Robert Hymes
 

one of the hundreds of rare editions of
(Chinese local histories preserved in the extra¬
ordinary collection of Columbia's own C. V.
Starr East Asian Libraiy an invahiable re-
somxe for work in Chinese history. Leading
historians of China from universities in this
country and abroad have made the collection
a hub of important research for decades, and
the turn toward local history, social history,
and cultural history that has marked the study
of C^hina in the last ten or twentv years \votild
not have been possible without the Starr col¬
lection and the few others like it.

Li Chung-chien's stress on the diffictilty of
his project suggests that problems or contro¬
versies may have dogged the wTiting of this
particular history. It is interesting that he
should picture local gentry saving "It is not my
affair," since the making of a county or pre-
fectural history, as a focus of local pride and in
part a record of the accomplishments of great
men and prominent families, often drew en¬
thusiastic participation from resident elites.
Indeed a local administrator in imperial
China—alwavs an outsider assigned to a post
in often unfamiliar surroundings by the em¬
peror or his central bureaucrats—might have
found in compiling a local history a project in
which to involve local gentry, a way to build
ties of friendly association and mutual aid that
could help him govern. In fact such a union of
local interests and biueaucratic needs seems
 

to have produced the genre of Chinese local
history as we know it.

The earliest roots of the local history
stretch back into China's middle ages. In the
T'ang dynasty (608-906) and perhaps before,
collections of maps with accompanying ex¬
planatory annotation called t'u-ching, literally
"maps and text," were compiled for the use of
county or prefectural administrators. Though
no such works survive, contemporary refer¬
ences, as well as the content of surviving
national geographical compilations that pre¬
sumably drew on the local works for their
information, suggest that the text might have
included not only comment on the maps with
details of routes and distances but also lists
and descriptions of government btiildings,
temples and shrines, schools, and the like—
the kinds of information a local administrator
might have needed to find his way around his
jurisdicdon and to go\ern without showing
embarrassing ignorance.

The "modern" local history, however, like a
great deal else in Chinese elite culture, seems
to have taken shape in the second half of the
Sung dynasty (960-1278), during what histo¬
rians call the "Southern Sung," because the
Sung governed only the southern two-thirds
of what had tradidonally been Chinese terri¬
tory. In this period and tmder the succeeding
Yuan dynasty, when China was reunited but
governed by a non-Chinese people, the Mon-
 

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