Abstract
Many scholars of late imperial China have argued that the imperial state's sanctioning of certain cults was an important factor in the standardization of Chinese culture. This paper is a case study of the Five Emperors, a local cult which was not only not sanctioned, but actively suppressed by state officials. In response, worshippers of thecult concealed their deities behind the Five Manifestations, a cult which was state sanctioned. But the cult retained distinctive rituals, iconography, and representations in local popular culture. The conflation of the Five Emperors with other trans-local cultures demonstrates that the standardization of Chinese culture was often only illusory, concealing enduring local distinctiveness.