilities of identification. There are days which local people assume are observed everywhere in China. Among these in Mountainstreet were the three principal points (yuan), on the fifteenth day of the first, seventh and tenth lunar months, when the three cosmological divisions were addressed as a set of offices to which the supreme god of heaven had appointed what were also called ‘gods of heaven’. That they are pan-Chinese does not, of course, mean that all Chinese do observe them, just that the local people think every other Chinese does. In Mountainstreet itself observance of some of the panChinese days was effectively voluntary. There was little social pressure to burn incense either at home or in the temple.
