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  The River, the Plain, and the State

  On July 19, 1048, the Yellow River breached its banks, drastically changing its course across the Hebei Plain and turning it into a delta where the river sought a path out to the ocean. This dramatic shift of forces in the natural world resulted from political deliberation and hydraulic engineering of the imperial state of the Northern Song Dynasty. It created 80 years of social suffering, economic downturn, political upheaval, and environmental changes, which reshaped medieval North China Plain and challenged the state. Ling Zhang deftly applies textual analysis, theoretical provocation, and modern scientific data in her gripping analysis of how these momentous events altered China's physical and political landscapes and how its human communities adapted and survived. In so doing, she opens up an exciting new field of research by wedding environmental, political, economic, and social history in her examination of one of North China's most significant environmental changes.

  Ling Zhang is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.

  Studies in Environment and History

  Editors

  J. R. McNeill Georgetown University

  Edmund P. Russell University of Kansas

  Editors Emeritus

  Alfred W. Crosby University of Texas at Austin

  Donald Worster University of Kansas

  Other Books in the Series

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  Erik Loomis Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests

  David A. Bello Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands

  Peter Thorsheim Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain During the Second World War

  Kieko Matteson Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669–1848

  George Colpitts Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780–1882

  Micah Muscolino The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950

  John Brooke Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey

  Emmanuel Kreike Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management

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  James L. A. Webb, Jr. Humanity's Burden: A Global History of Malaria

  Frank Uekoetter The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany

  Myrna I. Santiago The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938

  Matthew D. Evenden Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River

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  Thomas Dunlap Nature and the English Diaspora

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  Richard H. Grove Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860

  Elinor G. K. Melville A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico

  J. R. McNeill The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History

  Theodore Steinberg Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England

  Timothy Silver A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800

  Michael Williams Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography

  Donald Worster The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History

  Samuel P. Hays Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985

  Warren Dean Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History

  Robert Harms Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa

  Arthur F. McEvoy The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980

  Alfred W. Crosby Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Second Edition

  Kenneth F. Kiple The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History

  Donald Worster Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Second Edition

  The River, the Plain, and the State

  An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128

  Ling Zhang

  Boston College

  University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

  It furthers the University's mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

  www.cambridge.org

  Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107155985

  © Ling Zhang 2016

  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

  First published 2016

  Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.

  A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library

  isbn 978-1-107-15598-5 Hardback

  Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

  For my parents, Qiqi, and David

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Tables

  Acknowledgments

  List of Abbreviations

  Prologue 1048: The Opening of an Environmental Drama

  Part IPre-1048: Prelude to the Environmental Drama1Before the Yellow River Met the Hebei Plain

  2The State's Hebei Project

  3The 1040s: On the Eve of the Flood

  4Creating a Delta Landscape

  Part IIPost-1048: The Unfolding of the Environmental Drama5Managing the Yellow River–Hebei Environmental Complex

  6Life in the Yellow River Delta

  7Agriculture: A Subsistence-Oriented Economy

  8Land and Water: A Thousand Years of Environmental Trauma

  Epilogue 1128: The Close of the Environmental Drama

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1The Yellow River's Courses in Hebei:
1048–1128

  2Historical Shifts of the Yellow River's Courses

  3The Middle Reaches of the Yellow River

  4The Yellow River's Lower Reaches before 1048

  5Hebei in the Tenth Century

  6Early Song's Geopolitical Situation

  7Hebei's Administrative Districts in the Early Song Period

  8Hebei's Frontier Ponds

  9Earthquakes in the 1040s

  10A Geopolitical Map of the Early Song

  11Changing Courses of the Yellow River, 1048–1128

  12The Struggle for the Yellow River Shore in Daming

  13Hebei's Water Systems, 1048–1128

  14Southern Courses of the Yellow River after 1128

  Tables

  1The Size of Hebei's Frontier Ponds in the 1030s

  2The Yellow River's Floods before 1048

  3Hebei's Registered Households

  4The Unit Yield of Winter Wheat and Millet (in kg)

