I grew up in Asia, where annual festivals were basically our Super Bowl and a neighborhood block party rolled into one. The biggest spectacle of the year was the parade of Goddess Ma-Zu (妈祖). Drums thundered, incense smoked like an overachieving fog machine, and then—cue gasp—the Ji Tong would arrive. In my child’s memory he did all the impossible things: walked across flaming coals, cut himself with a sword without bleeding, and, between fire-walking and self-surgery, announced whether it would rain on Tuesday.
A Ji Tong (乩童, pronounced “ji-tong”) is a spirit medium: someone believed to serve as a living vessel for deities during rituals. When the trance arrives—sometimes with remarkable choreography—the ji tong allows the spirit to speak, heal, warn, or bless. The second character, 童 (tong), means “child,” not necessarily in age but in purity or suitability, a kind of spiritual open-concept floor plan.
As a kid, I took it all in with wide eyes and a sugar high. As an adult, I learned to ask harder questions. Recently I wrote a book, Fire Between Two Skies (to be released in January, 2026; special $2.99 pre-order price at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G2YZZ8LG) about the Taiping Movement, a millenarian civil war in mid-19th-century China that tragically ended the lives of twenty to thirty million people. Led by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed he was the younger brother of Jesus, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom challenged the Qing dynasty with equal parts theology and gunpowder. It was the deadliest civil war in Chinese history, and at its center were voices that claimed to speak for the divine.
Two of the Taiping kings, Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Chaogui, entered trances and spoke as God and Jesus Christ to guide and galvanize their followers. If you sidestep the geopolitics and the cannons, you can see how their performances fit into a long Chinese tradition of spirit mediums—Ji Tongs—whose authority comes not from election or exam but from channeling something greater. This is not to trivialize the Taiping. Rather, it helps us understand how vast human movements can be stirred by extreme religious practices. What I saw amid cymbals and incense in a temple parade echoes, in a haunting way, through the battlefields of the 1850s.
The Ji Tong’s flaming-coal walk can feel like a daredevil stunt—somewhere between ritual and reality TV. But the deeper story is about the human hunger for connection with the spiritual realm. As a Christian, I recognize that hunger, yet I believe God meets it not through spectacle or self-trial, but through His own self-revelation—His living Word in the Bible and His ultimate Word in Jesus Christ. So while I can watch Ji Tong’s coal walk with empathy for the longing it expresses, I anchor my hope in the God who has already come to this world in Christ and invites us into true communion with Him by grace.
