Jiangnan Region Research Articles

:The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture

This book is one of a number of recent works exploring the “sinister” side of Chinese worship, in which divinity works through raw power more than bureaucratic authority and emphasizes market greed over moral rectitude. It offers an important and welcome addition to earlier understandings of Chinese divinity, which often tended to assume a naïve Durkheimian reading of Chinese deities as a reflection of social categories. Richard von Glahn argues instead that Chinese religion fostered a long argument between an exorcistic side that focused on fearful beings of capricious power and an equilibrium-based view of the moral balance of the universe. These two views evolved through an interplay of different social groups (officials, local elites, Buddhists, Daoists, peasants, shopkeepers) who both shaped the system and were shaped by it, leading to important reworkings in the Han and Song dynasties. Von Glahn's argument turns on the case of the Wutong and their more and less respectable transformations (Wuxian, Wusheng, and many more). This set of five deities has ancient roots in stories of mountain goblins, but the cult came into its own especially in the Song through Ming dynasties in the Jiangnan region—a commercial and educational center throughout this period. There has been a remarkable outpouring of scholarship on this cult over the last few years, with important work by Ursula-Angelika Cedzich, Michael Szonyi, and Guo Qitao. All of these scholars have added to our understanding of the social dynamics of this complex cult, although there still remain numerous areas of conflicting interpretation.

The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture Randall Nadeau (bio) Richard von Glahn. The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 397 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 0-520-23408-1. Richard von Glahn's earlier published work on the cult of Wutong in late imperial China1 is supplemented and expanded by a full-length study of demonic spirits from the Shang to the Qing in his new book, The Sinister Way. Von Glahn, a social and economic historian of the Jiangnan region in the late imperial period, has written a comprehensive work on Chinese conceptions of divinity from antiquity to the present day. The book has seven chapters that can be divided into two parts. The second (chapters 5 to 7) focuses on Wutong, with a general introductory chapter on religion in the Song, which von Glahn identifies as a turning point in the history of Chinese religions. The first part (chapters 1 to 4) is a survey of ghosts and demons in ancient China, the Han, and medieval Daoism. Building on recent work on deity cults by Robert Campany, Terry Kleeman, Robert Weller and Meir Shahar, Kenneth Dean, and Paul Katz,2 von Glahn's contribution is twofold: he shows that "sinister forces" have been part of Chinese religious culture since very early antiquity, and he reinforces the growing sense among scholars that traditional demarcations between gods, ghosts, and ancestors and between "good" and "evil" are porous and indeterminate. The book is not merely a survey of demons but also a critical essay on traditional categories and classifications in the study of Chinese religion. [End Page 477] Prior to the pioneering work of von Glahn and his cohort, the prevailing view was that premodern China lacked a concept of evil (in the sense of unmitigated or metaphysical evil as a cosmic force). The pre-Qin philosophers saw evil as a distortion of the natural order (not built into it), resulting from social forces that were perverted or misapplied rather than inherently "wrong." Benjamin Schwartz has argued that most early thinkers sided with Mencius, believing in a natural inclination to the good. Goodness is sometimes overwhelmed by wants and desires that arise in response to social temptations, but the good is more fundamental, better identified as "innate," than is evil.3 Things that the Confucians recognized as evil—the pursuit of wealth and power and the satisfaction of sensual desires—were not inherently wrong, but wrong only in excess, in misapplication, or in response to their denial or frustration. Even in the case of Xunzi, whose famous statement that "the nature of man is evil, his goodness acquired" is usually pitted against Mencius' more sanguine view, there was never a sense that that evil was demonic or incorrigible. Evil for Xunzi, Schwartz comments, is a "disorder" that "arises somewhere in the area of interaction between the perceptions and the world of objects." Human desires are boundless and cannot be satisfied, and from this, conflict arises. Yet Xunzi's "genuinely optimistic faith that the 'internalization' of the moral-cultural heritage may in the end lead some to the attainment of virtue . . . has led some [scholars] to doubt that [Xunzi] genuinely believed that 'the nature is evil.'"4 When the possibility of moral rectification by one's own effort is affirmed as religiously as it was by Xunzi, it is hard to conclude that any of the Confucian moralists believed in metaphysical evil. For Chinese intellectuals, the conflict was not so much between cosmic forces of good and evil as it was between material and sensual desires, on the one hand, and societal expectations of virtue and duty, on the other. This internal battle, appearing vividly in Song and Ming Neo-Confucians like Wang Yang-ming, engendered a preoccupation with wrongdoing and led to the production of moralizing literature such as the "morality books" and "ledgers of merit and demerit" of late imperial China. Wolfram Eberhard famously described the internalized "sense of guilt" as the distinguishing characteristic of Chinese "shame culture."5 Eberhard ignored any nuance of time and place, collapsing hundreds of...

