P'u-t'ien

Every child of Pʻu-tʻien knows that the fertile plain, girdled by mountains and facing the Yellow Sea, was once a great salt marsh, for Pʻu-tʻien means "Salt Grass Fields." It was Lady Fourth Daughter, a Chinese girl of the Sung Dynasty, a thousand years ago, who dreamed of building a dam to hold back the salt tides, and to send the fresh life-giving waters of the River of Playful Fairies into a system of canals threading the plain. Thus would the salt marshes be redeemed into rice fields for the feeding of countless villages. The fair, high-walled county seat came to be named Hing-hwa, "Transformed to Flourishing," because of her gift of Fertile Fields. Being a child of Pʻu-tʻien myself I, too, have always known the lovely legends about Lady Fourth Daughter of the family of Ching.

Lady Fourth Daughter of China

1931, Mary Brewster Hollister, 同澤靈傳 [Lady Fourth Daughter of China], Cambridge, Massachusetts: Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, pages 11-12

According to the Pa-min T’ung-chih, Cheng Lu’s study was located at Hsing-haufu (P’u-t’ien hsien, Fukien) as earily^([sic – meaning early]) as the Liang and Ch'en periods, and the T’ang Shih-tao Chih ("A T’ang Topography of the Ten Districts") tells us that many "robe and cap" gentry families gathered at Ch’üan-choufu (Chin-chiang hsien, Fukien) when the Chin capital was removed to the south.

1960, Hisayuki Miyakawa, “The Confucianization of South China”, in Arthur F. Wright, editor, The Confucian Persuasion (Stanford Studies in the Civilizations of Eastern Asia), Stanford, Cali.: Stanford University Press, →OCLC, pages 37–38

Mu-lien was a pious Buddhist who attempted to save his mother from the punishments in hell, as we heard above (p. 25), and who, according to some traditions, eventually became Ti-tsang.⁷⁵ He, too, had several temples. In our survey, the oldest one was in Hsia-p'u (Fukien), renamed with his name in 954, rebuilt in 972, and for the last time, in 1915. There was still another temple for him in Hsia-p'u, but undated. Otherwise, we have only a 1608 temple for him in P'u-t'ien (Fukien) and an undated temple in Hsiang-shan (Kuangtung).

1967, Wolfram Eberhard, Guilt and Sin in Traditional China, University of California Press, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 58

All the cases I will examine come from P'u-t'ien district. Until the early Sung, P'u-t'ien was part of Ch'üan-chou prefecture; in 983 a new prefecture, Hsing-hua Commandery (Hsing-hua chün), was established with P'u-t'ien as the prefectural capital. The district is located on the lower reaches of the Mu-lan River, the principle river system between the Chin River of Ch'üan-chou to the south and the Min River of Fu-chou to the north. No doubt because of their proximity to the latter, which had been the social, cultural, and political heart of Fu-chien for many centuries, most of the elite kin groups in P'u-t'ien claimed to be collateral branches of prominent Fu-chou kin groups who had settled in P'u-t'ien no later than the early T'ang. Collectively the P'u-t'ien elite claimed the most ancient pedigree among the Min-nan elite. It is, therefore, not surprising that they claim the oldest genealogical tradition as well.

2004, Hugh R. Clark, “Reinventing the Genealogy: Innovation in Kinship Practice in the Tenth to Eleventh Centuries”, in Thomas H. C. Lee, editor, The New and the Multiple: Sung Senses of the Past, Chinese University Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, →OL, page 248