Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B.C.E.–50 C.E. by Erica Brindley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B.C.E.–50 C.E. by Erica Brindley Francis Allard Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B.C.E.–50 C.E. Erica Brindley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 302pp, 12 b/w illustrations, 3 maps, 3 tables, Bibliography, Index. US $103.00. ISBN 9781316355282. It is fair to say that substantially more has been written about China’s northern neighbors in pre- and early imperial times than about its early southern populations. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the perpetual need of Bronze Age and later dynasties to monitor, engage, and appease those powerful and mobile steppe polities that agitated at their doorstep. In contrast, not only was the south geographically distant from the dynastic centers of the Central Plains, it never emerged as a serious military threat. Textual, archaeological, and linguistic data combine to paint China’s vast southern region (from the Yangzi River to northern Vietnam) as a highly segmented ethnic landscape populated by mostly small-scale, pre-literate populations who spoke non-sinitic languages. The absence of any coordinated resistance to – or possibly even awareness of – the southern march of armies is evident from the recorded speed at which China’s early empires managed to incorporate the southern regions into their realms. Thus, by 214 b.c.e., Lingnan (consisting of present-day Guangdong and Guangxi) in southeast China had become part of the Qin empire, while troops dispatched one century later by the Han emperor Wudi are said to have taken no more than 3 years to reach and conquer a vast swath of territory covering present-day Fujian (along the southeast coast), Lingnan, northern and central Vietnam, and portions of Yunnan (in southwest China), all of which were soon partitioned into commanderies and constituent counties. Viewed from a comfortable historical distance, these early southern campaigns take on the appearance of effortless expansion which laid the foundation for the subsequent political integration and sinicization of China’s southern populations. In reality, however, the process of military, administrative, and cultural incorporation was also marked by serious challenges. Contemporary and later texts refer to regular and occasionally successful native uprisings, as well as debates at court regarding the wisdom of administering and holding on to such distant regions. Still, even as historical studies of the south have incorporated into their narratives details of these setbacks and the tasks faced by imperial [End Page 262] officials and military personnel, meta-accounts of China’s enlargement south of the Yangzi have viewed the expansion primarily as an inevitable sinicization process, the outcome of which was achieved through the gradual but insistent replacement of native political and cultural forms. Thus, while early western accounts of the expansion – most notably Herold Wiens’ (1954) China’s March Toward the Tropics and C.P. FitzGerald’s (1972) The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People – differ in regard to the manner in which native society was altered through sustained contact with Chinese soldiers, officials, traders, and colonists, they remain consistent in their adherence to the fundamental assumptions of the sinicization model. The view of early China’s southern region as an uneven ethnospace whose weak constituent populations were irreversibly drawn into the Chinese political and cultural sphere is now tempered by research conducted on more recent periods by western historians and anthropologists. This scholarship – much of it focused on ethnic groups located in southwest China – offers a more critical assessment of China’s infiltration of native territories by calling attention to the crucial fact that native acculturation to Chinese customs and views remained very much incomplete as recently as a few hundred years ago in some peripheral areas. Beyond the obvious relevance of such findings to discussions of earlier periods, these studies also highlight the reality that military, administrative, and cultural borders were likely never coterminous. These recent studies rely on a number of ideas (i.e., resistance, identity, acculturation, hybridization, agency) developed by Western scholars interested in the fate of peripheral populations that have been impacted by imperial expansion or touched by economic and cultural currents flowing from...