Location: Margin of the Empire
To narrow the scope of research and make it a concrete case, this dissertation uses cases from several villages in northeastern Fujian. Because of its mountainous landscape and environmental conditions, northeastern Fujian is a relatively poor region in southeastern China. Settled in river valleys and narrow coastal plains, most of its inhabitants made their living as farmers, fishermen, and hunters. Ever since the northern Han Chinese tried to expand their power to the southeastern coast, the city of Fuzhou,
which is located just to the south of the region, has served as the administrative center of Fujian. However, cultural, economic, and social development in northeastern Fujian, particularly in the eyes of the officials, critically lagged behind the rest of the province.
In this vast region of northeastern Fujian, I begin my research in Pingnan 屏南 County, one of the places I visited in summer 2008. Pingnan, which administratively was formerly the northern part of Gutian 古田 County, was promoted to the status of county in the early eighteenth century, when the governor of Fujian suggested to the Yongzheng emperor that this change would be a further step toward gaining control of the mountainous part of Fujian. However, this region, already then famous as a refuge of outlaws, remained on the margin of political administration. The name of this county rarely appears in the Veritable Records; after it received its promotion to the status of a county, it received very little imperial attention.
The marginality of Pingnan is evident in several aspects. Geographically, Pingnan is set amidst the deep Jiufeng 鷲峰 mountain range and not easy to access. The modern investigation indicates that only 3.6% of the Pingnan territories are river valleys and basins.16 No wonder that a booklet written by a county magistrate of Pingnan in 1945 uses this opening sentence to describe it: “The first thing that came to my mind as I first arrived here was ‘there is no more than two feet of flat land in the county.’” 17 The entire area of Pingnan is situated on the expanse between the Huotong River 霍童溪 and the Gutian River 古田溪, which is a branch of the Min River 閩江 (map 2). People settled along the
16
Pingnan xianzhi 屏南縣志 (Beijing: Fangzhi, 1999), 22.
17
Wang Huang 王滉, Pingzheng cuotang 屏政脞談 (Gutian: Huawen, 1944), 1. 17
small basins and narrow valleys along several unnavigable upper branches of these rivers. The settlements are small and relatively isolated from one another. According to the official records from the 1730s when Pingnan was separated from Gutian, of the 237 villages in official records, about one-quarter had less than ten registered households, and the median was twenty households (Chart 1). Only twelve villages had more than one hundred households, and so-called “village clusters” or towns on plains were rare in Pingnan.18 The structure of the settlement distribution and the size of settlements influenced how local society was organized.
Chart 1 Number of households in each village, 1730s19
Because of its mountainous landscape and its location, Pingnan was and is also economically marginal. The same twentieth-century county magistrate mentioned above used homonyms of its place name to describe Pingnan as “poor” (pin 貧) and “difficult (to access)” (nan 難).20 Until several years ago, Pingnan was still officially recognized as one of the six “poor counties” in Fujian Province. Because of its landscape, arable lands in Pingnan are scattered and small. Even in 1948, 86.8% of lands were officially categorized as “wasted plains and wasted mountains.”21 The cold and humid weather worsened its agricultural production, and farmers could only have one harvest each year—most
18
According to the records, a village had four hundred households. However, judging from its location and its current condition, this number seems wrong.
19
The data come from Qianlong Pingnan xianzhi 乾隆屏南縣志, 4/16-30.
20
Wang Huang, Pingzheng cuotang, 1.
21
Pingnan xian tongji shouce 屏南縣統計手冊, (Pingnan: Pingnan xian zhengfu tongji shi, 1948), 41
households 1-10 11-50 51-100 101-150 151-200 351-400 total
number 60 133 31 9 3 1 237
ratio 25.3% 56.1% 13.1% 3.8% 1.3% 0.4%
18
farmlands in southern China could produce two to three harvests.22 This is also the reason for the smaller size of settlements. Moreover, Pingnan is remote from the main transportation routes. Before the nineteenth century, there was no market town in Pingnan, and porters transported commodities, such as salt and seafood, from the towns in lower river valleys and coastal plains. In late imperial China, merchants competed for control of the salt monopoly, which usually generated huge profits. However, in Pingnan, no merchant was willing to do business in this region, so that the government permitted local residents to buy salt as individuals in the market towns in neighboring counties.23 However, lack of agricultural production does not mean a lack of economic activities. During the late imperial period, immigrants came to Pingnan to take advantage of natural resources, such as timber, iron, and silver, and since the mid-nineteenth century, after Fuzhou became a treaty port for foreign trade, Pingnan became an important locus of tea production.