  5Quotas of Summer–Autumn Taxes in 1077 (Various Measurements)

  6Quotas of Summer–Autumn Taxes for Hebei in 1080 (Various Measurements)

  Acknowledgments

  In summer 2008, I finished my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, which was an economic history of north China during the Northern Song Dynasty. A small section of the dissertation deals with the Yellow River's floods. Because of that, I was offered a fellowship at Harvard in fall 2009, which enabled me to move across continents to pursue an “environmental history” of medieval China. Yet, having read only Donald Worster's Dust Bowl and Mark Elvin's Sediments of Time and The Retreat of the Elephants, I saw “environmental history” as a rather foreign concept and debated its legitimacy as a self-defined sub-discipline of history. I viewed the title of “environmental historian” as a heavy hat people placed on my head rather than a self-identity deriving from proper scholarly training.

  Confused yet intrigued by the murky path laid in front of me, I have since begun a journey of soul searching, identity building, and intellectual self-reinvention. While this journey has been full of frustration – not knowing what to do or whether I'm doing it right – and loneliness – being at the margins of many established scholarly fields – it has also liberated me from various constraints and allowed me to venture into a splendid intellectual universe. Like a hungry child, I have tried to devour whatever seemed tasty and nutritious, be it history or social science or natural science, theoretical or empirical, and about medieval China or about the modern West in the twenty-first century.

  The present book is the outcome of this six-year journey. It is a modest experiment that seeks to capture how things entangle to constitute a messy, wild, blossoming world – a process similar to my formation of a new identity through wonderful encounters with different people and ideas. It is a peculiar telling of history that embodies my current philosophical positions, political pursuits, and intellectual desires. This book is not simply a study of a remote history; it is a documentation of the growth of my personhood.

  This book and this wonderful journey would never have become possible without the support from many individuals and research institutes. My longtime mentor Wang Xiaofu at Peking University has never stopped inspiring me with this powerful line: “Ling, one must first have dreams.” St John's College, Asian Studies, and the Needham Research Institute at the University of Cambridge paved a solid foundation for my training in Sinology and my interests in economic history and the history of science and technology. My loving doctor-parents Joseph and Hiroko McDermott watched every moment of my growth. They patiently taught me how to think, what makes an argument, and why some ideas are more meaningful than others. Taking the role as my first teacher for academic English, Joe painstakingly corrected my grammatical errors, which were nearly in every sentence I composed. For all the headaches and grey hair he got from my writing, I offer my sincere apology and deep appreciation.

  A fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment opened this medieval historian of China to the worlds of environmental science, marine biology, earth science, and zoology, all of which were completely alien to me. I thank my mentors Peter Bol and Daniel Schrag and my colleagues James Clem and many others for two eye-opening years. The post-doctoral fellowship in the Program of Agrarian Studies at Yale University drew me toward the world of social science, where I was intensely exposed to anthropology, political science, and various stripes of social theory. I thank my mentors James Scott, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, and Peter Perdue and my fellow scholars in the program for a life-changing year. I have become quite a different person in terms of what I care about and how I think. During the past few years, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University has not only provided me much needed office space but also sponsored me to organize several seminars and conferences. These events drew together scholars from various fields, offering me rare opportunities to learn from different kinds of scholarship. For their administrative and intellectual support, I thank the Center's directors William Kirby, Mark Elliott, and Michael Szonyi, as well as Lydia Chen, Jennifer Rudolph, and many other colleagues. I am grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, which generously funded a year of teaching leave, allowing me to focus on the writing of the book. My home institution, Boston College, has provided a friendly work environment and supported many of my research activities. My warmest thanks to my caring colleagues both in the History Department and in other departments.

