Whatever Piece Of It

I have it my mind that I need to return to the thread of Chinese history.  Slowly, years now, I’m making my way through the Cambridge History volumes.  To say that I’m finishing the last book on the Qing suggests I’ve covered a lot of ground, but the last century between us is the densest and there quite few volumes to go.  It’s always a great place to spend time.  And if I go to Taishan in April, I’d like to have the narrative, whatever piece of it, at the forefront, of my consciousness. 

This volume ends with a chapter on life for the common people at the end of the Qing.  We look at local disturbances, insurrections, and migrations of people across the realm at the end of the Qing Dynasty.  The aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion, the disruption to local authority after the Opium Wars, and a market flooded with cheaper, better, foreign goods was one where people with no safety net would lose their lively hoods, sell themselves into slavery and/or move en masse. 

The migrations are interesting to consider.  People moving from Guangdong and Fujian over to Taiwan.  Before that the island is relatively sparsely populated.  These are the “Taiwan Ren” as opposed to the mainlanders, you’d meet on the island today.  The distance between the two migration periods is only one hundred to as little as fifty years. People moving from Shandong and Hebei (Chili) up to Manchuria make their way in vast waves at this time too.  The Qing themselves finally capitulating and letting Han people settle in their ancestral homelands.   The alternative was leaving them vulnerable to the Russians, or the Japanese. 

And so it is when you meet anyone from Dong Bei you can almost guarantee that their ancestral home is from Shandong.  And you forget that all those people moved there around the same time as, for example the great Irish famine migrations to the U.S., in the mind nineteenth century.  When I meet people and ask them, “oh I bet you’re originally from Shandong” “Yes.  That’s true.”  I fancy they have a very close affinity for the place.  It probably doesn’t mean much at all, beyond a vague affinity, one hundred and seventy five years on.