Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the Late Tang through the Song (review)

Exactly two decades ago, Hugh Clark published Community, Trade, and Networks in Southern Fujian focusing on the economic development and social networks of the Minnan region. The word “community” also figures prominently in the title of this work, a sign that the new book emanates from the same dissertation, although community now is defined in terms of the structures, practices, and networks of kin groups. Clark offers a microscopic, almost anthropological, look into the area, its leading as well as lesser families, and the cohesion that holds the community together. He uses stories and anecdotes to enliven his social history analysis. Another objective is to use the Mulan Valley to test the hypothesis of the late Robert Hartwell and his student Robert Hymes, leaders of the Penn School, as pertains to the Song elite and its localist orientation. (Clark is also a Hartwell student who supports the basic thrust of the paradigm with adjustments.)

Hugh Clark knows the terrain well and makes extensive use of local resources, especially gazetteers, buttressed by archaeological evidence that has surfaced in recent decades. Replete with twenty-nine charts and tables and eighty pages of narrative-heavy footnotes, Portrait of a Community can be at times tedious, repetitive, and self-indulgent (the downside of having a personal computer), but it represents an important contribution to the field of Song studies inasmuch as Clark places the empirical evidence before institutional loyalties.

Divided into two parts, “Society” and “Culture,” the book moves from the composition, segmentation, and marriage connections of elite groups (part 1) to religious culture, literati culture, and kinship culture (part 2), culminating in a lengthy conclusion. An area enriched by largely unfettered commerce, the Mulan Valley of southern Fujian, situated between the populous metropolises of Fuzhou and Quanzhou, was prosperous like few other places in the empire due to the trickle-down from neighboring cities, the countryside enriched by cash crops and imports that included even foodstuffs. The area also benefited from the influx of migrants from across China, a migration that began in the ninth century, the late Tang, and accelerated in the next century, the Five Dynasties and early Song. Southern Fujian benefited as well from its sufficient distance from the capitals at Kaifeng and later Hangzhou, the extent to which the local elite could pursue trade and landowning without concern for ever-changing government policies, policies that often worked against elite interests.

Although preeminently interested in the community as a social unit, Hugh Clark does examine the role played by civil service degrees — a tool of government — in creating or buttressing social status at the local level. The level of civil service engagement in the Mulan Valley is remarkably high. The six branches of a single Fang clan produced seventy jinshi examination degree holders and fifty-eight facilitated degree holders in the Song, according to Clark (p. 120). Other clans were equally successful in the examination system and engaged in the process — that is, they evinced an orientation to public office — findings with important implications for the Hartwell paradigm. Hartwell had posited that examination success merely confirmed acceptance within the local elite; it did not create status, as commonly assumed. Clark’s findings suggest that the examinations were an important avocation of the Song elite in both periods, Northern and Southern Song, providing an avenue for upward mobility. The deficiencies in the Hartwell paradigm become even more apparent in chapter 4, when Clark discusses marriage strategies at Mulan. Hartwell had argued that marriage alliances for the Northern Song elite, emanating from the national identities and networks of a professional elite of civil servants, tended to be geographically dispersed, such that long-distance marriages were the norm. However, under...