Andrew Chittick

This work offers a sweeping reassessment of the Jiankang Empire (third to sixth centuries CE), known as the Chinese "Southern Dynasties." It shows how, although one of the medieval world's largest empires, Jiankang has been rendered politically invisible by the standard narrative of Chinese nationalist history, and proposes a new framework and terminology for writing about medieval East Asia. The book pays particular attention to the problem of ethnic identification, rejecting the idea of "ethnic Chinese," and delineating several other, more useful ethnographic categories, using case studies in agriculture/foodways and vernacular languages. The most important, the Wuren of the lower Yangzi region, were believed to be inherently different from the peoples of the Central Plains, and the rest of the book addresses the extent of their ethnogenesis in the medieval era.

This work explores the origins of local history writing in China in the second to fourth centuries C.E., focusing on local history as an expression of ideals about the local community, its cultural distinctiveness, and its potential for political autonomy. The research centers on the reconstruction and analysis of the Record of Old Xiangyang (Xiangyang qijiu ji), written by Xi Zuochi in the late fourth century C.E. Local history is considered first within the context of the expansion of narrative writing in the early medieval period, which was closely associated with the desire to record local customs, fengsu. These were considered to consist of two distinct elements: those inherent in human practice, or su, and those inherent in localities, or feng; both were felt to have the power to influence men to moral, cultured behavior. In characterizing su, early local history writers drew upon the tradition of biographical writing to develop an ideal of elite behavior that emphasized a detached, apolitical role in the local community. The community itself was viewed as a cultural forum, for the purpose of demonstrating and lauding restrained behavior and cultural attainment. Characterizations of feng were handled with the more novel genre of locality stories, which served as an antiquarian repository for tales about a local area, especially those with classical roots or allusions to imperial power. Over time, as the early tradition of local biographical compilations died out or was absorbed into imperial history, the more flexible format of locality stories accommodated tales of locals and non-locals alike. The selection of apolitical and non-local standards of value in local history writing is evidence of the medieval elite's powerful sense of identification with a universal classical cultural system, and a correspondingly weak sense of localism.