A networked look at the gentry of Song Ji'an
Because so much work has already been done on the “gentry corridor” in Song-Yuan China, I have chosen not to return to the marriage networks of elites explored by Robert Hymes, the patterns of religious patronage and local identification explored by Anne Gerritsen, or the compilation of local gazetteers following Peter Bol. Instead, I will explore the formation of a gentry community by looking at the social writings of its leading figures.
In particular, I look at three genres of composition that literary men made on behalf of their peers: commemorative texts, ritual texts and epitaphs. Commemorative texts largely include essays that were written to document major building projects, including the construction, repair or reorganization of of temples, schools or other public buildings. These represent the connection of the individuals to each other, and their common interest in the institution. The other two genres — ritual texts and epitaphs — were both made to venerate and document their late friends or relatives. They represent the connection of individuals to one another, and the participation of the living writer in constructing the ritual cult of the deceased. Together, these three genres allow me to further document two of the most formalized gentry behaviors — their cooperation to build institutions for the living community, and their interest in venerating the past members of those communities.
I have intentionally chosen not to include other categories of social connection that I find distract from the central concerns of connections through gentry institutions. First, I have left out any category of social connection that is not specifically attested by its own text; this includes indications, usually in biographies, that two individual were “friends,” “allies,” “rivals” or that one was the student of the other. I have also left out associations through common membership in institutions, including association through the examination system. Finally, I have left aside several types of connection that are specifically attested by individual texts, including prefatory materials, biographies, and less formal genres like letters and occasional texts.
The overarching reason to exclude these highly varied types of connections is that they tend to add even more data about the people for whom we have the most information. As we will see below, the super-connectedness of these individuals is partially a function of their historical importance, but largely a function of the volume of extant writings attributed to them. Adding more individuals to the personal networks of these super-connectors is of limited analytical value. In addition, many of the specific types of connection left out have shortcomings. Casual genres like letters and occasional texts are less formal demonstrations of institutional attachment. Biographical and prefatory essays were often written for people with whom the author was not personally acquainted, including figures that had long since passed away. Thus despite the limitations they impose, I have chosen to focus exclusively on the three genres of ritual texts, commemorative texts and epitaphs.
Using the China Biographical Database, I have constructed a network graph of all the known connections of individuals from Jizhou 吉州 (as Ji’an 吉安 was known in the Song) who were active between 1050 and 1300, including both people they wrote about and people who wrote about them. This creates a network of 771 individuals and 852 connections.
Looking at this network graph, a few features immediate pop out. First, there are a number of super-connectors — people strongly connected to one another, and who have a cluster of single connections around themselves. The most significant three individuals by this measure are Ouyang Xiu (at left), Zhou Bida 周必大(top) and Yang Wanli 楊萬里 (bottom), each of whom has more than 100 connections. After these three are a further nine individuals with moderate-sized personal networks, including Liu Yan 劉弇, Hu Quan 胡銓, Wang Tinggui 王庭珪, Liu Caishao 劉才邵, Ouyang Shoudao 歐陽守道, Wen Tianxiang 文天祥, Liu Shen 劉詵, Liu Chenweng 劉辰翁, and Zhao Wen 趙文. However of these nine, Liu Yan and Zhao Wen are only loosely connected to the rest of the network.
We must consider the reasons for the network centering on these dozen individuals. While these are well-known as the principle figures from Song Ji’an), they are also the main writers to have materials collected in later periods. The other people in this network are known principally — if not exclusively — through the writings of their more famous contemporaries. We know Peng Shanglao 彭商老 almost exclusively as a close associate of Zhou Bida, and Liu Feng 劉鋒 as a person for whom Ouyang Shoudao wrote a building inscription. The fact that the network is based largely on the personal connection of just twelve individuals also accounts for the fact that there are only a few more connections than individuals — most people in the network are known only through their connections to a single person.
How complete is this network graph? Is it anything close to a representation of the whole Ji’an gentry community? There are 141 individuals from Jizhou circa 1050–1300 portrayed in this network, as compared to 287 known individuals from this area and time period in the China Biographical Database. In other words, about half of known individuals in the database are not connected to any other known individuals. These are the many people known only by name and a few other pieces of information from lists in gazetteers or examination registers. Despite the more limited information available about these people, they were still prominent individuals from that time and place. If we are interested in the “true” social network of the Song Ji’an gentry this graph over-represents the networks of ten to twelve principle figures, and vastly underreports the networks of anyone not directly connected to one of these dozen men. In other words, it is not just missing half of all known figures, it is missing an unknown number of unknown figures — the social peers of the men and women known only by name. Without knowing the social circumstances of these lesser-known, but still locally important people, we cannot truly know the shape of the Ji’an gentry community.
