This article examines different ways of accounting for the numbers on display as monetary contributions to temples in an emigrant village in Fuzhou, China. My aim is to locate the various calculative principles required to bring these lists of discrete sums and partial quantities into felicitous relationships and interaction. Particularly, I outline two different ways of reading ritual numbers from public displays of temple donations: one premised on number’s aggregation as a single monetary sum and the other on number’s amplification as an unfolding topos of cosmic resonance and intensities. Ultimately, I suggest that the numbers inscribed into temple walls can best be seen as boundary objects which provide a common point of departure for engaging various styles of enumeration.
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