Zhao Shiyu (Zhang Jing)
The story of Gangnam always seems to be endless. How to tell a "new Jiangnan history" in the endless narrative? Recently, Zhao Shiyu, a professor in the Department of History at Peking University, gave an answer to his new book, "The Return of the Fierce General: A History of the New Jiangnan of Dongting Dongshan". Walking on Dongshan, Zhao Shiyu paid attention to the landing of jiangnan water people and water people from the everywhere fierce general hall, and thus unfolded, telling a hidden history of Jiangnan. In an interview with the Shanghai Review of Books, Zhao Shiyu claimed to be a "layman in the study of Jiangnan history", and once again affirmed that he did not study folk beliefs, and probably those who misunderstood this were more or less limited by the title of the book, in fact, zhao Shiyu was not a layman in terms of writing stories.
"The Return of the Fierce General: The History of the New Jiangnan in Dongting Dongshan", by Zhao Shiyu, Social Science Literature Publishing House, February 2022, 427 pages, 118.00 yuan
In 2016, you published an article in Exploration and Controversy about the history of the Jiangnan region, global history and historical anthropology, and concluded with a special lecture, "The breakthrough in the study of the Jiangnan region may lie in the overall history." And "The Return of the Fierce General" can be said to be a practice and an example of historical anthropology in the overall history of Jiangnan. Did you already have the idea of writing such a book at the time of writing this article?
Zhao Shiyu: That article was a conference paper, because I was a layman in the study of Jiangnan history, so I mainly wanted to talk about the possibility of historical anthropology studying Jiangnan, and by the way, I wanted to talk about my views on the study of global history in China. In fact, there is not much content in the article that involves Jiangnan, you can replace the "Jiangnan" in the title of the article with any place, and its starting point lies in the methodology.
In that article, I used the term "Jiangnan regional history" to emphasize the difference between the perspective and method of general Jiangnan history research, or to refer to the practice of studying Jiangnan with the concept of regional social history or even the concept of regional research. There are many ways to study Jiangnan, but I hope that no matter which approach is adopted, we can have a "cultural self-awareness" of our own approach, that is, to truly understand why we do this, rather than ignorantly following behind our predecessors. After figuring it out, we will continue to follow this path, and even carry it forward; if we don't understand it, then we may have to consider another way.
At that time, I didn't think that one day I would study Jiangnan, because the academic accumulation of Jiangnan studies was too rich. In the era when we were studying, Jiangnan in the Ming and Qing dynasties was almost half of the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties. I can't completely attribute the reason to the research hotspots of the mid-twentieth century, because looking at the list of Ming and Qing scholars, think about the proportion of those who came from Jiangnan and their activities, which really account for almost half of the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Another situation is that, with the exception of a very small number of mathematicians such as Professor Li Bozhong, Professor Wang Zhenzhong, and foreign scholars, most of the scholars of Jiangnan history are Jiangnan people, who were born and raised in Si, know the Wuyue dialect, and even they are witnesses and witnesses of Jiangnan history, and their life experience will easily judge that the conclusions we have painstakingly studied are wrong. When Professor Xie Xiang was preparing to write his doctoral dissertation, we were talking about this problem in our hotel room in Shanghai, and the study of Jiangnan history was like a mountain, and it was not easy to surpass it.
The latter point is very important to what I call the "history of the Jiangnan region", because many people think that it is enough to study Jiangnan through literature, which is the general study of Jiangnan history that I mentioned earlier. Taking Japanese scholars as an example, Masao Mori, Atsutoshi Hamashima, and Mio Kishimoto are all people who study the history of Jiangnan, of which Hamashima Atsutoshi runs the most in Jiangnan, Masao Mori follows, and Kishimoto Mitsuo has the least, and this difference is evident in the works of the three of them. If we really want to understand the personality of Gangnam people or The Gangnam area, of course, the more grounded the better, so that you are facing Gangnam that is different from other regions. If we only look at the collected works of Jiangnan scholars, if we are not particularly careful or know them very well, they are similar to the texts written by other scholars. If you look at Feng Menglong's edited "Mountain Songs", it is very different, but it has been transformed to have a little literary popularity; compared with Gu Jiegang's "Wu Ge Jia Collection", it is closer to the actual record. Both of them are Suzhou people, and they are also considered scholars, but they are more down-to-earth, so the Jiangnan that we see is not the same as other places in Jiangnan, or the Jiangnan that foreigners can understand at a glance.
