The Religious Culture of Southern Fujian, 750–1450: Preliminary Reflections on Contacts Across a Maritime Frontier

religious culture of southern fujian hugh clark The Religious Culture of Southern Fujian, 750–1450: Preliminary Reflections on Contacts across a Maritime Frontier his article consists of initial ideas that I have been considering on T the nature of China’s maritime frontier. The specific reference is that stretch of the frontier defined by Minnan Ꮈত, or southern Fujian province. Its impact on the economic and political history of China dur- ing the “middle period,” the centuries spanning the late-Tang through early-Ming dynasties (ca. 750–1450), has already been the subject of inquiries, including several of my own.1 But while new insights no doubt remain to be discovered, that is not the purpose of the follow- ing discussion. Rather, I want to reflect on the frontier’s impact on the religious culture of the Minnan region. I try to envision particularly the maritime frontier as a filtering membrane through which cultural influences could be received as well as distributed but always with an element of security that was rarely available on land frontiers. WHAT IS A FRONTIER? In broaching the theme of frontier, it is important first to establish what the term means. At its most basic the term is roughly equivalent to “border,” the line that delineates one zone — perhaps a state, perhaps something less tangible — from another.2 But this is not the way the 1 See esp. Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the Third to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1991); and “Muslims and Hindus in the Culture and Morphology of Quanzhou from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of World History 6.1 (1995), pp. 49–74. Concerning the Minnan region that is the focus of this essay, see also Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Regions, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 2000). For two much more com- -prehensive surveys of the maritime frontier, see Zhang Wei ്❒ʳand Fang Kun ֱ㴢, Zhong .guo haijiang tongshi խഏ௧ᡲຏ׾ (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 2003), pp. 1–9 See also Li Donghua ޕ೯ဎ, Zhongguo haiyang fazhan: Guanjian shidi gean yanjiu խഏ௧੉ .(ଡூઔߒ (Taibei: Daan chubanshe, 1990چ࿇୶, ᣂ᝶ழ 2 One dictionary traces the English word from Old French frontière, meaning simply “front,” and finds its earliest English usage to mean “front side.” From that came the concept 211 hugh clark term resonates to many. American historical discourse, for example, has long been driven by the idea of “frontier” as a boundary region separating the civilized realm that lay “behind” from a barbarous and savage realm that lay “beyond.” This was a land-based concept. In the North American experience, as well as that of other zones of European expansion such as Australia or South Africa, the sea was at the rear; it was the zone from which civilization came. The frontier always lay ahead — it was the interior. The frontier, therefore, was a contested zone in a way that the maritime rear never was or could be. And be- cause it was contested, it was also fluid; regions could slip “behind” the frontier into the realm of the civilized, only to be lost later should the “savages” who lay beyond gain strength and tactical advantage — a rare occurrence in the process of European expansion, to be sure, but nevertheless a real aspect of a contested frontier. China, of course, has an inland frontier. Indeed, most of China’s periphery confronts the Asian mainland — what Owen Lattimore so many years ago dubbed the “inner Asian frontier,”3 and it has been this engagement that has shaped China’s frontier consciousness. Through- out China’s history, from the invasions of the Zhou state late in the second millennium bc that led to the fall of the Shang/Yin dynasty, to those that marked the end of the Han imperial legacy in the fourth century ad, to the great invasions of the early second millennium that culminated in the Mongol conquest, and too many other occasions to mention as well, the inner Asian frontier has represented a tangible threat to imperial order. This frontier demarcated the boundary between the settled agrarian life of the empire and the migratory herding life of the steppe, and the two lifestyles were in eternal competition. The agrarianist needed stability, security, and above all boundaries that defined fields and separated holdings. The herding life was rooted in space and freedom. The values were in direct conflict, and so conflict was the result. This frontier was never expansionary in the same way that the European colonial frontiers were; too many factors — space, distance, of that “part of a country which … borders another country.” See The Oxford Universal Dic- tionary on Historical Principles, ed. C. T. Onions et al. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955 rev. edn.), p. 755. 