Comparison of some sediment-hosted, stratiform barite deposits in China, the United States, and India

Shifts in world barite production since the 1980s have resulted in China becoming the world's largest barite-producing country followed by the US and India. Most barite produced for use in drilling fluids is derived from black shale- and chert-hosted, stratiform marine deposits. In China, Late Proterozoic to Early Cambrian marine barite deposits occur on the oceanic margins of the Yangtze platform, in the Qinling region in the north and the Jiangnan region in the south. Most US ore-grade deposits are in the Nevada barite belt; most commercial deposits occur in Ordovician and Devonian marine rocks along the western margin of the early Paleozoic North American continent. Production in India is predominantly from a single Middle Proterozoic deposit in a sedimentary basin located on Archean basement in Andrah Pradesh. The geologic and geochemical characteristics of the deposits are consistent with origins from a variety of sedimentary-exhalative processes, with biogenic processes contributing to the concentration of some seafloor barite. Linear distributions of clusters of lenticular deposits suggest a geographic relationship to syndepositional seafloor fault zones. Sulfur isotope data of the barite deposits range from values that are similar to coeval seawater sulfate to significantly higher δ 34S values. Strontium isotope values of continental-margin-type deposits in Nevada and China are less radiogenic than those of cratonic-rift deposits (e.g. Meggen and Rammelsberg). Comparison of La n /Ce n ratios of barite in the Qinling region of China with marine chert ratios suggests a relationship to hydrothermal fluids, whereas ratios from the Jiangnan region and Nevada can be interpreted as reflecting a biogenic influence. The California Borderland provides a potential modern analog where hydrothermal barium is being deposited on the seafloor in fault-block-bounded basins. Anoxic to dysaerobic conditions on some marine basin floors result from upwelling, nutrient-rich currents and high productivity in surface waters. In this setting, biogenic processes could contribute to the concentration of barium from hydrothermal sources.

The Golden Mirror in the imperial court of the Qianlong emperor, 1739-1742.

In the last month of 1739, the third f the Manchu rulers, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795), ordered the compilation of a treatise on medicine "to rectify medical knowledge" throughout the empire. By the end of 1742, eighty participants chosen from several offices within the palace bureaucracy based in Beijing completed the Golden Mirror of the Orthodox Lineage of Medicine, the only imperially commissioned medical text the Qing government's Imperial Printing Office published. The Golden Mirror represents both the limitations in the power of the Qianlong emperor and the dominance in the Manchu court of Chinese scholarship from the Jiangnan region during the first decade of his reign. Chinese scholars participating in the compilation of the Golden Mirror fashioned a medical orthodoxy for the empire in the mid-eighteenth century from regional trends since the sixteenth century. The Golden Mirror is an illuminating example of how medical scholars participated in the formation of evidential scholarship in early-modern China and why Manchu patronage, southern Chinese scholarship, and medical orthodoxy, coalesced in the imperial court of the Qianlong emperor.

Jiangnan Region of Ancient China and the Korean Peninula

Jiangnan Region of Ancient China and the Korean Peninula

Wang Shizhen's Yan Shan Garden essays: narrating a literati landscape

The practice of building gardens in China dates from at least the Han, and persisted throughout subsequent periods as a relatively minor aspect of the lives of members of the highest levels of the social and political elite. Representing gardens and other forms of humanly modeled nature became an element in the discursive flow of literati culture as well. In the Tang, for example, sojourns in gardens and parks owned by members of the imperial family became a popular theme for poets.1 In the Song, Luoyang became a famous venue for retired officials, many of whom built private gardens. Li Gefei's ‘Luoyang ming yuan ji’ (Record of the Celebrated Gardens of Luoyang) describes 19 of these, and provided an idealized model of the garden as the gentleman's retreat from the vicissitudes of public life.2 It was also during the Song that gardens began to be built in the Jiangnan region, especially during the Southern Song, when gardens were noted in Lin'an (Hangzhou), Wuxing, and the environs of Lake Tai.3