Let's take another example that is easier to understand. When I was young, the Ming historians were very concerned about the issue of Jiangnan's emphasis, which of course was a matter of Jiangnan history research. However, the problem of the conscription system or finance is mainly a national problem, and the so-called heavy or light is a problem that arises from the perspective of the state. In the discussion, Professor Fan Jinmin put forward a very different view in the 1990s, one point is that Jiangnan is a continuation of the previous regime's measures in the region, and the other is that this heavy burden is constantly decreasing, in addition to the adjustment of national policies, one of the reasons is that the polder has caused an increase in land area, and there is also the fact that although Jiangnan has less land, the development of industry and commerce has enabled people to deal with it by folding. In most cases, we have no way of knowing how the author's innovative views are derived, and these views seem to be derived from the literature, but my feeling is that if the author is not a native of Jiangnan, he will not think like this, or will not understand the literature in this way.
As for why global history is mentioned, it is mainly to think that most of the domestic scholars who study global history are from the field of world history, and most of the scholars in the field of Chinese history study maritime trade, and few study the hinterland of China. It is rare to study global history like Professor Li Bozhong. Some scholars in South China Studies start from South China to study the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and then enter the research context of global history, so they take regional studies as the basis of global history, which is an important approach to global history research. So the main title of my article is "Studies in China," to borrow From Geertz's phrase "study in villages." I mentioned in the epilogue of "The Return of the Mighty General" that the flapping of butterfly wings in the Amazon rainforest caused Hurricane Texas, which is also the meaning of our regional research is to study the flapping of butterfly wings in a specific location, but it is more important to understand why and how it caused hurricanes in Texas. The study of regional history should be the history of the whole, and the history of the world is the history of the whole.
Therefore, although at that time I did not study or even think about the idea of Jiangnan history, the basic position was very clear, and this position would be reflected in both "The Return of the Fierce General" and other works.
You said that the first time I went to Dongshan was in 2018 with David Ke and He Xi, all of whom were "experts" who paid attention to water people and ran fields. Can you talk about your intuition and intuition on your first trip to Dongshan?
Zhao Shiyu: For me personally, Mr. David Ke and He Xi were the forerunners in the study of water people, but when we went to Dongshan that time, although we all knew that there were many people who took boats as their home, I did not have to discuss the idea of water people in my mind. We went to some villages that time, saw several fierce general halls, saw the Xi Clan Ancestral Hall, Lu Xiang, Xuanyuan Palace, and also went to Shihu Lake and the upper mountain. Before that, I attended the work conference on the compilation of the "China Canal Chronicle" in Hangzhou, and walked a section of the Zhejiang East Canal and several villages in Xiaoshan. After that, he went to Suichang in southern Zhejiang to make a front stop for the upcoming advanced seminar on historical anthropology. In general, it was a trip to the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions, and there was no direct research purpose, and we did not seem to discuss the topic of water people when we were in Dongshan.
In fact, this is the normal work of a few of our old friends. We often make an appointment to walk around the country, generally there is no clear research purpose, sometimes a research team to do the survey, we are not members of this team, we will also run; sometimes it is the field investigation point of doctoral students, we point out on the one hand, perform the duties of a mentor, on the other hand, we also increase our own knowledge; sometimes it is a personal interest, such as I think I can't read Liu Zhiwei and Zheng Zhenman's articles, I ask them to take me to run away from their research sites, face to face for help; and we have not been, But I think it is very important, I must personally run, a little touched, but I will certainly not study it in this life. For example, in June 2021, we ran for five days in the Liaodong region to see what the local society that had emerged in Manchuria was like. I wrote a field trip about this trip and posted it in Jiangxi Normal University Daily, No. 1, 2022.
