Diāncháo 滇考
Examinations of Yúnnán by 馮甦 (撰)
About the work
The Diāncháo in 2 juǎn is a topical history of Yúnnán composed in Kāngxī 4 (1665) by Féng Sū 馮甦 while he was serving as Judicial Officer (推官 tuīguān) of Yǒngchāng 永昌 prefecture in the southwestern interior of Yúnnán. It deliberately omits the typical fāngzhì (gazetteer) coverage of mountains and rivers, peoples and products, and confines itself to a jìshì běnmò-style sequence of 37 titled pieces tracing the political and administrative history of the region from the Warring States invasion of Zhuāng Qiāo 莊蹻 — who first opened the Yelang and proto-Dali region to Central Plain influence — down through the Hàn, Táng (with the rise of Nánzhào 南詔), Sòng (Dàlǐ 大理), Yuán (the Sàdiǎnchì 賽典赤 administration), Míng (Ming Yú 明玉珍 / Lán Yùmèng 藍玉夢, Mù 沐 family hereditary command, and the southwestern campaigns), to the early Qīng. Many of the late-Míng entries — the Yáng Yīnglóng 楊應龍 affair, the Màilǐgē 麓川 / Mong Mao 孟卯 wars, the question of the Three Pacification Houses (Sānxuānliùwèi 三宣六慰), the proposed re-opening of the Jīnshā 金沙 river, and the disputed history of the eunuch zhènshǒu tàijiàn 鎮守太監 in Yúnnán — are based on Féng’s own reading of unfortunately limited surviving local sources and are fuller than in the standard histories. The book’s organising thesis, set out in the preface of Kāngxī yǐsì (1665, the second month, third decade), is that Yúnnán is not difficult to govern in itself but is rendered difficult by bad governance; he points to the periods of effective rule — Zhèng Chún 鄭純, Zhāng Xī 張翕, Sàdiǎnchì of the Yuán — as proof that competent administration suffices. The book is in this sense a manifesto for the southwestern frontier service.
Tiyao
The Diāncháo in 2 juǎn was composed by Féng Sū of our (Qīng) dynasty. Sū, zì Zàilái, was a man of Línhǎi; jìnshì of Shùnzhì wùxū (1658); rose to Vice-Minister of Justice. The work was made in Kāngxī 1 (1662) when Sū was tuīguān (Judicial Officer) of Yǒngchāng prefecture. — He has set aside all matters of mountains and rivers, peoples and products, leaving only — from the entry of Zhuāng Qiāo 莊蹻 into Diān down to the end of the Míng and the founding of our dynasty — a record of the changing of administrative establishment and of the great heads of order and disorder, in the manner of the jìshì běnmò form, composed under topical headings, into 37 pieces. Each affair stands head and tail complete, the threads divided clear. Among the geographical writings it constitutes a separate genre, not to be classed with those that string together fragmentary hearsay without consistent threading. — His piece on the Jiànwén emperor’s seclusion (建文遯迹), though it cannot escape the influence of the Zhìshēn lù 致身錄, deserves attention; in the pieces on the campaigns against Màilǐgē (Mong Mao), on the Three Pacification Houses, on the zhènshǒu tàijiàn, and on the proposed opening of the Jīnshā river, he is everywhere fuller than the standard histories. — The book was written within a hundred years of the present, and on matters of strategic disposition and topographical contour his testimony often serves to confirm what later evidence would otherwise be wanting. Far better than the gazetteers that mark out the famous spots only to provide for the climbing-up of poets and the chanting of verses. — Reverently collated, Qiánlóng 45 (1780), 9th month. Chief compilers: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. Senior collator: Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
Féng Sū’s Diāncháo is one of the most useful early-Qing topical histories of a single province, and the most important Yúnnán-history work between the Wàn-lì-era Diān zǎi 滇載 and the Qiánlóng-era Yúnnán tōngzhì 雲南通志. Féng’s vantage — a metropolitan-trained officer of judicial responsibility in a sensitive late-Míng frontier prefecture in the early years of Qing rule — gives the work an unusual combination of scholarly distance and direct administrative knowledge. Its design is consciously jìshì běnmò: 37 pieces, each on a defined episode (the Jiànwén emperor’s southern flight, the Yuán Sàdiǎnchì 賽典赤 administration, the Sānxuānliùwèi pacification, the Mù 沐 family hereditary command in Yúnnán under the Míng, the Jīnshā 金沙 river debate). The preface of Kāngxī 4 (1665) frames the volume as a working tool for incoming officials. The book was carried into the Sìkù in 1780, four decades before its writer’s grand-children’s generation, and acquired its standard punctuated edition only in the late twentieth century.
For the Jiànwén-emperor flight episode (建文遯迹), Féng’s text follows the heavily romanticised Zhìshēn lù 致身錄, a fact the Sìkù compilers note but do not regard as decisive against the work as a whole; this is the principal source-critical reservation about the Diāncháo. For the Màilǐgē (Mong Mao) wars, the Three Pacification Houses, the eunuch frontier-commands, and the Jīnshā river debate, the work is a primary source.
Translations and research
- Diāncháo. Punctuated edition: Kūnmíng: Yúnnán rénmín chūbǎn-shè, Yúnnán shǐliào cóngkān 雲南史料叢刊 series.
- Took, Jennifer. 2005. A Native Chieftaincy in Southwest China. Leiden: Brill. (For the tǔsī / xuānwèi materials.)
- Hostetler, Laura. 2001. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Surveys the early-Qing Yúnnán-related corpus.)
- Atwell, William S. 1988. “Some observations on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ in China and Japan.” Journal of Asian Studies 45(2): 223–44. (Useful for the late-Míng Yúnnán background.)
- Wilkinson, Chinese History, ch. 50.
Other points of interest
The opening preface — pacing back and forth between learning (學) and serving (仕) — is one of the more candid programmatic statements by a seventeenth-century frontier official, arguing that an official posted to a difficult region is bound to study its history in order to govern it.
Links
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11107184