On The Towns Of Jinnan In Qing Dynasty

The main goal of the paper is to present the regularity of the existence and the development of towns in Jinnan area in Qing Dynasty by studying the towns with the basic theory of historical geography, expected to provide the historic geography foundation for the further town construction as well. We draw the following conclusions by research:With the development of time and space, the show of towns in geography were different and couldn't be regarded as only commercial towns in ancient history, which need to analyze the particular questions. To judge the functions of towns should be the first step in our research with the different standards. It's useful for resolving study difficulties to expand the towns as economic town-centers and noneconomic town-dwelling places. To judge the nature of commercial towns should be avoided two tendencies. The one is to do by generation of surface, and the other is quantitative changes instead of qualitative changes. We should emphasize the research on the relationship between towns and the village, which will be an important way to make a breakthrough in the further research.The relationship between towns and the village of Jinnan in Qing Dynasty has showed that towns belonged to the village but existed superiorities. One hand towns came from garrion towns or ordinary village dwelling places, developing just as the village even depended on the government; The other hand towns were superior to the ordinary village at the population and the scale, moreover because of their too many functions, such as politics economy and military affairs. Towns were established to center authorities of the native soil, In a word, although towns were limited to the village, in fact, they were the key places among the villages.Towns of Jinnan were mainly divided into single function towns and small amount multifunction ones in Qing Dynasty, which were composed of the major commercial towns. Lots of towns lay at valleys and riversides and convenient communications, which were mostly distributed in PuZhouFu. The distance situation from towns to the cities showed a curve distribution and the commercial towns were comcentrated between ten miles to forty miles. There were twelve towns hadn't been recorded but sixty-two were new numbers of Jinnan in late Qing Dynasty, which were mainly consisted of commercial towns and post towns.The development of commercial markets of Jinnan were bogged down and grew worse in Qing Dynasty. As the quantity of county fairs fell, that of the temple fairs would rise. The inner markets lost balance, more city markets but less commercial towns and village markets. A great deal of temple fairs distributed widely had frequent market days, that greatly instead of commercial towns and especially village markets. The unique development that commercial markets stagnated and county fairs entangled and involved temple fairs was deeply related to local natural and humanities environment.