Most religious paintings show a god who is already a god. This thirty foot handscroll paints the paperwork that made one. Its subject, a local deity named Li Zhong, is not being worshipped in these images so much as processed, in the bureaucratic sense as much as the ceremonial one, into an authorized position within a religious hierarchy that took its own institutional structure as seriously as any government office.
The Zhengyi Order, headquartered at Dragon Tiger Mountain in Jiangxi Province, called this act daofeng, "conferral of the Way," and the scroll shows both halves of it. The painted half is Li Zhong's own honor guard: standard bearers announcing his new rank, a white charger, an eight porter palanquin, guardians posted at the four directions, attendants swinging incense burners, and finally the god himself, painted larger than every figure around him. The written half, following directly after, transcribes the actual petition submitted to the Celestial Master requesting that recognition in the first place, the paperwork behind the procession.
What makes this more than a curiosity is what it reveals about how a decentralized set of local cults connects to a named religious authority. A god was not simply believed in by a village and left there. Someone had to formally ask a specific institution, at a specific mountain, to say yes. The scroll survives to record one specific yes, dated by its own colophon to 1641, near the end of the Ming dynasty, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938.