River-God Appeasement, Water-Spirit Belief, and Vernacular Religion in Rural China: A Redacted Jiepai Folklore Record from Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about river-god belief, water-spirit folklore, ritual appeasement, temple memory, and local crisis narrative in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese popular religion, vernacular religion, water-spirit folklore, ritual studies, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, local memory, and emic documentation. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “Sacrificing to the River God,” a redacted Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a redacted Jiepai narrative in which the demolition of the former Dragon King Temple is linked, in local belief, to the anger of a river god who relocates to a water site and occasionally punishes the human world. The public OA_V1 version records only the generalized folklore structure: temple loss, displaced deity, water-spirit anger, ritual appeasement, and local religious specialists. The record’s value lies in river-god belief, water-spirit folklore, ritual appeasement, vernacular religion, Chinese popular religion, temple memory, local crisis narrative, rural China studies, and Jiangnan folklore. The text is not presented as evidence for the truth of the causal explanation. It is preserved as an emic record of how a community-level water-related misfortune narrative may be interpreted through temple memory, deity anger, and ritual action. Methodologically, this item is based on a local friend’s account, the Archive Author’s redaction and narrative condensation, author annotations, and provenance notes. Compared with the fuller raw original, this OA_V1 release removes a large amount of person- and location-identifying information, contemporary event detail, and supporting spatial provenance. A key feature of this record is its redaction boundary. The public text does not name the specific water site, the specific source person, the original detailed event chain, or the specific location of ritual action. It preserves the narrative pattern while withholding identifying details and supporting evidence materials. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20965969. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the redacted public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include the fuller raw original, specific location photographs, location maps, raw field notes, private videos, source-identifying information, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive or handled under restricted access. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.