Where is the Border Pass - Liu Tingyu: The "She" in the History of the Southeast Frontier

On March 19, 2022, liu Tingyu, associate professor of the Department of History of Xiamen University, brought a lecture on the history of the She, from the perspective of folk literature, with the theme of "Folk Documents and The Study of Ethnic Groups in the Southeast Frontier of the Ming and Qing Dynasties" held by the Qiangji Project of the Qiangji Project of the School of History of Nanjing University. The lecture was presided over by Hu Xiaobai, associate professor of the School of History of Nanjing University, and a total of more than 300 alumni participated online.

Academic History and Folk Writings

At the beginning of the lecture, Liu Tingyu introduced the topic with the folk customs and ethnic costumes of the She. The Shes are the main ethnic minorities in Fujian and Zhejiang, mainly with the surnames of Lan, Lei and Zhong, and the actor Lan Yingying is the She. The traditional costume of the Shes is called the phoenix suit, which is mainly characterized by the headdress symbolizing the phoenix. The name of Professor Liu's monograph "Phoenix Yu Fei: Family Documents and The Study of the History of the She" is also derived from this costume feature.

As a scholar who has studied and worked in Xiamen University for a long time, Dr. Liu's academic theory has been greatly influenced by the academic paradigm of historical anthropology of Xiamen University. Mr. Fu Yiling mentioned in the "Fujian She's Surname Examination" that there are two main types of special groups in Fujian, one is the She, and the other is the Huang people. The latter are found in Fujian and Guangdong, but are not identified as ethnic minorities when it comes to ethnic identification. These two groups of people, in Mr. Fu's view, are from the Yue people. Mr. Chen Zhiping also believes that the Shes are descendants of the Fujian Minyue people. This statement became the main object of dialogue during Liu Tingyu's doctoral studies.

"Where did She come from?" Are the Shes really the descendants of the Yue people? On this issue, the previous generations of scholars have been quite mature in sorting out and studying the documents passed down from generation to generation, so if we want to break through the views of our predecessors, we must innovate in methodology. Dr. Liu makes extensive use of the field methods of historical anthropology, hoping to reinterpret the evolutionary context of She's history through the collection and interpretation of folk documents. The folk documents she collected during her long-term fieldwork can be roughly divided into four categories, namely ethnic minority documents, contracts, religious ritual books, and genealogies. To respond to and reflect on the issue of "where did She come from", the ethnic minority documents represented by Zutu and Changlian, as well as the genealogy that records the evolution of family history, play a relatively large role. Of course, the contract and the religious ritual book also play a very important role in this process: the spatial information contained in the contract is often the key data for geolocation, while the religious ritual book can make people form a three-dimensional and perceptual understanding of the national culture of the She. In the first part of the lecture, Dr. Liu gave a vivid and meticulous interpretation to the reader based on the various folk documents collected in the field process.

Where did "She" come from?

Liu Tingyu found in the fieldwork that at the level of ancestral memory, the Han and Shes in Fujian seem to have formed a mutual understanding between immigrants and indigenous peoples: whether it is Fuzhou, Minnan or Hakka, these Han people in a broad sense will claim to be descendants of the northern Central Plains immigrants, and regard the Shes as the descendants of the Minyue people. Starting from this question, she has expanded the academic extension of her she's studies, that is, through the investigation of the history of the She, to sort out the immigration problem in the history of Fujian.

Dr. Liu tried to investigate the ancestral origins of the Shes through an interdisciplinary and multidimensional research perspective, and to demonstrate their relationship with other ethnic groups. Molecular anthropological studies have shown that the Shes are genetically closely related to the Yaos. In the official version of the historical narrative of the She, the main distribution areas of the Shes are eastern Fujian and southern Zhejiang, that is, the homeland of the Yue Kingdom, and the commonly recognized ancestral home is the Phoenix Mountain in Chaozhou, Guangdong. However, according to the Records of Fang Zhi in southern Fujian, central Fujian, eastern Fujian, northern Fujian, northeastern Gan, and southern Zhejiang, it can be seen that the Shes in eastern Fujian and southern Zhejiang actually came from the junction area of the three provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, and Gansu, that is, in the southern part of present-day Jiangxi, represented by the Hakka areas of Longyan and Changting, as well as Guangdong and other places, the time was not earlier than the Ming Dynasty.

