明嘉靖年間,廣東理學士紳黃佐在出仕以後利用自身的人際網絡,為祖先撰寫了數量可觀的墓誌傳狀。黃佐在編纂《廣州志》、《香山縣志》、《廣東通志》時把相關文本載入其中,塑造黃氏宗族「名門望族」的社會地位,展現了士紳在地域社會秩序構建中展拓宗族勢力的身影。科舉為明代廣東士子向上流動、成就士紳身份提供制度管道,香山黃氏亦得以興起。香山黃氏是理學社會化的典型範例,其成功是理學在廣東實踐的成功。明中葉以降,理學成為廣東地方精英賴以不斷汲取的正統性資源,理學社會化促進了廣東地域社會結構的變遷。具體而言,科舉精英的崛起與社會的宗族化轉向將廣東整合成一個有機的、系統的地域社會,廣東因而得以歸納進國家的範疇之內。
During the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, Huang Zuo, a Confucian scholar in Guangdong Province, wrote many epitaphs and biographies for his ancestors by using his personal social network. When compiling the gazetteers of Guangzhou, Xiangshan County, and Guangdong Province, Huang inserted the texts about his ancestors. Those measures helped raise the social status of the Huang clan and showed the scholar's role in expanding clan power in the construction of regional social order. The imperial civil-service examination provided an institutional channel for Guangdong scholars to move up the social ladder and become gentry in the Ming Dynasty. The Huang clan in Xiangshan also rose in this way. The Huang clan in Xiangshan is a typical example of the socialization of Neo-Confucianism, and their success is the success of the socialization of Neo-Confucianism in Guangdong. Since the mid-Ming Dynasty, Neo-Confucianism had become the orthodoxy resource of Guangdong local elites. The socialization of Neo-Confucianism has been the mainline of social changes in Guangdong. Specifically, the rise of the elites who succeeded in imperial civil-service examination and the turn of the society to a focus on kinshipintegrated Guangdong into an organic and systematic regional community and firmly inserted Guangdong into the Ming empire.