The project is directed by Professor David Faure of the Department of History, and conducted by a team of internationally reputable researchers based in Hong Kong, Mainland China and the United States. It explores variations in Chinese local society within the rubric of a unified Chinese culture, and studies fifteen geographic areas in China to recover the history of both how local society acquired and identified with its own characteristics, and incorporated into, and accepted, the broad expanse of the unified culture. It will document observable indications of local ritual traditions and reconstruct the history of the local institutions in which they are employed.

The project is the joint undertaking of CUHK’s History Department, the South China Research Center in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Centre for Historical Anthropology in Sun Yat-sen University, the last having been a Ministry of Education (MoE) Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Science since 2004.

[More information]

Advisors and Committee

The West River project, under its full title “Redefining the West River: Ming and Qing State Building and the Transformation of Native Society” is a three-year project (2006/07-2009/10) based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

In this project, we propose that the West River basin can be looked upon as the result of repeated administrative and ritual changes spreading over much of China in different historical periods. Guided by this hypothesis, we seek to reconstruct locality-specific chronological developments of ritual and social changes, and to compare these developmental progressions in the light of known patterns from parts of China which have been well documented, notably the Pearl River delta and Putian, Fujian province. The ritual repertoire that forms the basis of our study includes a bundle of administrative, architectural and ritual markers related to temples and graves: the coincidence of gods and ancestors, the location of graves and related sacrificial halls, the existence or otherwise of the architectural feature related to the “family temple” (jiamiao), the use of written genealogies, agencies involved in the ownership of land, award of degrees through imperial examinations, and the presence or otherwise of various priestly orders in the performance of rituals. By demonstrating that these markers vary systematically in relation to the integration of the locality into the Chinese state at specific historical time, we argue that variations in local culture can be explained as the results of different patterns of negotiation between local society and the state in ritual terms.