see all the articles sorted by year and in short form
some Fujian maps from 1990 census data
Some factoids: Fujian is about the same size as Pennsylvania (46K square miles), but has the same total population as California (33M --Pennsylvania has 12 M)
Our task is to gather and organize a broad compass of information on one of China's macroregions, partly as an exercise to develop searching skills, and partly to create a resource exemplary of the possibilities of collaborative work.
We want to identify and point to useful resources, but also to build our own comprehension of the past and present of an integral piece of modern China, and to raise questions that may be useful in stimulating individual project ideas.
We'll begin with shotgun searches (Fujian, Fukien) in various interfaces, use the results to guide further compound searches, and follow up on interesting leads. Thus, Fujian may point to Fuzhou, Fuzhou to Foochow (for example)... Think of new approaches by looking at the findings of others...
We may set up working groups on particular subject areas, like geography and history and so on...
Here are links to a number of search interfaces:
JSTOR basic searchEach person will need to figure out the basic conventions and options of the specific resource, and then search for fujian and fukien. Chances are pretty good that you'll get a LOT of hits, especially if you're searching in the full text of articles.Asian Studies needs to be done from the Expand Journals List, journal-by-journal: Asian Survey, China Quartery, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, Pacific AffairsEconLitothers can be done by Select Disciplines, using the search Fujian OR Fukien, and Anthropology, Ecology, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science and Population Studies are all candidates
We're trying to build up a broad range of perspectives on the present and the past of this area of China. What you're looking for is interesting things that cast light on Fujian, and/or suggest other searches one might make. When you find something that looks worthwhile,
Here's some of what I've been looking at:
google search: fujian counties agriculture (2430 hits)
google search: fujian counties poverty
google search: fujian counties migration (viz: from UNESCAP and Where Do Most Chinese Illegal Aliens Originate?)Hakka:
"Leaving Ninghua, we drove past Qingliu, Liancheng and Shanghang. In these places, people all talk in the Hakka dialect, albeit with slight differences from place to place - a far cry from the local Fujian dialect... In western Fujian there are many counties exclusively inhabited by the Hakka people, such as Wuping, Mingxi, Changting and Yongding, in addition to the counties mentioned above." (http://www.virtualtourist.com/vt/5b2/1/")Longyan Prefecture (West Fujian)
estimates by county, and overseas
Taishan County timeline (includes Hakka/Punti wars)
Two books:
CALL NO. HT384.C6 F37 1997. TITLE Farewell to peasant China : rural urbanization and social change in the late twentieth century / edited by Gregory Eliyu Guldin ; with a new foreword by Walter Goldschmidt. IMPRINT Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe, c1997. CALL NO. HD3616.C64 X56 2001. AUTHOR Luo, Qi, Dr. TITLE China's industrial reform and open-door policy, 1980-1997 : a case study from Xiamen / Qi Luo. IMPRINT Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, USA : Ashgate, c2001.
A lot of what I have to deal with is fragments that (potentially) point to interesting and worthwhile threads of future research. I'll collect a few of them here, as exemplars, and maybe find ways to weave them into the macramé:
...Ningpo as an emporium for trade was at a head of navigation accessible to shipping but not easily penetrated by a high-seas fleet.Following up on Zayton:We found the same true of Foochow (with one unfortunate exception). After ascending the Rhine-like Min River for twenty-four miles, we reached Pagoda anchorage. There on the afternoon of August 23, 1884, a French ultimatum had expired and so a bigger French fleet (naturally) in a few minutes had sunk nine vessels of a new Chinese fleet moored nearby. They had also destroyed a shipyard built for China by French engineers. Going on up to Foochow, we soon got into the old treaty port atmosphere. It was more acerbic than anything we had met in North China...
[describes meeting a tea-taster, one H. Shelley Brand, whom Somerset Maugham had incorporated in "Snatched from Oblivion" and The Casuarina Tree] As tea shipments came down the Min from the Bohea (Wu-i) Hills upcounry, large investments hinged on the appraisal made by the professional "expectorator," who graded the different lots ("chops") by brewing and tasting samples...
Foochow as an ancient capital of two provinces had been a hotbed of xenophobia. The Confucian scholars struggled long and hard to keep missionaries out of the walled city. The first missionary to arrive, in 1847, since the consul did not invite him, had to lodge with an opium ship captain, the only Britisher as yet able to sell anything [cites Ellsworth Carlson The Foochow Missionaries 1847-1880 (BV3425.F66 C37)]. Sino-foreign animosity became better established as the two sides found out more specifically what they didn't like about each other... "The foreigners despise and distrust the Chinese now as before," I noted, "but in a milder way."
(from John King Fairbank Chinabound: a fifty-year memoir, pp 116-118)==
Ch'üan-chou in Fukien was the Arabs' Zayton. Both there and at Canton were Arab trading communities with their own mosques, a result of the great Islamic diaspora... (82)
(from John King Fairbank The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985)==
Dialectal diversity reaches its highest degree in the Southern zone, especially in Fujian province... in this region every county has its own distinctive dialect which often differs quite radically from those in neighboring counties, and in some cases even neighboring villages use forms of speech that are totally mutually unintelligible. (from Jerry Norman Chinese pg 189)
==
For sheer survival, the Fukienese turned increasingly to the sea after 1500. By that time, the mountainous province had less cultivated land per person than any other area in China, Fukien's half acre per capita being roughly half the national average... subsistence farming could no longer support the population. To survive, the Fukienese developed a specialized economy based on sea-faring and trade, manufacture, and the growing of cash crops for export.
