Hugh R. Clark's new book offers a highly detailed examination of the elite in the Mulan River Valley in Xinghua Prefecture (now the municipality of Putian), located between Fuzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian. It is an area well studied by other scholars, including Zheng Zhenman and Kenneth Dean, using the abundance of available historical sources, chiefly for the Ming onward. Drawing on many of the same kinds of works—genealogies, inscriptions, collected literary works, and local histories—Clark concentrates on an earlier period, from the ninth through the late thirteenth centuries.
This period saw the transformation of coastal southern Fujian (Minnan) from a “frontier” area to one that, by the tenth century, was experiencing a commercial revolution based on expanding maritime trade, which also greatly affected the agricultural economy of the region, including the Mulan Valley. Upon the establishment of the Song, some of the elite kin groups in this area were...
