The people of Kumemura, traditionally believed to all be descendants of the Chinese immigrants who first settled there in 1392, came to form an important and aristocratic class of scholar-bureaucrats, the yukatchu, who dominated the royal bureaucracy, and served as government officials at home, and as diplomats in relations with China, Japan, and others.
The community's special function came to an end in 1879, with Okinawa's formal annexation to Japan, and it has since been geographically absorbed into the prefectural capital of Naha; the area is now known simply as Kume.
Thus, even though these Chinese immigrants were hardly more than ordinary citizens back home in Fujian, they were regarded by their government which sent them, and by the Ryukyuans who welcomed them, as cultural envoys, bringing civilization to a lesser nation.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the community was enclosed within earthen walls, and consisted of over one hundred homes, inhabited by not only Chinese immigrants (and their descendants) but Koreans as well.
Only a few hundred Ryukyuans were ever resident in Fuzhou at a time, and only eight at the imperial university in Beijing, where they were allowed to stay for three years, or up to eight in exceptional circumstances.
A main thoroughfare, Kume Ōdōri (久米大通り) ran across the island from southeast to northwest; the Taoist Tensonbyō temple lay at the north end of the street, while a pair of Tenpigū shrines devoted to Tenpi, Taoist deity of the sea, lay at the south end of the road.
[6][8] During the period when Ryukyu was controlled by the Shimazu clan of Japan (1603-1868), the people of Kumemura came to serve an even more direct role in government and in diplomacy, at least initially.
Thus, the magistrate of the Kumemura community took on an unofficial role comparable to a minister of education, and the Ryukyuan people, even more so than before, were exposed to a campaign of both passive and active Sinification.
The kingdom's development was inevitably affected quite profoundly by policies imposed by Satsuma, and by the reforms instituted by Sai On, Shō Shōken and others.
In 1653, the government forbade anyone from moving their residence to one of the major cities, and imposed a number of sumptuary laws intended to reduce gratuitous spending; the bureaucratic elite may have been more wealthy than the Ryukyuan peasantry, but they were by most scholarly accounts still quite poor compared to the aristocrats in China and Japan.
Around 1801, young men from Shuri began to be sent abroad to study in Fuzhou and Beijing, breaking the monopoly on Chinese scholarship held by Kumemura for roughly four centuries.
Allowances were made for men of Kumemura to formally change their residence to the capital, and thus gaining the same opportunities offered those originally from Shuri, but while this benefited individual scholar-bureaucrats, on the whole it only served to accelerate the decline of Kumemura's prestige and power as its formerly uniquely important role in the country's government, education and culture came to be shared, or even taken over, by Shuri.