On Dec. 20, 2025, folk artist Li Lianshun from Xunxian County, Henan Province, presents his five-year-long creation of a clay sculpture series: Mythological Creatures from The Classic of Mountains and Seas. Photo: IC PHOTO

Since the late Qing (1644–1911) period, as China confronted dramatic shifts in the global order, Chinese intellectuals have sought to reassess the country’s internal and external relations, sparking a wave of intellectual reform. Scholars who had received systematic disciplinary training both at home and abroad devoted themselves to translating, reworking, and renewing traditional forms of knowledge. As modern social sciences gradually restructured and transformed classical historical traditions, older frameworks were increasingly displaced by modern ethnographic approaches, and a new body of knowledge for observing, recording, and analyzing China’s domestic and international relations took shape.

In the course of modern ethnography reshaping historical and geographical traditions, Chinese ethnographic observation and writing developed several defining characteristics: methodologically, it emphasized empiricism; theoretically, it stressed scientific rigor; and in terms of concern, it focused on nation-building. These features, to some extent, came to shape how Chinese scholars observed the world and understood domestic and foreign relations. By the 1930s and 1940s, a growing number of Chinese students were studying abroad, observing and analyzing foreign societies—particularly Western societies—and situating these inquiries within comparative frameworks. Two complementary trajectories emerged. One traced the overall development of human civilization, focusing on the evolution from clans and tribes to nation-states. The other pursued comparative studies of institutions and cultures, especially between Chinese and Western societies. Together, these approaches produced a mode of ethnographic recording and analysis distinct from early Chinese “Western studies,” such as The Classic of Mountains and Seas or The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, and gradually fostered a conceptual divide between a “universal world” and a “particular China” within the Chinese intellectual imagination.

However, as contemporary China increasingly emerges as an important force shaping a new order of global relations, it becomes urgent to move beyond this binary framework and develop a civilizational narrative capable of supporting new forms of comparative research and global conceptualization. Historically, Chinese thought approached the world with a sense of openness that did not rest on a simple opposition between Western and non-Western perspectives. Building upon this foundation, a return to classical historical-geographical writings and travelogues, as well as to the comparative civilizational perspective embedded in the concept of fengtu (local climate and customs), can help reconstruct a civilizational narrative within Chinese ethnography and expand the scope of regional and civilizational comparison.

Fengtu as medium for civilizational comparison

Themes related to fengtu appear widely in Chinese textual sources, including bamboo branch poetry, records of local customs, seasonal records, western travel accounts, and accounts of exotic objects. Texts explicitly labeled as fengtu ji (records of local customs) can be traced back to the Eastern Han Dynasty (25–220). From the Tang Dynasty (618–907) onward, such writings proliferated. In his reconstruction of the history of Chinese geography, Wang Yong traced records of local customs back to works such as The Classic of Mountains and Seas and Yu Gong (“Tribute of Yu,” from the Book of Documents), viewing them as pictorial and textual records of human habitation—its broad rivers, deep valleys, and diverse institutions. In essence, fengtu ji offer holistic portrayals of a locale’s natural and cultural geography, articulating a comparative civilizational perspective through the dialectical relationships between the local and the global, nature and culture, self and other.

One defining feature of fengtu ji is that they are based on firsthand observation, though not in a narrowly positivist sense. They emphasize the holistic experience of humans within their environment, revealing both the universality of local knowledge and the global relevance of local places. Consequently, fengtu ji often transcend a “center–local” framework, taking the locality itself as the center from which to observe and record people, landscapes, seasonal rituals, and legends, and other phenomena. Unlike modern ethnography, they do not categorize interconnected phenomena into institutional frameworks or situate overlapping historical processes within linear causal narratives. Instead, they integrate feng (historical interpretation) and tu (geographical representation)—attending to concrete experiences such as terrain, architecture, resources, people, seasonal cycles, rituals, and legends—to apprehend regional character and civilizational rhythms. As such, in comparative research on regions and civilizations, fengtu serves as a key concept within Chinese intellectual tradition, revealing the universality of local societies and constructing a global observational approach through local knowledge of seasonal patterns, phenology, geography, and ethical imagination. In this sense, fengtu ji offer a locally grounded path to understanding the world, transforming regional knowledge and practice into a medium for civilizational comparison and dialogue and reactivating the dynamic interplay between local and global knowledge construction.

