Writing Changshu County Gazetteers

This paper belongs to the study of difangzhi地方志,which is typically translated as“local gazetteer”or“local history.”It is generally believed that the genre’s origin can be traced to the Han dynasty that local leading families tried to record the prosperity of the land where they were living and to secure their place as leading local families.By the thirteenth century,gazetteers had attained the scope and form in which they were found down to the present,arranged by topics such as topography,customs and sights,government records,famous local personages and literature.It is worth noting that local gazetteers are not closed text.They would be revised at regular intervals.Moreover,the groups that dominated the writing of gazetteers,such as local officials and literati,were living in particular dynasties and were affected by certain cultural policies and ideologies during that time.Thus,we can grasp the transmutation of the phenomenon of local memory.The questions explored in this paper required detail reading of the gazetteers of Changshu County which belongs to Suzhou Prefecture.Thus,the changes of historical writing can be found,which will shed light on the process of writing local history.This paper starts with several questions as these: Why local literati chose to take part in writing gazetteers? How did local elites connect to and interact with central government policy? How did local groups writing and imagine history? To answer these questions,this paper consists of two parts,centered on biographies of Qu Shisi and Qian Qianyi.The first part examines the compiling of gazetteers in Changshu since Southern Song Dynasty.The gazetteers in the Southern Song and Yuan were credited to local officials,when local literati showed little interest in local history.Things changed in the Ming,when the cooperation between local officials and literati was improved.In the late Ming,when there was little official impetus to keep gazetteers of Changshu up to date,many scholars tried to write and publish local gazetteers.However,imperial gazetteer projects took place of the writing of local history by local literati in the Qing.Although the gazetteers seem like a mix of miscellaneous information at first glance,they were produced with specific agendas in mind,which varies from gazetteer to gazetteer in different time and social context.By paying attention to the process of writing and reading a gazetteer as a whole,one can figure out the subtle changes,and figure out how the editors and writers understand the time.The second part starts with a case study of the historical writing and politics behind the story of Qu Shisi瞿式耜in Changshu County Gazetteers.The biography of Qu was made up of three different historical writings:Qu’s autobiography,accounts of Qu family and Qu’s friends.The editors of Changshu County Gazetteers were affected by the narrative discourse at that time.However,at the beginning of the Qing,Qu’s martyrdom was politically sensitive.Based on their own understanding of political taboos,Qu’s biography and related historical facts were rearranged.By the middle of the Qing,as Qu was praised by Emperor Qianlong,the related writings in Changshu County Gazetteers also changed.In addition,private history continues to have an impact on the writing of local gazetteers.Then the paper continues the analysis of Qian Qianyi钱谦益through the lens of the politics in Qing times.Qian was undoubtedly one of the most gifted writers of the Ming-Qing transition,and he was also the most important person in Changshu County.However,Qian was disdained by many in the public as an opportunist since Qian turned his allegiance to the conquering Qing.Therefore,the editor of Changshu County gazetteers had to guide others to understand Qian.From the early Qing to Mid-Qing,the writings and memory of Qian had changed subtly,which provided a valuable reference point for early Qing social development.Emperor Qianlong’s comprehensive"blocking"of Qian shattered this mode of emplotment to some extent.But the Changshu County Gazetteers did not completely erase Qian’s traces.As the Qing government’s dominance of the ideological and cultural fields gradually weakened,the content related to Qian reappeared in the local chronicles.Through a diachronic investigation of the compilation of local gazetteers in Changshu,this paper attempts to outline the process in which local scholars and literati participated in the compilation and production of local knowledge during the Ming and Qing dynasties.Afterall,the editors of local gazetteers could not get rid of the time they were in,and the writing strategies they adopted reflected their own knowledge and imagination of local and nation.