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Accessed 27 May 2016 18:27 GMT
Prosopography
and its Potential for
Middle Period Research
Anne Gerritsen* a s i a r e s e a r c h i n s t i t u t e ( s i n g a p o r e )
and warwick university
Workshop on the Prosopography of Middle Period China:
Using the China Biographical Database (University of
Warwick, December 13–15, 2007)
Those of us whose research touches in some way on the period between
the Five Dynasties and the late Ming dynasty have now for a long time heard
about the existence of a database, compiled by Robert Hartwell (1932–1996),
said to include the biographical data of thousands of Middle Period China civil
servants. After Hartwell’s death, his estate passed into the care of the Harvard
Yenching Institute, where Professor Peter Bol initially took on the challenge
provided by the geographical data in the estate. Hartwell’s geographical data
inspired the development of the China Historical GIS.1 In contrast, the biographical data in the estate, designed by Hartwell to be used in conjunction
with the geographical information, initially received less attention. Questions
posed at the annual meetings of the Song and Conquest Dynasties Group
only seemed to confirm that this database would not be ready for use soon.
Behind the scenes, however, Professor Michael Fuller worked tirelessly at
developing the biographical data included in what became known as the
China Biographical Database (CBDB).
* I am grateful to the British Academy (London) and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
(Taibei) for their generous funding of the workshop at which these papers were presented and
to Warwick University for its support of the conference.
1. Hartwell’s original GIS datasets are available through the CHGIS website but were not
integrated into the China Historical GIS (from January 2007 in its fourth version). CHGIS
datasets are freely available for downloading (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/).
Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 38 (2008)
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anne gerritsen
When Hartwell began to compile biographical data—initially including
only officials serving in the financial administration of the Song dynasty, but
later including other Middle Period civil servants as well as their associates—
he designed his own database program, over time repeatedly migrating the
data to new generations of programs. Fuller’s tasks included structuring this
highly complex data and making it available for users first in FoxPro and then
in MS Access. More crucially, however, Fuller sought to redesign the tables
in the database so as to ensure their usefulness for Middle Period scholars,
and here an impasse emerged: it seemed impossible for scholars unfamiliar
with the database to indicate how the data should be organized and what
questions they might wish to ask of the data without actually using the data,
yet Fuller could not prepare the database for wider use without making some
decisions on its design that would have long-term implications. There were
other problems, too: it was difficult to judge the accuracy of the data without
extensive checking of that data, and hard to decide how to deal with the
­obvious gaps in the coverage of the database without a clear sense of its future
usefulness. Moreover, it seemed important to know what lessons might be
learned from comparisons with similar prosopographical databases currently
under development.
While Fuller continued his work on database design, Bol concentrated on
developing collaborations between the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Center
for Research on Ancient Chinese History at Peking University, and the Institute
of History and Philology at Academia Sinica in Taibei to add new content
to the database. Meanwhile, Naomi Standen (Newcastle University) and I
secured funding from Warwick University to facilitate systematic comparisons
between the China Biographical Database and similar databases in the UK.2
The full report this funding made possible, written by Andrew Wareham and
Artemis Papakostouli, then both of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, London, entitled “Prosopographical projects in the
pre-modern world: CHS and its counterparts,” can be downloaded from the
website of the Society for Song, Yuan and Conquest Dynasties Studies (http://
www.sungyuan.org).
These developments, useful as they were, did not provide a way out of the
impasse: without actually using the database it remained impossible to know
2. The project was awarded a grant from the Warwick Research and Teaching Development
Fund in 2003.
prosopography in middle period research
how one might wish to use the database, but without that knowledge Fuller
could make little progress in preparing the database for wider use. With this
in mind, I conceived of the idea of organizing a small workshop at Warwick
University. My plan was to provide access to the database in its preliminary (MS
Access) form to a number of junior scholars, who would be asked to carry out
small research projects using the biographical data, and to invite a number of
senior scholars to comment upon these papers. Taken together, these research
projects and the discussions they would generate could then serve to inform
those involved with designing and developing the database. Both the British
Academy in London and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taibei were
willing to fund this workshop, and the event took place on December 14–15,
2007. Abstracts of eleven of the papers presented at the workshop follow this
introduction, and full versions of these papers are available at the website of
the Society for Song, Yuan and Conquest Dynasties Studies.
In the remaining pages, I will briefly discuss the papers, highlight some
of the changes that have been implemented as a result of the workshop, and
offer some reflections on the implications of these projects for research in
Middle Period China. It is hoped that these papers will generate interest in
the database and help colleagues negotiate the still rather treacherous terrain
of Middle Period prosopography.3
the technique of prosopography
So what exactly is prosopography? The term primarily refers to a listing of
persons who share certain characteristics: they might all be of a certain rank,
have the same occupation, belong to the same period, or share a connection
to a single individual. For example, Debra Nails’ 2002 study, The People of
Plato, provides a listing of every person referred to in the Platonic dialogues,
including a short life with information where available on the career, the
family, and the writings of each person. Nails has written her book for those
who teach and research the philosophy of Plato; her painstaking work carried out over many years and published in a single volume makes further
3. Note that the authors of these papers used a version of the database that has now been
superseded by the updated and enlarged online version, and that a number of the issues raised in
these papers apply only to the MS Access version of the database, and not to the online version.
At present, the online version is not yet available to the public. The MS Access version can be
downloaded from the website (Google “CBDB Harvard”).
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­ rosopographical analysis possible.4 Here we encounter the term prosopograp
phy in a second, “applied” sense, referring to studies where prosopographical
methods have been used. Such methods include manipulating and analyzing
data gathered in a prosopographical listing to acquire further knowledge and
insights.5 It is in this sense that Lawrence Stone discusses it in his now classic
eponymous study of the subject.6 In a third meaning, used for example by
the Islamicist Chase Robinson, prosopography is understood to indicate the
biographical characteristics of individuals that mark their membership in a
given social group, as opposed to the characteristics that make them stand
out as individuals.7
We owe Hartwell a huge debt of gratitude for creating a prosopography
for our use. The task of collecting the biographical data of tens of thousands
of individuals he undertook to produce this prosopographical listing, allows
us to move straight on to using prosopographical analysis as a research tool.
That said, we have not yet resolved how best to use this tool for Middle Period
research. Prosopography relies on asking the same set of questions of a large
group of people so as to further our understanding of the members of that
group. Its success depends on the formulation of an effective set of questions,
part of the basic training of any social scientist, but a challenge to those of us
who work mostly in humanities-based disciplines. So what questions to ask?
To give an example from a different field, in her study of women traveling to
the Middle East in the long eighteenth century, Billie Melman asks about
each woman’s family status, her social origins, her occupation, the nature of
her travel, and the kind of publication her travel gave rise to so as to under4. Debra Nails, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 2002), xxxviii.
5. Ollie Salomies, “Names and Identities: Onomastics and Prosopography,” in John P. Bodel,
ed., Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions (London: Routledge, 2001), 75.
6. Lawrence Stone, “Prosopography,” in Historical Studies Today, ed. Felix Gilbert and
Stephen Richards Graubard (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 107–140.
7. Chase Robinson discusses the difference between biography and prosopography in Arabic
texts produced between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, the formative and classical periods
of Islam. In his particular usage, which he admits differs from the way the term is commonly
understood, prosopography is distinct from biography: “Whereas biography is about exemplary or
otherwise distinctive individuals, prosopography compiles and organizes those items of biographical data that mark an individual’s belonging to a group” (Islamic Historiography [Cambridge,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 66).
prosopography in middle period research
stand the structures and patterns that shaped their experiences.8 As she readily
admits, to understand these experiences themselves and to see the social and
cultural dimensions of the practice, we cannot do without textual analysis.
Our readings of texts, however, are all too often shaped by assumptions, in
Melman’s case about the social status of such women travelers or the kind of
texts they produced. Quantitative data will not supersede the need for textual
analysis, but can provide sometimes surprising insights that change the ways
we read these texts.
the warwick workshop
We were fortunate to be able to invite colleagues who have expertise in
working with a number of other online databases. These included: Dr. Alex
Burghart, Research Officer for the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England
(PASE http://www.pase.ac.uk/); Dr. Andrew Wareham, associated with the
Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, London, and more
recently Director of the Hearth Tax Project based at Roehampton University;
Professor Grace Fong, Project Editor of the Ming Qing Women’s Writings
Database (MQWW http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/); and Dr.
­Dagmar Schaefer of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (http://www.mpiwgberlin.mpg.de).
Dr. Burghart demonstrated the way in which the PASE database works,
highlighting the fact that it aims “to cover all of the recorded inhabitants of
England from the late sixth to the end of the eleventh century.”9 All existing
sources including inscriptions and coins are combed through for references
to named individuals, and each assertion about an individual in any of these
sources (a ‘factoid’) is included in the database. A total of over 84,600 factoids
leads to records for about 11,700 persons, based on over 2,000 sources.10 In
comparison, there are over 34,200 persons listed in the main biographical table
of the 2007 Access version of the CBDB database.11 A significant number of
sources has been used in the compilation of the CBDB, but by no means all
8. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
9. http://www.pase.ac.uk/, accessed on May 27, 2008.
10. http://www.pase.ac.uk/redist/pdf/PaseInventory-0505.pdf, accessed on May 27, 2008.
11. The number continues to grow now that it is possible to add new entries online; as of spring
2008, there were 39,000 biographical entries. For the latest figure, see the CBDB website.
