The gentry's nationwide patronage of Buddhist monasteries in China in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the late Ming and early Qing), a hitherto unrecognized phenomenon, helped the local gentry to establish dominance in local society. In the late Ming, many gentrymen became increasingly sympathetic to Buddhism, and this made the monastery available to them as an object of patronage; yet specifically religious commitments played a relatively minor role in motivating patronage. Rather than intellectual orientation or subjective perception, the issue behind the extension of gentry patronage over space and time is how an elite establishes its dominance during a period of social change. In supporting Buddhist monasteries, the gentry identified themselves as the dominant group in local society. Patronage showed who could participate in the activities of the gentry and who could not. At the same time, patronage reinforced existing ties among the more powerful patrons, which meant that patronage could also identify the elite within the gentry.The gentry gradually withdrew their support of monasteries toward the end of the seventeenth century, at the same time that some were mobilizing their lineages as corporate groups to assert local dominance. The actual dating of these trends varied, as shown in the three case studies of Zhucheng county (Shandong), Dangyang county (Hubei), and Yin county (Ningbo, Zhejiang). Lineage mobilization occurred independently of the decline in monastic patronage but gradually came to be seen as preferable to it. A visible sign of this preference is funeral practices. Gentry families began taking funerary ritual out of the hands of Buddhist monks and moving it into their lineage shrines. Shifting the ritual centre of gentry society from monasteries to lineage institutions meant a change in the structure of gentry dominance. By turning to their separate lineages, the local elite was moving away from the collegial relationship of patronage to a conflictual one, thereby setting the stage for the eventual breakdown of social order in the nineteenth century.
