348
BOOK REVIEWS
China. Inevitably, and by intention, such persons were ignorant of the local scene and background, and usually did not speak its dialect.
The contents of district gazetteers were usually fairly uniform, taking in the principal subjects such as history, geography, the economy and government, and providing extended or contracted accounts of these and other topics according to the interest and degree of industry shown by the compilers. The gazetteer also provided much information about the worthies of the district whether scholars, aged persons, religious figures, chaste widows and other females, or meritorious officials who had served there in past centuries. Interesting works on the district or by its natives were also included. Our Hsinan Gazetteer is a fairly typical product of the scholar-gentry's contribution to the writing of local history, albeit far from being the best example of the kind.
Baker and Ng's work is well-done. The chapters are concise and the notes and complementary material are comprehensive, useful, wide-ranging and enlightening. The material itself is varied and interesting. The book includes useful tables showing the contents of the 1688 and 1819 editions of the gazetteer (pp 5-16 and 128-130), and there are also maps reproduced from the two editions, showing the county, the district city, and coastal defences, all typical of those found in local histories of the Ch'ing period and before. Useful additional features are a reproduction of the Italian missionary Volonteri's bilingual map of 1866 (map 9) and Dr. Baker's production of two special maps (Nos. 7 and 8). The latter show the dynamics of local settlement and population growth, and their geographical variation, and greatly assist the reader in making sense of what would otherwise be a mere listing of administrative divisions and place names.
What then is there to be criticised? In general, any omissions are those of the gazetteer itself, being things which were largely taken for granted by the magistrate and local scholar-gentry who produced the 1819 edition. They expected that local villages and market towns would supply their own self-management and did not describe its workings, but owing to the distance in time and the vastly changed circumstances of the last eighty years,
348
BOOK REVIEWS
China. Inevitably, and by intention, such persons were ignorant of the local scene and background, and usually did not speak its dialect.
The contents of district gazetteers were usually fairly uniform, taking in the principal subjects such as history, geography, the economy and government, and providing extended or contracted accounts of these and other topics according to the interest and degree of industry shown by the compilers. The gazetteer also provided much information about the worthies of the district whether scholars, aged persons, religious figures, chaste widows and other females, or meritorious officials who had served there in past centuries. Interesting works on the district or by its natives were also included. Our Hsinan Gazetteer is a fairly typical product of the scholar-gentry's contribution to the writing of local history, albeit far from being the best example of the kind.
Baker and Ng's work is well-done. The chapters are concise and the notes and complementary material are comprehensive, useful, wide-ranging and enlightening. The material itself is varied and interesting. The book includes useful tables showing the contents of the 1688 and 1819 editions of the gazetteer (pp 5-16 and 128-130), and there are also maps reproduced from the two editions, showing the county, the district city, and coastal defences, all typical of those found in local histories of the Ch'ing period and before. Useful additional features are a reproduction of the Italian missionary Volonteri's bilingual map of 1866 (map 9) and Dr. Baker's production of two special maps (Nos, 7 and 8). The latter show the dynamics of local settlement and population growth, and their geographical variation, and greatly assist the reader in making sense of what would otherwise be a mere listing of administrative divisions and place names.
What then is there to be criticised? In general, any omissions are those of the gazetteer itself, being things which were largely taken for granted by the magistrate and local scholar- gentry who produced the 1819 edition. They expected that local villages and market towns would supply their own self-management and did not describe its workings, but owing to the distance in time and the vastly changed circumstances of the last eighty years,
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