Abstract: In the past, the discussion from the “mountain history perspective” has mostly focused on the frontier areas located at the edge of the national territory. In contrast, this paper focuses on the “marginal” society in the hinterland, especially in the mountainous region of North China, and re-examines the applicability of the “ethnicity” and the state formation of Ming and Qing in different regions.Yanshen had been a periphery mountain town in the heartland of central Shandong since the Ming dynasty. It was not until two hundred years later during the early Qing period that Yanshan was incorporated into the state administrative structure and became Boshan County. According to the early Ming lijia(里甲) records, population in Yanshen and its surrounding areas was categorized between “min” (民) and “unregistered”. The former was considered as the locals (xiangmin乡民) by the officials.Some of their descendants became scholars and achieved social status through the Civil Examination during the middle and late Ming. The latter often appeared in the official records as miners (kuangtu or kuangzei). With the development and integration of the mountain market in the early Qing dynasty, Yanshen town became not just a geographical name but a new regional identity and it was eventually made into a new county.The case study of Yanshen town shows that the nationalization process of the “marginal” society in the hinterland is not only the result of the cultural identity change of the mountain population and the formation of new regional identity, but also the active institutional creation and political choice of local people under the national system. Compared with the frontier regions, even though there was no similar predicament of “joining in” of “escaping from” the national territory,under its unique local conditions, people in the marginal areas of the heartland experienced equally the complexity of dynamic competition and cooperation among different groups about the national system and the imperial orthodox rituals.

Key words: Ming and Qing Empires, northern mountain society, regional identity, Yanshen town