Shangqing is a tradition that ended, and this entry describes what it was and says plainly that it is not now an independent body.
It began with a medium. Between about 364 and 370, at Jurong near what is now Nanjing, Yang Xi received a series of revelations from perfected beings, the zhenren, which came to him in vision and which he wrote down in his own hand. The principal revealing figure was Wei Huacun, a woman who had died in 334 and who appears in the material as the Lady of the Southern Peak. The texts were produced for two aristocratic patrons, the Xu family, and they are calligraphically as well as religiously significant; the manuscripts were collected and prized as objects.
What the revelations describe is an interior practice. Where the Celestial Masters tradition worked through communal ritual and talismans, and external alchemy through the compounding of minerals, Shangqing worked through visualisation. The practitioner meditates on the gods who inhabit the body, ascends in vision through the heavens, absorbs the light of the sun and moon, and pursues immortality as a transformation of the person rather than as a substance to be swallowed. Its central scripture is the Dadong Zhenjing, the True Text of the Great Cavern.
The revelations arrived at a useful moment. Southern aristocratic families, displaced by the loss of the north, were looking for a religious tradition of their own rather than the Celestial Masters practice the newcomers had brought with them. Shangqing supplied one, and its early social base was correspondingly narrow and grand.