The Shao Garden of Mi Wanzhong (1570–1628): revisiting a late Ming landscape through visual and literary sources1

The discourse on Ming gardens, in China or the West, has long drawn upon examples from the Jiangnan region, primarily those in the cities of Suzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou and their environs.3 Needless to say, this geocentric focus is not only artificial but also greatly limits the understanding of the role gardens played elsewhere in China. For instance, it is not widely appreciated that Beijing, the Ming capital from 1420 to 1644, was also an important centre of garden culture from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. Apart from gardens within the confines of the Forbidden City, there were numerous estates owned by the titled aristocracy and scholar-officials which were known variously for their landscaping, horticultural splendors or architectural features. Until fairly recently, however, the gardens have largely been neglected for scholarly purposes.4 Most of the major gardens in Beijing did not survive the Qing conquest in 1644 and certainly none are to be seen today. Therefore, the study of Ming gardens in the northern capital must rely entirely upon textual records and, from time to time, upon visual representations. Using both written and illustrated sources, this study will consider one of the great landscapes of late Ming Beijing — the Shao Garden (Shao Yuan) belonging to the scholar-official and cultural patron Mi Wanzhong (1570–1628).

A Second Look at the Tōwa Sanyō: Clues to the Nature of the Guanhuah Studied by Japanese in the Early Eighteenth Century

The vocabulary and usage of the Towa sanyo provide a framework for examining the characteristics of eighteenth-century Mandarin. This Edo-period Chinese primer, compiled by Okajima Kanzan, presents a language that is distinctively Mandarin, while also showing evidence of Wu dialect influence. The text contains examples of usage drawn from the literary language as well. Yet this primer has a true colloquial base and likely represents an idealized form of Guanhuah, the Mandarin koine that carried great prestige in the Jiangnan region frequented by Japanese merchants who studied the text. The colloquial of this text shows a striking similarity to the modern Harngjou dialect. But, with slight modifications, Okajima's later texts present a language more similar to the Nanjing dialect. It is thus possible to surmise that Ming-period Guanhuah may have once been strongly reminiscent of the Harngjou dialect in most of its key features

Kinematics and geochronology of the Proterozoic Dongxiang-Shexian ductile shear zone: with HP metamorphism and ophiolitic melange (Jiangnan Region, South China)

A kinematic and geochronological analysis of the 10–20-km-wide northeast-trending Dongxiang-Shexian ductile shear zone, that trends along a length of 250 km in the eastern part of the Jiangnan belt indicates a sinistral strike-slip ductile shear that was formed during the Neo-Proterozoic. The zone experienced polyphase deformation related to tectonic collision between the Huaiyu and the Jiuling terranes. Geochronological data and kinematic analysis of macroscopic structures, microscopic shear indicators and quartz C-axes fabrics shows that a ductile southeastward thrusting occurred at about 950-900 Ma followed by a sinistral strike-slip shearing along a northeast trend at about 770 Ma. Coarse clastic sedimentary rocks of Sinian age were deposited unconformably on the entire Jiangnan belt including the Huaiyu and the Jiuling terranes. This paper emphasizes that the Jiangnan belt in the SE margin of Yangzi plate is a Neo-Proterozoic orogenic belt with HP metamorphism and ophiolitic melange, not a Late Paleozoic-Mesozoic collisional orogen.

A Study on Xizhang Junk Form Barge Train

Time-honoured ancient Xizhang Junk form remains to be predominant in the barge train fleet which plays an important role in domestic transport of the Jiangnan region crisscrossed by waterways in East China. With a view to reduce the formation coefficient of barge train, the shallow water resistance of the Xizhang Junk, both individually and in train, has been investigated both by means of towing tank model tests and full-scale trials in Grand Canal. A modified body plan is proposed. Operational results have shown good energy-saving, if the modified form barge is placed as the first one in the barge train. In the appendix, empirical formulae based on existing vessels are given to show the parametric features of Xizhang Junk form.