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sources (the muzhiming 墓誌銘, for example, have not yet been systematically
analyzed.)12 In other words, even though the extant sources for Anglo-Saxon
England are far more limited than they are for Middle Period China, users of
that database can be confident that any individual who appears in the sources
will be represented in the database. A significant difference between PASE
and CBDB is the representation of material culture in PASE. Gifts exchanged,
belongings inherited, and donations received are all included, and can be
searched under the category “property.” One can find out, for example, that
two pilgrims who journeyed to Rome returned to England with “silk and
cloth dyed in purple.” They also had volumes of monastic rules, relics of the
saints and images of the virgin in their possession, suggesting by association
the high status of the purple silk. The database allows one to trace these two
anonymous men through the extant sources, to build a picture of all those
they were in contact with in their lifetime, and to find extant editions and
translations of those sources.13 Of course the information is frustrating in
its tantalizing nature: if only we could know where the silk had come from
and where it had been dyed, or what happened to it when it was brought to
England. What matters is the level of detail possible when the extant sources
are limited. The sheer volume of the Chinese sources probably makes the
inclusion of such detail unrealistic on any significant scale, but as a result of
the workshop, the category of “possessions” (cai chan 財產) has now been
added to the existing data tables.
Professor Fong’s database, a joint project of McGill University and Harvard
Yenching Library, is built on a different premise. MQWW includes writings
by women of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911) held in the Harvard
Yenching Library, including materials in its rare books collection, and digital
images of the full texts in this collection. The real strength of this material,
however, lies not only in the access to textual materials the database provides,
but in the research it facilitates: the “comprehensive, searchable database supports statistical research on women’s social and marital status, ethnic identity,
their geographical location, family and regional networks, male involvement in
women’s publication, and many other issues related to the social and cultural
12. For details on the sources used, see the CBDB website.
13. As it happens, not much is known about these two anonymous men; the author of the
text they appear in, Aethelwald, is also rather unknown, and the text, in manuscript until it was
published in 1919 by Rudolphus Ehwald, undated. The point is that the database is designed to
provide such detail wherever available.
prosopography in middle period research
history of women.”14 Like CBDB, and unlike PASE, MQWW does not aim
to include every known female in the extant written material—the material
is simply too abundant for that—so the nature of the statistical research possible is thus very different. Prosopographical research, however, seeks to find
out more about a specific population group, and in the case of MQWW that
group is determined by its shared activity of writing.15
The work done at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
under the direction of Dr. Dagmar Schaefer is useful in this context for yet
a different reason. The aim of one of the projects directed by Schaefer is to
facilitate the matching of data, including data extracted from CBDB, to maps
powered by Google. Examples of the work carried out in Berlin include, for
example, the mapping of all known kiln sites on timed map series, so that
one can see how the centers of kiln technology shift over time. By combining
kiln data with, for example, geological data, one can investigate the extent to
which the location of centers of ceramic production was dominated by access
to geological resources. As the CBDB website clarifies, extracting CBDB data
and including the data as a layer on any GIS-generated map is made possible
by the provision of x/y co-ordinates for all entries in CBDB. For ease of access
and user-friendly interface, however, Google maps are hard to beat, and it
seems likely that the Max Planck Institute will continue to provide extremely
valuable and user-friendly research tools.16
the warwick papers
Specifically, then, what did the case studies reveal? Using prosopography as an
effective tool relies on a number of important steps: to select from the complete
database a group defined by a set of shared characteristics for interrogation;
to formulate a set of questions that can be meaningfully asked of that group;
and to integrate the quantitative information such a query yields into wider
analyses. The papers presented at the workshop revealed that for a number
of reasons, it was not always easy or even possible to complete these steps.
Chang Woei Ong’s paper focuses on the Zhe family in Northern Song, and
14. “Introduction to the Online Digital Archive,” http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/
english/introduction.htm#text4, accessed on May 27, 2008.
15. Further funding has recently been awarded to this project to build an interface between
MQWW, CBDB, and CHGIS.
16. As of the summer of 2008, the CHGIS website also offers the possibility of downloading
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) for use with GoogleEarth.
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seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that the Song dynasty fell because
certain policies, enshrined at the dynasty’s outset, undermined the military
in the long term. His textual analysis reveals the ways in which members of
the military elite effectively mobilized military strategies to strengthen their
local and national standing. But Ong’s paper raises important questions for
the usefulness of the CBDB for research of this nature: his analysis highlights
the significance of specific events, such as the granting of rights to those stationed on the border to manage border affairs, and the implications of such
events over time. A biographical database such as CBDB does not include
events as a matter of course, because events are difficult to integrate into a
relational database.17 The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project has
painstakingly included each event noted in the texts, and related it to each
individual involved in the event. In response to the workshop discussions, the
category of “events” has been added to the online version of CBDB, so that
it will be possible to link individuals in the database to the major historical
events in which they played roles and to map connections between individuals
established through shared participation in those events.
Related to the difficulties associated with the representation of events in
the database is the spatial dimension of those events.18 Ideally, we would like
to know what happened in a person’s life, as well as where those events took
place. If someone was granted or withdrew from a particular position, we would
like to know where this took place. In principle, the database is designed to
accommodate a number of different types of place associations in a person’s
lifetime (categorized rather imprecisely as “actual residence,” “moved to,”
“household registration,” and “basic affiliation”), although in practice, the most
common place reference is “basic affiliation.” Place associations of women
are usually based on the place associated with their fathers, whether that is
the place where their fathers served or were born. The database would ideally
provide for each individual the places of his/her ancestry, birth, residence(s),
career posting(s), and burial, including the dates for which those places are
valid, allowing one to plot the movement of each individual through space
and time. This would then facilitate the building of a picture not only of the
movements of individuals, but where the paths of individuals intersect with
17. See also the discussion below of Naomi Standen’s paper.
18. This is specifically mentioned as a problem in the papers by Hilde de Weerdt, Chen
Wenyi, Chang Wook Lee, and Anne Gerritsen.
prosopography in middle period research
others. We can map, for example, the “basic affiliation” of the known members
of Wang Anshi’s social network, or the place of origin of all the prefects serving
in Ji’an prefecture over time, but we probably will not be able to map exactly
where each man in Wang Anshi’s network ever served, or where the men who
served in Ji’an lived just before they accepted the post of Ji’an prefect.
The issue is highlighted specifically in the paper by Fang Chengfeng, who
uses the case of Zhou Bida’s 周必大 (1126–1204) family as they migrated from
the north during the 1120s to test the value of the CBDB. Fang’s analysis
throws light on the pattern of that migration, revealing other factors beyond
the Jurchen invasion that scholarship of the “southward migration” (nan qian
南遷) thus far has taken little account of: the significance of civil service postings in determining the path of migration, the role of postings of relatives in
providing a base for widows and orphans, and the role of the family graves in
the process of resettlement and the claiming of a connection to new localities.
Fang’s precise tracing of the movements of the various members of the Zhou
family relies on extracting details distributed throughout literary collections
and local histories. Moreover, it relies on mapping the location of indi­vid­
uals through time and matching that mapping with other relatives. As Fang
points out in his conclusion, for CBDB to be able to do this work for him,
each event in an individual’s life would need to be dated and provided with
x/y co-ordinates.19 The striking difference between the CBDB’s representation
of Zhou Bida as a man from Jizhou and Fang’s research into the complex
pattern of migration that led to Zhou Bida’s construction of a Jizhou identity
has significant implications for what we can expect from CBDB. Such finegrained time-space detail is rarely available from standard biographies but
depends instead on tracing a life history from all possible documentation.
CBDB is biography based, but once all available biographies have been
digested researchers may find it worth their time to add value through such
detailed studies.
One of the main issues that emerged at the workshop was that of data
capture. Can (and should?) this database ever provide sufficient data so as to
satisfy all of our research needs? The papers that dealt with the Tang dynasty
can serve as example here. Hartwell only began to add Tang data at a later
stage of the project, and Tang data coverage remains slight. Anthony DeBlasi
19. The updated version, in response to the workshop, now includes the category of “visited
to or went to” to facilitate such research.
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set out to test the data included for holders of Tang dynasty high office by
comparing the CBDB data with what is available in published Tang reference
works. Finding the data available for Tang men extremely small, DeBlasi suggests a significant amount of data would have to be added to make statistical
analysis meaningful.20 The limited nature of the coverage seriously hampers
the scholar interested in Tang prosopography, although DeBlasi is able to
pose a number of queries about the manner of entry into the bureaucracy
for high officials, the kinship relations of high officials, and the background
of prefects. Chang Wook Lee evaluated the role of the CBDB for a study of
Hanlin academicians during the period 783 to 1082. He pursued two separate
lines of enquiry: one on the political aspects of the Hanlin academicians and
one on the social relationships of the Hanlin academicians. As in the case
of DeBlasi’s study, the thin coverage of Tang and Five Dynasties materials
in general, and the current exclusion of newly excavated materials such as
Tang dynasty funerary inscriptions (of which Lee claims there are over 8,000
extant) specifically, makes the use of CBDB for statistical analysis difficult.
Through a close analysis of Ouyang Xiu’s career, Lee demonstrates convincingly the value of including extensive detail on the various types of posts held,
often concurrently, including honorary and titular posts, and the bestowal of
various honors and their remunerations. Lee draws on the nearly 60 letters
of appointment (zhi ci 制詞) in Ouyang Xiu’s literary collection to make his
case. While these two studies clearly point to problems in the data coverage
for the Tang, they also highlight the potential for Tang dynasty research once
the available database architecture has been populated more substantially.
The issue of data coverage also emerges in Gerritsen’s attempt to evaluate
the usefulness of the database for research on women in Middle Period China.
Focusing on women of four different prefectures (Jizhou 吉州, Fuzhou 撫
州, Mingzhou 明州 and Wuzhou 婺州), the paper compares data on their
lifespan, age at marriage, number of children, the comparative status of their
fathers and husbands, and the address of their husbands and fathers. This
last comparison was intended to test the hypothesis that a shift took place
between Northern and Southern Song in the selection of marriage partners:
from selecting partners that strengthen ties to the capital to using marriage
alliances as a strategy to strengthen local ties. The design of the database in
20. The data on Tang women is even smaller, as DeBlasi points out, with only 52 women
included for the Tang dynasty.
prosopography in middle period research
principle allows for such investigations: sons-in-law are often included in an
individual’s network. In practice, however, one can only detect a trend over
time when there is an evenness in the coverage over time. In this case, the
available data is small (with samples on average containing 17 individuals)
and heavily skewed towards the Southern Song, rendering any detection of a
historical trend meaningless.