  During the past six years, countless colleagues and friends read parts of this book or heard me talk about some part of it. They invited me to their conferences or participated in activities I organized. They shared with me lengthy conversations or exchanged brief but insightful opinions. As I went through difficulties and doubts, many lent comfort and encouragement. For their advice, assistance, support, and friendship, my gratitude goes to Alan Mikhail, Arupjyoti Saikia, Bin Wong, Caroline Baltzer, Chris Neilsen, Dana Sajdi, Dario Gaggio, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Deng Xiaonan, Devin Pendas, Donald Worster, Emily Yeh, Eugene Wang, Felix Wemheuer, Franziska Seraphim, Gunnel Cederlöf, Han Maoli, Han Zhaoqing, He Xiaoqing, Heping Liu, Hilde de Weerdt, Ian Miller, Ian J. Miller, Iftekhar Iqbal, Jinping Wang, John Lee, Judith Shapiro, Julian Bourg, Kenneth Pomeranz, Kevin Kenny, Kevin O'Neill, Lincoln Tsui, Ma Junya, Marilynn Johnson, Micah Muscolino, Michael Puett, Mike McGovern, Nancy Langston, Noah Snyder, Paul Sabin, Paul Smith, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Qian Ying, Ralph Litzinger, Rebecca Nedostup, Robert Hymes, Robert Marks, Robin Fleming, Roseann Cohen, Ruth Mostern, Sakura Christmas, Sabine Dabringhaus, Sarah Ross, Scott Moore, Shi Lihong, Shirley Ye, Stephen Ford, Tim Wright, Tineke D'Haeseleer, T. R. Kidder, Victor Seow, Virginia Reinburg, Wang Ao, Wang Jiange, Wen Xin, Xia Mingfang, Yajun Mo, Yang Rui, Ying Jia Tan, Zhang Ping, and Zuo Ya. Some of these people (and many others who are not mentioned here) may have forgotten their brief encounters with me, but I cherish their profound influences.

  I thank Edmund Russell and John McNeill for taking a real interest in my work and waiting patiently for me to complete the manuscript. I am grateful to two anonymous readers who treated my manuscript with care and support and peppered it with thoughtful critiques. I thank my wonderful editors Deborah Gershenowitz, Amanda George, Arindam Bose, and Cynthia Col who deserve every credit for making this book beautiful. Any error that remains belongs to me.

  My wonderful friends and colleagues Corey Byrnes, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, David Bello, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, James Scott, Peter Perdue, Priya Lal, Robert Marks, and Ruth Mostern read parts or the whole of the final manuscript. I am deeply indebted to them. My dearest Eleanor Goodman – my favorite poet in the world – polished every single sentence and corrected every mistaken punctuation mark in the book.

  My love goes to my trusting parents and supporting sister. Sometimes even I wonder how they can so wholeheartedly believe in me and trust what I do. Nothing I do compares to what they have given me. My thanks to Chuck and Kitty for putting up with me when
I spent most of the Christmas holidays writing. And David. Oh, David. This book is made of the strawberry smoothies you prepared every morning, of the literature and poems you whispered at nighttime, and of the moments when we debated uses of a word or implications of a concept. With all the joy, excitement, challenges, and adventures that we have shared, for all my silliness, stubbornness, and even tears that you have endured, I read this book as my not-terribly-romantic love letter to you.

  Abbreviations

  GSJ

  Gongshi ji

  MXBT

  Mengxi bitan

  OYXQJ

  Ouyang Xiu quanji

  QSW

  Quan Songwen

  SHY

  Song huiyao jigao

  SHYBB

  Song huiyao jigao bubian

  SMCZY

  Song mingchen zouyi

  SS

  Song shi

  SSWJ

  Songshan wenji

  XCB

  Xu Zizhitongjian changbian

  XCBSB

  Xu Zizhitongjian changbian shibu

  XSBGZY

  Xiaosu Baogong zouyi

  Prologue

  1048: The Opening of an Environmental Drama

  The Sixth Day of the Sixth Month, “People Were Flushed Away Like Fish and Turtles”