This short monograph is Hugh Clark's third foray into the topic of the Sinitic conquest and colonization of the lands south of the Yangtze that occurred over the first into the second millennium CE, and his second monograph dealing specifically with the southeast coast region that is now Fujian province. Only ninety pages long, the book is only half the length of his 2015 monograph The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China Through the First Millennium CE and has a more specific geographical focus, namely the Putian district in central Fujian. Clark follows the transformation of the area from an indigenous frontier region into a Chinese county over the Tang and Song periods, the titular Wu Xing being a semi-legendary bureaucrat of the Tang period whose story is symbolic of that transformation process. Wu was remembered not only for his fight against the jiao (a local water creature), but also for constructing a dam that drained a large wetland, thereby converting it to rice cultivation and Sinitic settlement. At the same time, agricultural settlement marginalized the indigenous inhabitants of the area (known in Chinese texts as the Quanlang), who were either assimilated or driven to nearby offshore islands by the newcomers. In contrast, in the second half of the book, Clark makes a convincing argument for a reversal of the traditional unidirectional civilizing project of Sinification embodied in the Wu Xing legend by revealing how a significant cultural practice of the “Chinese” inhabitants of the Fujian coast in later centuries (the worship of the sea goddess Mazu) was no less than the continuation of a local indigenous Quanlang tradition.
Teasing out the indigenous pre-Sinitic elements of Chinese culture in Southern China is not an entirely new approach in Sinological research, being first pioneered by scholars such as Wolfram Eberhard and Princeton Hsu (Xu Songshi) as early as the 1940s, but only in the last two decades has such research been applied on a granular level to discussion of local history. Clark is one of the masters of this approach in English language scholarship. The fact that he has chosen south-central Fujian as the topic of this work is especially welcome, as the early history of the region has not received much scholarly attention in English. Early Fujian has always presented difficulties for the historian due to its late incorporation into the Sinitic cultural world and the consequent paucity of primary sources. Common go-to source materials for the pre-Tang period in southern China, such Li Daoyuan's Commentary on the River Classic (500 CE), skip over the area altogether. To fill in these gaps in the primary sources, Professor Clark has employed textual analysis, environmental history, ethnology, and archaeology to bring the story of the region to life.
I was particularly pleased at the mention of the absence of indigenous voices in the Chinese sources, and appreciated the author's attempts throughout the book to bring indigenous cultures to the fore whether by discussion of folklore preserved in Chinese texts or features of indigenous material culture such as petroglyphs and bamboo rafts. However, I couldn't help feeling that indigenous peoples were somehow still “missing” from the story, and that still more could be gleaned about them from local toponyms, the substrate vocabulary of local dialects, historical anthropology, local genealogies, and archaeological remains. What kind of societies did these people inhabit? What languages did they speak beyond simply “Austronesian” (itself a highly debatable assertion)? How might their leaders have viewed or chosen to deal with the outsiders who believed it was their role to “tame and civilize” them? I also came away feeling that an opportunity had been missed for more critical evaluation of what it meant to be “ethnically or culturally Sinitic” in Tang-Song Fujian. Was it really possible that northern émigré lineages continued to feel distinct from the indigenous peoples they lived among even after centuries of intermarriage and residence alongside them? At one point the author expresses skepticism regarding the northern ancestry of the Huang clan of Putian, and there is certainly evidence that those of the same surname in neighboring Jianzhou were indigenous Southerners, as Yue Shi's Universal Geography of the Taiping Period cites a Tang work that states them to be “of the snake race” (the indigenous Fujianese were associated with snakes). There is also textual and genetic evidence to suggest that male migrants from the north married local indigenous women, and it would have been good to see both the subjects of intermarriage and indigenous assimilation given more attention, as these must surely have been two of the major vectors of indigenous-to-Sinitic cultural transmission at this time. I also had a minor criticism related to the occasional use of evidence from other regions that were not directly relevant to what was going on in Fujian. Although such examples are important for laying out background context of the larger, centuries-long colonization of the lands south of the Yangtze and the general tropes used by Chinese writers to describe it, I felt these were sometimes less useful as illustrations of goings-on in central Fujian. For instance, Liu Zongyuan's observations of the environment in distant Yongzhou (65–67), and Sun En's uprising in Hangzhou Bay in the late fourth century (48–50) were carried out in very different environmental and linguistic contexts from Putian, and I feel it may have been better to stick to using examples from districts closer by. These are very minor criticisms, however, and do not detract from the main argument.
In summary, Clark has successfully demonstrated in a short and very readable work how, despite the overwhelming technological and numerical superiority of the northern colonizers, the indigenous peoples of Fujian were not merely assimilated to the incoming culture but instead played a significant and vital role in its transformation, resulting in the creation of a local iteration of Sinitic culture that incorporated major elements of their own religious and cultural practices. Clark's book is not merely commendable as a groundbreaking study on an understudied region, it also stands as a useful guide for other scholars who might wish to conduct research on how indigenous encounters played out elsewhere south of the Yangtze. This truly presents a rich field of research, as such stories are waiting to be told in almost every locality of Southern China.