Naomi Standen set out to investigate the socio-political transformation of
rulership and governance during the Five Dynasties (907–960). Venturing
into territory that was of little interest to Hartwell, Standen found the existing data coverage thin to non-existent, and the categories that shaped the
associations between individuals too static for her purposes. In response she
moved to create her own spreadsheet-based database that allowed for greater
flexibility and ease of input. Her work here, which potentially forms the initial
stage of a much larger research project that broadly investigates the ways in
which power moved from individual powerholders to institutional structures
of power during this period, focused on the composition of groups associated
with the court and the emperor. To compensate for the lack of data, Standen
not only created new sets of data but also organized the data into new categories, classifying the types of associations she found as “givens” (including
native place and kinship), “circumstances” such as a martial encounters or
joint appointments, “deliberate creations” such as marital ties and adoption,
and “relationships of unequal power” such as refusals and rescues. Only
through such categorizations do the power dimensions of those associations
become manifest. She strongly argues for greater involvement of the users of
the database, through, for example, the creation of user-defined categorizations of associations, and the uploading of data sets, which the online version
is intended to facilitate.
Mark Strange focuses on the networks that surrounded Sima Guang and
Wang Anshi. He makes use of the database to locate significant experiences
with border administration in the life experiences of the associates of the two
men and of prosopographical analysis to identify the group characteristics
of the networks of associates that surrounded these two powerful opponents.
His analysis of the two networks confirms some of our assumptions about the
existence of differences between the associates of the two men, but also challenges those assumptions where the backgrounds and experiences turn out to
be largely shared between the two networks. His paper thus shows how prosopographical research can provide the impetus for new textual research.
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Robert Foster’s paper investigates the social network of Lu Jiuyuan 陸九淵,
testing the information available in CBDB by comparing it to information
compiled in a number of other sources.21 His research reveals that, although
many of the associations that appear in other sources are conspicuously ­absent
in the database, several associations are only visible in the CBDB. Most importantly, these include the associations created by marital connections in
the extended Lu family. The analysis of network connections, if one uses the
filters of kinship, sex, and the nature of the connection, can reveal the role
marital connections played in the consolidation of local ties, in this case in
Jinxi 金溪 county in Fuzhou 撫州 prefecture, highlighting the potential of
CBDB-based research where it is used in conjunction with other datasets.
Some of the papers, instead of investigating networks of individuals, created
groups based on shared participation in socio-cultural practices. Chen Wen­
yi’s paper, for example, investigates the exchange of “presentation prefaces”
(zengxu 贈序), which she has argued elsewhere had become popular first in
the Tang dynasty and again in the mid Yuan dynasty.22 Whereas her dissertation work relied on an analysis of the content of the prefaces, her ­approach
here supplemented that data with quantitative analyses of temporal trends,
local variations and generic differences. The CBDB data is limited, to be
sure, yielding only one-tenth of the number of prefaces exchanged compared
to a count of prefaces included in extant wenji collections, but the lack of
coverage is compensated for by the fact the database facilitates relatively quick
comparisons across time and space. Chen Wenyi is thus able to compare the
data for the exchange of prefaces with epitaphs, or the data for Jiangxi with
Zhedong, or the Southern Song data with Yuan dynasty data, or the status
differences between authors and recipients of prefaces through time and
space.
Inspired by the relevance of the sociology of social networks to longue durée
questions in imperial Chinese history, Hilde De Weerdt set out to undertake
a case study of correspondence networks (focusing on Mingzhou Prefecture,
21. These include both published secondary sources and Foster’s PhD dissertation on Lu
Jiuyuan. See Robert Foster, “Differentiating Rightness from Profit: The Life and Thought of Lu
Jiuyuan (1139–1193)” (Harvard University, 1997).
22. In CBDB, such prefaces are referred to as “departure notes” (贈行序 or 送行序). Chen
Wenyi explores this genre more fully in her PhD dissertation. See Chen Wenyi, “Networks,
Communities, and Identities: On the Discursive Practices of Yuan Literati” (Harvard University,
2007).
prosopography in middle period research
now Ningbo) to gauge the utility of CBDB in mapping the frequency, distance,
social make-up, and content of correspondence associations. Her inspiration
here was the promising presence of a number of types of associations in the
database, such as X “corresponded with” Y, or “sent a congratulatory note
to” or “replied to an official letter from.” Lack of detail for correspondence
and postings data in CBDB, however, thwarted her attempt at mapping correspondence associations (a query into correspondence exchanged between
residents of Mingzhou and beyond yielded zero results), but led her to test
the coverage for all types of associations in Mingzhou and across jurisdictions
in CBDB. Despite the absence of evenly-spread geographical detail on the
majority of postings and a dearth of data on sub-circuit level postings, De
Weerdt was able to develop hypotheses about the differential geographical
distribution of Mingzhou residents’ first- and second-order connections thanks
to the richer coverage of the exchange of biographical writings (muzhiming)
and ritual texts (jiwen). She suggested, for example, that Mingzhou residents
were mostly connected with other Mingzhou residents though first-order ties
(person to person), but had second-order (i.e., via another individual) of a
political nature almost exclusively outside of Mingzhou.
Chen Song reflects the approach of someone intimately familiar with the
database itself, as Chen Song serves as one of the CBDB project managers. His
investigation of changes in the socio-political roles of elites in Sichuan relies
on sophisticated interrogations of the available data and deftly demonstrates
the changes over time through the projecting of this data onto historical maps.
Using network visualization software, he is able to show the impact of changing personnel policies implemented from the mid-eleventh century onwards,
when native incumbency began to be possible for prefecture and circuit level
office. His case study of the Sichuanese elite shows the political motivations
behind the social changes we usually refer to as “localization” and associate
with a weakening central state from the late eleventh century onwards. His
paper is a powerful demonstration of the potential of this database for testing
and adjusting the hypotheses we work with in Middle Period history.
methodological considerations and implications
The Warwick workshop clearly had its uses: the pilot projects and the more
or less successful outcomes of the research they represent can, if nothing else,
serve as guidance to others to see what might work and what does not. Clearly,
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the database presents problems in terms of coverage, and each participant
found gaps in the specific areas he or she investigated. The plan to develop a
system of automated data capture under human editorial supervisions will go
a long way towards greatly increasing comprehensive, rather than selective,
coverage of extant sources, adding significant numbers to the extant data.
Nevertheless, gaps are bound to remain, because the sources themselves
were selective to start with and because only a proportion of the sources have
survived. More valuable, perhaps, would be a further consideration of the
questions that the database can answer despite its imperfect coverage. The
methodology of prosopography is, after all, frequently used in precisely those
areas where coverage is imperfect at best. The advantage of working with
a limited amount of extant material, as prosopographers of the Byzantine
world or the Roman empire do, is the confidence this generates amongst its
users that all materials have been included, despite the fact that this material can represent only a fraction of the material produced at the time. The
sheer size of the extant material for Middle Period China (not to mention
the potential for growth emerging from ongoing archaeological work) means
we have much more material to work with, but it remains only a sample of
the total population. The contentious issue of the representativeness of the
sample afforded by CBDB will likely remain for the foreseeable future, and
we must remain alert to the problems this throws up. As Robinson warns,
“treating prosopographies as data banks is not without its risks, especially if
the answers are taken to be representative for society at large.”23 Of course the
biographies this database relies on come from a narrow slice of the social and
political elite, as do many other prosopographical databases. Over time, all
Liao, Jin, and Yuan biographies will be included, but the database can only
reveal what is in the historical record; coverage of the non-Han population
who rarely interacted with the compilers of biographies will always remain
incomplete, as will coverage of members of the lower socio-economic strata
for whom biographical records rarely were composed. The closer the questions
are focused upon the members of that elite themselves, the more accurate
those results are likely to be. Our challenge will be to devise queries that
yield meaningful results despite the unevenness in the coverage and the lack
of broad social representativeness. Ultimately, China’s historical record will
23. Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 71.
prosopography in middle period research
give us one of the most detailed and continuous records of a political elite
available for the last two thousand years. At the very least the existence of a
deep and broad prosopographical database means that we can investigate
changing patterns across tens of thousands of cases. These abstracts, and the
full papers downloadable from the site, will potentially go some way towards
suggesting ideas and possibilities for such investigations.
references
Chen, Wenyi. “Networks, Communities, and Identities: On the Discursive Practices of Yuan Literati.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007.
Foster, Robert Wallace. “Differentiating Rightness from Profit: The Life and
Thought of Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1193).” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1997.
Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918:
Sexuality, Religion, and Work. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Nails, Debra. The People of Plato : A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 2002.
Robinson, Chase F. Islamic Historiography. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Salomies, Ollie. “Names and Identities: Onomastics and prosopography.” In Epigraphic Evidence : Ancient History from Inscriptions, edited by John P. Bodel,
73–94. London: Routledge, 2001.
Stone, Lawrence. “Prosopography.” In Historical Studies Today, edited by Felix
­Gilbert and Stephen Richards Graubard, 107–140. New York: W.W. Norton,
1972.
PA P E R A B S T R A C T S
“Social Writings from the Song and Yuan: The Recipients of Prefaces by
Jizhou and Mingzhou Writers” (Chen Wenyi, Academia Sinica)
This paper explores one aspect of literati social connections by analyzing the
practices associated with a literary genre known as the “presentation preface”
(zengxu 贈序). I try to test how the CBDB can be used to study the general
features of one specific practice. By treating the recipients of “presentation prefaces” as a group of actors for prosopographical analysis, this paper
investigates what kinds of personal relationships and social networks were
expressed in preface writing: who the recipients were, what relations they had
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with the author, and what geographical range they occupied in opposition
to the author.
