Environmental History in East Asia

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Tsui-jung Liu

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317974895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

As environmental history has developed as growing sub-discipline within the study of history, great emphasis has been placed on the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, as Environmental History in East Asia shows, by drawing on research and methodologies from the fields of science, technology, geography, geology and ecology, we are able to develop a much richer understanding of a region's history.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of environmental history in East Asia, ranging temporally from the Ming dynasty to the 21st Century and spatially across China, Japan and Taiwan. Split into four parts, the chapters cover a wide range of fascinating topics, comparing environmental thought and policy in the East and West, the transformation of the landscape, land resource utilization and impact of agriculture and disasters and diseases across the region. A diverse selection of case studies are used to illustrate the chapters, including the role of Daoism, Qing pasturelands and 21st century swine flu.

Truly interdisciplinary in approach, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian environmentalism, environmental history, Asian anthropology, Asian development studies and Asian history more generally.

1 Scientific curiosity in China and Europe

Natural history in the late Ming and the eighteenth century

Mark Elvin

Prelude

In my lectures in 2005 at the Collège de France I suggested that one hindrance to the development of a ‘modern’ type of natural science in late-imperial China was that there was an ‘insufficient density of interest’ to sustain the socio-intellectual matrix needed to maintain the interacting collaboration and criticism, and the continuity of thought and practice, essential for progress in this precarious domain of thinking.¹ In 2011, Professor Toby Huff published a generally excellent book under the title Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution. A Global Perspective, with many of whose theses I agree, but implying that late-imperial China was a culture without any significant scientific curiosity.² To be fair, he concentrates on astronomy where, together with physics, his case is strongest, but even here it is not entirely accurate.³ In the present chapter this denial is shown to be particularly mistaken when directed towards natural history and the environment, a domain that he barely touches on.

From one point of view, it might nevertheless be imagined that what the two of us have been saying amounts to little more than two different ways of advancing much the same general idea. I would argue that while there is some truth in this view, it misses a crucial point. There is a major analytical difference between positing a complete and, by implication intrinsic, absence of some characteristic in a culture, as he appears to do, and positing, as I do, a relatively weak but not insignificant presence that in only one or two rather minor domains (such as, in China’s case, the historical reconstruction of ancient and mediaeval phonetics) grew strong enough to support the socio-intellectual matrix of the kind needed for sustained scientific advance.⁴ This latter point of view, to the extent that it is valid, also opens a door for further research, whereas the former tends to close such possibilities off.

Introduction: The texts compared, and their nature

The central Chinese text examined here is the Wuzazu 五雜組[俎]⁵ [Fivefold Miscellany] of 1608 by the official Xie Zhaozhe 謝肇淛 (1567–1624).⁶ 1 would have liked to compare it with the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into Commonly Presumed Truths of 1646 by the physician Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682).⁷ Both authors were polymaths fascinated by the question of the truth or falsehood of improbable and bizarre events. They were near contemporaries and both tackled questions of cosmology and deeply held religious, philosophical, and ideological beliefs, though the details of natural history—including human beings—were one of their principal foci of interest. Both had an intense curiosity about how things are and how they came to be that way, the Chinese scholar no less than the western savant. Regrettably, Browne’s hyper-Latinate style, encrusted with strange words and arcane references, is a struggle even for native readers of English to understand, even if in the longer run familiarity often breeds admiration. A book would be required to do justice to such a complex project.

I have therefore taken a more limited and accessible topic, and concentrated my remarks on a comparison of Xie with one of the subtlest, but also most straightforward, of Western observers of nature with the naked eye, namely the Anglican clergyman Gilbert White (1720–1793), using mostly his Natural History of Selborne, this last being the place where he worked and lived.⁸ I have limited myself for the most part only to observations that both of them made in person, or thought to be true beyond reasonable doubt. In Xie’s case this means a severe restriction on the proportion of his work that can be examined, and to some extent risks distorting an unfamiliar reader’s impression of the character of his book.⁹

The only fundamental difference in basic botanical knowledge between them is that White, coming after the revolution in plant science started by Camerer’s discovery and experimental proof of the sexual mode of reproduction in flowering plants in 1691–1694,¹⁰ and Koelreuter’s demonstration of the crucial role of insects in pollination in the years between 1761 and 1766,¹¹ knew in basic terms what was going on in these respects while Xie did not. White could also draw on a much more precise plant taxonomy developed by Renaissance herbals and perfected by early modern botanists like Gaspard Bauhin, John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, and many others before Linnaeus.¹²

The gaps in basic zoology were as great but different. The most important of a general nature was the abandonment in Europe of a belief previously held in both cultures, namely the spontaneous generation of insects and other very small creatures. This was demolished by Francesco Redi and others in the second half of the seventeenth century,¹³ roughly midway between the lives of Xie and White. This apart, the two cultures were in many respects surprisingly similar, as we shall see, and this raises the suspicion that general attitudes to nature, even among the educated and interested, probably did not play as great a role in making possible or inhibiting the emergence of ‘modern’ science as one might reasonably be inclined to think.¹⁴,¹⁵

Non-intrusive observation

Xie acquired his understanding of the metamorphosis that produced dragonflies (interchangeably qingting 蜻蜓 or qingling 蜻蛉) from direct observation. He wrote that:

When qingting fly, that they love to dip momentarily into the water is not because they love the water, but to deposit their eggs. The nymphs (shuichai 水蠆 metamorphose intoqingling, and when <two>¹⁶ qingling mate and return to the water to adhere to some object and scatter their eggs, they re-emerge again as nymphs, and the nymphs once more become qingling. This alternating transmission by transformation continues without end.