Just like when we read books, we read a book that is not directly related to one of our studies, and it must be much more than the book we read to write an essay. If you read a book that is directly related to it just for one study, and then read a related book for another study, and other books are rarely read, it will definitely greatly affect the depth and breadth of the study. I always say that I am not so much a scholar as a literati, which means that I am willing to read first and second to write books; mainly to acquire knowledge, not to give knowledge to others. Why is walking thousands of miles and reading thousands of books at the same time? Not only because of the relationship between knowledge and action, but also because the path of knowledge of the two is the same.
So to be honest, the first time I went to Dongshan, although I was deeply impressed by the avalanche of the Fierce General Hall, it did not immediately make me think of studying Dongshan, so I did not immediately search and collect information related to this place. I just think that as the origin of Biluo spring tea, white sand loquat and Taihu hairy crab, there are not only beautiful scenery, food, and monuments, but also very few tourists, and there is no nightlife on the street at night, very quiet, feeling that the atmosphere we describe in ancient books is more in line with my imagination of the Ming and Qing Dynasties Jiangnan compared with the Jiangnan area that has been urbanized, including the very commercial, tourist-like Zhouzhuang, Wuzhen and other Jiangnan ancient towns.
During the Spring Festival in 2019, it was my second visit to Dongshan, which was the right day of the "Raising the General" activity, and I was willing to specifically go to see the ritual process of a place at a specific time, indicating that I began to seriously want to understand a place, but whether I could do a study was not clear at the time.
On the sixth day of the first lunar month, "Rushing lake mouth" and Sloppy General Will go out on the patrol route
Speaking of water people, the most well-known is the "Yan family" in the coastal area of Fujian, Guangdong, and a little more cognition, going north to Xianggan, as for Jiangnan, it has become a blind spot for most people to know water people. What do you think is causing this cognitive blind spot?
Zhao Shiyu: The cognitive blind spot about people on the water is caused by many factors. The first is the lack of historical information about the floaters, in fact, because all the mobile population is difficult to control by the state, in a continental agricultural country, they are not the main taxpayer population of the state, so they will not become the focus of the state's attention. At the same time, the floating population of the water people is relatively scattered in life, and it is difficult to form a group like the nomadic peoples on the grassland, so there is no group identity, and there is no tribal society and even a country like the grassland people. In the agricultural countries of the mainland, there is a clear distinction between the scattered floating population and the settled agricultural population, and the former is difficult to become a state household, so it is possible to climb the ladder of success in the upper echelons, so it is natural to become a marginal group and not be concerned by the people who hold the hegemony of writing.
Secondly, if it is only because of the lack of historical materials and researchers to ignore it, it is understandable, but if people really think that we need to pay attention to the water people, we will always try our best to find the clues of the water people in history, the problem is that the researchers may not pay attention to them at all. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, Chen Youyi's subordinates had many water people, and many of the "pirates" who cruised along the southeast coast and even Southeast Asia in the late Ming Dynasty were also water people, but we often forget their identity when recounting their history. Professor Luo Xin recently mentioned in a lecture that the traditional representation of jiangnan development in the historical narrative during the Eastern Jin Dynasty and southern dynasties is plausible and contrary to common sense, and he believes that the main force of Jiangnan development should be the locals, not the Central Plains people in Nandu. Since the development of Jiangnan is to a large extent the process of the formation of water towns into land, it is in this process that a large number of people on the water have become people on the shore, and the identity of the main force of these developments has also been forgotten, precisely because those Central Plains immigrants have the identity of the settled/registered population that is more worthy of being recorded and told, and have the legitimacy to become the protagonists of history.
Why are the coastal people of Liangguang and Fujian more widely known? It's a really good question that I haven't really thought about and studied. My guess is that whether it is Xianggan or Jiangnan, whether in the rivers or lakes, the water people are active in the Yangtze River and its tributaries, their activity space is smaller than the coastal water people, and they are constantly becoming shore people and becoming settled farmers, just like the development of polders in the Tang Dynasty and the southern Jiangsu Province, the two lakes in the Southern Song Dynasty, and the lakes and embankments in Jiangxi. The coastal delta alluvial plains are a bit special, so the development of Shatian in the Pearl River Delta in the Ming Dynasty also attracted a large number of water people to land. But many coastal areas do not have such conditions, do not have a large amount of land that can be developed, so they have to live on the sea, and they need to explore the wider overseas world, which makes their influence become cosmopolitan. In this way, their footprints reached Southeast Asia, South Asia, and even Europe and North America, so their symbols such as Mazu in Fujian went all over the world, and their influence as the earliest foreign trade merchants and overseas settlers exceeded a smaller region. In the past, it was always said that Wei Yuan was the first person to open his eyes to see the world, and I think the water talents along the coast were. In this case, during the Republic of China period, some famous scholars began to investigate and study the water people in Guangdong and Fujian, and in recent decades, there have been South China studies scholars with Guangdong and Fujian as the research object to continue the efforts of their predecessors, and the study of water people must be the proper meaning of the topic of South China studies, and people's understanding of the water people here has increased.