Elsewhere, through a detailed analysis of the content of numerous prefaces
dating from the Yuan dynasty, I have established that there was a general mode
of practice surrounding the “presentation preface.” In this paper, I expand on
that earlier work by using CBDB to study concrete patterns of this practice,
such as temporal trends, local variations and generic differences. I first draw
data from CBDB to provide statistics for analysis. I then supply a complete
list of prefaces written by Jizhou and Mingzhou authors during the Southern
Song and Yuan (falling roughly between 1100 and 1350). (Note that it is almost
impossible to collect all the recipients from a specific area without the help of
the database.) In combining these two kinds of information, I have two objectives. First, I aim to get a better sense of the distance between the unfinished
database and a completed data set. Second, I hope the experiment based on
the numbers from the two more detailed case studies can suggest the potential
results we can expect to achieve when the database is complete.
This paper concludes that CBDB is more valuable in generating new
­issues for study than in simply providing answers to existing questions. For my
research on the practices associated with prefaces, the simple fact that CBDB
can, when it is completed, provide information about the recipients and make
it possible to analyze them as a group is of great help. Moreover, the CBDB
should be able to provide valuable information about obscure figures, such
as different types of specialists (fortunetellers, physicians, craftsmen, etc.), and
thus facilitate the study of these hitherto neglected segments of society. It is also
very useful in testing various temporal trends and geographical distribution,
two factors that should serve to modify/qualify generally accepted conclusions
and stimulate new directions for further research.
I make two suggestions regarding the future development of CBDB. First,
concerning the data, I recommend that we include ALL prefaces in the
database because prefaces are important indicators of social relationships.
Second, for the queries, I assume there will be a way to collect information by
association (as the “geo-reference” part of the query in the current CBDWin).
It would be useful to be able to establish correlations among various types of
association, especially since this database consists of so many different types
of association. Finally, it would be very helpful if we could also analyze the
networks with criteria of certain types of association.
prosopography in middle period research
“Military Commissioners and Grand Counselors:
Testing Tang Era Data Capture in the China Biographical Database”
(Anthony DeBlasi, University at Albany)
This essay assesses the utility of the CBDB in its current state for Tang-era
prosopographical research by examining its coverage of three concrete populations. On this basis it offers suggestions for bringing the database closer to
its potential. By comparing the information already entered in the database
for Tang individuals with that readily available in published biographical
indices and compilations, the paper identifies some patterns in the CBDB
data. This data comparison also makes clear that the CBDB’s useful database
architecture remains under-populated and relatively data-thin, thus limiting
its present value for doing Tang-era prosopography.
The data tested concern the occupants of different bureaucratic posts, a
common method for prosopographical research. Compiling diachronic lists
of government officials holding three different posts and then comparing these
lists and the data in the database associated with the identified officials provides
a solid basis for understanding the current limitations of the CBDB. The three
lists are: (1) Grand Counselors that served during the Tianbao 天寶 (742–755)
and the Yuanhe 元和 (806–820) reign periods; (2) Military Commissioners
(jiedushi 節度使) of the Xuanwu 宣武 command; and (3) Prefects (cishi 刺
史) of Lianzhou 連州. These offices were chosen first because they represent
different levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Second, they are all represented
in previously published compilations. The list of Grand Counselors was drawn
from the tables in the Xin Tang shu 新唐書. The Military Commissioners
were taken from Wu Tingxie’s 吳廷燮 Tang fangzhen nianbiao 唐方鎮年
表. The Lianzhou prefects were identified using Yu Xianhao’s 郁賢皓 Tang
cishi kao quanbian 唐刺史考全編.
The above comparisons reveal that relatively few of the individuals appear
in the database. This fits the overall coverage of the Tang in the CBDB.
Whereas the standard Tang biographical index, the Tang Wudai renwu
zhuanji ziliao zonghe suoyin 唐五代人物傳記資料綜合索引, contains
30,000 indivi­duals, only 2285 of 34,212 records currently in the CBDB are
Tang records. For the three populations examined, the extent of the coverage declines with the prominence of the post. 63% of the Grand Counselor
sample appears in the CBDB compared to the standard index. 28% of the
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Xuanwu Military ­Commissioners are included in the CBDB data, and only
11% of the reconstructed list of Bianzhou prefects is in the database. Overall,
the combined adjusted number of individuals in our three samples is 117. Of
those, the CBDB has entries for 35, or 30%. The Tang suoyin has entries for 112,
or 96%. Ultimately, the examination of these three small sample populations
suggests that the Tang portion of the CBDB is best at capturing high profile,
capital positions. As one moves into lower profile offices, the coverage drops
rather dramatically.
The utility of the database depends also on the amount and quality of the
information that populates the data fields associated with each individual.
The architecture of the database promises much research potential because
of its well-developed field structure relating to career history, entry into the
bureaucracy, personal associations, and kinship relationships. At the moment,
however, the amount of information provided for the three test populations
used in this essay is too limited to provide any useful statistical entry into
Tang history. There are nonetheless some patterns that emerge in what has
already been entered in these fields. The data for entry into the bureaucracy
suggests a bias toward entry via examination for Tang individuals. With
­regard to the kinship data, the more prominent the post, the more data that
appears for those holding it. For example, the CBDB contains an average of
2.1 kin per record, but the Grand Counselors have an average of 2.4 kin per
record. Currently, the association data is too thin and unreliable for research
purposes. Even very well known historical relationships are missing in the
data.
The analysis of the sample populations suggests that the first step for
improving the Tang CBDB data is to mine the Tang Wudai renwu zhuanji
ziliao zonghe suoyin to increase the number of Tang figures included. Utilizing the almost thirty thousand entries in the index to augment the slightly
more than two thousand Tang entries in the CBDB would require a serious
investment of time and resources, but it is a well-defined task that would
require only widely available sources. It would further allow a geographically
dispersed cadre of individuals to add the data to the CBDB. More generally,
the value of utilizing pre-existing compilations to more quickly populate the
database is clear from the samples examined. Once that is accomplished,
attention could be turned to the expanding corpus of published Tang era
inscriptions.
prosopography in middle period research
“The Migration of Zhou Bida’s Family during the 1120s and 1150s:
An Evaluation of the CBDB”
(Fang Chengfeng, PhD candidate, History, Peking University)
Historians frequently have to face the reality that people are constantly on
the move. Theoretically, the CBDB can easily trace the movement of a given
person by looking at the entries of addresses in the database. This paper
­focuses on the issue of addresses by tracing the migration of Zhou Bida 周必
大’s family during the 1120s and 1150s. Zhou Bida’s basic affiliation was Luling
廬陵, Jizhou 吉州, Jiangxi Circuit 江西路, but before the collapse of the
Northern Song, his family resided in Guancheng 管城, Zhengzhou 鄭州 in
the north. Thus the Guancheng-Luling migration seems to be an example of
the southward migration 南遷 studied by historians of the Song.
The starting point of the Zhou family’s migration, however, was not
Guancheng. Zhou Shen 周詵, Bida’s grandfather, was the vice prefect 通判
of Jizhou when the war among the Song, the Liao, and the Jurchens broke
out in the 1120s. His son Zhou Lijian (1) 周利建, Bida’s father, was an official
in Kaifeng 開封. He and his wife then moved to Pingjiangfu 平江府 in 1126,
before the fall of Kaifeng. Zhou Lijian (2) 周利見, Shen’s eldest son, was in
Xiazhou 峽州 and then the Sichuan Basin when the Jurchens invaded. In
sum, family members were already in the south before the collapse of the
Northern Song. Therefore, instead of asking about the process of southward
migration of the Zhou family, we might instead ask: how did the dispersed
family members reunite and become a new family in the Southern Song?
During the process of reunion, Zhou Shen, Zhou Lijian (1) and other adult
members successively died. Zhou widows and orphans always followed in the
footsteps of their relatives who held offices, and those who were officials also
constantly moved following changes in their appointments. From the 1120s
to the 1150s, Zhou Bida and the other family members seldom resided in
Luling. Although the Zhous had seldom resided in Luling, in the autumn of
1150 Zhou Bida passed the prefectural examination of Jizhou, which meant he
was regarded as a Luling person by the government. How did this happen?
The family graveyard played a significant role in shaping the identity of
Zhou Bida and his family. Evidence from another two families demonstrates
that the establishment of the family graveyard could be the beginning of
resettlement. It was Zhou Lijian (2) who built the family graveyard and
maintained the concentration of the tombs of the family members (zuzang
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族葬). According to Patricia Ebrey, the proximity and the order of tombs are
vital for the grave rites. Since none of the Zhou family members had permanently resided in Luling before the 1150s on the one hand, and the family
was regarded as Luling-affiliated on the other, the family graveyard became
the most important means for the Zhous to show their new affiliation. Luling
in this way was shown to be the new home of the Zhou family, whose ritual
identity was confirmed by the dead, not by the living, who constantly moved
across the empire.
My research drew mainly on the writings of Zhou Bida rather than on the
CBDB. The comparison between my resources and the data in the CBDB
reveals something significant. First, how to integrate addresses from different fields? In the CBDB, addresses are in several fields, namely the field of
­Addresses, the field of Office, and the field of Association. The reporting system
needs to find a way to gather all sorts of addresses at once. Furthermore, since
the addresses come from different fields, it will be problematic to organize
the sequence of the addresses into one report.
The CBDB is good at analyzing spatial distribution when it works together
with CHGIS. Determining spatial movement, however, presents a challenge
that goes beyond those involved in figuring out distribution. It requires the
knowledge of sequence in which respective movements occurred. The CBDB
deals well with the data for which accurate times are known, but it is not flexible enough to deal with the data dated ambiguously. And even when exact
dates are not known, such ambiguous data can be very useful in reconstructing
the traces of the biographees.
Second, the CBDB needs to find a way to figure out how various people’s
movements are linked. My paper shows that people move with others. For
instance, Zhou Bida, his siblings, his mother, his grandmother, his maternal
uncle and his maternal grandmother were all in Hengzhou around 1132. The
CBDB has to be able to 1) trace person A’s mobility by retrieving the various
addresses related to him or her; 2) search among people who have a relationship (kinship or association) with person A and are related to the addresses
retrieved.
