Professor Yu-Xiao Long, Guizhou University
2007 award – major project
£56,026 for 15 months
This project aims to identify, register and digitise endangered collections of Jinping archives of old forestry contracts in Guizhou, China, so as to form a lasting base for safeguarding these materials and making them accessible to researchers. The Jinping archives of old forestry contracts refer to a bulk of private and public collections of contracts concerning the production and marketing of commercial woods in Jinping and adjacent areas during late imperial and early modern times.
Jinping and neighbouring counties, an area mostly inhabited by Kam and Hmong ethnic groups (also known as “Dong” and “Miao” respectively with certain degree of derogatory connotation), used to be admirably affluent owing to their well-developed traditional forestry that supplied woods of high quality to the royal families and wood trade markets of South China in late imperial and early modern times. With the development of the market-driven timber industry, land tenure system changed and ownership of forests was transferred frequently among different people, which led to the emergence of various local norms and rules, as manifested in the contracts of forestry subjects. The commercial forest industry of the region, after thriving for over 300 years, started to decline as the Republican warriors successively ruled the area and direct state control penetrated into the local forestry. Local Hmong and Kam communities became trapped in poverty, and forestry contracts a textual memory of the past. Nevertheless, prior to the 1950s, the old forestry contracts were well kept by Hmong and Kam families or lineages as evidential legal documents for property rights, and as symbolic manifestations of family decent and cultural identity.
The importance of the Jinping archives cannot be overestimated in view of their extraordinary value for ground-breaking scholarly explorations. These historical records were unknown to the outside world until some scholars from Guizhou Institute of Nationalities “discovered” them in several Kam and Hmong villages in Jinping County of Guizhou Province in the early 1960s. Since the “discovery” of the archives, a significant number of domestic and overseas scholars have been fascinated by such a large quantity of reliable and unique records that can nurture research breakthroughs in China 's legal, social, and economic histories.
Tthe archives have become seriously endangered for various reasons. First of all, the majority of the collections have unfortunately been destroyed in political movements, as they were often viewed by local revolutionary officials as so-called “antirevolutionary restoration records.” As a result, at least four fifths of the original collection of forestry contracts were destroyed, while only a small proportion survived the political traumas and other destructive causes, and survived to the present.
Pilot research trips have confirmed that there are approximately 100,000 old forestry contracts remaining in rural Jinping. Damaged by worms or moulds, darkened by smoke, threatened by flood and fire, and lost in family relocation, most of the surviving collections are in danger, deteriorating, and disappearing. The forestry contracts were recorded on three kinds of medium, namely paper, stone and cloth, with most of them on the man-made paper made from straw and paper-mulberry.
These records are mostly legible and physically suitable for digitalization, but in view of the fragile condition and the large quantity, certain curatorial care and metadata have to be in place before digitized copies can be efficiently made. During the project phase one, the work will be done primarily in Jinping, but including neighbouring counties such as Tianzhu. Fieldwork will be conducted to further investigate and locate possible private and public collections of the archives in addition to the ones previously identified in our pilot research. Intensive teamwork will be carried out, in collaboration with the local archival organizations, to professionally register the newly located/identified collections record by record, and also register the records in previously identified collections if they have not been registered according to relevant professional standards. Digital photography will be used as the method for copying the materials. The digital copies will be integrated with metadata in an archival database system so that they can be efficiently listed, searched, sorted, browsed, and examined. While the original archives and the master copies will be deposited in Jinping County Archives, digital copies will be deposited in the British Library, and the National Hmong and Kam Ethnohistorical Archives at Guizhou University.
