History of Fujian

The area now called Fujian was first mentioned in the Zhouli, a classic traditionally dated to the 12th century bce but now thought to have been written about 300 bce. Its text mentions the seven Min tribes together with “eight barbarian peoples” in the south.

During the latter part of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu) period (770–476 bce) one of the feudal states within the China area was the kingdom of Yue, located south of Hangzhou Bay; it included what is now Fujian province. The lord of Yue was nominally a vassal of the Chinese king. The Yue and their culture are considered by some to have constituted one of the principal elements that merged to form the contemporary Chinese ethnic and cultural complex.

In the last quarter of the 5th century bce, Yue became a powerful kingdom after its conquest of the state of Wu (473 bce) to its north. During the era known as the Zhanguo (“Warring States”) period, Yue was, in turn, conquered by the kingdom of Chu (c. 334 bce) to the northwest. Wuzhu, one of the sons of the vanquished Yue king, fled by sea and landed near Fuzhou to establish himself as the king of Minyue. When Zhao Zheng (who, as Shihuangdi, became the first emperor of the Qin dynasty) conquered the kingdom of Chu in 223 bce, the Chinese domain was finally unified within the bounds of a monolithic state. Li Si, the famous prime minister of Qin, deposed the king of Minyue, establishing instead a paramilitary province there called Minzhong Jun. The collapse of the Qin dynasty (207/206 bce) was followed by the war between the famous general Xiang Yu and the crafty Liu Bang (known by his temple name Gaozu), the founder of the Han dynasty. Wuzhu, the deposed king of Minyue, sided with Gaozu, who defeated his rival and became emperor of China; he reestablished Wuzhu as the king of Minyue, which consisted roughly of the present area of Fujian. During the reign of the emperor Wudi (141–87 bce) a rebellion by the Minyue tribes was put down, and the tribes were resettled in the inland region far to the north between the Huai and Yangtze rivers.

During the Six Dynasties period (220–589 ce) the region remained in the Chinese domain, but true Sinicization did not come about until the Tang dynasty (618–907), when intermarriage between the Tang settlers from the north and the local people became common.

After the fall of the Tang, the territory of Fujian reemerged as the kingdom of Min, with its capital in Fuzhou. In the mid-10th century it was subdivided into the state of Yin, controlling the Minbei, and the state of Min, controlling southern Fujian from Zhangzhou. The region grew rapidly in importance as the economic hinterland of the Nan (Southern) Song capital, Lin’an (modern Hangzhou). Fujian became a key supplier of rice to the region following the introduction of a fast-ripening variety, called Champa rice, from Southeast Asia. It also became the major producer of sugarcane, fruit, and tea. Because of the importance of trade to the Nan Song, the province was also important as a shipbuilding and commercial centre for both overseas and coastal trade. The port of Quanzhou, known to the Venetian traveler Marco Polo as Zaitun, was one of the world’s great ports in this period, with more than 100,000 Arab traders living in the area.

Fujian’s decline began with the Ming dynasty ban on maritime commerce in 1433 and was reinforced by the Qing dynasty’s policy of isolation, which particularly affected the province in the late 17th century, when Ming dynasty loyalists occupied Taiwan and the islands off Fujian. The economy revived somewhat in the mid-19th century when Fuzhou and Xiamen were opened as treaty port cities, but the modern shipbuilding industry established at Mawei by the Qing was destroyed by a French fleet during the Sino-French War of 1883–85. In 1886 the island of Taiwan was separated from the province to set up an independent province of Taiwan.

In the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution of 1911–12, Fujian was a pawn in the struggles of local warlords and was divided into political and military fiefdoms. In the early 1930s, part of western Fujian was incorporated into the communist-controlled territory of the Jiangxi Soviet. A revolt of Nationalist troops stationed in the province against the Nationalist government in Nanjing in 1933 led Nanjing to assert its control over the province and to expel communist forces. After 1938 the Japanese occupied the coastal centres of the province, while the provincial government retreated inland to Yong’an in central Fujian in 1941; from there it administered the interior of the province for the remainder of the war. In 1949 the communist-led Third Field Army took control of the province.