Of course, in recent years, some scholars such as Zhang Xiaoye, Xu Bin, Chen Yao, Liu Shigu and others have also made excellent research on the water people in the Two Lakes area and the fishermen with nine surnames in Zhejiang, and the same theme papers edited by He Xi also have research on the water people in the Weishan Lake area of Shandong and the Taihu Lake area of Jiangnan, so this cognitive blind spot is gradually being broken. Personally, I think that the target of these studies is not the water people in a certain area, but also "The Return of the Fierce General", we are trying to sort out the social structure process of a specific area by recognizing the activities of this group of people. With the same philosophy in mind, we have made great strides in the goal of regional studies moving towards the whole through three generations of efforts.
Jiangnan has always had many ghosts and gods, and many scholars in the academic circles have paid attention to the layered deification of Jiangnan folk beliefs. In the book, you peel off the "modern" identity of Liu Meng as a locust repellent god, and find that he is the original belief of the water people, so you pay attention to the landing of the water people and the water people in Jiangnan, associate the faith with the agricultural development, commercial development, ethnic groups, and clans in Jiangnan, and tell a whole history of Jiangnan. So if it wasn't for General Liu Meng, do you think you would find another wedge to tell this story?
Zhao Shiyu: This question has helped me clarify a point to the readers of "The Return of the Fierce General", and it is what I have always wanted to emphasize, this book is not a study of folk beliefs, but is different from scholars who are engaged in religious studies or folk beliefs. Since I studied the Dongyue Temple in Beijing more than twenty years ago, there have always been people who think that I am studying folk beliefs, but I deny them all, often making people unclear. As asked, the worship of General Liu Meng is just a "wedge" or an entry point for me to discuss the history of Jiangnan.
At least as far as my education is concerned, most people agree that research should be small and big, neither big, nor small, let alone small. The latter three options are either inoperable or reduce the value of the study. Of course, this "small" wedge or entry point is not chosen arbitrarily, it is deeply investigated and carefully considered. In "The Return of the Fierce General", I said that for a person who has just come to Dongshan, as long as he goes deep into the streets and alleys or the countryside, he will find that the Fierce General Hall abounds and makes a deep impression. This shows that the Hall of The Mighty General is very important to the locals, and it can be said that there is no second sight of the historical relics that can be compared with it. When David Ko talked about "liturgical signs", he gave many kinds of examples, but in Dongshan, the Mammoth Hall is the most obvious, indicating that this is the most important cultural landscape in the lives of Dongshan people. Some people would say that a large number of tea trees, including loquat and arbutus and other fruit trees, as well as fish ponds are also important cultural attractions here, right? Yes, but these can be easily seen elsewhere in Gangnam as well.
Zhao Shiyu "running field" in Dongshan
Of course, this is only in Dongshan, and I can't say that the entire Jiangnan region is "full of villages listening to Liu Meng". Well, at least I can always use it as a wedge or an entry point to study Dongshan. However, when my research began, I found that the Mengjuntang did not only exist in Dongshan, my gaze extended outward from Dongshan, from the eastern part of Suzhou or the east bank of Taihu Lake to the direction of Shanghai, and found that many places had the worship of Liu Meng, although many places were due to the expansion of urbanization - before this was agriculture or water villages - the existing Mengjuntang was not as much as Dongshan, but the hook literature was still common in the historical period. In particular, General Liu Meng is only a representative, and there are many people of the same or similar nature as him, such as the Five Spirits, such as the Seven Governors of Jin Yuan, and even the earlier Wu Zixu. These are all talked about to a greater or lesser extent in "The Return of the Fierce General". In this way, I can discuss from Dongshan to Jiangnan, so Dongshan has become a "wedge" or entry point.
