REGIONAL APPROACH TO CHINESE HISTORY
11
Thirdly, historians have tended to think of recent Chinese history largely in terms of the "impact of the West", forgetting that for most Chinese the foreigner and his activities were of little real importance. They may have been important to Peking and to some members of the bureaucracy in certain areas of the empire, but the barbarian and his doings could not have loomed large in the day-to-day life of the average Chinese villager or even the average Chinese official. Yet most studies of nineteenth-century Chinese history have been concerned with the Opium Wars, the "scramble for concessions", the Boxer Uprising, the impact of Western thought on Chinese intellectual history. Even the Taiping Rebellion has been thought of largely in terms of its Christian origins and its impact on Sino-Western relations and little has been done, until recently, to treat it as a Chinese phenomenon, which ultimately it was. But what relevance did all this have for the fisherman in his junk off Lantau or the peasant farmer in Szechuan?
If there is any validity to the above comments about distortions in Chinese history, it may be that a useful corrective device would be a regional approach to Chinese history. We might be able to gain a better insight into the life and times of nineteenth-century China, for example, by limiting the scope of our studies to cohesive geographic and cultural areas. This would tend to neutralize the all-China, or north-China bias. It would put the impact of the West in its proper perspective. Above all, it might provide answers to the questions raised at the very beginning of this paper: for the person living at a given place and at a given time, what was really “going on”?
As an experiment, I have chosen the Hong Kong-Macao-Canton area of south China. This has the advantage of being comparatively small and relatively homogeneous in terms of language, culture, and economic base. Its people were aware of their regional cohesiveness, especially in comparison to outside-province people, though even within this area there were racial and linguistic differences. I have limited my study, more or less, to the first half of the nineteenth century.
Politically, the area approximated the territory included in the hsien,3 or districts, which occupied both sides of the Canton River estuary. The districts constituted about two-thirds of the
REGIONAL APPROACH TO CHINESE HISTORY
11
Thirdly, historians have tended to think of recent Chinese history largely in terms of the "impact of the West", forgetting that for most Chinese the foreigner and his activities were of little real importance. They may have been important to Peking and to some members of the bureaucracy in certain areas of the empire, but the barbarian and his doings could not have loomed large in the day to day life of the average Chinese villager or even the average Chinese official. Yet most studies of nineteenth century Chinese history have been concerned with the Opium Wars, the "scramble for concessions", the Boxer Uprising, the impact of Western thought on Chinese intellectual history. Even the Taiping Rebellion has been thought of largely in terms of its Christian origins and its impact on Sino-Western relations and little has been done, until recently, to treat it as a Chinese phenomenon, which ultimately it was. But what relevance did all this have for the fisherman in his junk off Lantau or the peasant farmer in Szechuan?
If there is any validity to the above comments about distortions in Chinese history, it may be that a useful corrective device would be a regional approach to Chinese history. We might be able to gain a better insight into the life and times of nineteenth century China, for example, by limiting the scope of our studies to cohesive geographic and cultural areas. This would tend to neutralize the all-China, or north-China bias. It would put the impact of the West in its proper perspective. Above all, it might provide answers to the questions raised at the very beginning of this paper: for the person living at a given place and at a given time, what was really “going on”?
As an experiment I have chosen the Hong Kong-Macao-Canton area of south China. This has the advantage of being compara- tively small, and relatively homogeneous in terms of language, culture, and economic base. Its people were aware of their re- gional cohesiveness, especially in comparison to outside-province- people, though even within this area there were racial and linguistic differences. I have limited my study, more or less, to the first half of the nineteenth century.
Politically, the area approximated the territory included in the hsien,3 or districts, which occupied both sides of the Canton River estuary. The districts constituted about two-thirds of the
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