In one sense this book is the analysis that Hope Wright could scarcely have hoped for when she published her Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes-Études) in 1956. Ruth Mostern has applied a wholly new methodology of digitizing the data in the List and using GIS (geographical information systems) to analyze them, in an attempt to write spatial history at the scale of the state. This work provides an overview—unachievable before now—to complement the extensive body of local histories for the Song period. The data on which it is based are freely available online, with links to a number of other GIS projects.
Hope Wright's work listed every change in status for every named place in the Song empire: establishment, abolition, promotion, demotion, name changes, and so on. These are what Mostern calls “place-making events,” and by trying to explain patterns in the...
