Maintaining Gods in Medieval China: Temple Worship and Local Governance in North China under the Jin and Yuan

Abstract

Maintaining Gods in Medieval China: Temple Worship and Local Governance in North China under the Jin and Yuan Iiyama Tomoyasu Translated by Macabe Keliher Despite the wealth of recent research on China’s middle period, local society and state control in North China under the Jin and Yuan remain unexamined.1 Work to date on middle-period history has given us a greater understanding of the economy and demographics of the Song, but it is confined to trends in the south, taking the Jiangnan region as the focus of research. As such, not much light has been shed on society in North China under Jurchen and Mongol control after the demise of the Northern Song, not to mention the forms of Jurchen and Mongol rule.2 Likewise, although research related to [End Page 71] the politics, economy, and military of the Yuan dynasty and Mongol Empire3 has developed steadily, little work has been done on Jurchen and Mongol rule of the north. In light of this problem, the following article addresses the role of local officials in society and the social and political control they enacted in North China under the Jin and Yuan. Research on the north has not been completely lacking. Indeed, some of the first work on this subject was undertaken by Kobayashi Morihiro 古林森廣, who examined the professional development of local officials as reflected in the Yuan dynasty guanzhenshu 官箴書 (guidebooks for governance), and Elizabeth Endicott-West, who investigated Yuan dynasty local government through the activities of the daruγa (an office created by the Mongols for the purpose of governing conquered territories) and suboffical functionaries (xuli 胥吏).4 However, both of these scholars have only given general overviews of Yuan dynasty provincial rule, and in doing so they consider the dynasty as a discrete unit of time separate from what came before or after. We therefore lack a comprehensive perspective of the developments in North China under Jurchen and Mongol rule since the fall of the Northern Song, and have little understanding of the degree of continuity between the prefectural and county administrations of the Yuan and that of the Northern Song, Liao, and Jin. Furthermore, these studies focused primarily on administrative structures and the nature of the central bureaucracy, but did not address the actual practice of local government or the interaction and intersection of state and society. In attempting to address these issues, I have shown elsewhere that the changing of local power-holders in North China during the Jin and Yuan did [End Page 72] not necessarily coincide with the rise and fall of dynasties. In an investigation of local elite advancement strategies, I pointed to a situation of continuity in local influence and authority from the Northern Song through the Jin and Yuan.5 Given those findings, it is also necessary to investigate local governance and how local officials confronted particular situations in their jurisdiction, and to do so from a trans-dynastic perspective. Furthermore, it is also necessary to look at the local circumstances of officials of the time, as well as how those local officials were evaluated by their predecessors. This will not only reveal developments in local control, but also lead to a consideration of the character and mechanism of that control. What methods, then, will be most effective in getting at these questions? In order to advance research along a longer time frame, I propose to look at phenomena and events diachronically. An arbitrary example of such a method would be irrigation and land reclamation, which by their very nature were long-term enterprises and thus would serve as suitable objects of investigation. However, in undertaking such inquiry, we must be wary of the problem of the paucity of historical records that can provide the necessary details and description for a concrete investigation. For instance, although we should make use of the memorials and personal correspondence of officials, as well as administrative guidebooks, each of these sources has its limitations. We have ample memorials and other correspondence from the early and middle Yuan, but the vast majority of these documents focus exclusively on the policies and circumstances of that period alone and thus cannot serve as primary sources for...