BOOK REVIEWS 179

2001 Shisanhang de Shiqian Jumin [Prehistoric Penghu]. Bulletin of the Institute of inhabitants of Shihsanhang]. Taipei: History and Philology 72(4):889–940. Shisanhang Museum of Archaeology. TSANG CHENG-HWA,LI KUANG-TI, AND CHU TSANG CHENG-HWA, AND HUNG HSIAO-CHUN CHENG-I 2001 Penghu Qimei dao shiqian shiqi 2006 Xian Min Li Ji [Footprints of Our Zhizaochang de faxian he chubu janjiu Ancestors]. Tainan: Tainan County [A preliminary study on three lithic Government. workshops found on Qimei Island,

The People Between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE. Catherine Churchman. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. xvii + 266 pp. Hardcover, US $85. ISBN 978-1-4422-5860-0.

Reviewed by Erica Fox BRINDLEY, Department of Asian Studies, Pennsylvania State University

The People Between the Rivers is a masterful providing a convincing account of the historical account of an important , its political structures, trade networks, and peoples and chieftains, and the various cross-cultural contacts of peoples in the Chinese administrative empires with which Two Rivers Region, one that helps explain they constantly interacted. It provides a the eventual formation of Vietic states to the focused, interdisciplinary analysis of cultural southwest. To date, there has been very little interactions involving a neglected group of work on these ancient peoples in Western peoples over a large expanse of time, scholarship. Churchman is one of the first approximately 550 years. The author’s main Euro-American scholars to take this region as sources are texts, mostly histories and other an integral unit that might be discussed on its treatises written during the period under own as a vital crossroads among peoples of examination, but Churchman also brings incredible diversity and difference and as a broad insights and critical approaches from crucial node for understanding basic problems linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to in the history of Chinese empires and bear on the study; the result is nothing short of frontiers. spectacular. This study provides a crucial Churchman is sophisticated in her use of missing link in the chain of our understanding social science theories and methods and of premodern China–Southeast relations. provides a critical reading of her sources. It is one of the finest histories concerning first Although this region has been understood to millennium C.E. or be part of “China” for the last thousand years, that I have seen in years. Churchman shows that it can be fruitful to Churchman’s work on what she calls “the view it as the “northernmost extension of a people between the rivers” (i.e., the Red Southeast Asian cultural world” (p. 12), at River and Pearl River) concerns groups least during the first millennium C.E. referred to as the Li and Lao in Chinese Approaches garnered over recent decades in language sources of the period. This book the study of Southeast Asia can be employed adds considerably to a growing body of to study this region as well. Churchman also scholarship on the history of the southern makes use of a wide variety of languages and reaches of the East Asian mainland, sometimes scribal systems beyond her primary sources in referred to as China’s southern frontier.1 The classical Chinese to greatly enrich the People Between the Rivers fills an important account. Secondary sources in Mandarin, lacuna in our understanding of this frontier by Vietnamese (written in Chữ Nôm), Japanese, 180 ASIAN PERSPECTIVES • 2018 • 57(1)