Another important characteristic of fengtu ji is that, although they place strong emphasis on recording natural geography, they are not scientific in the modernist sense. They dissolve the sharp division between nature and culture, departing from the naturalistic ontology of modern Western political thought. The ontology underlying fengtu ji is one in which psychological, physiological, physical, and cosmological dimensions are mutually constitutive, wherein nature embodies moral order, and local customs constitute the foundation of a universal order. Whereas modern ethnography tends to define politics in terms of governance, law, and power, fengtu ji illuminate the intimate connections among the natural macrocosm, the bodily microcosm, and political structures and operations. In doing so, they offer a civilizational logic that can inform contemporary reflections on international order, providing a critical lens through which to understand modern state power: The relationship between fengtu and politics is not a simple correspondence between “nature” and “institutions,” but a mutually constitutive one, representing a distinctive political ontology that enriches reflections on the political dimensions of civilization.

A further distinctive aspect of fengtu ji lies in their conception of the other—not based on binary opposition but on relationality—emphasizing both difference and interconnectedness between self and other. Modern ethnography frequently frames human differences in terms of linear temporal distinctions—such as “savage versus civilized” or “traditional versus modern”—or spatial hierarchies like “center versus periphery.” By contrast, fengtu ji situate others within a shared historical and ritual framework, constructing regional interactions through networks of historical linkage and spatial connection. This produces a polycentric and networked vision of civilization that differs from the Western-dominated “civilizational hierarchy” and its developmentalist variants, transcending the closed interpretive frameworks of cultural relativism. Such an approach enables comparative analysis that moves beyond nation-centered or globalized narratives, foregrounding regional networks and comparisons grounded in commerce, ritual exchange, historical linkage, and geography.

From fengtu ji to ethnography

Compared with earlier fengtu ji, late Qing works display notable new features. Wu Rulun’s Shenzhou Fengtu Ji (A Record of the Local Customs of Shenzhou) stands as an important example of this transformation. Compiled in accordance with the conventions of official Qing local gazetteers, the work combines local history and fengtu ji, reflecting a shift in both form and conceptualization. Influenced by evolutionary and materialist thought, Wu emphasized the idea of “humans guiding Heaven” and national prosperity through the development of agriculture and commerce via practical knowledge. He prioritized resources as the core content of fengtu, linking natural knowledge directly to national destiny and marking a shift from ritualized locales to productive and epistemic resources. Yet even as he stressed utility and technique, Wu retained attention to ceremonial objects and political ethos, constructing an integrated framework that connected material resources with education, preserving aspects of the holistic observation characteristic of traditional fengtu ji.

By the early twentieth century, as modern disciplines were introduced and field investigation gained prominence, numerous empirical survey reports emerged. Some continued to bear the title fengtu ji, including Wang Zhicheng’s Nanyang Fengtu Jianwen Lu (Observations on Nanyang Customs) and Yao Hesheng’s Shuibaiyi Fengtu Ji (Notes on the Customs of the Dai Ethnic Group). Over time, however, as fengtu writing gave way to modern ethnography, the conceptual foundations of fengtu were gradually displaced by progressivist, scientific, and modern state-oriented perspectives. These reports emphasized scientific rigor and objectivity in ethnography, analyzing human differences but largely abandoning fengtu ji’s relational “subject–object” framework and holistic integration of the human and natural worlds. As a result, scientific ethnography diverged from fengtu ji, reducing fengtu to material facts disconnected from civilizational and moral order, incorporating nature into cultural-scientific analysis as technical and instrumental data; national boundaries became increasingly clear and stable, while attention to temporal continuity and civilizational linkages between self and other diminished.

In sum, the mode of observation embodied in fengtu ji not only inherits the Chinese historical-geographical framework of human-nature co-constitution but also offers a basis for dialogue and comparison with other civilizational knowledge systems rooted in locality, symbolism, and ethical perception. Such comparison reveals that fengtu knowledge reflects the internal structure of civilization itself, grounded in dynamic relationships between locality and cosmos, and life and environment, rather than in singular social institutions, offering a cross-civilizational cognitive foundation. Moreover, the relational conception of the other inherent in fengtu ji helps loosen the grip of binary oppositions—self and other, inside and outside—freeing observation from the constraints of nation, ethnicity, culture, and community, and fostering a dynamic, relational perspective on the world. This approach situates landscapes within analyses of social structures and civilizational processes, attending to resources and their flows to trace cross-regional connections. Simultaneously, regional comparisons of customs, seasonal cycles, and rituals reveal the logic by which time and social order are constructed across civilizations, elucidating the interplay among humans, nonhumans, life, artifacts, deities, and climate. In short, this comparative approach extends beyond institutions and formal structures to the civilizational conditions, symbolic order, and ethical framework of fengtu, advancing a genuinely civilizationally informed ethnography.

Zhang Fan is an associate professor from the Department of Sociology at Peking University. This article has been edited and excerpted from Folklore Studies, Issue 4, 2025.