(WZZ 789)

On occasion, he also used his own powers of observation to contradict long-held views. Thus he affirmed that snowflakes always had a hexagonal symmetry:

The saying has been handed down that after the <winter> solstice the snowflakes are five-pointed. But every year, as the winter has moved into spring, I have gathered snowflakes and looked at them. All have been six-pointed. Not one or two out of ten has been five-pointed. Thus one learns that even old sayings are not entirely correct.¹⁷

(WZZ 127)

Gilbert White, for his part, insisted that he was “an outdoor naturalist, one who takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others” (NHS 136). What was more, compared to book-learning that “may be done at home in a man’s study,” the “investigation of the life and conversation¹⁸ of animals is a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country” (NHS 169). He was modestly proud of having learned “something new and amusive” about the mating of swifts as the “result of many years’ exact observation.” This was that “swifts pair¹⁹ on the wing.” He continued: “I would wish any nice²⁰ observer, that is startled at this supposition, to use his own eyes, and I think he will soon be convinced. In another class of animals, viz. the insects, nothing is so common as to see the different species of many genera pairing as they fly. … If any person would watch these birds of a fine morning in May, as they are sailing round at a great height from the ground, he would see, every now and then, two meet, and both of them sink down together for many fathoms with a loud piercing shriek. … [T]he swift … appears to live more in the air than any other bird, and to perform all functions there save those of sleeping and incubation” (NHS 203).

Intrusive observation

White also practised what might be called “intrusive observation”. Here is his demolition of the reason put forward by a French anatomist²¹ in 1752 to explain why the cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) does not hatch its own eggs:

[T]he <alleged> impediment … arises from the internal structure of their parts. … [T]he crop²², or craw, of a cuckoo does not lie before the sternum²³ at the bottom of the neck, as in poultry …, but immediately behind it, on and over the bowels. …

Induced by this assertion, we procured a cuckoo, and cutting open the breastbone and exposing the intestines to sight, found the crop lying as mentioned above. … The sternum in this bird seemed to us to be remarkably short, between which and the anus lay the crop, or craw, and immediately behind that, the bowels against the backbone.

It must be allowed, as this anatomist observes, that the crop placed just upon the bowels must, especially when full, be in a very uneasy situation during the business of incubation; yet the test will be to examine whether birds that are actually known to sit <on eggs> for certain are not formed in a similar manner. …

Not long after a fern-owl [Caprimulgus <europaeus> or goat-sucker] was procured, which, from its habit and shape, we suspected might resemble the cuckoo in its internal construction. Nor were our suspicions ill-grounded; for upon the dissection, the crop, or craw, also lay behind the sternum, immediately on the viscera, between them and the skin of the belly …

Now, as it appears that this bird, which is so well known to practise incubation, is formed in a similar manner with cuckoos, Monsieur Herissant’s conjecture—that cuckoos are incapable of incubation from the disposition of their intestines—seems to fall to the ground.

(NHS 227–228)

I do not know o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Academia Sinica on East Asia
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Scientific curiosity in China and Europe: Natural history in the late Ming and the eighteenth century
• 2 Environmental ethics and aesthetics: The Laozi revisited
• 3 Vision and significance in environmental policy history
• 4 The effect of environment on the war between the Song and the Jin states
• 5 The retreat of the horses: The Manchus, land reclamation, and local ecology in the Jianghan plain (ca. 1700s-1850s)
• 6 Problems concerning the environmental history of the Chinese Loess Plateau
• 7 The Zhaozhou Bazi Society in Yunnan: Historical process in the Bazi Basin environmental system during the Ming period (1368-1643)
• 8 Lashihai: Changing environmental protection of an Alpine lake and wetland
• 9 Forest landscape change at the Sihmen reservoir catchment (2002-2007)
• 10 Limitation and adaptation: Environment and technology in JifU region's rice cultivation during the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911)
• 11 Historical knowledge and the response to desertification: A study of agricultural water supply technology in eighteenth-century Northwestern China
• 12 The aesthetics and politics of Chinese horticulture in late Qing borderlands
• 13 Maize cultivation and its effect on rocky desertification: A spatial study of Guizhou province (1736-1949)
• 14 Infant mortality and beriberi in Osaka city between the world wars: Impact of the mother's diet on infant health
• 15 Faith healing and vaccination against smallpox in nineteenth-century Japan
• 16 Living style diseases: Parasite infections and Kaoping region's rural environment
• 17 Ecodemics: Facing and mediating the risks from the wild
• 18 Beyond uncertainty: Industrial hazards and class actions in Taiwan and Japan
• Index