Harvard University lAW HY did Chinese literati begin to write local history? And w does this tell us about Chinese history? For historians" local history" in a Chinese context refers in the first place" local gazetteer," a rather standardized compendium of informa about an administrative unit: the prefecture, county, cant town. The gazetteer is a record of those the central govern appointed to administer the area, as prefectural administrators county magistrates, for example, and the buildings that wer of their infrastructure, such as offices, warehouses, postal stat and schools. It is also a record of the natural and constructed land-scape, its rivers and mountains, reservoirs and bridges, and of the local population in the villages and cantons, their shrines and acad-emies, students and degree holders, and men and women who became famous at home and abroad. In one of the stock phrases used in prefaces to local gazetteers the gazetteer (zhi~") is to the locality as the history (P) is to the nation.'The gazetteer was not the only format in which local history was written, but because it became ubiquitous we can use it to address the question of when local history began. The standard union cata-logue of local gazetteers lists about 8000 extant editions from before