In addition to General Liu Meng, is it possible to find other "wedges" or entry points to discuss the history of Jiangnan or the history of people in the process of becoming a land in a water town? I think there must be. Of course, this involves the methodological question of historical anthropology.
As I said in another article, historical anthropology differs from traditional historical research in that researchers can often discover historical research topics from the current living world. What I saw in Dongshan was the Fierce General Hall, and others were not necessarily. What about the rest of Gangnam? Not necessarily. Mr. Fei Xiaotong's "Gangcun Economy" also has a fierce general hall in the open string bow, although he mentioned it, but he did not take this as a starting point, of course, he mainly focused on the rural livelihood model. Geographers' field observations may first focus on local land-use patterns, such as trees, tea planting, fish ponds, polders, and so on. There are also anthropologists who study the water people of Jiangnan, starting from the fishermen's sacrificial organization Gongmen or Tangmen; folklorists discuss the treasure scrolls and Xuanjuan activities in Jiangnan, involving the "Buddha Head", "Buddha Lady" and the Congregation of the Temple, all starting from the specific problems of the discipline and extending. However, although historical anthropology starts from the observation of reality, it also needs to return to the investigation of regional history, so it must return to the academic historical context of Jiangnan history research, so it will inevitably involve important historical themes such as state systems, events, regional development, and social structure. I think that to discuss the activities of people in the process of becoming a land in Jiangnan's water towns, we must find an entry point from real life, and Liu Meng's kind of gods are indeed very rare, of course, taking the temple propaganda activities as the entry point is also similar, because there are documents from historical periods, especially folk documents, as a support.
"How do people on the water get ashore" is the most important question in "The Return of the Fierce General", and it is also a problem that historical anthropology will face in the study of water people. So, generally speaking, what kind of motivation and in what way will people on the water go ashore?
Zhao Shiyu: I said in "The Return of the Fierce General" that this has both internal motivation and external pull. In fact, what matters is that the people on the water are not the final destination they expect? If you look at the results, the answer is almost yes, because there are fewer and fewer people floating on the water, and even the fishermen now most of them are already living on the shore.
How do people on the water get ashore? I believe that in different historical periods and different places, the process and method of disembarkation will be different, of course, the earlier the period, the more unclear the specific situation. I mentioned in the book that the state's inclusion of floaters in the household registration is an important manifestation of the external pull, because if the floaters are always wandering around, the state will lose its meaning in incorporating them into the household registration. Of course, at the beginning, they may be included in the fishermen or boat households, rather than fully settled households, the main purpose may not be to collect a small number of fishing lessons, in addition to strengthening control, it is more important to let them undertake military service, such as undertaking water transportation or something, or military service. For this way, the establishment of fishermen's communes or fishermen's brigades in the 1950s will be very rich, and those who are interested can study them. In the past two years, due to ecological protection, the Yangtze River Basin has been banned from fishing for ten years, and it is believed that the few people on the water will all become shore people.
Of course, from the perspective of the entire history of China, the water people ashore is mainly because of agricultural development, more and more land, the water will be smaller and smaller, and the livelihood and lifestyle of the water people will of course change. There is both the external pull of the country and the choices of the water people themselves. In the case of the former, the state needs more agricultural labour for financial reasons; in the case of the latter, a relatively stable way of earning a living can be obtained, and even social identity can be changed by becoming a household. Even in coastal areas where land resources are scarce, water people can obtain the identity and status of merchants, but in the end they still need a foothold, that is, nodes in the commercial network, dock towns or port cities are such places, which is the point of view in the final chapter of "The Return of the Fierce General".
When I first read "The Fierce General Returns Home", I thought that revealing for you the water people and the water people on the water in Jiangnan was writing the "pre-history" of the Jiangnan (town economy, scholar culture) that we are familiar with. At the same time, I also have a question, why when we talk about Jiangnan, it is easy to think of the small bridges and the land of flowing water and fish and rice, but we ignore the social history of Jiangnan as a water town? Later, when I thought about it again, I felt that maybe the "small bridge flowing water" and "the land of fish and rice" were not really representative of the image of Jiangnan Water Town. If you could say it, what would you think it would be?
