As has been explained in the opening chapter, our story illustrates a process of cross-cultural engagement and economic transformation from a very local perspective that by the end of the first millennium CE had been widely underway across the broader South for many decades, even centuries. There was no standard process, no local model that can stand alone to illustrate how this engagement played out from place to place. The common feature across the South, however, was the interaction between the array of culturally and ethnically non-Sinitic cultures that had long occupied the land from time immemorial and the intruding Sinitic model that had evolved from the ancient culture of the Central Plain, an engagement that led to a profound change in both.

When this process began, as early as the Han dynasty if not even in the latter stages of the Zhou era, the diverse cultures and politics of the Yangtze River basin and the coastline south of the Shandong Peninsula were very different from those of the Central Plain. Over the course of the first millennium CE this changed as the disparate cultures of North and South engaged and cross-influenced each other. Our story comes rather late in the broader process. For a variety of reasons: mountain barriers, indifferent soils and indigenous hostility toward immigrants, among many, the more narrowly defined littoral regions south of the Hangzhou Bay and east of the Pearl River estuary, including both the coast and the interior highlands, attracted only a small number of the early Sinitic migrants. They primarily followed the interior river basins, which bypassed the area known to early scholars as Min. It was not until the mid-centuries of the first millennium CE that the Sinitic presence began to have a noticeable impact, and it was not truly until the turmoil and migration associated with the mid-eighth-century rebellion of An Lushan that has been referenced several times in earlier chapters when that presence became defining.

A reader might well ask, in light of this, what makes this particular story, a very local story that does not even include all of Min, worthy of focus? For one thing, I have long found it an interesting story that speaks in many ways to the lives of people in a remote past.