Politically, Pingnan was also marginal in terms of official administration. Before it was separated from Gutian in 1736, Pingnan was the untamed part of Gutian. This mountainous region was on the border of three prefectures (Jianyang 建陽, Jianning 建寧 and Fuzhou, see Map 1), which situated it at a distance from the supervision of all three prefects—the centers of local administrations. When this region appeared on official records, it was usually because of local rebellions caused by people that the local government could not fully control, such as bandits, migrant miners, unregistered immigrants, or devotees of local cults, such as “vegans.” However, these so-called
22
Qianlong Pingnan xianzhi 乾隆屏南縣志, 5/1a.
23
Qianlong Pingnan xianzhi, 5/23-25a.
19
“rebellions” were usually serious local conflicts that transpired when the powerless government failed to maintain local order. Rectifying the absence of official powers was possible only after the establishment of Pingnan County, which caused a series of transformations in its political and social structures.
Unlike many regions that scholars have studied, Pingnan is geographically, economically, politically marginal. These marginal positions also introduced its marginality in mainstream culture. Local officials called Pingnan residents “barbarians” in different contexts. In an official gazetteer, Pingnan people were described as “no different from raw miao” (與生苗無異), and in a litigation, a defendant from Pingnan was called an “old barbarian” (lao manzi 老蠻子) by the official.24 Many local customs, such as swidden agriculture or cremation, were regarded as vulgar, as a county magistrate suggests in his poem: “the vulgar customs here are close to those of miao and yao.” (薄俗近苗猺)25 In addition to these pejorative terms, detachment from the mainstream culture is also evident in the fact that no one had ever attained an official degree through civil examinations in this region before the county was established. Since the system of civil examinations was an important institution to build the connection between the empire and its local subjects through the accumulation of cultural capital, the lack of degree holders suggests detachment both politically and culturally from the empire.
A decisive transformation in Pingnan started in the early eighteenth century, when the local order was rebuilt after the chaos of dynastic transition and the Rebellion of Three
24
Shen Zhong 沈鍾, “Zhi Ping guanjian 治屏管見,” Qianlong Pingnan xianzhi, 4a; Boyuan supu yinben 柏源蘇譜印本, 15.
25
Qianlong Pingnan xianzhi, 5/3b.
20
Feudatories, and a new county government was established by the empire. The new administrative unit restored the local administration, and created the new quota of government students (shengyuan 生 員 ) for Pingnan residents. These students later became leaders who were able to create both political and cultural bonds with the new regime. There was also a revival of economic activities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as foreign trade further integrated the regional and global markets.
In other words, in the case of Pingnan, we can observe the process through which a geographically marginal community became politically, economically, and culturally integrated into a greater community. During this process, textual practices played an important role. Although the volume of textual materials is greater in core areas, such as the towns in the Lower Yangtze Delta, the process of integration happened much earlier in these areas, and it is more difficult to study the role of textual practices in these complicated communities. By contrast, in peripheral communities, where the process of integration was late and the textual materials are relatively simple, it is easier to observe the evolution of textual practices, especially with respect to the development of textual culture and literate mentality.
However, although the marginality of this community is a key attribute and the implicit theme of this dissertation is the process of integration through texts, this does not mean that this community was static and isolated from the beginning. Although Pingnan, or northern Gutian, is situation on deep mountains and along rivers that are unnavigable, communications between Pingnan and other inland mountains, lowland valleys or coastal plains, were frequent, and people moved in and out of this region. Limited agricultural production meant that people had to look for other resources to support their and their
descendants’ lives. Many went deep into the mountains and looked for new lands to open. Others became migrant workers who travelled around for new jobs. While most of our textual materials came from those who settled down and most official records only recognize settlers, those “not being governed” were on the same stage. Our investigation of textualization, to some extent, reveals mostly the lives of those who were on the way of integration and leaves aside a certain number of people who kept distance from larger political, cultural, or economic entities.
Moreover, although the term “process” is often highlighted, it does not mean that there was only one process or that this process was linear or even evolutionary. The development of textualization was uneven, often punctuated or accelerated by certain events, and sometimes even degraded during a disturbing era. The influences from the different layers of communities also directed this process in various ways. Local officials assigned by the court, immigrants from neighboring counties, soldiers of garrisons or military farms sent by the military institutions, candidates of civil examination going back and forth between native villages and provincial capitals, merchants from another towns, and missionaries from another countries, all brought in new cultural elements and different texts. Instead of a one-dimensional, universal process, textualization was rather diverse and conditional.