Abstract: With the approval of Emperor Qianlong, the 1744 proposal by Lin Zhicun, Provincial Education Commissioner of Henan, banning the three-teaching-hall became a nationwide theocratic cleansing movement. While the extensive archives of this case have provided scholars with evidence from the perspective of the central government, the local sources for this case, including stele inscriptions, sectarian scriptures and oral histories, unearthed via f ield studies in recent years, have made available an equally important popular narrative. The hidden interaction between the early Qing central government and the local society, demonstrated through detailed studies of both imperial archives and local sources, will shed new light on the comprehensive relationships between intellectual history and sectarianism in the early Qing theocracy.