On The Historical Economic Geography In Tujia Area Of Hubei,Hunan,Guizhou Provinces And Chongqing Municipality

The fields of most studies on regional historical geography are natural area,administrative area,economic or cultural area,and few people take the distribution of nationalities as their reseach domains.This paper concentrates on the areas where Tujia people mainly inhabited of Hubei,Hunan,Guizhou provinces and Chongqin municipality,so it is the beginning of a study which takes the distribution of one nationality as its research field.The study has its realistic sense too.Through it we can get some laws of economic development in Tujia areas and provide intellectual support for the development of these places which are one part of the Development of West China.The paper has seven parts.They are the introduction,five chapters and the summary.The introduction delivers the necessity,importance and the present condition of the research topic,then shows the characteristics,the system,the time limit,the research regions of the paper and the methods the author uses.The first chapter states the factors influencing the economic development of Tujia areas.The author briefly discusses the geographical conditions,the evolution of the administrative areas,the changes of regional policy and the nationalities, population, tyaffic etc. On the one hand,physical geography provided rich resources for the economic developnent;On the other hand,the inaccessibility of the mountainous regions restricted the development.In history,Tujia areas had been subordinate to different administrative areas and were borders of them.The regional policy had experienced three stages,that is,vassal prefecture,Tusi system ( which means system of oppointing national minority hereditary headmen in the Yuan,Ming,Qing dynasties ) and the system after the bureacratization of native officiers in Qing dynasty.Because later Han,Miao,Dong,Bai,Yao people and Mongols moved in,Tujia areas where Tujia people lived in a compact communities,were interlockingly inhabited by Tujia,Han and Miao people but mainly by Tujia people. In historical times,the edges and places where were developed earlier in Tujia areas were areas Tujia people mainly inhabitedTujia people mainly inhabited and there were less people lived in the centre of these areas.Though Tujia areas had poor transport facilities,there were some progress in land and water comunication.The second chapter is the agricultural geography of Tujia areas.The author mainly talks about the evolution of agriculture structure ^ the distribution of the main crops,the regional differences of the agricultural development,the characteristics of the agricultural geography and the factors influenced the development of it.The structural evolution included the evolution of the agricultural types and that of the stereoscopic structure.The evolution of the types meant cultivation gradually occupied the leading position,fishing,hunting and gathering's importance came down,and at the same time forestry and animal husbandry slowly developed.The evolution of the stereoscopic structure was embodied by the cultivation's moving forward from river valley to mountainous ragions,hunting gathering forestry and animal husbandry's moving to the moutainous regions under the pressure of cultivation,and fishing's sticking to the river valleys.In history,the dry farming crops were staple and the rice-growing areas were small.The crops were horizontally and vertically distyibuted.There were two big agricultural regions in Tujia areas.one was the cultivation region and the other was the traditional region in which fishing,hunting,gathering and cuitivation existed side by side. The changes of the agriculture were characterized by the enlargement of the cultivation and the reduction of the traditional agriculture. With the development of the agriculture,which was accelerated by Han people,Tujia people's traditional fishing,hunting and gathering continued as well.The traditional features of their farming such as beating drums and gongs as weeding,women going in for farming,slash-and-burn cultivation, cease-farming etc,were retained over...