Writing, Publishing and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 by Joseph R. Dennis (review)

Early in graduate school, when I was searching for a viable dissertation project in middle period spatial history, I suggested to my advisor that I would start by reading a bunch of gazetteers to see what would crop up. Had I done so, I would still be at that aimless pursuit these twenty years later, and I am grateful that he discouraged me from embarking on it. Nevertheless, gazetteers have retained their fascination for me, one that they hold for many historians of China. It is surprising they have never received book-length attention in English. This has made it difficult for people like my graduate student self to work with gazetteers in ways that go beyond quick reconnaissance trips to seek particular categories of information about individual counties and prefectures. Joseph R. Dennis has now gone a long way toward rectifying the problem. He has read all or part of about five hundred Ming gazetteers, about half of all those extant. His fantastic new book, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700, is based largely upon that effort.

This important book is the first monograph in any language to examine the social contexts of the production, circulation, reading, and use of local gazetteers in imperial China. The central contention of the book will be unsurprising to many readers, though Dennis documents the details and complicates the story in ways that make the book quite fresh. Namely, he explains how local gazetteers, "foundational building blocks" for the empire and "points of contact between the center and the local" (p. 4) linked the central government and local societies. Vehicles of local cultural production, gazetteers transmitted local information to government officials in local administrative positions and in the capital. Gazetteers allowed information about localities to circulate to local and nonlocal readers and authors alike, and they connected localities, including those that were newly established or geographically remote, to the centralizing state and its civilizing culture. They were often the only source for local textual information like stone inscriptions and genealogies of locally important families. Gazetteers produced for frontier counties demonstrated that these jurisdictions were part of the civilized world, and gazetteers were often the first Chinese-language works produced in a given locale. By the end of the Ming, almost every county and prefecture in the empire had been the subject of at least one gazetteer.

Gazetteers were always "strategic texts" (p. 9). Not only did they perform critical functions on behalf of the imperium, particular gazetteers were often authored with specific agendas in mind. These varied from one gazetteer to the next. For instance, it was common for privately sponsored gazetteers to make claims on behalf of a particular version of local leadership and lineage status that benefitted one or a few powerful families. Gazetteers could also represent one influential party's perspective on land ownership or water rights in the midst of lawsuits about the issue in question. In other cases, state activity such as imperial touring or the formation of a new jurisdiction prompted gazetteer production. Because gazetteers are the only genre of writing published in each and every county in the empire, this book explores topics of wide significance and enduring interest beyond the genre itself, such as the production and dissemination of knowledge and the operation of the publishing industry in diverse locations, and the relationships between local societies and the central state in both core and peripheral regions.

The first section of the book explains why gazetteers were compiled, at both government and local initiative. It includes exceptional detail about the role that gazetteers played in domesticating the frontier, silencing non-Han voices in favor of orthodox Han literary culture, and about the use of gazetteers as quasi-genealogies. It demonstrates how gazetteers were "sites of struggle for social and cultural capital" (p. 108). The second section...