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Forging Identities through Local Histories: The Ming and Beyond
Organizer: Desmond Cheung, University of British Columbia, Canada
Chair: Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Tobie Meyer-Fong, The Johns Hopkins University
From the Ming period on, historians of China can use a wide array of local histories or gazetteers (fangzhi) to study various localities and institutions in depth. This panel looks at the ways in which the Ming compilers, editors, and authors of gazetteers used those texts to define the relations between themselves, greater society, and the state and between the present and the past in pursuit of various objectives. Dennis shows how the Ming state used gazetteers to bind recently pacified northern and southwestern frontier regions into the polity. Milburn demonstrates, on the other hand, how leading literati of Suzhou used the local gazetteer and other publications to assert a local identity and history distinct from the state narrative centered on Hua-Xia culture. Cheung explores how the histories of the construction and reconstruction of two shrines to statewide heroes link Hangzhou to other places and the Ming to other times. Finally, Des Forges suggests that officials and scholars of the Ming period reconstructed the walls of three cities in Henan in efforts to recover some of the glories of the past, as well as to deal with current crises and advance future agendas, a pattern that has continued to be played out in subsequent periods down to the present. Overall, this panel asserts that the study of local history can reveal more than the histories of specific times and places, and can help to relate the histories of localities to those of regions, institutions, China and the wider world.
“Creating and Re-Creating Local Histories in Ming Dynasty Border Regions”
Joseph R. Dennis, Davidson College
When a frontier locale was incorporated into the Ming empire or reconstructed after destruction in war, a new gazetteer was often produced. The underlying motivations for compiling such gazetteers and the end products were different from those seen in more stable, core regions. In core regions local officials often compiled gazetteers because superior officials ordered them to do so, or to record their accomplishments in office at the end of their terms. Prominent local families used gazetteers as vehicles for perpetuating their status and power and shaping the history of local land and water rights. Literati were inspired by grand historical projects or the need for a paycheck.
In Ming China's border regions, however, gazetteers also were an important medium for incorporating locales into the Ming empire and for re-establishing Chinese identity following war. In this paper I will examine gazetteers from the Ming's northern and southwestern border regions, particularly those of locales that had been newly brought into the regular administrative structure or sacked by the Mongols. I will analyze how the gazetteers were constructed, compare them to those of core areas, and discuss how border region gazetteers help us to better understand the gazetteer genre as a whole.
"'Our Identity Unchanged for Millennia': Wang Ao and the Ming dynasty Reinterpretation of Suzhou"
Olivia Milburn, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom
In the mid-Ming period, the pressures of commercialization and mass tourism brought unprecedented challenges to the cultural identity of the city of Suzhou. One of that city’s most famous sons, Wang Ao (1450-1524), a former Chief Grand Secretary, was instrumental in redefining literati identity during this time. Through his patronage, he redirected the attention of Suzhou educated elite to the ancient history of this region. At a time when other Ming dynasty literati were identifying themselves as the heirs to the Han and Tang dynasties, those of Suzhou looked back still further, to a time prior to the Qin unification of China, to the history and culture of the Gouwu people, and the deeds of the great kings of Wu: Shoumeng, Helü, and Fucha. Wang Ao not only wrote a number of works on local history, he also sponsored the compilation of the most important Ming dynasty gazetteer for Suzhou, the "Gusu zhi". In addition to this, he erected commemorative stele at major historical sites, conducted archaeological excavations, and commissioned works from many of the most important local artists, poets and calligraphers of the day, including such luminaries as Shen Zhou, Tang Yin and Wen Zhengming. This paper explores the impact on Suzhou of Wang Ao’s vision for the city, following the decision to stress its importance as the heartland of the Wu people, and the centre of a major independent pre-Qin culture.
"Building Histories around Ming Hangzhou: A Case of Two Heroes"
Desmond Cheung, University of British Columbia, Canada
Two prominent Hangzhou shrines that were built and rebuilt over the course of the Ming (and still attract visitors today) were those to the two “national heroes” Yue Fei and Yu Qian. The elevation of the famously loyal and treacherously condemned general Yue Fei (1103-1142) to heroic status began early, thanks to the efforts of his immediate descendants, and his shrine in Hangzhou was established during the Southern Song. Yu Qian (1398-1457) was a Hangzhou local who rose to be Minister of Military Affairs. After the disastrous Tumu Incident of 1449, during which Ming Yingzong was captured by Mongols, Yu’s determination to defend the north while installing the captive emperor’s younger brother both stabilised the situation and brought his later death amid the court machinations that saw Yingzong’s restoration. Following his posthumous rehabilitation Yu also had a shrine erected in his honour.
Both shrines were rebuilt numerous times during the Ming dynasty and, as attested in local gazetteers, were important projects in local society. For their builders and recorders – including influential locals, resident administrators and outside officials –their significance could also reach across a larger region, up to the centrally fashioned narrative of the state. We can also read from travellers and other literary commentators how such sites had historical, institutional, and other associations stretching beyond Hangzhou and even beyond the Ming. This paper will therefore examine different ways in which local histories worked, the spatial and temporal terms in which they moved, and how they might be understood.
Views from the Central Plain: The Ming As Seen in the Histories of Three City Walls
Roger V. Des Forges, University at Buffalo, SUNY
As part of its effort to restore order and security to the central plain after centuries of internal warfare and frontier conquest, the Ming reconstructed the walls of many cities including Kaifeng, Guide (Shangqiu), and Zhengzhou in Henan Province. In the process, it drew on earlier models, including ancestral cities of the Song, Tang, and Han periods located in or near these sites. The Ming-period city walls were in turn repaired and preserved during the succeeding Qing period, and they were variously developed, militarized, and destroyed during the Republic and early People's Republic. In the "new era" of reform and opening since 1978, the walls have been protected, civilianized, and partly reconstructed, again on the basis of Ming and earlier antecedents. This paper explores how official and unofficial residents of the three cities continue to invoke various aspects of the past to justify different projects of the present and alternative visions of the future. It weighs the degree to which the three cities, representing at one time or another all of the various levels of the Ming-Qing administrative hierarchy, are typical of Chinese cities in general. It also seeks to relate the histories of these city walls to the records of China's "long walls" (often over-simplified into the "Great Wall") and to the experiences of city walls in other civilizations.