Finally, the CBDB’s data is not adequately detailed. There are two reasons
for this. First, current work is based on Wang Deyi’s index, which contains
very limited information. Second, though it would be better if we input into
the CBDB original biographical texts, my paper shows that some crucial
prosopography in middle period research
evidence cannot be found in biographies, but in prefaces and diaries. This
indicates that only when different kinds of materials are well digested and
organized, can the information be maximized for the CBDB. Actually, the
most valuable and well-organized materials lie in the large number of existing
second-hand works, such as genealogies, local histories, literary history and
political history, including institutional history. Therefore, the most reliable
contributors of data to the CBDB should be the scholars who use it.
“Comparing Sources for Lu Jiuyuan’s Social Network”
(Robert W. Foster, B
­ erea College)
While researching material on Lu Jiuyuan for my dissertation, I compiled a
non-systematic database of individuals encountered in Lu Jiuyuan’s collected
works, local gazetteers, biographical compendia, the Song-Yuan xue’an, and
other sources. Most of the 160+ individuals were disciples, family members,
those mentioned in the yulu and nianpu of Lu’s collected works, people for
whom Lu Jiuyuan had written funerary inscriptions, or with whom he had
corresponded. The goal of the current paper is to compare family connections
and social network information compiled from four sources: the CDBD, the
dissertation database, Robert P. Hymes’s detailed study of Fuzhou, Jiangxi,
found in Statesmen and Gentlemen: the Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in
Northern and Southern Sung, and from the list of disciples compiled by Xu
Jifang based on the Song-Yuan xue’an 徐紀芳 (Lu Xiangshan dizi yanjiu
[Taibei: Wenjin chubanshe, 1990]). With rich sources external to the CBDB
we can see how useful the database can be as a single source of information
or used in conjunction with other materials. It is clear that each source has its
strengths and weaknesses, but none provides as clear a picture as information
garnered from all of them together.
The integration of the Lu family with local society becomes clear when we
look at the descendents of Lu Jiuyuan’s grandfather, Lu Jian, compiled from
information generated by querying the CBDB. Though there are some quirks
and the database returns are constantly shifting due to on-going data entry,
the key benefit of the CBDB is that it broadens the scope of relationships to
include marriage in ways that my gleanings from textual sources did not. By
further generating data for marital connections for Lu Jiuyuan’s family (particularly his five brothers) we find deeper connections with the local elites of
Jiangxi that might further explain the position of the family in local projects
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such as granary building and the militia. Such findings should encourage us
to challenge the view put forward by Robert Hymes that the Lus were not
actively involved in local society to the same extent as other elite families.
One particularly interesting link is with the Wangs of Linchuan, connected
to Lu Jiuyuan through the marriage of his brother Jiuling to a great-greatgranddaughter of Wang Anshi. When asked to write a record for the rebuilt
school in Wang’s home county of Linchuan, Lu Jiuyuan produced a respectful,
though critical, account of Wang; and later, when criticized for writing the
piece, Lu retorted that a truer assessment of Wang did not exist. Earlier, I had
credited Lu Jiuyuan’s positive assessment to his agreement with Wang’s stress
on returning to the “rightness” inherent in the models of ancient sage-kings. In
part, this is true, but the CBDB also demonstrates strong family connections
to the Wangs of Linchuan and to other Linchuan shidafu families. Linchuan
was also the residence of eleven of the 82 men linked to Lu Jiuyuan in the
Song-Yuan xue’an, and for ten of the 117 people linked directly to Lu Jiuyuan
in the CBDB.
Turning to Lu Jiuyuan’s larger social network, we can compare the listing
of 82 men linked to Lu Jiuyuan in the Song-Yuan xue’an, as compiled by Xu
Jifang, with the 117 linked directly to him in the CBDB. We find that 46 of
the men from the Song-Yuan xue’an are not in the CBDB. One of the more
interesting people to not be in the CBDB is Fu Mengquan, leader of the
Huaitang group comprising 65 out of the 82 men in the Song-Yuan xue’an.
If we turn to the people linked to Lu Jiuyuan in the CBDB who are not in
Xu Jifang’s listing, we find 23 men. But, if we winnow away those who do not
have established kinship relations with Lu Jiuyuan, we find eleven non-kin
men mentioned as close associates in the CBDB, who seem to be intellectually connected to Lu, but who are not mentioned in the Song-Yuan xue’an.
So the CBDB is providing new information on connections beyond family
that are not clear in the Song-Yuan xue’an. However, the CBDB does not
have information on an even greater number of men linked to Lu Jiuyuan
intellectually.
The interaction between Lu Jiuyuan and Zhu Xi was a key moment in
the intellectual history of Neo-Confucianism. The two exchanged letters
and, at the behest of Lü Zuqian, met for the “Goose Lake Debate” to discuss
their intellectual differences. According to Xu Jifang, of the 82 men in the
Song-Yuan xue’an group, 22 were also linked to Zhu Xi’s school. Combin-
prosopography in middle period research
ing the data gathered from searches for those directly connected to both Lu
Jiuyuan and Zhu Xi produced 353 records. Yet of that group, only thirteen
were reduplicated. Of Lu Jiuyuan’s brothers, only Jiuling, whom Zhu met
at Goose Lake, is found in Zhu Xi’s direct social network, while Lu Jiushao,
who was also in correspondence with Zhu Xi and seems to have opened the
intellectual debate that led Jiuling and Jiuyuan to Goose Lake, is not. It would
be useful to develop a means by which people can reliably contribute to the
information in the database, since at this stage I was unable to enter links
such as that between Lu Jiushao and Zhu Xi.
Clearly the CBDB has some gaps, but it does provide a great deal of information and opens further avenues of exploration. Since the database is not
fixed, but is constantly being amended, these gaps and issues are continually
closed and fixed. However, it is only fair to point out the difficulty of using
the database if one is not well-schooled in Microsoft Access. It is clear that
this paper barely scratches the surface of the compiled information, but for
the CBDB to become a truly useful tool for research there are at least two key
issues to face: the creation of a user’s manual, or a more user-friendly interface, on the one hand, and an efficient and trustworthy means of opening the
database to further data entry. It might help to determine how scholars and
students of Chinese history can individually contribute to this resource.
“Use of the Hartwell Database to Study Tang-Song Hanlin Academicians,
783–1082” (Chang Wook Lee, PhD candidate, Binghamton University)
During the Tang-Song transformation, one of the most significant political
and social changes was the establishment of new imperial secretaries and the
transition in the power of the ruling class from its traditional base in the old
aristocratic families to the emerging hold of the newly rising elite class. In
736, the Tang government created the new imperial secretaries called Hanlin
Academicians 翰林學士, modeled upon the pre-existing Chief Secretaries
中書舍人 of the Secretariat and the various other types of academicians.
This event reflected changes in elite society and it significantly influenced
the development of elites in subsequent imperial history.
This paper discusses political and social issues related to the Hanlin Academicians during the Tang-Song transition by using the Hartwell Database.
Because this paper concentrates on the political aspects of the Hanlin Academicians during the Tang-Song, its main focus is on the various different
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official posts in the Chinese government, such as special commissions 差遣
使職, titular offices 階官 and prestige offices 散官. From the seventh century
on, both the Tang and Song governments made frequent use of special commissions in order to create new official posts and to supplement the weakness
of the pre-existing governmental structure. But they could not substitute the
existing governmental structure with the newly created special commissions
since no other special commissions could completely replace the centuriesold Three Departments 三省 and Six Ministries 六部 in the government.
Although the Yuanfeng reforms 元豊官制 (1085) ended this complicated
governmental organization by re-establishing the Three Departments and
Six Ministries, the use of special commissions continued into the Ming-Qing
period.
This paper examines the various different governmental official posts
based on information concerning the Hanlin Academicians in the Hartwell
Database. Second, this paper also uses the Hartwell Database to investigate
the social relationships of Tang and Song Hanlin Academicians, especially
those formed through marriage, sponsorship and the recommendation 薦擧,
but also those reflected in ancestral place 祖籍, current residence 籍貫 and
funeral locales 葬地.
“Mapping Communication from Mingzhou: Networks of Correspondence” (Hilde De Weerdt, University of Oxford)
Responding to the call of John Unsworth, who wrote convincingly about the
need for reports on failed research among humanities researchers, my report
presents a record of the questions and methods that guided my first foray into
the CBDB, a rationale for research on correspondence networks, a review of
the rather unsuccessful results qua content, an examination of the reasons
behind the mixed results, and, finally, reflections on the utility and extensibility of CBDB in pursuing research on social networks.
The scope of its biographical data and the fine granularity of the stored
information make possible multi-factor analyses of social and cultural developments on both large and small spatial and temporal scales. The typology of
associations drew my attention in particular. The wide range of social, political, and textual relationships the database proposes to track has the potential
of cross-pollinating research on imperial Chinese society, the sociology of
social networks, and relational models of social history. The first section of
prosopography in middle period research
my report therefore briefly reviews the history of social network analysis and
the interaction between network models and social history. Recent work in
the “new science of networks” and the application of relational analysis in
the scholarship of Charles Tilly present productive challenges for historians
working on the social, political and intellectual lives of imperial Chinese
elites. Can major transitions in imperial history such as the reorientation
towards local society in the twelfth century, the spread of Neo-Confucianism,
and the economic and cultural rise of the south be explained by or correlated
to changes in social network ties at regional and/or empire-wide scales? Can
outstanding questions such as the level of political organization and the
nature of political participation be answered by systematically investigating
and mapping associations among elites of various kinds? My interests in
intellectual history and in the dissemination of political information led me
to a pilot project designed to trigger a larger investigation into the history of
correspondence networks.
