Chinese popular religion has never had a single central authority the way some traditions do, and most local gods were never formally recognized by anybody beyond the community that already prayed to them. That makes a scroll like this one worth pausing over, because it documents the exception rather than the rule: an institution that did, in fact, claim the standing to say which local gods counted.
That institution is the Zhengyi Order, the Orthodox Unity school of Taoism, whose leaders carried the title Celestial Master and whose seat at Dragon Tiger Mountain in Jiangxi functioned, for centuries, as something close to a licensing body for regional cults. A community with a god it wanted taken seriously beyond its own village could petition the Celestial Master directly, and the scroll's second half preserves exactly that kind of petition, requesting recognition for the god Li Zhong.
The procession the scroll paints is not incidental decoration around that petition. It is the visual argument for why the request should be granted: an honor guard, a palanquin, guardians of the four directions, all the trappings of a figure who has already, in the painting's own logic, earned the rank being requested. Whether Li Zhong's worshippers commissioned this scroll before or after the Celestial Master's actual decision is not settled by the object itself, but either way it captures something distinctive about Zhengyi Taoism specifically: an organized, mountain based religious authority sitting between ordinary devotion and the wider tradition, deciding, case by case, which gods belonged.