Local matters: Lineage, scholarship and the Xuehaitang academy in the construction of regional identities in south China, 1810--1880

This study seeks to explain how a marginalized segment of Guangzhou's literary elite utilized a foreign scholarly tradition to secure its place in local cultural circles. Ruan Yuan, who founded the Xuehaitang academy in Guangzhou during the 1820s, envisioned the new academy as a means of spreading the influence of his native Jiangnan scholarly tradition of evidential research. Guangzhou's in-migrating and sojourning elite responded with the greatest alacrity to the scholarly and literary agenda promoted at the Xuehaitang. This elite was composed of sons and grandsons of extra-provincial merchants, officials and yamen staff members, as well as Guangzhou's Banner community and the large contingent of scholars from the Hakka-speaking Raying Department in far eastern Guangdong. For this community of urban sojourners in Guangzhou City, the Xuehaitang and its novel curriculum served as a tool in local cultural competition.; This community of sojourners in Guangzhou was quite distinct from the dominant lineages of the Pearl River Delta hinterland. Elite members of the dominant lineages in Daliang, Foshan and the Enclosure district along the West River could demonstrate descent from Delta ancestors who had participated in the construction of Han elite culture during the Ming Dynasty. By and large, scions of the dominant Delta lineages ignored the new Xuehaitang and its imported scholarly and literary discourses. In contrast to the sojourning urban elite, members of the dominant Delta lineages could muster impressive cultural and economic resources, largely centered in the lineage itself.; Nevertheless, Xuehaitang scholars managed to usurp local “Yue” or “Lingnan” cultural symbols and thereby legitimize their own place in local society. Through anthology compilation projects and literary exercises, Xuehaitang scholars reinvented local tradition, searching out predecessors whom they resembled, or perhaps portraying predecessors to look like themselves, and finding a nascent tradition of evidential research. In short, the anthologists, poets and classicists based at the Xuehaitang redrew the cultural map of Guangdong, placing themselves at the center. Thus, the great flourishing of Guangdong elite culture in the nineteenth century was largely due to the efforts of a cultural elite with only tenuous ties to the local elite culture of the Ming.