Wúxī xiànzhì 無錫縣志
Gazetteer of Wúxī County by 闕名 (anonymous)
About the work
A four-juan early-Míng county gazetteer of Wúxī 無錫 (modern Wúxī, Jiāngsū), without authorial attribution, compiled in the early Hóngwǔ era (1369 onwards) of the Míng founder. The work is structurally distinct from — and not the same as — the Yuán-era 28-juan Wúxī xiànzhì by Wáng Rénfǔ 王仁輔 (recorded in Qiānqǐngtáng shūmù 千頃堂書目). The Sìkù tíyào establishes the Hóngwǔ dating from two converging arguments: (1) the work is titled Wúxī xiànzhì (county gazetteer), and Wúxī had been Wúxīzhōu 無錫州 (prefecture status) under the Yuán; the demotion back to county is precisely Hóngwǔ 2 / fourth month / 1369 (per Míng shǐ Dìlǐzhì); (2) the xuéxiào (schools) section records the xiāngjǔ of Lù Yǐdào 陸以衜 in Zhìzhèng xīnsì (Zhìzhèng 1 = 1341), so the work covers events into the late Yuán. The original preface is lost. The author and the precise date are unknown; notBefore is 1369 (the demotion of Wúxīzhōu to Wúxīxiàn) and notAfter is conservatively the end of the Hóngwǔ reign (1398).
Tiyao
We respectfully note: the Wúxī xiànzhì in four juan does not give the compiler’s name. According to Qiānqǐngtáng shūmù, there was a Wúxī xiànzhì in 28 juan by Wáng Rénfǔ 王仁輔 of the Yuán; the juan-count does not match — that is a different book. According to Míng shǐ Dìlǐzhì, in the fourth month of Hóngwǔ 2 (1369), Wúxīzhōu was changed back to Wúxīxiàn. In this gazetteer, the Gǔjīn jùnxiàn biǎo 古今郡縣表 ends with “Wúxī promoted to zhōu”; but the title actually reads Wúxīxiàn, so the rubric reflects the early-Míng change. Furthermore, while the prefectural-county table ends in the Yuánzhēn era (Chéngzōng’s Yuánzhēn = 1295–96), the xuéxiào section already records the xiāngjǔ of Lù Yǐdào in Zhìzhèng xīnsì (1341) — so the records reach the late Yuán. This is therefore a Hóngwǔ-era book.
The first juan is yìlǐ 邑里 (the township and lanes). The second juan is shānchuān (mountains and waters). The third juan is shìwù 事物 (affairs and things), divided into upper and lower sub-juan. The fourth juan is cízhāng 詞章 (literary writings), divided into upper, middle, and lower sub-juan, and within these are 21 minor categories. The diction is concise and the events well-summarized — also a fine recension of a county gazetteer. It is a pity that the original preface of the first juan is already lost, and the běnmò of the compilation cannot be ascertained.
The Yuán shǐ Dìlǐzhì states that in the second year of Chéngzōng’s Yuánzhēn (1296), Wúxī was promoted to zhōu. But this gazetteer has it as the first year. Since the writer was recording contemporary affairs and dates, the year must be exact; from this we may infer that the Yuán shǐ contains many lacunae and errors. This is also one proof of the principle that “for books, an old recension is to be valued.”
Reverently collated and submitted, eleventh month, Qiánlóng 46 (1781). Editors-in-chief: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. General collation officer: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Wúxī xiànzhì is one of the earliest extant Míng-era county gazetteers, and the only complete pre-Jiājìng gazetteer of Wúxī. It is bibliographically separate from the lost (or fragmentarily transmitted) Yuán-era Wúxī xiànzhì of Wáng Rénfǔ 王仁輔 in 28 juan. The early-Míng dating is anchored on the title-form (Wúxīxiàn — the county designation reinstated only with Hóngwǔ 2 / 1369) and on internal Yuán-era event coverage running through Zhìzhèng 1 (1341). The author is unrecorded, and given the work’s modest scale (four juan) and its missing preface, the most economical hypothesis is a local-school or county-clerk compilation produced in the immediate aftermath of the Hóngwǔ administrative reorganization, perhaps as part of the early-Míng campaign of county-by-county documentary reorganization that culminated in the 1418 (Yǒnglè 16) edict on standard fāngzhì rubrics.
The structure is unusually clean for a small county gazetteer: (1) Yìlǐ 邑里 (township and ward); (2) Shānchuān 山川 (waters); (3) Shìwù 事物 (affairs and things, upper and lower juan; covers institutions, taxes, products, ritual, etc.); (4) Cízhāng 詞章 (literary writings, upper / middle / lower juan, with 21 sub-categories). The literary section in particular is unusually substantial in proportion to the work as a whole — about a third of the gazetteer.
The Sìkù tíyào’s observation that the work corrects the Yuán shǐ Dìlǐzhì (which dates Wúxī’s promotion to zhōu to Yuánzhēn 2 = 1296, while the gazetteer dates it to Yuánzhēn 1 = 1295) is one of the more substantive bibliographic findings of the Sìkù preliminary editorial survey: it establishes that the gazetteer must derive from contemporaneous (Yuán-period) administrative records and that its date is to be preferred over the imperial dynastic history.
The work is a key source for: (a) the institutional and demographic history of SòngYuán Wúxī; (b) the YuánMíng transition in the lower Yangtze; (c) the literary geography of the Wúxī region (the cízhāng section preserves substantial material on the Tài Lake landscape including poems by Sòng worthies); (d) the early-Míng prosopography of the Wúxī gentry. The gazetteer was largely superseded by Hóng Yìnglóng’s 洪應隆 1574 (Wànlì 2) Wúxī xiànzhì and the various Qīng revisions, but as the documentary base for late-Yuán Wúxī it is irreplaceable.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
- Hargett, James M. 1996. “Song dynasty local gazetteers and their place in the history of difangzhi writing.” HJAS 56.2: 405–42.
- Wilkinson, Endymion. Chinese History: A New Manual. 6th ed. 2022. §§16.4.1, 65.3.3.1 (Míng gazetteer corpus).
- Modern punctuated edition: in Sòng Yuán fāngzhì cóngkān 宋元方志叢刊 (Zhōnghuá, 1990), vol. 6 (despite the early-Míng compilation date, the work has long been transmitted alongside the Yuán-Sòng gazetteer corpus).
- Dennis, Joseph R. 2015. Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. The standard recent monograph on the gazetteer ecology of the lower Yangtze in the Yuán-Míng transition.
Other points of interest
The work’s anonymity, the loss of its preface, and the absence of a běnmò postface make it unusual among the Sòng Yuán fāngzhì cóngkān corpus — every other extant pre-Míng or early-Míng gazetteer of comparable size has at least some prefatory or compositional self-account. The Sìkù tíyào’s closing remark — “for books, an old recension is to be valued” (shū guì jiùběn 書貴舊本) — is one of the more aphoristic statements of evidential-philological principle in the Sìkù prefatory corpus.
Links
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (6th ed., 2022).
- ctext.org