China Briefing, 1994 (review)

Reviews 491 William A. Joseph, editor. China Briefing, 1994. Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994. ix, 235 pp. Hardcover $39.85. Paperback $15.85. This excellent volume keeps to what the title promises: a briefing on important recent developments in China. The focus is on developments in 1992 and 1993, which, given the time needed for information to be collated and presented in Chinese sources, like the Statistical Yearbooks, means that this volume brings thorough and well-researched analyses with little delay. Ofparticular importance is Christine Wong's clear and insightful contribution on China's economy. The key to understanding most ofChina's behavior during the last few years lies in the difficulties in the fiscal system and the delays in banking reform; Christine Wong dissects these topics with admirable clarity. The link between local autonomy and the impossibility ofa monetary policy is analyzed. Richard Louis Edmonds gives a well-structured overview ofChina's environmental issues. One important point is the decision to build the Three Gorges dam, for which Edmonds lines up the detailed arguments of the proponents and the critics. Edmonds' realistic summary of the degradation ofnatural resources and the impact ofpollution emphasizes both the seriousness ofthe situation and its economic and political context. Lynn Webster Paine's chapter on education gives a well-read overview of the educational reforms, and it examines the changes in the educational system in the light ofwhat is happening to the economy. Margaret M. Pearson's chapter on foreign investment and trade is very useful and up-to-date. It covers a vast array oftopics, including the domestic aspects of foreign investment and trade, the link between Hong Kong and Taiwan (where, much to my disappointment, she uses the trendy and suggestive, but meaningless, terminology of"Greater China"), the accession to GATT, and Sino-American economic relations. It may be that relations with the European Union and Japan did not hit the headlines to the same extent, but it is my impression that structurally very interesting developments have taken place in this area during the last few years, a discussion ofwhich would have complemented Pearson's otherwise excellent account. Joseph Fewsmith contributes a superb piece of Pekingology. The most important political developments and power shuffles among the top leadership are© 1995 by University described with great insight. Fewsmith's chapter yields important data and constiofHawai ?Presstutes an impressiveiysuccinct analysis ofthe vagaries ofChinese politics. Dru C. Gladney's chapter on ethnic identity in China serves as a general background chapter, but it does not have the ambition to outline the most recent 492 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 developments. It is, however, a remarkably germane contribution, which helps the reader understand the complexities of the Chinese population. National identity and ethnicity are some ofthe strongest legitimizing factors underlying the Chinese state, and changes in this field may have enormous consequences. Dru Gladney's analysis is particularly useful since it does not draw any hasty conclusions , but keeps a sound, long-term perspective, founded in excellent scholarship. The chapter on "Rural China in Transition" by Huang Shu-min also maintains a long perspective, and describes rural development in broad strokes. Nancy Hearst's chronology is a very useful and highly selective overview of foreign relations and "dissident" events, interspersed with accounts ofpurely domestic phenomena. The glossary is useful for readers who have difficulty in keeping track ofthe many Chinese names and the specialist expressions relating to China. This volume is useful for those who need a reliable, up-to-date analysis of China. It is just what the businessperson, diplomat, or informed traveler needs while in China—and it is good and worthwhile reading for the China specialist who needs to be kept informed on current matters. Flemming Christiansen University ofManchester Dorothy Ko. Teachers ofthe Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth -Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 395 pp. Hardcover $45.00. Paperback. $16.95. In Teachers ofthe Inner Chambers, Dorothy Ko celebrates several clusters ofliterary women who lived and wrote in the Jiangnan region (roughly Yangzhou to Hangzhou) during the long seventeenth century (roughly 1575 to 1725). Ko recovers for us a lost world of...

