The Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China, Version 1.0

In 1958, Sinologist Hope Wright published a work entitled An Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China. Originally published in Paris by the Centre de Recherches Historiques of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and reprinted as a second-generation photocopy in 1992 by the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, the Alphabetical List is now out of print.

The Alphabetical List is an index to every jurisdiction in the Song (960–1276) spatial administrative hierarchy named in one or more of the following three Song texts: the Song shi dili zhi 宋史地理志 [Song History, Geography Monograph], the 980 太平寰宇紀 Taiping huanyu ji [Records of the Universal Realm in the Taiping Era], and the 1085 Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi 元豐九域志 [Treatise on the Nine Territories in the Yuanfeng Reign]. Wright’s compilation is the most comprehensive print source for Song geography in any language. The Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China (DGSD) is a MySQL database derived primarily from the Alphabetical List.

The Alphabetical List consists of 4,009 headwords, including all Rank One circuits (路 lu), Rank Two prefectures (府 fu, 州 zhou, 軍 jun, and 監 jian), Rank Three counties (縣 xian) and county-rank jun and jian, and Rank Four towns (鎮 zhen) and garrisons (sai 塞 and bao 堡) that existed at any time during the Song dynasty, along with centers of state industry (mines, foundries, and commodity markets) located in prefectures, and information about the number of cantons (鄉 xiang) in each county, the resident (zhu 住) and guest (客 ke) population of each prefecture in 980 and 1085, the civil rank of each prefecture and county, the designation of counties that served as prefecture seats, the military-ceremonial designation, if any, of each prefecture, the latitude-longitude coordinate of each prefecture, and the distance of each county from the seat of its parent prefecture. The DGSD transforms all of this information into a flexible, extensible, georeferenced, and queryable format.

I developed the DGSD in collaboration with my graduate student Elijah Meeks, with partial funding from the Society for Song-Yuan Studies. It supports my book Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of State Power in Song Dynasty China (960–1276 ce) (Harvard University Asia Center, forthcoming). The book demonstrates how the Song court repeatedly reorganized the structure of counties and prefectures in order to distribute civil and military officials around the empire in accordance with changing priorities. Therefore, the DGSD is designed to identify the events that transformed the political landscape, and to make the histories of often fluid places as accessible as the names of the jurisdictions themselves.

The DGSD is a genre of database known as a digital gazetteer. The term gazetteer generates some confusion in Chinese studies, since it is the English word most commonly used to gloss the Chinese local geographies known as 地 方志 difangzhi. As the expression is used by geographers, a gazetteer refers to a place name directory, like the list at the back of an atlas. In a networked computing environment, gazetteers refer to databases organized around named places and their locations, and they have become essential to all spatial search infrastructure. A gazetteer is distinct from a geographic information system (GIS), although the two are often used together and frequently translated into one another. A gazetteer is a database about named places, while a GIS is a system for storing, analyzing and displaying georeferenced information.

The DGSD is freely available for download at http://songgis.ucmercedlibrary.info/ . It is also being peer reviewed and made available by the China Historical GIS (CHGIS) at http://fas.harvard.edu/~chgis . The website also includes release notes and presentations, which provide additional information about the DGSD and the research I have conducted with it, sample GIS shapefiles derived from the DGSD, and illustrative maps and charts. If you use the database in any published work, please cite it as: Ruth Mostern and Elijah Meeks, “Digital Gazetteer of Song Dynasty China v.1.0” (2009). Please send feedback and information about your use of the DGSD to Ruth Mostern (rmostern@ucmerced.edu).