The Guizhou To Palpable Dongzhai In The History Of Geography

Since the 1990s, the rural settlements have been paid more and more attention by scholars, especially after a large number of ancient villages were destroyed as a result of the urbanization and the ancient villages' tourism. However, most of previous studies focused on the Han villages in terms of the building, tourism, culture protection. Just because of the limits of history literature and the difficulties of social investigation, the historical geography study of the minority nationality ancient villages has not started until now.Dimen village, located in Southeast Guizhou Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, is an ancient village of the Dong with rich material entities and historical culture. With the setting up of Dimen Dong Cultural Eco-museum, which is the first private Eco-museum in China, Dimen village become famous and is paid more and more attention. In the study of Dimen village, although its history has been involved in some aspects, there still have been no monographs and thesis about its historical changes and space evolution until now .This paper will take a historical geography study in Dimen village, including the origin of immigrants, the social organizations, the process of forming and developing of the village, the characteristics and cultural meaning of its landscape, the planning idea of the village and so on. Finally, this paper will explore the direction of protection and development of Dimen village.This paper included three parts: preface, text and conclusion.In preface, the author reviewed the research history of Chinese villages in 20th century, after making clear of the concepts of settlements, villages, and ancient villages. Then, the author summed up the current situation of ancient villages study, and pointed out why the historical geography study of the minority nationality ancient villages is so week. Finally, the author explained the topic selection, synopsis, methodology, and significance of the research.The text of paper, as the most important body of this article, is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is mainly about the history of Dimen village, including the administrative changes, population sources, formation and development of the village, the social organizations. The second chapter is the cultural interpretation of Dimen village's landscape using the theory of human geography. The landscape of Dimen village is divided into living facilities, public facilities, religious facilities and landscape connectivity lines, including residential areas, granaries, wells, drum towers, flower bridges , pavilions, walled door, stage, Tong Ancestral Hall, Ka room, Sa altar , old trees and so on . The author analyzed of the position, function and cultural meaning of them.The third chapter is mainly about the planning idea of the site selection and space layout of Dimen village, especially the effect of "Feng Shui " theory. Then, the author summed up the causes and laws of the formation and evolution of Dimen village. Based on the field investigation, the author summarized the present situation and difficulties of protection and development of Dimen village in the forth chapter, and then explored the direction of its protection and development.At last, the author reviewed the whole paper in conclusion and hoped the historical geography study of Dimen Village would become an exploration of the historical geography study of minority ancient villages and do a help to China's minority culture protection and tourism development.This paper has some new ideas in the following areas:(1) Resources. In this paper, the author not only uses the traditional historical documents, such as Twenty-Four Chronicles and so on, but also firstly looks up some archive literature such as "Liping County Annals ", "Local Records of Maogong ", Yuankou "Wu Genealogy ", Dimen "Wu Family Tree". Apart from that, stone inscription and other oral materials such as the ancient songs, legends and so on are also used by the author. In particular, Dimen "Wu Family Tree" has never been used by other studiers before. The author reproduced the whole content of the "Wu Family Tree" and sorted out one Dimen genealogy . Using the related records of Yuankou"Wu lineage", as well as considering of the history of Chinese immigrants and the historical background Guizhou building, the author made clear of the time and route of Dimen ancestors' migration.(2) Research Methodology. Apart from the History methodology such as consulting of historical documents, the author also used Sociology methodology and method of Cultural Anthropology such as field investigation. According to the subject classification, the historical geography of ancient villages belongs to the historical settlement geography. However, different from ancient cities study, the materials for ancient villages are very limited, so using multi-disciplinary research methods is inevitable. In this paper, the author got a lot of materials especially the oral information not only from history literature, but also from the field investigation and interview.(3) Academic Viewpoint. This paper firstly sorts out the time and route of Dimen ancestors' migration, and notes that there had been Dong people living in Dimen before the arrival of the Han Chinese migration .The wildly spreading saying of Dimen ancestors from Jiangxi Ji'an is exactly the expression of national amalgamation between Han and Dong nationality. At the same time, the paper explains the culture concept meaning of Dimen's landscape from a historical human geography perspective for the first time and summed up the planning idea of the site selection and space layout of Dimen village.