Mazu: Empress of Heaven and Sea

Nobody sets out to invent a god. So how does it happen?

In the tenth century, on a poor island off the Fujian coast, a shaman's daughter named Lin Moniang went into the sea after a drowning sailor and never came back. She was barely out of her teens, and she should have been forgotten within a generation.

Instead, the fishermen who mourned her began to see her: a girl in red robes moving over the storm-waves, steering their boats home. Word travelled the way rumour travels along a coast. A shrine became a temple, a temple became a network, and then the powerful arrived. Emperors, needing the loyalty of the coast and the safety of their treasure fleets, raised a drowned teenager through rank after rank until she outranked most of the living — Tianhou, Empress of Heaven. Admirals credited her with their victories. Migrants carried her across the South China Sea in the holds of their ships. A thousand years on, more than two hundred million people pray to her, and two governments that agree on almost nothing — Beijing and Taipei — both claim her as their own.

Mazu: Empress of Heaven and Sea tells the whole of that improbable story, and uses it to ask a larger one: how does a real, ordinary person become a god — and why do the powerful never stop trying to own her? It is a sweeping history of the maritime Chinese world, of faith and power, the sea and the people who feared it, and the strange machinery by which the powerless dead are made sacred and then made useful.

She began as a girl the sea took. She became the goddess who rules it.