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Brief introduction about the bookWhile official Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint, Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture in the culturally diverse southwestern region of China. Since the acceptance of a new socio-political structure never happens overnight, they observe local rituals against the backdrop of extant written records, focusing on examples from the southwestern Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and southwestern Guangdong provinces. The authors contemplate the crucial question of how one can begin to write the history of a conquered people whose past has been largely wiped out. Combining anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis, they dig deep for the indigenous voice as they write a new history of China’s southwestern region -- one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China nation-building process.About the AuthorDr. David Faure is the Director of the Centre for Comparative and Public History, Department of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He graduated with a BA degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and received his PhD at Princeton University. Dr. David Faure has written extensively on Chinese social history and Hong Kong’s history, and is currently interested in the history of the people in south China and Chinese business history.More information: http://www.history.cuhk.edu.hk/dfaure.html