The "She" of the Song and Yuan Dynasties

How exactly is the "She" in historical documents presented? Liu Tingyu pointed out that the word "She" has existed since a long time, representing a slash-and-burn production method, but its use to refer to a specific ethnic group began in the late Southern Song Dynasty Liu Kezhuang's "Zhangzhou Zhishe" list text. In the list, Liu Kezhuang classifies Shedong as a xidong — an ethnic minority scattered in Nanling, and the xidong in Zhangzhou is She. According to Liu Kezhuang's records, the Shes in Zhangzhou at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty still practiced a slash-and-burn lifestyle, did not pay taxes, and were not organized into households. But at the same time, there was also a lot of contact between them and the Han Chinese. In this way, under the auspices of Liu Kezhuang, a group of Sheren were incorporated into the state governance system of the Southern Song Dynasty.

Surprisingly, the "She" in Zhangzhou suddenly became active at the end of the Song Dynasty, and its scale also expanded rapidly, and it was later involved in the Song and Yuan Wars, and was organized by Zhang Shijie to oppose the Yuan army. From the end of the Song Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, "She" appeared frequently in historical records, but suddenly disappeared after the middle and late Yuan Dynasty. By the time it reappeared, it was already in the local chronicles of Fujian after the middle of the Ming Dynasty.

Why would a slash-and-burn nation suddenly carry out a large-scale relocation of the entire ethnic group? Why do they appear in different geographical spaces at different historical times? Faced with this question, which neither Zhengshi nor Fang Zhi mentioned, Dr. Liu hoped to find an answer in the process of fieldwork.

"She" and the Ming Dynasty health center system

Mr. Tan Qijun once wrote "Examination of the Origin of Hunan People", which is based on a large number of genealogies as a reference. Mr. Tan believes that genealogy, genealogy, and genealogy have the phenomenon of emperors as ancestors and celebrities as ancestors, so the official ranks and knighthoods need to be used carefully, and "when and when their clan names come from and where they migrate" is more valuable. With this line of thought, Liu Tingyu collected more than 240 tribal genealogies of the She, and made a table of information on the migration time, migration place, and place of migration, and then concluded that the She's families near Fuzhou all moved to near Fuzhou during the Hongwu and Yongle years of the Ming Dynasty, and their emigration places were more diverse, including Chaozhou, Luo Yuan, Jianning, and so on. In addition, Dr. Liu found that these families were more or less related to the military.

The Guangdong Sheren in the Boxer Codex of the sixteenth century

In the second year, Hongwu moved to the Fu'an Lianling Lei family in Luoyuan, and initially moved his ancestors to serve as the deputy governor of Luoyuan's Central Army. Although the vice-chancellor of the Chinese army was not an official or military position accustomed to the Ming Dynasty, this title can provide at least one piece of information: Lei seems to have a relationship with the army. The same is true of the Zhong family of Fuding Xiqi, in the ancestral memory, the ancestor Zhong Shezi was a small banner under the Army of the Jianning Right Guard Left Xia Hundred Households. The Chongru Lan Qiman family, who lived roughly in the same area, allegedly moved to Fujian in the thirteenth year of Hongwu. Most Fujian chronicles date the construction of Funingwei in the 20th year of Hongwu. The Chronicle of Funing Prefecture in the Wanli Period records that Funing Wei was built in the thirteenth year of Hongwu. It can be seen that the information contained in a genealogy of the Shes can also supplement and correct the records of the correct history and local history.

After a large number of data collation and data comparison work, Liu Tingyu restored the ming dynasty village names as much as possible, checked the place names one by one, hoping to verify the hypothesis that these She's families may be related to the Tuntian system of coastal army guards in the early Ming Dynasty. Kung Fu paid off, and Dr. Liu discovered that these Shes did indeed live in the area of the Ming Dynasty's military tun weishou. So the next question is, how did the ancestors of the Shes recorded in the genealogy move from the original Fujian-Guangdong-Gansu border area to the Tuntian area near Fuzhou to live? She continued to dig for clues in the three levels of genealogy, local history, and zhengshi, and found that due to the huge population losses caused by the wars and plagues in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, when the Weishou Tuntian was set up in the early Ming Dynasty, the Weishou Tuntian in various places was arranged near Fuzhou. Thus, the Fuzhou area was a world of soldiers in the early Ming Dynasty, and the area was home to the largest Tuntian in Fujian. In this macro context, the typical representative who is more affected is the left and right guards of Jianning. The Jianning area is mainly mountainous and the cultivated land area is small, so tun tian can only be set up elsewhere. At that time, the most abandoned fields in Fujian were near Fuzhou. It is precisely because of such a historical opportunity that the She ethnic group that originally lived at the junction of Fujian, Guangdong and Gansu was incorporated into the Tuntian Army of the Yuan Dynasty through the Tuntian system of the Yuan Dynasty, because the old army of the Yuan Dynasty was collected in the early Ming Dynasty, thus entering the Tuntian Army system of the Ming Dynasty. And because the Tuntian of the Ming Dynasty Jianning Left and Right Guards was set near Fuzhou, the overall historical migration of the ethnic group from the junction area of Fujian, Guangdong and Gansu to the eastern Fujian region was finally completed. The current Shes are indeed concentrated near Fuzhou.

