河南省商城縣の紳士層の存在形態

Abstract

I tried in this article to analyse the structure of the gentry class in Shangcheng 商城 County at the beginning of the 19th century, by employing the namelist of contributors to the publication of the Shanecheng xianzhi 商城縣志, published in the Jiaqing 嘉慶 period. From this list I extracted a number of 536 persons who might be considered as the gentry, and investigated the social ranking they belonged to. I found that only 19 persons ever held an official position of rank 7 and higher, or had been succesful in the jinshi 進士 examinations ;it was clear that the greater part were jiansheng 監生 ('nationaluniversity students') or shengyuan 生員 ('students'). Lately Japanese scholars doing research on the gentry usually use the expression kyoshin/xiangshen 郷紳, but I suppose that those called xiangshen at the end of the Ming 明 were retired officials of rank 7 or higher, or retired jinshi('doctors'). More than 70% of the gentry class in Shangcheng County were of the student class, and they exercised great influence in the contemporary rural society, and brought about all kinds of harm to the people. I think that in the gentry studies a distinction should be made between the xiangshen = higher gentry class and the lower gentry class, consisting mainly of students.