Digital Humanities

Geographical Connections Yongan City (Yongan County), Yan River, Fuliu (Sha County), 26th to 29th Du (Youxi), Gongchuan, Datian County, Yanping Prefecture, Sanming City, Site of Provincial Capital Relocation, 13 Townships, 1 Town, 2 Sub-district Offices, 151 Village Committees. II. Ming Dynasty Genesis: From Borderland to the Birth of “Yongan” The creation of Yongan was a classic administrative experiment in “governance through security.” According to the Yongan City Gazetteer and the Yongan County Continued Gazetteer, the mid-Ming Dynasty saw large-scale uprisings led by Deng Maoqi, which created a power vacuum in the remote mountainous regions of central Fujian. ...

Ever wonder how a peasant farmer in rural Zhangzhou ended up paying his taxes with silver that once sat in a Mexican mine? Sounds far-fetched. But in the second half of the 16th century, that’s exactly what happened. I’m Chuke. Today I want to crack open the Wanli Zhangzhou Prefecture Chronicle and trace how global silver flowed through the valve of Moon Harbor (Yuegang), seeped into every Lijia unit in Southern Fujian, and turned physical tax obligations into cold, hard numbers on a ledger. ...

Geographic Connections Mountains: Pingshan, Wushan, Yushan (The Three Mountains), North Ling Mountain Range. Water Systems: Min River, Jin’an River, Baima River, Antai River (Hongqiao River), Xima River, Dongxi River. Lakes: West Lake (Xihu Tang), East Lake (now reclaimed). Landmarks: Sanfang Qixiang (Three Lanes and Seven Alleys), Tongji Bridge, Wumen Sluice, Wanzao Canal, Daqiaotou, Wuyi Square. I. City Built on Water: The Foundation of Drainage in Jin and Tang Dynasties The drainage logic of ancient Fuzhou began with its unique “basin” geography. Located in the lower reaches of the Min River, Fuzhou is flanked by the North Ling Mountains and the Min River to the south. According to the Fuzhou City Gazetteer, the foundation of Fuzhou’s urban planning lies in the deep coupling of “Mountains, City, and Water”. ...

Have you ever seen a giant building that has stood for centuries without a single nail? I spent a long time studying the Longyan State Chronicle and county records from Yongding. One number stopped me cold — scattered across the folded mountains of West Fujian are more than 23,000 Tulou. They aren’t ordinary houses. They are miniature societies — integrating defense, ritual, education, and living into a single structure. These buildings are piles of earth and wood, but they are also physical projections of a society in turmoil. ...

What if I told you that one of China’s most industrialized economies, four hundred years ago, was hidden deep in the mountains of western Fujian? Not today. Four hundred years ago. I was flipping through the Longyan State Chronicle when a string of numbers stopped me cold. 78 iron smelters. 32 coal seams. 4,500 paper-making troughs. 36,508 taels of silver in annual tax revenue. Those numbers would be impressive for an industrial city today. They all came from Ming and Qing dynasty Longyan — a county wedged between the Wuyi Mountains and the Boping Ridge. ...

There’s a pagoda that has been standing on the east side of Guanghua Temple in Putian for over nine hundred years. It’s not tall. 30.6 meters. But its surface carries 78 stone inscriptions — the names and donation amounts of hundreds of Song Dynasty people, spanning from 1192 to 1194, coming from Xinghua Army, Quanzhou Prefecture, and even as far as Lin’an. I stared at this data for a long time. How did a stone pagoda become a Song Dynasty “financial statement”? ...

Ever wondered how a hill less than a hundred meters tall became the spiritual anchor for generations of scholars in southern Fujian? I spent a month cross-referencing the 1573 Zhangzhou Prefecture Chronicles, Zhu Xi’s 1190 lecture records, and modern remote sensing data. The result floored me — Zhishan (originally Liyuan Mountain) may be a mere bump on the landscape, but the density of information it carries dwarfs any mountain. This is the “North Star” of Zhangzhou. ...

Geographical Connections Specific locations mentioned in this article include: Quanzhou Prefecture, Jinjiang, Nan’an, Anxi (Tea Clan Region), Hui’an, Yongchun, Dehua, Houzhu (Migration point), Fengzhou (Early settlement hub), and Jubao Street (Clan commercial hub). I. Bloodline Origins: From Central Plains Migration to Hokkien Clan Formation Open the Quanzhou Prefecture Chronicles, and you’ll discover a startling fact: the earliest “household registrations” on this land weren’t created by the government — they were written by the clans themselves. ...

Have you ever wondered how many numbers are hidden in a single cup of tea? I used to think tea was a purely sensory experience. Then I opened the local chronicles of Northern Fujian. Behind every leaf, I found ledgers. Imperial ledgers. Farmer ledgers. Trade ledgers. Every single entry, precise to the last digit. In the 6th year of the Dade era (1302 AD), the Yuan government built the Imperial Tea Garden at the Fourth Bend of Wuyi Mountain. 360 catties of tribute tea. Over 20 roasting houses. A workforce of nearly 500 pickers. This was a “capacity planning document” from seven centuries ago. ...

Geographical Connections: Zhangzhou Prefecture, Longxi, Haicheng (Yuegang), Zhangpu, Jiulong River Basin, Xiangcheng District, Xiamen Bay. 35%. That’s the percentage of Taiwan’s Han population with ancestral roots in Zhangzhou. One out of every three Taiwanese people traces their family tree back to this small city in southern Fujian. I found this number while flipping through the Selections from Zhangzhou Chronicles in the Taiwan Records. Honestly, at first I wasn’t surprised — Hokkien people crossing the strait to Taiwan is common knowledge, right? ...