We Are the Literati Here: The Chang Family and the Compilation of the 1258 'Ganshui Gazetteer'

Introduction

In 1232, a local scholar named Chang Tang 常棠 completed the Ganshui Gazetteer (Ganshui zhi 澉水志), a work only nineteen pages long in the modern Zhonghua shuju edition. In 1258, with official support, he managed to have the township gazetteer published. Apparently only one of four township gazetteers written during the Song dynasty, it is also the only township gazetteer from the Song dynasty to survive. The central issue this article seeks to explain is why Chang Tang compiled the Ganshui Gazetteer during the period from the 1230s to the 1250s and how he used the still-evolving format of gazetteers to serve his own objectives and his family's.¹

During the Southern Song, the compilation of prefecture gazetteers was common, but the compilation of county gazetteers, not to mention township gazetteers, was more unusual. Table 1 shows the number of gazetteers for different administrative levels compiled in the Song, based on the meticulous 2010 study of Song gazetteers by Gu Hongyi 顧宏義.² After searching through

Figure 1.

The Location of Ganpu in the Southern Song

a large body of sources and recorded any item that mentioned a gazetteer compiled in the Song, Gu found 1,031 individual titles of gazetteers. The statistics in Table 1 are based on Gu's work. After eliminating duplicates and errors, I have revised the total count of gazetteers compiled in the Song dynasty down to 988. Of these, only twenty-nine survive today. Most of these 988 Song-dynasty gazetteers were written during the Southern Song. It is noteworthy that nearly 80% of the 988 gazetteers were prefectural-level gazetteers.

Although the number of counties in the Song empire was four to five times larger than the number of prefectures, the number of county gazetteers was far fewer than the number of prefectural gazetteers, comprising only 18% of the total number. The number of township gazetteers was even lower: just four, or only 0.4% of the total. At any rate, it is undeniable that township gazetteers had begun to emerge in the Southern Song, if on a very small scale relative to the publication of county and prefectural gazetteers.

Due to the paucity of extant Song gazetteers, except for some general surveys,³ serious research on the history of Song gazetteers has been scarce. In his pioneering 1963 study, Aoyama Sadao argued that during the Song,

Table 1.

The Number of Gazetteers Compiled during the Song

a. Gazetteers of "industrial prefectures," the translation proposed by Charles Hucker for jian 監, were gazetteers of "a prefecture-level agency in an area where the main economic enterprise was a mine, a salt yard, or something of the sort that required the special attention of local officials." See Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 145.

gazetteers proliferated to serve the needs of a centralized bureaucratic political system, and were influenced by the rise of evidential research;⁴ however, it seems to me that these two factors provided the historical background but did not explain the increase in the compilation of Song gazetteers. Applying the localist turn hypothesis, both James Hargett and Peter Bol have argued that the localization of elite interests and activities influenced the compilation of Southern Song gazetteers.⁵ While both scholars have convincingly pointed out that local literati played an important role in Song gazetteer compilation, in my view, they have underestimated the role the state played in the process; for example, although the central government was generally passive on gazetteer compilation, most Southern Song gazetteers were still initiated and financed by local government.

Current scholarship on township gazetteers has been focused on the Ming and Qing periods, which can provide a framework for comparison. Mori Masao argues that Ming and Qing township gazetteers from the Jiangnan region displayed both the self-identification of their authors with local society and their concern with the acute problems facing market townships. Mori made a sharp distinction between township...