From small fry to big fish: Representing the rise of Jiujiang township, Nanhai county, 1395–1657

In 1657, before the dust from the traumatic Ming-Qing dynastic transition had settled in south China, a literatus named Li Chunxi compiled a local history of his native Jiujiang township (bao) in Nanhai county. The place it described was a relatively new one on the cultural map of seventeenth-century Guangdong. Located in the Pearl River Delta hinterland southwest of the provincial capital, Guangzhou, Jiujiang was part of an area that had recently emerged as the epicenter of commercialized agriculture in the delta. This area consisted of several prosperous Nanhai county townships and the neighboring townships of Longshan and Longjiang in Shunde county, all bordered by the North and West Rivers. The industrial town of Foshan lay to the north, between Jiujiang and Guangzhou. Despite Jiujiang's booming commercial economy, it had only begun to produce a gentry class — defined in terms of degree-holders — in the middle of the fifteenth century. But two centuries later Li Chunxi could justifiably boast of the thriving elite culture as well as the economic prosperity that the township had achieved on the eve of the Ming-Qing transition.