About Journal of Longyan University

Journal of Longyan University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Longyan University is the Chinese-language academic journal — Longyan Xueyuan Xuebao — of Longyan University in Longyan, in the west of Fujian Province. Like other Chinese university journals, or xuebao, it is sponsored by its host institution rather than by a commercial publisher, and it publishes scholarship across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Its editorial identity is shaped by where it sits: a university in the Hakka heartland of western Fujian, in a city that was also part of the former Central Soviet Area, so Hakka culture, the region's famous tulou earth buildings and the revolutionary history of western Fujian stand alongside general disciplinary research in its pages.

No ISSN for the journal was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. What can be stated with confidence is the journal's institutional setting and its regional brief, both of which are well documented in accounts of the university and of Longyan itself.

Longyan: Hakka ancestral land in western Fujian

Longyan is a prefecture-level city in south-western Fujian, bordering Guangdong to the south and Jiangxi to the west. Its administrative history is old: in 736, during the Tang dynasty, the prefecture of Tingzhou was established in western Fujian, administering counties including Changting and Xinluo, and six years later Xinluo was renamed Longyan, meaning “dragon rock”, after a nearby cavern that remains a famous scenic site.

The city is described in university sources as a well-known old revolutionary area, a Hakka ancestral land and a national forest city. The Hakka are a Han Chinese subgroup whose ancestors migrated south from northern China in successive waves, beginning in the centuries after the break-up of the Han empire, to escape war and disorder. Those who settled in the mountains of western Fujian formed the Hakka community of the region and spoke the Hakka dialect, and Longyan — together with neighbouring Sanming — is regarded as one of the ancestral homes of Hakka culture, with its distinct language, cuisine, architecture and strong clan cohesion.

The tulou: earth buildings as scholarship

The most famous material expression of that Hakka heritage is the Fujian tulou. These are large enclosed earthen dwellings, several storeys high and built in round or square form, constructed from a rammed mixture of clay, sand and lime on a stone foundation. Built mostly between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, tulou were communal homes designed for defence as well as shelter, and a single building could house an entire clan — so that the history of one tulou can read as the genealogical history of a family.

There are more than 30,000 tulou in Fujian, concentrated in the south-west of the province in Longyan and Zhangzhou, with the largest number — over 16,000 — in Longyan's Yongding district. In 2008, 46 Fujian tulou sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, with UNESCO describing them as outstanding examples of a unique building tradition and communal living system that developed in harmony with the surrounding environment. The Zhencheng Building in Hongkeng village, built in 1912 and known as the “prince of Hakka tulou”, is among the listed buildings. For a journal published in Longyan, tulou studies are therefore not an exotic specialism but research into the built environment of its own hinterland — its construction techniques, clan organisation, conservation and heritage tourism.

Revolutionary history of the western Fujian soviet base

Longyan's second defining historical layer is revolutionary. In January 1929, after the Red Army left Jinggangshan, it moved towards southern Jiangxi, and southern Jiangxi and western Fujian soon connected to form the beginnings of the Central Soviet base area. Western Fujian's role in that base area gives the region a dense concentration of revolutionary sites, relics and martyrs' memorials, including the former site of the Fujian Provincial Soviet Government in Changting and the site of the Gutian Conference, both visited today as red-education bases.

Local tradition records that tens of thousands of people from western Longyan joined the Red Army and the Long March that began in 1934, and that a striking share of the generals commissioned from Fujian province in the decades after 1949 came from Longyan — a fact behind the city's nickname as a home of generals. The university itself states its aim to carry forward both the spirit of the Soviet area and the Hakka spirit, and the journal's coverage of western Fujian soviet-base history reflects that dual inheritance directly.

Longyan University: the host institution

Longyan University — Longyan College in some English renderings — was founded in 1958 as Longyan Teachers College. In 2001 the former Fujian Resources Industry School was merged into it, and in May 2004 it was officially upgraded and renamed as an undergraduate college. It is a full-time, multi-disciplinary undergraduate institution approved by the Ministry of Education, run under a system of provincial and municipal co-construction with the city as the main partner.

The university has been designated a model applied undergraduate university in Fujian Province and a master's-degree fostering unit, and it was among the province's first civilised campuses. It has 14 secondary colleges and 41 undergraduate majors, and its library operates what is described as the largest document information centre in western Fujian, with a modern retrieval system and mirror site. That breadth — teacher education at its root, expanded by the resources-industry merger into applied and technical fields — is the academic base from which the journal draws its contributors and its subject range.

Scope and regional research themes

As a comprehensive university journal, the title publishes across the disciplines taught at the university. Its distinctive contribution, however, lies in the regional themes that few journals elsewhere are positioned to cover from primary material: Hakka language, folklore and migration history; the architecture, conservation and social organisation of the tulou; the history of the western Fujian revolutionary base and the Central Soviet Area; and studies of the economy and ecology of the mountainous Fujian–Guangdong–Jiangxi border region the university says it serves.

These themes connect. Hakka migration history explains the tulou; the tulou explain the clan society from which the revolutionary base drew its recruits; and the forested mountain environment explains both the building materials of the region and its modern designation as a national forest city. A journal that can publish across that whole chain, from dialectology to heritage conservation, occupies a specific place in Fujian's scholarly publishing landscape.

The journal in Fujian's university press landscape

Fujian's provincial undergraduate colleges each publish a xuebao of this kind, and the western Fujian titles — Longyan's alongside those of Sanming and the northern Fujian institutions — form a loose regional system documenting scholarship about the province's interior, balancing the coastal focus of the larger universities in Fuzhou and Xiamen. Within that system, the Journal of Longyan University is the journal of record for its city's university, carrying the research output of its 14 colleges to a national readership of scholars working on Hakka studies, revolutionary history and regional development.

Readership and continuing role

The journal's natural readership is the community of Chinese academics in the humanities, social sciences and sciences at comparable institutions, together with specialists in Hakka culture and tulou architecture, for whom Longyan is a primary field site. Heritage professionals working on the conservation of the World Heritage tulou, and historians of the Central Soviet Area, likewise have reason to follow a title published at the centre of both subjects.

As Longyan University pursues master's-degree authorisation and its stated goal of becoming a high-level applied undergraduate institution serving its locality, its journal remains the most durable public record of that ambition — a Chinese-language scholarly periodical rooted, as few are, in a landscape of earthen clan fortresses and revolutionary memory.