During the sixteenth century, entire coastal communities turned to the sea for their livelihood. Fukienese pilots were the finest in East Asian waters, as even Portuguese mariners testified. Farmers took acreage out of rice cultivation and planted it with the higher-paying sugarcane. Fukienese merchants distributed the sugar, aloong with such other local products as textiles, metal wares, and porcelain. The new economy brought wealth to many communities --by 1600, Chang-chou was known as "little Soochow"-- and a marked cosmopolitan flavor to all of south Fukien. For while many products went to domestic markets, a large part went overseas, especially to Japan, the Liu-ch'ius, the Philippines, and southeast Asia.
The long-term consequences of this commercial revolution remain to be explored, yet its immediate impact on the social order must have been obvious even to contemporaries. A predominantly mercantile society, its upper classes deep in foreign trade and commercial profit, was hard to square with the Confucian vision of the good society, defined as agrarian and self-sufficient. Traders were sure to encounter disturbing notions overseas. In going abroad, moreover, they violated specific dynastic statute. Unorthodoxy and illegality commingled in Fukien's turn to the sea. (17-18)
the bulk of the Taiwanese settlers, over 80 percent, came from Ch'üan-chou and Chang-chou, two prefectures in Fukien that had contacts with Taiwan back in the pirate days. (44)
(from Johanna Meskill A Chinese Pioneer Family)
Unravelling a religious mystery Feature on an archaelogical find in China from Australian BroadcastingZayton was the Hong Kong of the Mongol period. It had international trade links both overland and by the sea route. It had a multi-religious, multilingual community of Arabs, Persians, Central Asians, Mongols. It was the place to be in the 13th and 14th centuries...Quanzhou..." [chwan´jO´] formerly Tsinkiang[chin´jyang´, tsin´kyang´], town (1994 est. pop. 207,800), SE Fujian prov., China, on an inlet of Taiwan Strait. Local handicrafts, machine tools, fertilizer, sugar, and flour are produced. Quanzhou has been identified with Zaiton (Zaitun or Zayton), which was the departure point for Marco Polo's return journey. The Overseas Chinese Univ. is in the town. The name sometimes appears as Ch'uan-chou."from 1911 Encyc Britannica:
CHINCHEW, or CHINCHU, the name usually given in English charts to an ancient and famous port of China in the province of Fu-kien, of which the Chinese name is Ch’uanchow-fu or Ts’uanchow-fu. It stands in 24° 57’ N., 1180 35’ E. The walls have a circuit of 7 or 8 m., but embrace much vacant ground. The chief exports are tea and sugar, tobacco, china-ware, nankeens, &c. There are remains of a fine mosque, founded by the Arab traders who resorted thither. The English Presbyterian Mission has had a chapel in the city since about 1862. Beyond the northern branch of the Mm (several miles from the city) there is a suburb called Loyang, approached by the most celebrated bridge in China.’Archaeology of a medieval port in Fujian (Richard Pearson, Li Min and Li Guo) --and includes a nice bibliographyCh’Uanchbw, owing to the obstruction of its harbour by sand banks, has been supplanted as a port by Amoy, and its trade is carried on through the port of Nganhai. It is still, however, a large and populous city. It was in the middle ages the great port of Western trade with China, and was known to the Arabs and to Europeans as Zaiiun orZayton, the name under which it appears in Abulfeda’s geography and in the Mongol history of Rashiddudin, as well as in Ibn Batuta,Marco Polo and other medieval travellers. Some argument has been alleged against the identity of Zayton with Ch’flanchow, and in favour of its being rather Changchow (a great city 6o m. W.S.W. of Ch’Uanchow), or a port on the river of Changchow near Amoy. “Port of Zayton” may have embraced the great basin called Amoy Harbour, the chief part of which lies within the Fu or department of Ch’tianchow; but there is hardly room for doubt that the Zayton of Marco Polo and Abulfeda was the Ch’tianchow of the Chinese. Ibn Batuta informs us that a rich silk texture made here was called Zaiiuniya; and there can be little doubt that this is the real origin of the word “Satin.” Zettani in medieval Italian. Ac&vtuni in Snflnish
Christian Angels on the South China Coast (Macquarie-Quanzhou Project)
Act 2 scene 2 from Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions
China's International Economic Policy Ken Davies
To understand China's role in the global economy you have to look at its past as well as its present and the intended future. China enjoyed many centuries of economic supremacy as the richest country in the world up to the 18th century. It was, and still is, the most populous, though India will soon overtake it. China was engaged in world trade during that long period. The Silk Road was a thoroughfare for merchants from the West and the "great ships of Zayton" left Quanzhou for Africa, captained by Zheng He, in the Ming dynasty. Many English country houses are still filled with the Chinese furniture and porcelain that was fashionable two centuries ago and which provided China with a large trade surplus in its trade with England for which England had to pay with shiploads of silver. The ornate clocks and Fabergé eggs in Zhongnanhai were not made in China, they were imported.from A Far East Journal (Harold Abbott Rand Conant's journals, "Cathay Years 1915 - 1941"But trade was always limited in scope and occasionally, as in the long period from 1370 to 1567, prohibited. Even when the Ming ban on private trade was lifted, foreign merchants could not travel freely and ply their wares throughout the country. They were confined to Macau, then Guangzhou. China, a vast land with a highly-developed system of organic farming, was largely self-sufficient in the necessities of life, symbolised by the uneatably large number of dishes regularly set before the young Emperor Aisin Gioro Pu Yi to show him the abundance of his empire. And it was of course the West, spearheaded by Britain, that forced the gates of China open to trade in the Opium War 160 years ago.
ggogel search: tea fujian and + areas
Fujian International page
comparative phonology of Min dialects
Min Nan from Omniglot
one to find: Norman, Jerry. 1991. "The Min dialects in historical perspective." Languages and Dialects of China. Edited by William S-Y. Wang. [= Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Monograph Series Number 3.] Pp.325-360.
hey look: Fujian Post