scubish.com: Scuba diving Fujian Province - China

(; Postal map spelling: Fukien, Foukien; local transliteration Hokkien from Min Nan Hok-kiàn) is one of the provinces on the southeast coast of China. Fujian borders Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, and Guangdong to the south. Taiwan lies to the east, across the Taiwan Strait.
The name Fujian comes from the combination of Fuzhou and Jian'ou, two cities in Fujian. The name was coined during Tang Dynasty.

Most of Fujian is administered by the People's Republic of China (PRC). However, the archipelagoes of Quemoy and Matsu are under the control of the Republic of China (ROC) based in Taiwan. Thus, de facto there are two provinces (in the sense of government organizations) with the same name. The two sides are rendered in different Romanizations of Mandarin. The PRC side renders the name of the province in Hanyu Pinyin, yielding "Fujian", while the ROC side renders the name of the province in Tongyong Pinyin, Wade-Giles and Postal map spelling, resulting in "FuJian", "Fuchien" and "Fukien", respectively.

The existence of two parallel Fujian provincial governments is a result of the Chinese Civil War. After losing mainland China (including most of Fujian) to communist forces in 1949, the Republic of China (ROC) retreated to Taiwan while retaining control over a few offshore islands of Fujian. Since then, the PRC (mainland) and ROC (Taiwan) have maintained separate provincial governments for Fujian. This article is concerned mainly with Fujian administered by the PRC; see Fujian (ROC) for more information on the ROC's province of Fujian.

Fuzhou is the provincial capital of PRC-controlled Fujian while Quemoy is the seat of the ROC-controlled Fujian, though in practice most powers in ROC-controlled Fujian are delegated to the two counties of Quemoy and Matsu Islands.

History

Recent archaeological discoveries demonstrate that Fujian (especially the northern coastal region around Fuzhou) had entered the Neolithic Age by the middle of the 8th millennium BP (6th millennium BC). From the Keqiutou site (7450-5590 BP), an early Neolithic site in Pingtan Island located about 70 km southeast of Fuzhou, numerous tools made of stones, shells, bones, jades, and ceramics (including wheel-made-ceramics) have been unearthed, together with spinning wheels, a definitive evidence of weaving. The Tanshishan (昙石山) site (5500-4000 BP) in suburban Fuzhou spans the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Age where semi-underground circular buildings were found in the lower level. The Huangtulun (黄土崙) site (ca.1325 BC), also in suburban Fuzhou, was of the Bronze Age in character. These findings, however, also indicate that the agricultural tradition was weak if not lacking in this area, which is consistent with the early records stating that the indigenous people in Fujian, primarily those living along the Min River, were Austronesians with "large eyes, flat nose and tattooed bodies" , who made their living by fishing. These people were probably the original inhabitants of southern China. Some of them may have been assimilated, driven further south, or exiled during Han Dynasty to eastern China (north of present-day Shanghai).

For the Han Chinese, this area was also known as Minyue. The...