To Chasten Society: The Development of Widow Homes in the Qing, 1773-1911

TO CHASTEN SOCIETY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF WIDOW HOMES IN THE QING, 1773-1911* Angela Ki Che Leung During the last decades of the eighteenth century, in the Jiangnan region, a new type of public philanthropic institution arose: societies and homes for chaste widows, generally known in Chinese as xuli hui or qingjie tang. Most research on this institution discusses it only in the context of the nineteenth century, implying that it was essentially a phenomenon of the post-Taiping era (Gao 1990 [1935]; Lum 1984; Tao 1991). A more precise and complete historical reconstruction of the institution has recently been provided by the Japanese scholar Fuma Susumu, who argues that the origin of widow homes can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. According to his evidence , the idea of a home for chaste widows was first conceived in 1773, by Wang Zhong of Yangzhou; a year later, the first home was established in Suzhou. Fuma rightly emphasizes that the first organizations for accommodating chaste widows were essentially for widows of poor scholars, and that the institutions extended their services to other social classes only later on, in the nineteenth century (Fuma 1991). The present study, while confirming Fuma's basic findings, sets out to explain the social and ideological forces that lay behind the proliferation of widow societies in the Qing. I am particularly interested in tracing the links between the cult of widow chastity, the familial model of philanthropy, state ideology, and local social activism in the development of such societies during a period of increasing social disorder. First, however, it is necessary to highlight the importance of the institution's development: after the appearance of the first model and before the outbreak of the Taiping rebellion in 1850, at least 56 widow institutions were established in the provinces of Jiangsu, "This paper has appeared in a slightly different form in the proceedings of the conference "Family Process and Political Process in Modern Chinese History" sponsored by the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, and the Department of History, University of California, Davis, June 1992, pp. 415-50. I would like to express my gratitude to Cynthia Brokaw, Jerry Dennerline, Louise Edwards, Benjamin Elman, Evelyn Rawski, William Rowe, and an anonymous reader for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article . I am also grateful to the participants of the Nankang conference for their criticism and remarks. Late Imperial China Vol. 14, No. 2 (December 1993): 1-32 1 2 Angela Ki Che Leung Zhejiang, Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Hebei, although most of these were concentrated in the two provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang (41 out of the 56, or 73.2 percent). After 1850, the spread was even greater: at least another 132 institutions were established in the half century between 1850 and 1900, reaching the provinces of Hubei, Gansu, Anhui, Yunnan, Henan, and Shandong. In the remaining eleven years of Manchu rule, another 28 institutions were founded (finally reaching Jiangxi). Thus, a total of 216 institutions were established between 1773 and 1911, not including those numerous multi-functional institutions, quite common in the nineteenth century, that included aid to chaste widows as one of their many functions (Leung 1991).1 When compared with the other major types of philanthropic institutions— foundling homes, poorhouses, and dispensaries—that were established at the beginning of Manchu rule, chaste widow institutions seem to have been a belated effort and their number relatively small.2 But their organizational principles are most revealing of the nature of Chinese public philanthropy of the mid- and late-Qing period. They reflect the deep-seated anxiety of the elite classes, as well as the lower gentry, over the preservation of Confucian virtue in a period of increasing social violence, especially against young widows . They reveal the enormous gap between the ideology of widow chastity and the social conditions of the later Qing period. Chaste Widow Institutions as a Moral Instrument The emergence of chaste widow institutions was not only part of the philanthropic movement of the late imperial period, but was also closely linked to the penetration of the cult of chastity. Indeed, one major purpose of these institutions was...

Bedded barite deposits in the United States, Canada, Germany, and China; two major types based on tectonic setting

Bedded barite deposits can be divided into two types based on stratigraphic succession, tectonic setting, and geochemistry. The first, herein termed the margin has abundant chert in the host sediments, is deposited in small ocean basins lying between a subduction zone and a passive continental margin, and has a geochemical signature that suggests an appreciable influence of oceanic crust. The barite is deposited on or adjacent to the passive margin side of the basin. Subduction leads to consumption of the ocean floor of the basin, collision of the volcanic arc with the passive margin, and thrusting of the barite-bearing sedimentary sequence onto the stable platform. This group of deposits lacks economic accumulations of Pb and Zn. Examples are the Fancy Hill and Chamberlain Creek deposits in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas and the East Northumberland Canyon deposit in central Nevada. The second type, for which we propose the term rift is hosted by coarse clastics of turbidity current origin and is deposited in intracratonic rifts with strong local relief; the host rocks have a chemistry suggesting entirely continental affinities. Volcanic rocks, where present, tend to be alkalic basalts. Most barite deposits of this type are accompanied by economic accumulations of Pb and Zn. Examples include the Meggen and Rammelsberg deposits in Germany and the Anvil and Howard's Pass deposits in the Selwyn basin of western Canada.The barite deposits of south China can be assigned tentatively to these two types. Those of the Qinling district were deposited in a chert-dominated section on oceanic crust in a closing, remnant-ocean basin, placing them in the continental margin type. Those of the Jiangnan region are chemically more like the cratonic rift-type deposits and seem to reflect a similar tectonic setting. If this assignment is correct, the Jiangnan area should be considered prospective for Pb and Zn mineralization near the barite deposits.