Why investigate networks of letter-writing? Mapping the frequency and
distance of correspondence across time will result in findings regarding the
connectedness and centrality of particular places, individuals or groups of
individuals. Taking account of the status (degree-holder, non-degree holder,
bureaucratic ranking and actual post) or kinship relations of individuals in
plotting letter writing may result in new findings regarding patterns of social
and political interaction among (groups of) elites. When letters are differentiated by genre and content, conclusions can be drawn regarding what types
of information spread at what times, to what extent, among whom, and in
which directions. The nature of the plotted networks may also help explain the
reach and speed of particular types of information. Results obtained regarding
changes in frequency, distance, genre and content can also be correlated to
known events and developments in the capital or in the provinces. Networks
of correspondence could also be compared to networks resulting from other
types of associations, especially those involving the exchange of writing, in
order to determine the weakness or strength of ties and the role of different
types of associations in the formation of social boundaries.
What strategies can we use to tackle some of these questions with CBDB?
I narrowed the parameters of my inquiry down to mapping the exchange of
correspondence in Song dynasty Mingzhou (Ningbo). As a first step towards
constructing a correspondence network centered on Mingzhou during Song
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times I set out to compile a table of individuals who were resident in Mingzhou
at a given point in time either as natives of the area or as officials posted there.
Step two was to query the associations by correspondence of the individuals
listed as working or living there. The report’s tables and charts evaluate the
results of these queries and test them against a broader sample of postings
and association data. The tests highlight the following conclusions: 1) the lack
of specificity for the geographical location for the majority of postings data;
2) the unevenness in the quantity and quality of the biographical data; 3) the
virtual absence of association by correspondence data; 4) the unevenness of
the quantity and quality of association data, with some types being tracked
in relatively large numbers (e.g., the exchange of biographical writing) and
others in insignificant proportion.
As a first step towards mapping networks that show the extent of direct as
well as indirect connections, the report looks not only at relationships of the
first order (those linking Mingzhou individuals to others directly) but also
at second-order relationships (those removed at a distance of two edges). It
compares the distribution of association types by degree of separation, by place
and by time. The results produce creative hypotheses about the connectedness
among prefectures, their centrality, differences in the distribution of social ties
among counties, intra-county fragmentation, and the historical trajectories of
the frequencies of different types of association.
My report concludes with some suggestions and desiderata whose implementation may contribute to the fulfillment of CBDB’s promise as the basic
infrastructure for future network research on imperial Chinese social life.
Those concern preferred strategies for the acquisition of data, their modification, and modes of access.
“Factionalism and the formation of eleventh-century military policy”
(Mark Strange, D.Phil candidate, University of Oxford)
The eleventh-century statesmen Sima Guang and Wang Anshi defined their
political relationship in terms of factional opposition. That image has stuck
for much of the past thousand years: clear-cut groups of conservatives and
reformers have been fashioned around them. Among the central themes of
this opposition has been their response to a foreign threat to Song’s imperial
integrity and, as a corollary, their formation of military policy. Sima Guang
prosopography in middle period research
and his conservative associates advocated restraint in the use of force; Wang
Anshi’s network cluster tended towards belligerence—that is the picture that
has taken root.
Assumptions of divergence between the two men provide the starting point
for this paper. The rhetoric of political opposition, especially in the context of
military policy formation, demands treatment in its own right. It goes beyond
our concerns here. Instead the present focus is on the biographical data of
Sima Guang and Wang Anshi, and the lived experiences and group identities of their associates. Three tasks present themselves: to identify differences
in the military experiences of these two individuals and their associates that
might account for conflicts in policy; to examine the value of characterizing
Sima Guang and Wang Anshi as the driving forces of two opposing political factions; to propose ways in which prosopographical research might be
used as a foundation on which to construct further study of military policy.
A sampling of biographical data, taken from the CBDB, supplies the context
for analysis.
All this comes with an early caveat. The CBDB is necessarily schematic:
the forms of tables and lists through which it presents its data show that most
readily. They simplify individual experience and distort complex social and
political realities. They also reflect current organizing principles as much as
any contrasts or similarities in eleventh-century society. And for the purposes of
the present paper they implicitly perpetuate rather than question assumptions
of a factional opposition between Sima Guang and Wang Anshi, and their
two network clusters. But to conduct this sort of large-scale prosopographical
research and to gain insights into the formation of eleventh-century political
identities, there is little choice but to use the data as it stands, remaining alert
at all times to the values inherent in its graphic form.
Certainly differences do emerge between Sima Guang and Wang Anshi,
as well as between the network clusters that developed around them. These
have been well documented; a handful of examples makes the point. The
majority of Sima Guang’s associates came from regions along the Yellow
River, like Sima Guang himself, or from the area around Chengdu; most
members of Wang Anshi’s network cluster came from the mid-Yangzi valley and its southern tributaries, as well as the Yangzi delta. The two men’s
family backgrounds differed. Sima Guang came from a high-ranking official
family and gained his first post through the yin privilege system; Wang Anshi
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came from a family of local officials and was not eligible for such hereditary
benefits. With a close focus on military experience, a larger proportion of
Wang Anshi’s network cluster than of Sima Guang’s associates came from
regions under high-level military administration. Yet it was Sima Guang who
served as an official in frontier regions and in posts with military jurisdiction; Wang Anshi, by contrast, tended to take local civil posts in the circuits
of the mid- and lower-Yangzi valley, far from the military tensions of the
frontier.
But if we sharpen our focus on military experience, the same data brings
out convergences. A north/south divide in native place yields little as an organizing principle here. Frontier regions—the most likely settings for military
conflict—are more robust as an organizing principle for comparison. And
in this the two network clusters are strikingly similar: each comprised low
proportions of individuals from frontier regions; neither network’s members
had experienced much sense of military urgency in their native regions. This
extends to their official careers. The proportion of individuals who held posts
that might have afforded first-hand experience of the practical implications
of court-directed military policy—military administrative posts in frontier
regions—is low for both networks.
The educational backgrounds of members of the two network clusters are
similar. Both contain equally high numbers of jinshi degree holders and yin
privilege recipients, despite broad contrasts at the time between the regions
from which they came. Of greater relevance here, though, is the fact that
not a single member of either network entered officialdom through military
channels. Both attracted individuals who started their official careers with a
civilian focus.
In the types of association that bound their members together, Sima Guang
and Wang Anshi’s network clusters show parallels. Most associations formed
around literary exchanges and both network clusters located themselves exclu­
sively in the context of civil governance. Five types of military association
appear in the CBDB; not one features here.
The clearest indication of convergence is the participation of individuals in
both network clusters. And more than that: some individuals even appear able
to move back and forth between the two clusters, changing their allegiances
with the pull of personal acquaintances and external political circumstances.
Here, more than anywhere, is a sense of the fluidity of eleventh-century politi-
prosopography in middle period research
cal relationships and a warning against the schematic discourse of factional
opposition.
That is not to reject outright the idea that there were two coherent and
integral network clusters that surrounded Sima Guang and Wang Anshi; an
above-average density of associations linked their associates. But such cohesion does not provide evidence of factionalism. Unexpectedly, given the broad
sweep of its vision, prosopographical analysis throws up exceptions that destabilize the general image of opposition. Despite the density of the bonds of the
two men’s network clusters, what stands out is how much convergence there
is between their collective identities, how much divides between them blur,
and how uneasily the discourse of factionalism sits with the bio-data of Sima
Guang and Wang Anshi, and their associates. Long-held binary oppositions—
proposed even by Sima Guang and Wang Anshi themselves—are inadequate
as an analytical assumption for the study of complex political relations in the
eleventh century.
This paper does not propose convergence in place of existing representations of divergence. Quite the opposite—it aims to reject all such generalized
models and to acknowledge the contingency and malleability of political
identities at this time. The discourse of factionalism suggests homogeneity
and permanence, and factional oppositions like the one commonly attributed
to Sima Guang and Wang Anshi appear clear-cut as a result. Under close
scrutiny, though, external political boundaries blur and internal associations
become loose and unstable. The CBDB shows clearly that the structures of
eleventh-century political and social groupings were shaped by the particular
circumstances that attended their formation. And that is where its value lies.
In affording opportunities to look at the broad canvas of eleventh-century
political activity, it paradoxically nudges us towards a consideration of close,
individual details. We gain new impetus to sharpen our understanding of policy
formation in the eleventh century and to give the hazy people-like outlines
that emerge from the CBDB’s data some of the texture and individuality that
cannot be gained from the sweeping categories of prosopographical research.
From these crude but suggestive outlines, we therefore turn to the textual
record for an insight into the inner machinery of eleventh-century political
relations rather than just their external forms, as we attempt to replace schematic simplicity with a sense of the complexity that underlay eleventh-century
political debates.
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“The Zhe (She) Military Family in the Northern Song”
(Chang Woei Ong, The National University of Singapore)
The set phrase “Cherishing the civil, ignoring the military” (zhongwen qingwu
重文輕武) has been used by scholars and laymen alike to explain why the
Song was not the powerful Han or Tang. According to this conventional
wisdom, the Song founders, after witnessing how the loss of control over the
military had cost the rulers of the Five Dynasties their empires, became wary
of the possibility of themselves falling prey to the recurring problem. They
quickly took measures to prevent regional separatism from becoming a real
threat. As a consequence, the Song army was weakened to the extent it could
not defend against foreign invasions. It is therefore not surprising that the Song
would eventually collapse, first under the Jurchen invasion in 1126 and later
under the Mongol invasion in 1279.
Despite several attempts over the past few decades to rectify this perception,
this view has remained prevalent. But it is essentially teleological, as it explains
historical phenomena (e.g., the organization of Song military institutions) by
looking at how they fit with the final outcome (the fall of the Song). In doing
so, time and space are suppressed to justify the claim that the tragic ending
to the dynasty was predictable by looking at the initial Song policies towards
the military; regional variations and temporal changes are neglected in this
process.
The purpose of this paper is thus to restore the temporal and spatial dimensions of the military aspect of the Song. I examine how historical actors made
choices under specific circumstances and what were the factors affecting
their choices and how did they change over time. In particular, I trace the
historical experiences of a Zhe (or She) 折 family, stationed at the so-called
hewai (河外, lit. beyond the Yellow River) region, whose members, making
use of the unique conditions there, excelled in military services generation
over generation.