Liu Tingyu added that the study of molecular anthropology is a strong evidence for her to reconstruct the historical evolution of the She, who have a Yue component, but are not necessarily descendants of the linear Han Dynasty Min Yue people, but should be an ethnic group active in the Nanling ethnic corridor.

The Shes of the Qing Dynasty "Imperial Qing Gongtu"

Ethnic integration in the southeastern frontier region

After combing through the migration process of the She, Liu Tingyu hoped to start from this and pay attention to the ethnic integration in the history of Fujian. She believes that although the Hakka in Fujian insist that they are descendants of the Northern Han people in the Middle Ages, they actually share a lot of common historical heritage with the She. For example, at the linguistic level, Sheyu and Hakka are actually close to each other, and the strengthening of Hakka identity is related to the special political and cultural ecology during the Republic of China.

Dr. Liu believes that after the Hakka and Shes lived together for a period of time in history, there was a divergence, and the time point of this differentiation should be between the Song, Yuan, and Ming. During the Song and Yuan Wars, a large number of Southern Song and Han armies came to the border area of Fujian, Guangdong and Gansu, so that the Hakka family retained a lot of Han identity related to the Song Dynasty. After the integration of this southward migrating Song army group with the original local Shejun, some ethnic identities with different tendencies were developed, and some of the Ancestors of the She, who retained their own Panhuan beliefs, moved to the southern part of Fujian and Southern Zhejiang after entering the Ming Dynasty, making it easier to preserve their own ethnic identity.

Interestingly, in the Hakka, Minnan and Fuzhou people in fujian, they have developed folklore around the "She" is a descendant of Minyue in the period from the Ming to the Qing, such as the legend of the Eighteen Caves of Pingmin in the southern Fujian region, and the "barbarian king" in the story is the blue surname with the characteristics of the She. Even the legend of the "Kaizhang Saint King" in the entire Zhangzhou area was built on the basis of similar legends.

For Fujian, "brute" is a very dangerous word, and "Han" is the opposite. The legends of heroic ancestors from all over Fujian are all stories about how their Han heroic ancestors came to the barbaric land of Fujian and defeated the local barbarian forces. But today's She, similar to the Yaos, are a nomadic people in the Nanling Ethnic Corridor. Even in the Song Dynasty, the Shes were not a group that lived permanently in Zhangzhou, but a group that had been migrating frequently in the Nanling Ethnic Corridor, a dynamically changing ethnic group.

But after a wave of Han Chinese who migrated to Fujian merged with the locals, the Shes were constructed as a cultural symbol. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, various ethnic groups living in Fujian used she as a symbol to create a barbarian image in order to get rid of their association with "barbarians". That's why they need to emphasize that they are descendants of the Han chinese in the north, which is a concept that wants to become the center of China, not necessarily the true history of ethnic integration.

Around the 1950s and 1960s, the Shes were yamada

Afterword

At the end of the lecture, Liu Tingyu shared with the audience the happy experience and interesting stories of fieldwork. She lamented that not every search can have surprises, but sometimes one or two gains can often have a very far-reaching and irreplaceable impact on the entire research. The sense of historical presence obtained by fieldwork is not the experience that can be obtained in the study. Finally, Dr. Liu summed it up with a sentence from Mr. Fu Yiling. "Contrary to the ancients, I do not regret my lack of work, and when I read a book, I have quite a lot of new insights, and I do not hesitate to fight with the me of yesterday." She hopes that her academic research can continue to grow in such a way of life. After the lecture, Dr. Liu responded to many questions from the online audience. The lecture lasted more than two hours and ended successfully with the audience's hesitation.