Structural analysis of the Nanchang-Wanzai sinistral ductile shear zone (Jiangnan region, South China)

In the central part of the Middle-Late Proterozoic Jiangnan region, South China, a large ductile shear zone, called the Nanchang-Wanzai fault zone, 2–4 km wide, extends for 300 km along the southern boundary of the Jiuling Mountains, Jiangxi Province. Mesoscopic fabric, microstructure and quartz C-axis fabrics in the Nanchang-Wanzai mylonite zone provide some kinematic evidence for a left-lateral wrench movement. This paper reports also a TEM (transmission electron microscope) analysis of the microstructures of Differential stresses ( σ 1− σ 3) in the shear zone, determined from the free dislocations density, the subgrain size and the dynamically recrystallized grain size, lie in the range of 50–190 Mpa. We discuss the formation age of the ductile shear zone and infer that the deformation took place after the Late Proterozoic, most likely during the Early Paleozoic. Lastly, we emphasize the role of Proterozoic and Caledonian orogenies for the formation of this area.

Proterozoic stratigraphy and tectonic framework of China

AbstractThe time span of the Proterozoic is taken as from 2600 to 600 Ma with subdivision boundaries at 1850 and 1050 Ma respectively, as 2600 Ma seems more appropriate for the initial Proterozoic in China, Siberia and parts of Gondwanaland, and 600 Ma is an inferred age of the Precambrian–Cambrian boundary based on recent study of the Yangtze Gorge section. The Proterozoic of China includes the Lower Proterozoic Wutaian and Hutuo-an, the Middle Proterozoic Changchengian and Jixianian and the Upper Proterozoic Qingbaikou-an and Sinian.Based mainly on tectono-sedimentary types and associations, seven stratigraphic super-regions are recognized in the Proterozoic of China and stratigraphic successions of various representative regions are shown in two tables, one for the Sinian and another for the Pre-Sinian Proterozoic. Palaeogeographic outline of the main super-regions and chronometric limit of the principal stratigraphic units are briefly discussed. Three types of stable Sinian successions are distinguished, the Yangtze type, the Quruktagh type and the Jiaoliao type, which are correlated mainly on the basis of tillite horizons and of sabelliditids and the Ediacara type of fossils. Semi-stable and mobile types of Sinian deposits in Southeast China are also briefly mentioned.The Proterozoic tectonic units of China and the nature of their boundaries are shown on a sketch map showing basement structures. Crustal sectors of continental nature are designated as continental tectonic domains, while broad and complicated crustal sectors of mainly transitional and partly oceanic nature may be called continental margin tectonic domains. The boundaries between these domains are usually the principal crustal consumption zones. On this basis, three continental domains, the North China, the South China and the Southern (Gondwana), and two continental margin domains, the Northern (Siberian–Mongolian) and the East China, are distinguished. Platforms, continental nuclei, massifs and uplifts are used to denote subdivisions within the tectonic domains. The development of aulacogens is an outstanding feature in the continental domains, especially in the Middle Proterozoic. Aulacogens may be classified into an intra-platform type and a platform margin type. Early Proterozoic aulacogens are usually brachy-axial and intermittent, and show conspicuous deformation at closure, much like a geosyncline. Thirteen aulacogens of different types are shown on the sketch map.The boundary nature of continental domains is analysed in terms of island arcs and marginal seas, and also of emplacement of granite rocks in border parts. The North China Domain was basically consolidated at around 1850 Ma and has a passive northern margin stretching from Nei Mongol to Central Tianshan, but the southern margin was active and was twice subducted by the Qinling marine realm at 1700 and 1000 Ma approximately. The Yangtze Platform was not completely consolidated until 1050 Ma BP but has a core older than 1850 Ma. A broad continental margin terrain had developed in the Jiangnan region and farther to the southeast in the Middle and Late Proterozoic. At least two island arc belts with interarc basins, an inner Fanjingshan and an outer Sibao, may be discerned in the Middle Proterozoic, and a Late Proterozoic island arc zone over 1000 km in length was developed along the southern margin of the Jiangnan Uplift, represented by the Banxi Group and equivalent strata. This kind of broad complicated continental margin tract which has a long development history may be called the open type or the West Pacific type.