3 The locus classicus is Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: The American Geographi- cal Society, 1941), but the theme is also addressed in many of the lectures and essays collected in Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958, with preface by Étienne Balasz (London: Oxford U.P., 1962). See also Hattori Katsuhiko ᆮຝ܌ข, Kodai Chˆgoku no .(խ㧺圸ಷ䷽圲圧圸ࡌ劊 (Tokyo: Mineruba shob±, 1969זײ gunken to sono shˆhen 212 religious culture of southern fujian environment to name a few — prohibited either side from gaining a de- cisive advantage over the other. Thus to a degree that was rarely part of the European colonial experience it was a frontier of flux and contest where each side held the upper hand at one time or another. Every bit as much as the European frontier of North America pitted civilization against savagery, however, the inner Asian frontier was perceived to pit civilization, which China has always equated with settled agriculture, against barbarism, the wayward life of the wandering herder. As defining as the inner Asian frontier has been to Chinese history and identity, however, a cursory glance at any map of China shows a maritime littoral that is equally as long as the land frontier, stretching from Manchuria all the way to Vietnam. This is the frontier that I am interested in, and it presents a different picture. To the European immi- grants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North America and elsewhere, the maritime littorals of their new lands were, as I said, “the zone from which civilization came.” But of course those Europeans had reached their new lands via the sea. In this they were qualitatively different from the Chinese, and in that difference lies a critical contrast. When the newly unified empire that emerged out of the wreckage of Zhou late in the first millennium bc began a pattern of expansion to the south — and expansion was almost always toward the south, for the early center of the northern plains already was confronting the limits of inner Asia — it did so through the inland river routes: the Han River through modern Hubei, the Gan and Xiang Rivers running south from the Yangtze, the delta networks of Guangdong. It would be rash and unsupportable to suggest there was no migration along the coast, but it is a fact that coastal migration was not favored. Thus as the sea was encountered it marked the limit to expansion; there were no waves of further migration across the waters — not, at least, until many, many centuries later under vastly different circumstances. To the Europeans, the sea was a source, a link to the motherlands that were the very definition of civilization. To the Chinese, the sea was a limit, a boundary against which they abutted and which marked the end of their expansion. The sea, therefore, marked something for the Chinese that was dramatically different from European perceptions of it. Europeans knew what lay beyond, for that was whence they had come, but the vast littoral of the south for the Chinese was essentially an unknown. Except in a political sense, after the “Age of Discovery” the Europeans did not generally regard the sea as a frontier. The Chinese did. But this was not the frontier of the north, the “inner Asian frontier.” That was 213 hugh clark dan gerous, an eternal source of threat. The maritime frontier of the south was generally not a source of concern. Yet that need not mean it was benign, for it clearly was a demarcation between the empire and something beyond. And central to the Chinese world view was that anything that lay beyond the empire was a threat to orthodox civilization. Thus as much as the maritime frontier was a political boundary, it was also a cultural boundary separating civilization from the incho- ate forces that lay beyond every bit as much as the far more dangerous northern frontier. EARLY ENCOUNTERS The expansion southward of northern polities inevitably brought the land-oriented plains cultures into contact with indigenous peoples who possessed their own, different, experiences and beliefs.4 One such encounter was that between the consolidating Qin and Han empires and the Yue peoples of the southeast coast. Just who the Yue were and how we should understand the textual references in Chinese sources remains an open question; classical Chinese ethnography was character- istically vague about the peoples encountered on the empire’s periph- eries, content instead with generalized references of which “Yue” was one. In addition to the Yue kingdom of the late-Zhou era mentioned above, for example, the ninth-century imperial gazetteer Yuan he jun- ။) in theۍ xian tuzhi ցࡉಷᗼቹݳ refers to the “myriad Yue” (bai Yue far south, the “Yue of Min” (Min Yue Ꮈ။) of the Fujian coast, and to the “eastern Yue” (dong Yue ࣟ။) of the Hangzhou Bay region.5 More generally, the second-century Hanshu comments: “The myriad Yue are scattered throughout the seven or eight thousand li stretching from Jiao- zhi (the Red River delta of modern Vietnam) to Kuaiji (the Hangzhou ጟࡩ, and it is not possibleڶٺ Bay region).

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