Zhao Shiyu: Indeed, this book can be roughly said to be the history of jiangnan at present, but it is also the other side of the "familiar" history of Jiangnan, the relatively "unfamiliar" or obscured by the grand narrative of Jiangnan history. It is not wrong to say that "small bridges and flowing water" are the image of Jiangnan, but this is mainly the image of Jiangnan town, the image of the literati. The "Land of Fish and Rice" is indeed a Jiangnan image, and Guo Jianguang's song "Reed Flowers Blooming, Rice Fragrant, Shore Willows In Rows" in the model play "Shajiabang" shows the polder agriculture of Yangcheng Lake and the landscape of Ludang along the lake. However, we also need to know how such a landscape was formed, that is, the process of water and land.
Jiajing "Wu Yizhi Dongting Dongshan Map"
On the other hand, even Jiangnan cannot be solidified into a homogeneous imagination, and Jiangnan is not only an image, but can have different and diverse images. Especially if we put Jiangnan in a dynamic historical process to observe, the land of small bridges and flowing water may once be a zeal country, and the land of fish and rice may once be a lake with fish and rice. Just as in many places in Jiangnan today, the former small bridges and the land of fish and rice have disappeared, becoming a forest of high-rise buildings and crisscrossing road networks, but it cannot be denied that the former is purely illusory.
The task of historians is to try to recreate the vanished human past through the various materials that remain today, both written and non-written. In the Book of Han, it is said that "jiangnan is vast, or fire cultivates water." The people eat fish and rice, and fish and hunt mountains for their business", which is probably the scene of the Eastern Han Dynasty, which is quite different from later generations, at least farming and agriculture are not as large as later generations. In the poetry and song of the Han and Tang literati, the small bridge flowing water in Jiangnan is not a very common theme, but in the poetry of the Song Dynasty, this literary image suddenly mushroomed, which is completely consistent with the historian's understanding of the development of Jiangnan in the five generations. Of course, during the Two Song Dynasties, this scene was not widespread in Jiangnan. Therefore, if it is not considered in a specific era, it is difficult to abstractly summarize the imagery of Jiangnan Water Town.
Most importantly, whether it is the small bridge flowing water or the land of fish and rice, it shows a relaxed and comfortable "sense of happiness". But I know that behind this expression of "happiness" there has always been another life experience, that is, countless bitterness and suffering.
The final chapter of "The Return of the Fierce General", "From Dongshan to Shanghai", is a small place and a small group of Dongshan Cave court merchants who unfold a picture of the big world through waterways and trade, focusing on trade. I would like to ask, back in the cultural community of Jiangnan, is the story of the water people still the narrative we are familiar with?
Zhao Shiyu: Whether in Jiangnan or in other water towns, the story of the water people has not been a narrative that we are familiar with. On the one hand, the life experiences of ordinary people have never been the dominant historical narrative, let alone the stories of the people on the water; on the other hand, although the stories about them are not blank in historical documents, they are often ignored. As the number of people on the water is decreasing, and as people are always selectively amnesiac about their own history, they are increasingly fading from the concern of historians and even ordinary people. Although in the recent Shanghai epidemic, people have paid a lot of attention to the life course of ordinary people, but at that time, this journey and its attention may not be able to occupy a prominent proportion in the future historical narrative, if this will become a fact, it will be really sad.
Speaking of Shanghai, when the "Ten Mile Ocean Field" that began in the late Qing Dynasty and the "magic capital" of the twenty-first century aroused the favor of countless adventurers or investors, the obscure early pioneers who made this dock city were gradually forgotten, and Shanghai was only one of the many, large and small water town docks, but its geographical location and specific era opportunities made it unique, and the history of Shanghai was only a continuation of the history of Dongshan and the history of Ningbo. After we understand the historical process described in "The Return of the Fierce General"—and of course, there are different scholars who have shown this process through different perspectives—this should be the familiar history that our fathers and grandparents personally experienced. Therefore, I never think that there is a "cultural community in Jiangnan", if there is, it must be due to some kind of artificial need to be constructed.
The purpose of historians' research should be to forget memories.