T'UNG-CH'ENG

Pinyin Tongcheng town in Anhwei sheng (province), eastern China. It stands on the edge of the Yangtze River floodplain, the area to the south being a maze of lakes, the largest of which is Lake Ts'ai-tzu. It was founded as a county under the Sui dynasty (AD 581618) and received the name T'ung-ch'eng during the T'ang dynasty (618907). From the beginning of the Ming dynasty (13681644), it was administratively and commercially dependent upon An-ch'ing. Many immigrants came there from southern Anhwei and Chekiang provinces in the 14th and 15th centuries, when large-scale drainage and reclamation of the marshy southern part of the county were undertaken both by the local authorities and by individual families. The area became noteworthy from the 15th century onward, when a group of wealthy local clans became not only both rich and prosperous but also remarkable for their scholarship. By the mid-16th century the area was already famed as the most important centre of scholarship north of the Yangtze. It was seriously devastated by a series of local risings in the period from 1634 to 1644 at the end of the Ming period, which continued for a few years thereafter. The preeminence of the local scholars was again reestablished, however, with the local Yao and Chang clans producing a great number of high-ranking officials throughout the 18th century. Not only was T'ung-ch'eng thus a centre of a strong political faction but it also became the focus of the T'ung-ch'eng school, one of the chief literary schools that flourished during the Ch'ing period (16441911). The school advocated the philosophy of the Neo-Confucians, who had flourished in Sung times (9601279), combining this with emphasis upon rigorous textual scholarship and the use of simple and unadorned prose. The T'ung-ch'eng school was of national importance in the late 19th century, one of its advocates being the great general and modernizer Tseng Kuo-fan. Several of the earliest translators and experts in Western affairs belonged to the school. Pop. (mid-1980s est.) 10,00050,000.