The Palace of Eternal Joy (Yongle gong) is a mammoth cult site dedicated to one of late imperial China's most popular deities, Lu Dongbin. In one of the first book-length studies of a Chinese sacred site, Paul Katz focuses on the Palace's role in the development of Lu's legend. This highly innovative approach takes into account the various and "histories and " of the Palace presented in different texts and surpasses previous scholarship by stressing the ways in which the site both reflected and produced cultural diversity. Katz breaks new ground by analyzing the texts in terms of the textuality - the processes by which they were produced, transmitted, and understood.