Abstract
The Guangdong Atlas, compiled in 1866, recorded information about villages in a relatively detailed and precise manner. This paper examines the Atlas’s survey of Canton Prefecture, which was the political and cultural center of the province, and the only prefecture that was scientifically surveyed during the Atlas compilation. Meanwhile, both Hong Kong and Macau at the time belonged to Canton Prefecture. The Guangdong Atlas, together with the Annotations for the Guangdong Atlas (published four years later) provide precious materials for the study of the morphogenesis of villages in Canton Prefecture at that time.
Interpreting the Guangdong Atlas can help us to develop a better knowledge about villages in the late Qing Dynasty from a historical geography perspective. This paper observes the spatial distributions of villages and their relationships with the mountains, waterways, walled cities, rural markets, and xun (garrisons). It attempts to explore the morphogenesis of villages in Canton Prefecture, and examines the social and morphological mechanisms that shaped village clusters.
Mountains, waters, and cities were the key factors that affected the distribution of villages, respectively connecting the village groups around hillsides, riversides, and suburban areas. Rural markets and xun were interwoven into the rural network, becoming important nodes in the landscape as well as rural life.
The information given in the Guangdong Atlas and its Annotation express the attitudes that the map-makers had toward various places. These map-makers intentionally ignored settlements in the sand field areas.
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Notes
- 1.
It is easy to confuse the Guangdong Atlas with the Annotation of the Guangdong Atlas. In fact, the contents of the Qing Dynasty Atlas Assembly, which includes Annotation of the Guangdong Atlas (as published by the Xi’an Map Publishing House), is identical with that recorded in the Guangdong Atlas. The Collection of Guangdong Local Gazetteers from Past Dynasties includes both the Guangdong Atlas and Annotation of Guangdong Atlas. Both of these documents are listed as engraved in 1866; however the signatures of the main officials indicate that the Annotation book was published later than the Atlas.
- 2.
The compilation of the Guangdong Atlas was organized by Mao Hongbin 毛鸿宾, the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, and by Guo Songtao 郭嵩焘, the viceroy of Guangdong Province.
- 3.
The ‘construction-ruler’ promulgated by the Ministry of Works in the Qing dynasty was called the yingzao-chi 营造尺, in which 1 chi was equal to 32 cm.
- 4.
Each li equals approximately 500 m.
- 5.
The map does not present the complete sea area of Canton Prefecture.
- 6.
The only exception is Xinning County, which has more villages marked in the map than those listed in the Annotations.
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Acknowledgements
Wu Jianchi contributed to this paper as a co-first author. Thanks are due to Prof. Huang Duo for technical support in the GIS analysis, He Jing and Mu Qi for their helpful discussions regarding several sections, and Li Rui, Pu Zexuan, Cai Weizhe, Huang Lidan, Cao Haifang, Zheng Anheng, and Lin Junjie, who contributed to the statistical analysis of the data presented in the maps and in the annotations book. This article was funded by a grant from the Social Science Basic Research Program, Research Center of Architectural History and Culture, SCUT.
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Feng, J., Wu, J. (2021). Reading the Morphogenesis of Late Qing Canton Prefecture Villages Through the Guangdong Atlas. In: Xu, S., Aoki, N., Vieira Amaro, B. (eds) East Asian Architecture in Globalization. EAAC 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75937-7_17
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