Study Of Social History Of Settlement In East Fujian Province

The study of new social history highlights the creed that "the society is a community in which people live", and tries to reproduce the historical framework of the development of the settlement in an empirical study. This essay attempts to reconstruct the progress of the community itself of the settlement in the midst of local history with the ancient steles and interviews which collected by the author in Sanxi village, Changle county, Fujian province, and to discover the characteristic of culture under the local background with the dispute of elements that conclude clans, belief, marriage, subsistence and, etc.Sanxi village locates in Changle county, east of Fujian province, in which people move and the population increase, and becomes a pattern of which few Clans growing exuberantly while many others shrinking and margining gradually, among which the clans of Pan, Chen and Yang belong to the former and that of Ding, Dong and Liao inferred to the later by the reason of history and geography elements since Tang dynasty. The organizations of every family which belong to certain clans play an extraordinary role in the process of the development of Sanxi. The formation of certain clan accompanies with the process in which the settlement of Sanxi shaped as a spatial entity. The distribution of local resources, moreover, altered with the changing of the leading power of the community, which reflects the subtle connection between the local authority and the progress of the settlement.First part of this essay mentions the reason of writing the paper and the methodology which contains the means of research and interview, and the academic reviewing of settlement study and social history. The second and third chapters, each discusses the process of which the settlements of Sanxi formatting a spatial entity gradually from a diachronic vision, and on the other hand, finds the cultural characteristics of the settlement as a whole, are the core of the entire narrative. The fourth chapter debates on the integrity of settlement from an angle of culture reason, is based on the facts which being precise in the discussion of last two chapters. The final part is the fifth chapter, outlines the progress and pattern of development of Sanxi in history, and points the value and insufficiency of the study as a conclusion.