The provincial boundaries of China were changed regularly with
each new dynasty. So were the names. And so are the English
translations of past and present names, including the maps which
scholars today use to chart the regional structure of the country. It
can be very confusing for beginners. P, for example, writes about
Lingnan in the 18th-19th centuries (as "probably China's second
most commercialized and densely populated macro-region" at that
time; though North China was the first before the medieval Song
revolution which turned the Lower Yangzi into the most advanced).
Yet, while I have located the name of every other region P
mentions, I have not seen the name "Lingnan" in any of the five
books or so I have checked, including *The Cultural Atlas of the
World: China*. Only in one of the multiple maps charted in this
book did I locate a region called "Lingnan", and that map is for the
provinces of Tang China AD 822. After that, in the maps charted for
the subsequent historical periods, including maps for the Ming and
Qing dinasties (1369 -1900s); and there are many maps depending
on their purpose; there is not one region named Lingnan. This
problem is compounded by the fact that the region called "Lingnan"
in Tang times, is occupied by different provincial names:
"Guangdong" and "Guangxi" both of which P discusses as
separate regions. As of now, considering the possibility that, by
"Lingnan", P means "Guizhou" part of that region was part of
Lignan in the Tang period, and because P never mentions
"Guizhou" whereas he mentions the other two, "Guangdong" and
"Guangxi".
I need to be clear about these regions to move on in my evaluation
of P's thesis, which I already started in the post on international
trade. For, I will argue that 1) those regions that exhibited
continued growth during the 19th and even 20th centuries, without
serious Malthusian pressures, were new regions of expansion of
settlement, and that 2) these areas were "external" to China similar
to the way the Americas was to Europe.