This is therefore a study of social mobility and elite strategy, which is the
paramount issue in the study of social history of the Song and later dynasties.
But such studies have been predominantly about the literati, or shi 士, class.
In comparison, the military elite attract much less attention from historians.
The limitation of sources is one possible reason, as unlike the shi, the military
elite seldom (but not never, as we will see later) produced literary works. Also,
the view that stressed the diminishing importance of the military sector during
prosopography in middle period research
the course of the Song dynasty discussed above might have contributed to
this bias. To correct the imbalance, it is therefore necessary to explore how
military resources were being exploited by ambitious men to achieve local
and national prominence.
The paper is divided into three parts. It first describes the peculiar situation
of Hewai from the tenth to the early twelfth centuries and documents the
rise of Xi Xia and its impact on the region. The second part surveys the Zhes’
relationship with the court and the findings indicate that the Song court was
more often than not willing to put the task of defending the borders in the
hands of the Zhes, who had managed to secure hereditary rights to the post
of prefect of Fuzhou in Hewai since the beginning of the dynasty. The third
part examines the various strategies that the Zhes adopted to stay afloat in an
increasingly Song world. They began by marrying local strongmen, then by
marrying prominent military families of national importance. Over the course
of history, they also adopted certain practices of the literati class and intermarried with established literati families. But a notable point is that, despite the
Zhes’ effort to explore various means to stay competitive, military endeavors
remained the most vital route for their success.
A detailed study of the Zhe family, I believe, should inspire us to rethink
some widely accepted perceptions of the Song dynasty. First of all, the Zhe
story did not fit the conventional Song story of “Cherishing the civil, ignoring the military.” On the contrary, what the Zhe case exhibits is the court’s
overwhelming concern for border defense. Also, the Zhes’ pattern of rising
to prominence and sustaining their success does not resemble any group
of Northern Song elite, both civil and military, that has been substantially
discussed in secondary scholarship. In many ways, the Zhe are unique in a
Northern Song setting.
On the other hand, the Zhe story reflects a typical Song problem: how
concern over national security and border defense could be incorporated
into the greater goal of building an imperial state governed by a bureaucracy
that was based on a civil order. For its part, the court had to strike a balance
between maintaining a workable defense system and preventing the growth
of excessive military power. The relationship between the court and the Zhe,
and the willingness of the Zhe in helping the court to contain an aggressive
Xi Xia regime for more than a century attests to the Song ability to achieve
such a goal.
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Research for this paper was done entirely through “conventional” means
of flipping through historical materials in their printed forms. The Hartwell
database, at its present stage, is not very useful for conducting a study of this
nature. It draws information mainly from standard biographical materials,
which constitute only a very small part of the rich materials pertaining to the
Zhe family. There are tremendous amounts of information about this family
in Xu Zizhi tongjian changbian and Song huiyao that are not extracted and
included in the database. Furthermore, the current database lacks a function
for the users to search “events” (e.g., the Xi Xia “rebellion” of 1038), which
makes it next to impossible to identify major figures related to major events.
But the potential of the database is huge. If fully developed, it will certainly
change the way we study Chinese history. I think the most important development is that the database will make apparent some connections between
people and events that we tend to neglect if we simply browse through the
printed materials.
“Networks and institutions in the CBDB: Adding the non-kin network of
Liu Zhiyuan of the Five Dynasties” (Naomi Standen, Newcastle ­University)
Working with the CBDB has helped me to identify just what data I need
for my project, to develop methods for collecting that data, and to provide a
framework within which to think about methods for ensuring systematically
robust analysis of the data. My interest is in the socio-political transformations
of rulership and governance in the Five Dynasties (907–960). The warlord
regimes of this period were in the process of evolving from the personalised
politics of leaders and retinues of the late Tang (characterised by charismatic
adult rule) into the institutional politics of memorialising officials of the
Song (characterised by the ability to sustain rule by a minor), but it remains
unclear just how and when these transformations happened. We should first
distinguish ruling authority (who was in charge) from governance (how things
got done). Then the question is: what was the (certainly uneven) trajectory by
which political power shifted from a ruling group comprising the emperor’s
direct personal adherents to become incorporated instead into established
institutions of government under whoever happened to be staffing them at
the time. At what point did handpicked individuals stop being the locus of
a bureau’s power and the institution become itself the source of authority
prosopography in middle period research
for those placed in charge of it? To trace the change we need to be able to
compare what kinds of relationships bound ruling groups together (or not)
in both the presence and the absence of effective and regularised institutions. Five Dynasties leaders often adopted their followers as sons or married
them to daughters, but there were many more ties than this. What was the
full range, how were they forged and broken, which were more important,
when and why? And of the many factors binding people to leaders or each
other, how important was cultural background? Chinese, Shatuo and many
others regularly served together, married each other and pledged allegiance
to each other. Was such behaviour statistically unusual? Did culture modify
the influence of other factors upon choices made? Did any of this change
over time? Rather than assuming the primacy of culture, we must examine
cultural factors within a framework in which other possibilities can be given
equal consideration.
To trace the vast proliferation of connections between individuals a data­
base is a essential. In order to trace the relative significance of personal bonds
­(centred on the emperor) and institutional/structural bonds (where the
emperor is one actor among many) it must be possible to examine the same
dataset from both egocentric and whole-network perspectives at any given
moment. The annals (which are the emperor’s biography) of the Later Han
(947–950) founder Liu Zhiyuan provide a suitably limited body of material
for this preliminary study; the biographies of people with links to him are the
next phase. None of the relevant data is in the existing CBDB and entering it
is a major task. Just under two juan of annals produced over 430 relationships,
of which over 300 are associations with Liu Zhiyuan.
It quickly became apparent that it would be more effective to create spreadsheets for the new data, which can ultimately be uploaded directly into the
CDBD without the need for re-keying everything. With a few exceptions
(notably natural phenomena and the movements of the emperor) almost
all of the information in both annals and biographies can be expressed as
an association between two people. Triadic relationships where X sends Y to
do something to Z must be expressed as a set of three pairs to capture all the
associations.
The two basic types of data around which my analysis will need to revolve
are these associations between people, and the official posts held by individ­
uals at any given moment. However, the almost entirely non-literary types
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in whom I’m interested are not the focus of the existing CBDB, so I found
major omissions in its lists of associations and official posts. Furthermore, the
relationships that individuals have with their emperor (the ones I’m interested
in) are very different from those they tend to have with each other (the ones
collected by Hartwell). Hence over a hundred new relationships needed to
be added to the CBDB list of ASSOC_CODES. There is also a need to be
able to date associations much more precisely than a year or reign era. The
CBDB records named individuals, but sometimes associations important for
my purposes involve unnamed people or groups like military officers or ‘the
court’, and a method is needed for recording these, not least lest they subsequently become nameable through further work. Data on official posts could
particularly lend itself to automated collection, were that to be possible.
Where the CBDB is rather unwieldy to work with, spreadsheets are flexible.
Being able to experiment freely with new fields and types of data allowed me
to establish more fully and precisely what kinds of information are required
to answer my research questions. Better still, I found that simply tabulating
data into a spreadsheet revealed that associations fell naturally into different
types. I made a preliminary identification of four broad categories on the
basis of how links were formed and what the power relationships were in that
relationship (a very preliminary and tentative listing). The method of turning
the materials into data has thus contributed to my analysis, and so will help
to shape my further research:
Givens:
• native-place
• kinship
• cultural group
Circumstances:
• martial and other encounters—fighting alongside or under command of,
etc.—or possibly against; prior service with or under authority of or in authority
over; visits
• joint service, incl. discussions with
• shared experiences incl. joint appointments to same post or bureau
• relationship with relatives, e.g. posthumous titles for fathers, etc.
prosopography in middle period research
Deliberate creations:
• adoption (none in this material)
• repeated/multiple post-giving (not just single posts or occasions, though confirmation and retirement posts may be included)
• marriages
• urging leader to power (taking throne, seizing cities, etc)
Relationships premised on unequal power (potential relationship-breakers?):
• submitted or gave allegiance to (in battle, during siege, etc)
• provoked response in (anger, admiration, advice taken or rejected)
• sent or received envoy/ message
• refusals—of posts, acceptance of mandate, etc
• given task—signs of especial trust; or just given orders?
• transfer of position
• rescues etc
I can now consider the significance of individual and perhaps collective agency
in the formation of groups by categorising together links such as marriage ties
and, inter alia, instances where one individual is given a disproportionate
number of posts to be held simultaneously. One might not naturally place
these together, and it is difficult to imagine how such a categorisation might
have been arrived at by more traditional methods of handling the source
mate­rial. This promises to be a powerful way of approaching the same dataset,
and was facilitated by the ability to group associations according to projectspecific criteria.
Suggestions towards methods and guidelines for researchers adding new
data to CBDB
• Those adding new data should use spreadsheets, and may suggest new fields
for possible inclusion in CBDB.
• New data should be added in cohesive blocks for thoroughness. For example,
full coverage of a specified set of annals, or a set of biographies chosen on
clear criteria. New inscriptions will need to be added as they become available, although that could create (or compound) the CBDB’s problems with
consistency of geographical and chronological coverage.
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• New sources should be mined comprehensively, including all relationship
data and not just what a particular researcher is specifically interested in.
• Automation is desirable for basic information like official postings, which
­account for a large proportion of the annals, but manual checking/adding
would still be required too.
• All the above implies that CBDB requires a permanent maintenance staff to
guide those adding new data, ensure consistency, check and integrate spreadsheets provided by researchers, etc.
Desirable features:
• Extra fields providing more detail on dates and official positions.
• Method for pulling out time-slices of who was in which government department/bureau in which year/month.
• A method for noting triadic links, and the direction of links.
• Permit user-defined categorisation of associations to suit specific research
purposes.
The basic structure of the database seems robust enough to collect and
manipulate most, and probably all, of the types of data that I need, and CBDB
should eventually be very useful for work such as mine. Furthermore, CBDB’s
value lies not only in its collection and organisation of a vast amount of data,
but in the ability of the discipline and practice of working with the database to
themselves generate new research questions and approaches. In terms of encouraging wider use, this last point may be where the greatest potential lies.