French, German, and English were consulted in formulations such as “southern China,” and discussed in some manner. “Yue,”“,” and so on. The contributions of the book are many. Churchman breaks new ground with her Foremost, the book outlines crucial changes conclusions. She shows that even after the in political structures, administrative practices, imperial conquest of the surrounding river trade, and strategic alliances that together offer plains and coastal , the Two Rivers a plausible, step-by-step model of cross- region witnessed the growth of powerful, cultural contact and interaction. Churchman non-Chinese political structures (dong chief- thus rewrites the history of “sinicization.” doms) associated with a bronze drum culture. Instead of sinicization of the region, we see This helps explains the archaeological dis- mutual accommodation and even a type of covery of more than double the number of reverse response to sinicization during part of Heger II-type drums associated with this the period covered. Second, the book stresses region than any other category of bronze the importance of paying attention to the drum in the entire South China and Southeast distinction between lowland-upland peoples Asia region. Churchman further clarifies that rather than focusing on contemporary, natio- the process of cross-cultural interactions over nalistic distinctions between the regions of the approximately 400 years between the Han “Chinese” and “Vietnamese” and Tang empires is one in which contact Jiaozhou. Churchman shows that there were with Chinese empires actually had a reverse stark differences between the cultural com- effect on sinicization, what she calls a “de- plexes of imperial, administrative, military Sinifying effect” (p. 204). This defies the states and those of upland chieftains, while the standard story that contact with Chinese lowland administrative centers of Guangdong culture would inexorably result in the loss of and Jiaozhou actually had more in common one’s culture and socio-political structures, than they had with the uplands regions but resonates with recent work by James Scott between them. Third, the book outlines a (2010) and others on non-state peoples in the history of peoples who have heretofore been Zomia regions of Southeast Asia. neglected in most scholarly accounts of Churchman ends her narrative by demon- southern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. strating that the powerful Tang empire was And lastly, Churchman’s account of how trade able to negotiate with and bestow adminis- worked between the people of the Chinese trative and military ranks on the heads of dong empires and the peoples of the Two Rivers chiefdoms to bring large, consolidated chunks Region is of great interest, not least because it of the region under imperial, administrative involved human trafficking and slavery, which control. From such a position of power, the are not well-discussed in the scholarship of Tang would then reorganize and fragment the premodern Asia. administrative units, wresting power from the The language Churchman uses throughout erstwhile dong chieftains and defeating smaller the book is nuanced and innovative and groups of recalcitrant peoples. This fine- advances our approaches to studying so-called woven account not only enables us to see how “lost” cultures and the history of cross-cultural the process of cross-cultural interaction had its interaction. By referring to the region she own specific history (one that ran counter to studies as the Two Rivers Region, its peoples as the sinicization model for hundreds of years), the “people between the rivers” or the Li and but also to see how such a history involved Lao peoples, their culture as “bronze drum specific imperial strategies of negotiation that culture,” and their political units as dong would eventually favor a transition from dong chiefdoms, Churchman avoids the pitfalls of to administrative unit and the eventual relying on national and ethnic categories that, dissolution of bronze drum political structures without proper contextualization, can obscure in the region. the changing realities under investigation. For While the scope of the project is tightly example, the phrase “Two R ive r s R e g i o n ” is defined and Churchman accomplishes relatively devoid of cultural baggage and virtually everything she sets out to do, there unattached to nation-state divisions inherent are nonetheless areas that might have been BOOK REVIEWS 181 explained in more detail. For example, how REFERENCES CITED might the ethnonyms Li and Lao, so relevant for the Southern Dynasties period, have fit ANDERSON,JAMES, AND JOHN WHITMORE, EDS. ’ back into the larger complex of Yue or Luo- 2014 China s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier Yue from the Han period and earlier? In Over Two Millennia. Leiden: Brill. addition, a more explicit discussion of how the BALDANZA,KATHLENE bestowal of administrative titles on dong chiefs 2016 Ming China and : Negotiating compared with the act of casting and displaying Borders in Early Modern Asia. Cambridge: bronze drums in the context of bronze drum Cambridge University Press. culture would be helpful. Is it possible to know BRINDLEY,ERICA the relative prestige of each form of legitimacy 2015 Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions at different periods of time, or can such and Identities on the Southern Frontier, – information not be gleaned from the record? c. 400 BCE 50 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The People Between the Rivers should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in BRINDLEY,ERICA, AND KATHLENE BALDANZA 2014 Maritime Frontiers in Asia: Sino-Viet premodern Chinese and Southeast Asian Relations, ca. 900–1800 CE. Asia Major history, especially the history of cultural contact 27(2):1–146. and change involving diverse populations of CLARK,HUGH people. It is a remarkable piece of scholarship 2016 The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China on the cross-cultural interactions in premodern through the First Millennium CE. East and Southeast Asia, and it helps provide an Honolulu: University of Hawaii. integral, missing piece to the puzzle of how COOKE,NOLA,TANA LI, AND JAMES ANDERSON, EDS. Vietnam came to be Vietnam, and how 2011 The Tongking Gulf Through History. Chinese empires and states, since 1000 C.E., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. came to occupy more permanently the south- ern reaches of the East Asian mainland. KIM,NAM 2015 The Origins of Ancient Vietnam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. NOTES MAIR,VICTOR, AND LIAM KELLEY, EDS. 2015 Imperial China and its Southern Neigh- 1. In just the past decade, many edited volumes bours. Singapore: Institute of Southeast and a few monographs have been published on Asian Studies. the ancient or premodern southern frontier of SCOTT,JAMES C. China. Examples include Cooke, Li, and 2010 The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anderson (2011), Mair and Kelley (2015), Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Anderson and Whitmore (2014), and Brindley Asia. New Haven: Yale University and Baldanza (2014). For archaeological Press. monographs, see Kim (2015) and Yao (2016). For political, cultural, or religious YAO,ALICE histories involving one or more regions along 2016 The Ancient Highlands of Southwest the southern frontier, see Brindley (2015), China. Oxford: Oxford University Baldanza (2016), and Clark (2016). Press.