Fenye by the Numbers: A Quantitative Analysis of Astrological Contents in Chinese Local Gazetteers

Abstract Fenye (分野, lit., “field allocation”), is a traditional Chinese astrological system that associated celestial phenomena with regions on earth since ancient times. During middle and late imperial China, many literati writings criticized this system as illogical. Yet in the local gazetteers that were compiled in late imperial China to document local data within each administrative region, compilers continued to use fenye as the canonical way to identify their regions within the vast empire. The Jesuit introduction of Western sciences to China, in particular the technology that could precisely locate any place or region with latitude and longitude, appeared to render fenye obsolete, which fueled even more literati criticism. Modern scholars consider the public criticism from the Qianlong emperor and the resulting removal of fenye from the 1781 Rehe Gazetteer the end of fenye in imperial orthodoxy. However, by quantitatively analyzing a collection of 4,410 titles of local gazetteers and their section headings, this paper reveals many examples of local literati who resisted removing fenye entirely from their local history, well into the late Republican period.