ABSTRACT
To make my narrative more concise, I have chosen to approach the larger story of Quanzhou by way of organizing available materials around a smaller genealogy. This is a history of an institution of spatial organization, that of pu and its Ming-Qing version pujing. The changing institutions specifi ed by the terms of pu and, later, pujing were core to the making of the outer form and the inner dynamics of place and landscape in imperial Quanzhou. It was central to both the imperial arts of control, to the regional urban elites’ strategic tactics, and to popular religious/cultural practices and conceptions. It was installed in the city in the thirteenth century, during Quanzhou’s commercial heyday, and evolved into, in terms of its political and social roles as well as its cultural conceptions, diverse patterns of ritual landscape and social activity in late imperial dynasties of the Ming and the Qing. After having spent more than a decade studying them, I have found that changing spaces of pu and jing refl ected most clearly the changing nature of politics, commerce, public life, and landscape in historical Quanzhou.
