We Are the Literati Here: The Chang Family and the Compilation of the 1258 'Ganshui Gazetteer'

In 1232, a local scholar named Chang Tang 常棠 completed the Ganshui Gazetteer (Ganshui zhi 澉水志), a work only nineteen pages long in the modern Zhonghua shuju edition. In 1258, with official support, he managed to have the township gazetteer published. Apparently only one of four township gazetteers written during the Song dynasty, it is also the only township gazetteer from the Song dynasty to survive. The central issue this article seeks to explain is why Chang Tang compiled the Ganshui Gazetteer during the period from the 1230s to the 1250s and how he used the still-evolving format of gazetteers to serve his own objectives and his family’s.1 During the Southern Song, the compilation of prefecture gazetteers was common, but the compilation of county gazetteers, not to mention township gazetteers, was more unusual. Table 1 shows the number of gazetteers for different administrative levels compiled in the Song, based on the meticulous 2010 study of Song gazetteers by Gu Hongyi 顧宏義. After searching through