China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Hugh R. Clark, Ursinus College
Chair: Richard VonGlahn, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: John W. Chaffee, Binghamton University
Over the last two decades the historiography of China’s middle period as practiced in the West has experienced dramatic growth and refinement. Our understanding of the forces that combined to produce one of the most dynamic periods in human history has been revolutionized by the work of Robert Hartwell, Robert Hymes, Patricia Ebrey, Peter Bol, and a host of others. As students of the middle period seek to expand on their work, an emerging focus is regional and local historiography.
The present panel focuses on the social and cultural history of Fujian in the Song and Yuan. Few areas were as deeply affected by or as central to the profound change and innovation of the middle period as Fujian, a center of the examination culture, the Song economic revolution, and the daoxue movement. For this reason, it is an ideal focus for regional and local inquiry.
Each paper takes a regional or local approach to pursue a specific line of inquiry. The individual topics range widely: innovation in kinship practice in Minnan; the social context of porcelain production in Dehua; the structure of local control networks in Jianyang; innovations in religion in Minbei. They are united by their common focus on change and innovation within Fujian. Their underlying theme is the need to perceive social and cultural innovation as the outcome of on-going interaction between regional and national models.
Hugh R. Clark, Ursinus College
The compilation and regular up-dating of extended kin group/lineage genealogies has long been an integral part of Chinese kinship practice. The genealogy provides a record of descent while also defining who belongs to the extended kin group and who does not. In this paper I examine the reinvention of the genealogical tradition among the elites of southern Fujian during the Ten Kingdoms interregnum and the early Song.
China had a long genealogical tradition before the mature Tang that was tied to the rigid patterns of social stratification of the early imperial era. Only elite families within the social hierarchy were permitted to maintain genealogies, through which they defined their elite standing. With the collapse of the aristocratic order in the course of the early Tang, this tradition also withered. What we are familiar with today developed within the much more mobile social structures of the later imperial era and represented a new concept.
Modern scholarship has argued that the reinvented tradition derived from the mid-11th century work of Fan Zhongyan and others. I argue on the contrary that the new tradition has its origins in local society, for which I use Minnan as my model, in the preceding century. The new tradition, I suggest, was rooted in the dramatic social fluidity of the interregnum century and was an integral part of defining the new social structure of the late imperial era.
Edward L. Davis, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Following a brief historical archaeology of religion in Fukien during the Middle Period (750–1600), my paper will focus on the important cult to the Xu Brothers, two princes of the Kingdom of the Southern Tang worshipped south of Fuzhou from the late tenth century until modern times.
Where my previous published work on this cult sought to solve the mystery of its origins, this paper will take up its development, first as a reflection of the historical archaeology introduced earlier, but then as a way to address (and question) the parameters that have come to define research on religion and society in the Middle Period. How or to what extent was this Fujianese cult, and Fujianese religion in general, shaped by the geographical orientations of the province (land vs. sea, northwest vs. northeast); by migrations of its peoples, cultures, and commercial goods; by its social networks at the local, provincial, regional, and national levels? What was the relation between the various religious strata reflected in the cult’s development in time and its geographical and social extension in space? Finally I will consider how a religious culture of the periphery came to redefine the culture of the center and thereby question the dominant paradigm of Chinese civilization which sees Chinese culture as radiating out from the Central Plain, a view by the way which is now being seriously threatened by recent archaeological discoveries.
Chuimei Ho, The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the success of Minnan (southern Fujian) in manufacturing and exporting high and medium quality ceramics during the Song-Yuan period was unmatched by other Chinese ceramic centers—the only exceptions were Jingdezhen in Jiangxi and Longquan in Zhejiang. Together these three centers were responsible for 99% of all exported porcelain and stoneware. However, the ceramic industries of Jingdezhen and Longquan were directly or indirectly sponsored by the national government, while that of Minnan was on its own. How this happened is the subject of an ongoing research project between the Field Museum and Xiamen University.
This paper focuses on the potters of Minnan and their working environment. Several key questions are addressed: How many kinds of unit participated in the production process, from raw material procurement to marketing? Who were the owners of the units, and what types of ownership existed? Where did labor come from, and how was it organized? In what ways were enterprises stuctured and physically laid out? How did they relate to one another?
Careful analysis of archaeological data, with the help of ethnographic and historical information, allows us to suggest tentative answers to some of these questions. The archaeological data in question has been gathered by our research team while surveying over 200 kiln localities. Most of those contain the remains of kiln debris.
Lucille Chia, University of California, Riverside
During the Song, northern Fujian (Minbei) was an area full of contradictions. On the one hand, government officials deemed it ungovernable, full of violent, superstitious, and rebellious natives often indistinguishable from the tea and salt smugglers, bandits, and miners in the region’s mountains. Moreover, because the area bordered on Jiangxi and Zhejiang, it often shared in the natural and man-made disasters that began somewhere else. On the other hand, Minbei boasted some impressive cultural achievements. In the Northern Song, Jian Prefecture produced the greatest number of jinshi in the country and continued to do well in the Southern Song. The influence of Zhu Xi, who lived and taught there for over forty years, made the region a leading intellectual center by the late 12th century. Finally, by the 12th century, the commercial publishing industry centered in Jianyang had grown into one of international scope.
This paper looks at how we can reconcile these very different aspects of Minbei society in the Song by examining the nature of local control—the shifting alliances and conflicts among the local powerful clans, the literati elite responsible for the area’s academic success, the local government officials, and the bandits and smugglers who often belonged to the local clans. In particular, I will consider several uprisings and natural disasters for which we have information in the standard Song sources and in a number of regional genealogies.