“Native Incumbency and Elite Networks in Song Dynasty Sichuan:
Evidence of the Mid-Eleventh Century from the China Biographical
Database” (Chen Song, PhD candidate, Harvard University)
Political and social transformations of the late eleventh century have been
described by Robert M. Hartwell as (i) the increasing importance of regional
divisions in public administration and bureaucratic rotations and (ii) the
­demise of a professional political elite from diverse regional backgrounds and
the breakdown of their nation-wide marriage alliances. On the one hand, the
balance of governmental power shifted from the central government to large
regional commands, and there was a corresponding shift in career patterns
from interregional ones in specific branches of the bureaucracy to intraregional
ones that crossed diverse fields of administration. On the other hand, from
prosopography in middle period research
late Northern Song on, elites became more reluctant to migrate out of their
home areas and more willing to marry locally. The implication is that both
in government structure and in elite society, during the last two centuries of
Song dynasty, China came to exist more as a federation of regional divisions
than as a national entity.
Drawing upon existing data in the CBDB, this paper studies these transformations in Sichuan from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Through an
investigation into the incumbency of local government positions in Sichuan
and the consequences for its native elite networks, this paper seeks to demonstrate that native incumbency and intraregional patterns of bureaucratic
rotations in Song dynasty Sichuan provided the political impetus for localized
social networks and marriage alliances.
The geographical isolation of Sichuan, its recent history of political independence in the aftermath of the Tang collapse, and repeated rebellions following the Song conquest of the region had all raised great suspicion among
political leaders in the Song court. During the first hundred years of the Song
dynasty, Sichuanese elites were not allowed to serve in positions of vice-prefects
and above within Sichuan, and those who came out of Sichuan to serve in
the court were forbidden to return to Sichuan even after they became aged.
Although compromises and short-lived rescissions were made in 1018 and 1030,
the tide was not effectively turned until the mid-eleventh century, by virtue
of the confluence of a variety of social, political, and intellectual currents.
Government restrictions on native incumbency of local government positions in Sichuan were relaxed around the mid-eleventh century, and by the
1060s instances abounded of Sichuanese elites posted to significant local
positions in Sichuan. Meanwhile, by the 1060s, there had emerged a circle of
Sichuanese elites, among whom a discourse had been developed and circulated. This discourse, which exculpated native scions of Sichuan from its recent
history of political separatism, was evoked in 1068 by a Sichuanese official,
in his memorial to the newly enthroned Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067–85), in
defense of the political allegiance of his landsmen and in support of postings
of them to local government positions near their home areas.
Legacies of policy change since the mid-eleventh century and of the sociopolitical movement among native Sichuanese elites in advocacy for their own
political allegiance were consolidated in the method of “delegated appointments” (dingchai fa 定差法), promulgated in 1070, which made consecutive
appointments in Sichuan possible.
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Consecutive appointments in Sichuan, or intraregional patterns of bureau­
cratic transfers, cannot be substantiated by existing data in CBDB, for it
requires the documentation of full office-holding histories for a significant
number of Sichuanese elites, which CBDB has not covered yet. But existing
data in CBDB does report a soaring number of native Sichuanese who, since
the latter half of the eleventh century, held significant positions in prefectural
and circuit governments of Sichuan, which had been hitherto almost exclusively staffed by officials of non-Sichuanese origins.
Native incumbency and consecutive appointments in Sichuan introduced
into the historical scene a new group of sociopolitical actors, who were scions
of influential local elite families and managed to penetrate into local governments. By the mid-eleventh century, officials of non-Sichuanese origins,
who had nearly monopolized government positions in Sichuan, were seldom
connected to each other and could hardly be identified as one cohesive
group. Instead, each of them was oriented towards more cosmopolitan circles
centered on prominent cultural and political elites based in the court far
away from their administrative jurisdictions in Sichuan. Politically aspiring
Sichuanese elites in early Northern Song wished to enter into these circles,
and governors posted to strategic Sichuan prefectures played an important
role as patrons and sponsors for these aspiring locals.
But since the latter half of the eleventh century, along with native incum­
bency, interwoven webs of social connections among Sichuanese elite families,
often formed independently from the political structure of the ruling dynasty
and sustained over many generations, crept into the administrative apparatuses
in Sichuan as scions of these families were appointed to local government
positions. These densely knit networks among Sichuan officials of native
origins, which rivaled the cosmopolitan ones, were further cemented by
agnatic and affinal ties. Prominent lineages managed to place many of their
sons in administrative positions of counties and prefectures, and as such for
generations. Intermarriages were actively pursued among these locally based
office-holding elites, including prefectural administrators, circuit intendents,
as well as regional commissioners in civil, fiscal and military affairs.
Social and political change in Sichuan since the mid-eleventh century
unfolds a historical dynamic alternative to the received wisdom on the localist
turn, a dynamic in which the consolidation of local power bases and the pursuit
of political success may not exclude each other. The shift in the balance of
prosopography in middle period research
power from the central government to large regional administrations, native
incumbency of local government positions, and the emergence of intra­regional
patterns of bureaucratic rotations, all made possible a cross-fertilization
between office-holding in local governments and the consolidation of local
power bases. Thus, the localized elite networks in Sichuan revealed not the
dissipation of political aspirations among native elites, but rather a reorientation of such aspirations from the court to regional and local governments.
The macroscopic analysis of this historical change which CBDB facilitates,
in spite of the paucity and historiographical bias of its data at the moment,
attests to the strength of such relational databases in revealing macro-historical
patterns and in testing and refining propositions pertaining to a long temporal
range and a large geographical area.
“Using the CBDB for the study of women and gender?
Some of the pitfalls” (Anne Gerritsen, Warwick University)
When Robert Hartwell began his vast project of compiling biographical data
for what would become the CBDB, women were not his priority. He was,
however, interested in marriage alliances and migration patterns, so gradually
data on women was included in the database. In my paper, I explore what
the database can tell us about women, highlighting some of the pitfalls of
such a project. I have largely relied on the data provided in the database, and
only in very few instances supplemented the CBDB data with information
from elsewhere. My point was to see what the database could yield in terms
of gendered biographical research, and to test the accuracy of conclusions
drawn from the database alone. One of the problems the database presents
for anyone wishing to use it to study women and gender relations during this
period of history remains that women were included on the whole only as
daughters and wives, rather than as persons in their own right.
The associations and connections between individuals that characterize
this database include only a small number of women. If we briefly take this
group of women for whom we know they had “connections” as our focus, what
can we find out? It turns out that most of these “connections” that involve
women are based on a man writing a grave inscription (the database uses the
term “epitaph”) for a woman. The group also includes a small number of
empresses and other exceptional females to whom certain men had largely
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political connections, and their presence in the focus group problematizes
our ability to make any statements about the group as a whole. We find, for
example, that the group of women with associations had longer life spans
than the women in the database in general, that a majority of women with
associations (61%) had these with individuals with a different place of origin
(the database uses the term “address”), and that most of the epitaphs (70%)
were written by men with an address that differed from their recipients. The
question remains, however, whether this group of women defined by their
“having associations in the database” is a suitable object for meaningful prosopographical queries. Similar problems present themselves when we separate
for analysis the group of women for whom we can trace kinship data in the
database. Again, compared to the amount of data on kinship available in the
database as a whole, the data involving women is very small. It mostly involves
information about fathers and husbands, and, for example, hardly any data
about kinship relations between women.
A more fruitful avenue of inquiry was to identify groups of women on the
basis of their address. That strategy led to small sample groups, as the table
below illustrates, but at least they form to some extent a meaningful group for
separate analysis and comparison. For Jizhou 吉州, for example, we have data
for 885 individuals, of whom only 15 are women, while the Jizhou population
as a whole counted, according to Hartwell, around 22,400 households in 742,
and 251,200 households in 1542. I asked a number of identical questions for the
women in the database from a number of prefectures, including their dates
(separating them into dynastic groups), their average life span, their age at
marriage, and the number of children they bore. I also compared the status
identification assigned to the women’s fathers and their husbands. Finally, I
investigated the nature of their connection to the men they married, asking
whether they shared the same address, and where not, how and where the
association between the two families was formed. This yielded the following
table:
size of sample (no. of women)
Dynastic group
median age
median marital age
number of children
Status
F marrying outside M
Jizhou
15
66.6% SS
66
18
3
mostly same
27%
Fuzhou
11
63% NS
49.5
14
3.5
inconcl.
40%
Mingzhou
24
87.5% SS
66.5
19
5
mostly same
25% outside
Wuzhou
19
74% SS
70
20
3
mostly same
21% outside
prosopography in middle period research
Clearly, the size of the samples makes drawing conclusions rather hazardous.
Another problem that presented itself during the course of this research was
the nature of the assignment of an address to an individual. My comparison
of addresses between women and the men they married was intended to
test the Hartwell/Hymes hypothesis that marital strategies changed between
Northern and Southern Song, and that men started to marry locally. One
could argue that the table above confirms that, considering that most of the
low percentages (27% and lower) are based on Southern Song samples, and
the higher percentage (40%) reflects a Northern Song sample. The problem,
however, lies in the assignment of an address that this is based on, as a brief
comparison of the data for one individual I worked with, drawn only from
the database, with the data for that same individual drawn from conventional
textual research presented in the paper by Fang Chengfeng, revealed.
The database is an extremely powerful tool for researching the socio-political
world of pre-modern China. It also holds some extremely important information about women and their roles within that world. Some of that information,
however, is not readily available as much of it has been included in the “notes”
sections in the main biographical table and therefore cannot be captured by
the queries one formulates to analyze the data. The ‘LookatNetworks’ in its
current Access form can only handle a single individual at present. It might
be useful to be able to explore the networks (within 2 nodes) of a group of
people, whichever way that ‘group’ was composed. Finally, I found that even
within this small study of women, the error level seemed high, especially for
women, where the database only provides partial names.
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