preface
Yushu is located in the center of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, at the source of rivers, with towering snow peaks and vast grasslands. In the Chinese literature, the Yushu of the Yuan and Ming dynasties is not recorded in detail. In the Chinese records of Yushu in the Qing Dynasty, except for the Brief Description of xinning fu xinzhi, Weizang Tongzhi, Tibet Tukao, and Tibet Record, there is no book that describes it in more detail. Mr. Zhou Xiwu's "Yushu Investigation" filled this gap to a certain extent.
In 1914, Sichuan and Gansu competed with each other for Yushu, and Zhou Xiwu went to Yushu to investigate and understand the local history and the boundary between Ganchuan and Tibet, and then wrote the "Yushu Survey". The whole book is divided into two volumes, with one volume of "Ninghai Jixing". In 1920, it was printed by the Shanghai Commercial Press, also known as the "Investigation of Yushu Toast".
"Yushu Toast Survey"
Background and content
The purpose of the "Yushu Investigation" was to clarify the basic facts that the two provinces of Minchuchuan and Gansu were competing with each other for Yushu. At the same time, the detailed description of the Yushu area in the book provides an extremely valuable reference for the study of the history of the Tibetan people in Qinghai, and its appendix "Ninghai Jixing" records the observations and historical evolutions along the way from Lanzhou to Jiegu, which is the basis for the study of the Tang Dynasty Ancient Dao.
The "Yushu Survey" adopts the zhishu style and is divided into ten categories: tribe, mountain range, waterway, terrain, politics, religion, customs, industry, palm history, and examination. Each begins with a small preface to outline and outline the evolution, followed by notes and lists. The whole book is hierarchical and clear in context. The book is divided into two volumes, with a total of more than 400,000 words. The author has made detailed records and examinations of the mountains and rivers in the Yushu area, tribal toasts, religious customs, animal husbandry planting, etc., and has made the first sketch of the Yushu area drawn by the new law in China, which also has a detailed account of the religious customs of the twenty-five ethnic groups of Yushu that people care about, and also records various situations of people's lives.
Images and memories
In the "Yushu Investigation Record", there are also concise pictures and 20 photos of the Yushu Twenty-Five Ethnic Groups, which are rare image materials of the natural and social landscape of Yushu in the early twentieth century.
The Survey of Yushu Toast contains a map - the location of Yushu in Qinghai
The "Yushu Toast Investigation Record" is accompanied by a map - a concise map of the Yushu Twenty-Five Tribes
The cultural fields of the Tongtian River Basin are The Kanai Monastery and rab monastery
Lens and Face: A Memory of Yushu stuck in the early 20th century
The Compound and the Crowd: Staying in the Memory of Yushu in the Early 20th Century
Dress and Ceremony: Marrying an ancient newlywed couple
Ferry: A cowhide raft that crosses the other side of the River of Heaven
Prototype of the town: the temple at the top of the hill and the village at the foot of the mountain
Unchanging theme: food and utensils
Exchange and Trade: The Ancient Gathering as a Corridor
Egu Water Upstream: Flow and Leapfrogging
People and gods in rituals
Divine queue
Viewed and recorded
Center stage: static and moving
Edition and Tibetan translation
Since its completion, many different editions of the "Yushu Survey" have been published one after another, or published as monographs; or included in the series of local history books, and some scholars have made special interpretations to answer the questions in the text; because the field points involved in its text are located in the scope of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, there are a large number of descriptions of regional cultures, covering the names of mountains and rivers, religious temples, social production, local history and characters, and other thematic chapters. Translating it into Tibetan is indisputable to the scholarly value of cultural studies in the Yushu region. Fortunately, in 2021, Mr. Gengyang, a senior translator from Yushu, excerpted some of the content of the article and published it as internal material. The translation adopts the vocabulary of the Yushu dialect and conforms to the Tibetan orthography of the oral narrative technique, which makes the line-notation characteristics of the zhou's texts appropriately expressed. About a century after the original work came out, Mr. Gengyang's Tibetan translation can be described as a response from the new century, which is of great significance. Similarly, there are many geographical and cultural profiles in the original text that involve the source area of the Tongtian River, and due to geographical remoteness and other reasons, it is impossible to check the Tibetan expression of the Chinese transliteration of the name and has not yet been fully translated, so we expect that researchers who have paid attention to this can bring us this surprise.
Different versions of the Yushu Survey
Yushu County Chronicle/Appendix
Yushu Survey of the Republic of China / Chronicle of Yushu County of the Republic of China
In the selected historical materials of the Republic of China, it is selected as a selection of social materials on the frontier
Chinese Local History Integration • Qinghai Fu County Album
Proofreading of the Yushu Survey (1986 edition)
Tibetan excerpt translation of the Yushu Survey (2020)
(The above information is partially selected from the preface of Wu Jun's interpretation of the "Yushu Investigation Record")
Source: Yushu Release