This chapter explores the process behind local cultural-memory production in Guyuan, the devastated regional hub of eastern Gansu at the time of the Haiyuan earthquake of 1920. It considers three textual forms of communal memory produced over the twentieth century – published diaries or memoirs, wenshi ziliao (Cultural and Historical Materials) and difang zhi (city or district gazetteers) – for what they reveal about fundamental tensions within official, party-sponsored records, in other words between revolutionary and communal accounts of the past. The chapter examines the extent to which the language and broader system of values from the republican period lived on in official local records through the Maoist People’s Republic and afterwards. Held up against Maoist storytelling on the old society, gazetteer biographies and wenshi ziliao accounts provide profoundly mixed messaging on “how things used to be,” from mutual-aid practices to civic life, before the interventions of the Communist Party. The chapter then turns to the question of silences in the communal record, of the limited role of women in communal memory and how this evolved over time, and the fate of the historical record of Guyuan’s Muslim population.

Chinese late imperial urban civilization was made up of loose regional economies with a few large cities supported by lots of market towns. The Grand Canal remained its backbone, and China’s most prosperous cities were distributed along its length, and international maritime connections to the early modern global economy saw the growth of the Pearl River Delta. Elsewhere defence was important. Ming Dynasty coastal cities faced threats from pirates. Then as the Qing Dynasty expanded into the northwest, cities in the new province of Xinjiang developed around military garrisons. Walls remained a primary characteristic of Chinese urban form, and they surrounded large commercial and administrative cities, as well as those built for defensive purposes. All cities were now governed by a mixture of state and private interests, including the newly established merchant societies. The Ming and Qing Dynasties saw the flowering of late imperial urban culture. The cities of the Lower Yangzi Delta set the standards of style and taste, but the movement of gentry, merchants, and other urban residents brought this urban culture to the farthest corners of the empire. They produced travel guides, urban histories, prose, and poetry that recorded all aspects of urban life in minute detail.