Nonetheless, this network graph is still a useful tool to look at the overall shape of the upper echelons of Ji’an gentry in this period. First, we can find comfort in the fact that a number of otherwise little-known individuals appear in the networks of multiple key figures. Xiao Fengchen 蕭逢辰, a native of Taihe (then written 太和) who served in various local offices in the 1240s and 50s, had a building inscription composed by Ouyang Shoudao and a sacrificial prayer (jiwen 祭文) composed by Wen Tianxiang; he is also known from a list officeholders and prominent locals. We know less about Zhou Jiuding 周九鼎 — who I have been unable to find on such lists — but his donation to the construction of a building was recorded by both Wen Tianxiang and Liu Chenweng. Outside of connections with celebrities on the level of Wen and Liu, this latter sort of individual would remain unknown to history. And while we may take comfort in the fact that Zhou was known to both Wen and Liu, we will never known how many individuals like Zhou Jiuding existed but are not in our records. Even without knowing how many Zhou Jiudings we are missing, these connections confirm the impression that we are looking at a real, active social network that existed outside of the writings of a few dozen individuals.
By eliminating all the people with only a single connection, we are left with what looks much more like an actual social network.
This eliminates all the people who are only known through the writings of a single individual, usually one of the twelve noted above. In this reduced network there remains a tight grouping of interconnected people, 47 of them from the Jiangxi region, and 39 from Ji’an. While this is certainly a massive underrepresentation of the gentry community active at that time, we can rest assured that this was a real social phenomenon that transcended the twelve individuals for whom we have the most information. For these several dozen individuals, we can see a relatively dense network of connections — each person was in fact connected with more than one of his neighbors. This is presumably a step closer to what the “true” social network of Song Ji’an would look like if we had a similar amount of data about all 287 known figures from this time and place, and especially if we had better data on the unknown number of contemporary peers that have been lost to history. This network further makes clear that this was a gentry community — a group of social peers among the leading families — and not just the retinues of a few high-level aristocrats.
If we look only at the individuals for whom there were known local or regional links, eliminating connections that the most prominent individuals made through state service, most of the network remains connected.
This is further demonstration that this was largely a group of local gentry, connected through social ties and service in their natal community, rather than a subset of a court aristocracy that just happened to live near one another. Yet this last exercise reveals the importance of information to this analytical process. With non-local connections removed, two lone individuals and a small network appear disconnected from the larger network.
A group of figures active around the late eleventh century — including the leading statesman of the day in Wang Anshi 王安石 — is connected only to itself. This probably stems from a lack of local sources from this period that would show their connections with the larger Ji’an community; without a leading figure like Ouyang Xiu to report on local individuals from this period, we only hear about them through outsiders. This is similarly true of Zhao Xiyi, who was most active during the period after prominent locals like Zhou Bida and Yang Wanli faded from the scene, but before Ouyang Shoudao and Wen Tianxiang were active. Zhao appears unconnected to the rest of the Ji’an community largely because the writings of him and his contemporaries in the area did not survive. Based on this reasoning, we can see these network graphs as very rough approximations of the community links in eleventh to thirteenth century Ji’an, as seen through the writings of twelve major individuals from the area, and a few non-locals.
As a final exercise, we can find evidence for the shifts in the nature of the elite during the Song — the trend to localization described by Robert Hartwell, Beverly Bossler and Robert Hymes. Compare the ego-centric networks of several of the key figures in the above graphs; for these networks, I have included all individuals linked to the central figure, but not displayed the links between them. The earliest of the major figures is the familiar Ouyang Xiu, active in the mid-late eleventh century.
Ouyang has only a few locals (green circles) in his ego-centric network. In fact, these include only later Ji’an people who wrote about him — Zhou Bida and Yang Wanli — and his relatives, ancestors or descendants (represented by squares). Ouyang Xiu was, like his contemporaries among the elite, primarily concerned with networking at court. Furthermore, a plurality of the people at court with whom he networked were centrally associated with areas near the Song capital region between Luoyang 洛陽 and Kaifeng 開封 (red circles).
By the mid-twelfth century, there is a marked contrast in the networks of JI’an figures that supports theories of the localization of elite society in the interim. The ego-centric network of Hu Quan — active in the 1150s and 60s — is full of local and regional figures.
Zhou Bida, a slightly later twelfth-century figure of similar political importance to Ouyang Xiu, has a much larger number of connections local to Ji’an (green) or Jiangxi (yellow).
Wen Tianxiang, a major political figure in the mid to late thirteenth century, also had a majority of local figures in his personal network.
Having confirmed that the gentry of Song Ji’an became a fundamentally local community by the end of the twelfth century, I plan to look at some implications that this had for the ordering of local society — and specifically local lineages. I will suggest that as the leading figures of Ji’an became tied to one another through literary circles, institution-building, and participation in local government, they developed connections between their individual lineages as well. Robert Hymes has clearly shown the development of one aspect of these lineage connections: marriage ties. I will focus on two other avenues of inter-lineage cooperation: genealogy compilation, and shrine-building. Tune in next time…
References
The China Biographical Database, May 2014 release.
Peter K. Bol. “Local History and Family in Past and Present,” in Thomas H. C. Lee, ed. The New and the Multiple: Sung Senses of the Past. The Chinese University Press, 2004.
Beverly Bossler. Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status and the State in Sung China. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Anne Gerritesen. Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China. Brill, 2007.
Robert Hartwell. “Demographic, Political and Social Transformations of China, 750–1550.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2. December 1982.
Robert Hymes. Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou Chiang-Hsi in Northern and Southern Sung. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
