Organizer: Steven B. Miles, University of Washington
Chair: Edward J. M. Rhoads, University of Texas, Austin
Discussant: John Herman, Virginia Commonwealth University
The papers in this panel examine the geographical and cultural region of Yue, or Viet, during the Song and Qing dynasties from a variety of historical perspectives. Each paper looks at a part of the Yue region, including the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, as well as northern Vietnam, and seeks to understand how boundaries are defined politically, ecologically and culturally. Moreover, we hope to increase the dialogue between historians of the Song and Qing dynasties.
Following a political definition of boundaries, Mostern’s paper is concerned with the reconfiguration of the administrative map of Guangxi during the very early Song. She addresses both the nature of Song state power and the idea of the frontier. Anderson asks in his study of literary exchanges between envoys of the Song court and the indigenous Le court to what extent the Yue/Viet region of southern China and northern Vietnam retained a common identity. He is interested as well in the competition for power manifested in the medium of a literary exchange of poems.
Marks’ paper tackles the broader sweep of ecological and economic history of the region. In contrast to the view of geographically-determined macroregions in China, he stresses the role of such historical contingencies as malaria, Mongol invasion and river silting in the formation of the Lingnan macroregion. Miles’ paper looks at "localist" poetry exercises at Guangzhou’s nineteenth-century academy, the Xuehaitang, in which students were asked to categorize, describe or glorify local Yue peoples, products, scenery or traditions.
Mapping Authority: Politics, Territory and Frontier Administration in Early Song Guangxi
Ruth Mostern, University of California, Berkeley
When Zhao, Kuangyin and the Song army conquered Guangnan in 972 A.D., the burgeoning empire inherited a vast patchwork of tiny prefectures and counties. The military rulers of the ninth and tenth century era of disunion had favored large administrations, rewarding retainers with self-governing land grants. To the centralizing Song state, set on an administration run by civil officials deputed from the capital, local autonomy, along with its associated territorial practice, was untenable. The first two decades of Song power over this region featured extensive and rapid reorganization of territory. The first three years of Song dominion over Guangnan West Circuit featured over a hundred jurisdictional changes—as many as the rest of the empire combined. Many places were abolished experimentally, only to be reestablished within months or years. When jurisdictions became too large, policing and tax collection were impossible. If too small, the cost of keeping order on a distant frontier, where the population was sparse and tax revenues limited, was prohibitive. This paper examines the process by which the southeast frontier was spatially normalized and incorporated into the Song ecumene by the early eleventh century. In addition it grounds the territorial history of Guangnan West in that of the realm as a whole, and illuminates the then dominant ideology of territory in which jurisdictions, not fixed in time and place, were established and abolished in accord with political exigencies.
The Poetry of Diplomacy: Viet Assertions of Autonomy in a Yue Cultural Discourse
James A. Anderson, University of Washington
"Please take our inmost thoughts about this borderland," remarked the Le court negotiator Khuong Viet (Ngo Chan Luu: 933–1011) in a farewell poem to the departing Chinese envoy Li Jue, "and to our Emperor make them clear." (Huynh Sanh Thong, The Heritage of Vietnamese Poetry, 1979, p.3). This paper will look closely at the late tenth-century meeting at the Hoa Lu court between the Song envoy Li, representing the Chinese imperial presence in the South, and the Buddhist monk advisors to the powerful Vietnamese ruler Le Hoan (r. 980–1005). The Vietnamese ruler had several years earlier defeated Chinese troops at Chi-lang, when Chinese troops attempted to seize control of the former Tang dependency. Sources later recorded that, during official negotiations, Li and the senior monk Do Phap Thuan (915–990) engaged in a literary exchange of short verse. Vietnamese records report that Thuan was the better poet.
In my study, I will suggest that Khuong Viet and Do Phap Thuan’s choices of the popular poetic styles, such as the ci-form, points to a shared elite cultural discourse between literate communities along the South China coast. Both Li Jue and his Vietnamese counterparts understood the literary conventions, even the literary showmanship implicit in the exchanges. I will examine the extent to which a common set of literary devices was shared by people living within the cultural region we have termed Yue/Viet. Moreover, through the medium of these poems, I plan to explore how differing notions of imperial and indigenous power were expressed through an intrinsically Chinese poetic tradition by these representatives of Vietnamese and Chinese political orders.
Geography Is Not Destiny: Historical Contingency and the Making of Lingnan
Robert B. Marks, Whittier College
The macroregion thesis about China and its historical development is valuable and powerful, especially when applied to China’s late imperial period. But there are assumptions implicit in this theory that can lead to erroneous conceptions, about China’s historical development. Based on nineteenth-century data, the macroregional thesis assumes a particular physiography of drainage basins bequeathed by nature to humans about which not much was or could be done. This paper shows, contrary to the historical picture implicit in macroregional analysis, that the area that became the south China macroregion dubbed "Lingnan" was not geographically determined, but rather was historically contingent.
The geographic "core" of the Lingnan macroregion, the Pearl River Delta, was not created by purely natural processes, and had not been simply waiting for the Chinese to migrate from the north and reclaim it for agriculture. Rather, the creation of the delta from a watery estuary was the result of a complex causal chain, involving malaria, a predominantly upland pattern of settlement in the northern hills until the Mongol invasion at the end of the Southern Song, an increased silt content in the rivers flowing south, the construction of dikes and levees in the Song that directed the silt-laden waters into the upper reaches of the Pearl River estuary, and then the capture of that silt by refugees from the north who had fled from the Mongols to the islands in the Pearl River estuary, turning it into the productive, highly fertile alluvial plain that became the core of the Lingnan macroregion.
In Praise of Yue: "Localist" Poetry Exercises at the Xuehaitang and the Literary Agenda of Ruan Yuan
Steven B. Miles, University of Washington
When Jiangnan native Ruan Yuan established the Xuehaitang academy in Guangzhou during the 1820s, in addition to promoting evidential research and Han exegeses of the Classics, he also sought to advance a specific literary agenda. Thus a large part of the new academy’s curriculum was devoted toward poetry exercises in which students were asked to categorize, describe or glorify local Yue peoples, products, scenery or traditions. This paper examines the extent to which this overwhelming amount of "localist" poetry in collections of Xuehaitang student writings represents an attempt among members of the Guangzhou academic elite to tie themselves to Central Plains and Jiangnan culture by demonstrating their ability to use archaic and hence legitimate literary forms to poeticize the local.
In addition, this study seeks to address the often neglected relationship between Han Learning in classical scholarship and the promotion of pre-Song literary models. Because Guangzhou during the Qing dynasty had been weak in classical studies yet could boast of a respectable poetic tradition, Ruan sought to propagate his ideals of classical scholarship in this southern cultural center by promoting a literary agenda at the Xuehaitang. Nevertheless, this strategy ran the risk of alienating the rural elite of Guangzhou Prefecture from urban scholars at the Xuehaitang, as the latter increasingly identified with northern culture. Thus, employing archaic literary models to poeticize local Yue culture served to legitimize both the literary and classical projects at the Xuehaitang.