Actually, I’d love to find one of these gazettes or, in fact, any book on the history of Yanqing, official or otherwise. Of course, it’d be very slow reading, but I’m sure there’s a lot more great stories to be told about that place.

I’m truly fascinated with this history through food trend. Our colleague Robbie is doing/just did a fabulous dissertation on Mexican political history as seen through the story of bread and bakeries in that country. Now peppers in China…alright, I’m getting hungry, better stop.

brian dott, a history prof. at whitman university, is currently working on a history of peppers in china, although i don’t think he has anything published yet.

I seem to think that most counties had a gazetteer (地方志）compiled on a (semi)regular basis under the direction of local officials and local notables. Consulting my copy of Wilkinson, there are about 8000 local gazetteers still extant, the vast majority, obviously, from the Qing. They are fabulous resources for finding out information about a particular place.

For a variety of reasons, there tend to be more extant from the southern part of China than from the north.