History and Autoethnography: Accounting for the Indigenous population of Yunnan, 1550–1650

Abstract

From its inception in the thirteenth century, Chinese imperial rule of Yunnan, its most southwestern province, involved written accounts of the region's Indigenous population. In local gazetteers, officials used conventionalised categories and tropes to describe and order the people they ruled. By the sixteenth century, sons of local elite families routinely received classical Chinese educations and were beginning to compile their own gazetteers. This article argues that local writers, including men of both Indigenous and migrant descent, used historical narrative to inscribe themselves as subjects in descriptions of Yunnan's people and in so doing to claim membership of the imperial governing class.