Pages: 277-294

This article is devoted to the historical and ethnographic description of the city of Wenshan — the administrative center of the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. This city, unattractive from the point of view of tourism, has an important historical and cultural content, encoded in its name, and associated with the fate of many non-Han peoples inhabiting it, and with the dramatic history of the national policy of Chinese power in different dynastic periods. The author attempted to reveal this content and to introduce ethnographic and historical plots into the Russian science, to help the reader better understand the ethno-social processes that took place in the past of this city and the country as a whole. Special attention is paid to such political institutions as Tu si and Liu Guan. They are the systems of indirect and direct administration, which represented the confrontation, the periodic dominance of the manifestations of the local and the central authorities, which determined the form of management of peripheral territories, which is now used in China. The example of Wenshan, which appeared as a reaction to the conflict between Tu si and Liu Guan, gives us the opportunity to see the high price and value of peace in the history of the Chinese multiethnic society.

Keywords: history of Yunnan province, Wenshan, Zhuangzu, Yizu, Hanzu, Tu si system, Liu Guan system, history of Chinese clans, conflict, war

Information about author:

Alexey Zakurdaev (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. N. N. Miklouho-Maklay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Lenin Ave., 32-A, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation
E-mail: [email protected]