Robert Hymes
 

county in their domain at semi-regular inter¬
vals, and it became almost unknown for a
history to be compiled without government
participation. But as Li Chung-chien's rumi¬
nations also suggest, for one man to compile
a local histor\' was verv difficult, and
collaboration—often semi-competitive in
character—between administrators and the
local literati remained the norm.

It is precisely the combination of bureau¬
cratic and governmental with local and
gentry-centered concerns, and the often fruit¬
ful tension between the two, that makes the
Chinese local history an extraordinarily rich
resource for the historian. Here are all the
technical geographic-cum-administrative data
that a just-unpacked local administrator
needed—maps (see for example the map of
Ch'ii-fu Cotmty from Fan Tang-luan's history
in figure 2), population figures, land surveys,
tax data, and the like. Biu here too are
records that celebrate the particularities of
local life as objects of pride, especially local
elite, held up for the admiration of gentry
descendants and the elite of other regions.
Biographies of prominent men, lists of suc¬
cessful examination candidates, inscriptions
copied from stone, retelling the founding and
history of local institutions both public and
private—temples, shrines, schools, granaries,
militia organizations, gardens, poetic and
philosophical societies—with the names of
sponsors   and   donors   and   records   of  the
 

amounts spent, epitaphs, also copied from
stone, and offering the most detailed record
of a man's life of any Chinese biographical
genre, selections from the poetry and prose of
a county's famous writers: all of these, in
quantit\, will find their way into a typical local
history. Some works give special aiieniion to a
countv's vistial character: Li Chung-chien
praised Fan Tang-luan particularly for the
quality of the Ch'ii-fu history's maps and
illtistrations (see the example in figure 3, a
woodcut of an important local academy).

The Starr Library's collection is especially
rich in Ch'ing and to a lesser extent Ming dy¬
nasty editions, and it also holds reprints of all
the forty or so surviving Siuig and Yuan local
histories (these, unfortunately, represent only
a small fraction of the hundreds originally
compiled in those periods). The Library is
also beginning to acquire the new local histo¬
ries that are appearing as this exceptionally
flexible genre revives under transformed con¬
ditions in the People's Reptiblic. It will be fas¬
cinating to see whether and how the genre's
paired tasks of serving governmental needs
and celebrating local pride contintie to coex¬
ist in a contemporary .setting. Together with
the Library's almost unparalleled wealth of
rare genealogies from the same periods, the
local histories collection makes C:;oltuubia's
holdings a resource unsurpassed in this coun¬
try for research in the social and cultural his¬
tory of both premodern and modern China.
 

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