4: What Makes a Frontier Province? Genre Questions in the Southwest Borderlands of Late Imperial China

Knowledge of the southwest frontier in late imperial China relied on a network of writers and publishers through which texts from the borderlands were transmitted to the publishing houses of the metropole and circulated from there. For official texts, primarily gazetteers, this network was integrated with the administrative hierarchy connecting counties and prefectures with provinces and the central government. Writers of unofficial texts, whether travel narratives, albums, or histories, relied on personal connections and name recognition to enter the publishing market. Yunnan’s marginal location meant that for mainland audiences the province as a whole was more recognisable than any of its cities or significant sites.
This paper considers the range of texts that have been identified as ‘gazetteers’ of Yunnan to interrogate how the concept of ‘Yunnan’ emerged from these writings. Alongside official gazetteers, earlier works like the Tang-era Manshu (Yunnan zhi) and Yuan-era Yunnan zhilüe were taken as ancestors by Ming and Qing authors. The first gazetteers of Yunnan were all provincial gazetteers, and later writers also preferred this focus to a more local one. Xie Zhaozhi’s Dianlüe, later included in Siku quanshu, reorganised material from provincial gazetteers into his own categories. On the one hand, as provincial gazetteers became more common, the category of ‘province’ became more salient as a way of apprehending imperial territory. On the other hand, unofficially produced gazetteer-adjacent texts pushed the boundaries of the genre as it existed in late imperial China. Knowledge of ‘Yunnan’ emerged from the literary borderlands between the two.