I SPENT MY TWENTY-FIRST SUMMER living in a little green tent beside the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. A century of gold mining had torn up its river valleys, but the Yukon was still a wild place, bigger than California, with thirty thousand people and twice as many moose. That summer gave me a glimpse of landscapes in which humans were just one among many animals, not the dominant ones. In August, as the brief northern summer waned, I flew to Hong Kong. I can still remember my astonishment at its crowds—the Kowloon area had thirty thousand people per square kilometer. I was fascinated, and though I still love that city, I could not help but see it as a devastated landscape. This impression was only strengthened as I traveled around China that year and realized that humans had wiped out natural ecosystems across much of the subcontinent. Even squirrels have been erased from the landscape, surviving only in the mountains.
I studied early Chinese philosophy that year at Hong Kong University and was struck by the following passage from Mencius: “The trees on Ox Mountain were once beautiful, but because it is near a big city they were all chopped down with axes. Can this be considered beautiful? The vegetation does get respite over the days and nights and is watered by the rain and dew, so it is not that no new shoots grow, but then cattle and sheep come and graze on them. That is why the mountain is so bald. People see its baldness and assume it never had trees on it, but is that the nature of the mountain?” Mencius used this as a parable of human nature, and it is also a profound reflection on the ways we perceive our environments. But I was not thinking so deeply about it then. I was just amazed to learn that people had been transforming China’s environments for so long, since I had thought that environmental problems were a modern phenomenon. I began to wonder what China’s natural ecosystems had looked like before people came to dominate the landscape. I went to the library to look into it and gradually realized that nobody had written the book I wanted.1
This book is the result of my inquiry into those questions, but it is quite different from what I was looking for back then. In those days I considered “the environment” to consist of everything outside of human societies, as exemplified by national parks that had been conveniently depopulated so tourists could see proper nature. Like many North Americans, I imagined human history as a kind of frontier rolling over nature and converting it to towns and farmland, a simple transition from nature to culture. It was only when I returned to Canada and discovered the field of environmental history that I realized how far we have been misled by this focus on wilderness. I decided to apply the methods of environmental history to the study of ancient China. But when I started reading through the classical texts—in translation until my Chinese improved—I found few other passages that explicitly discussed environmental change. Luckily, the fields of archaeology and paleoecology were producing a lot of relevant data. China’s construction boom of the past few decades has been a bonanza for archaeologists, who have unearthed an unending stream of new discoveries, from seeds and bones to roads and cities. Perhaps most amazingly, huge quantities of documents written on bamboo and wood have been discovered, many of them legal statutes and routine administrative “paperwork” from China’s early empires, the Qin and Han. These documents contain so much information on environmental questions that it gradually dawned on me that states are themselves agents of environmental change.2
This book combines the comparative study of political institutions with the methods of environmental history to examine the ecology of state formation in early China. It traces this process in the central Yellow River valley, the heartland of Chinese civilization, from the origins of farming until the fall of China’s first empire. It focuses on the Guanzhong Basin of Shaanxi Province, a region known outside China for the city of Xi’an and the terracotta army that guards the tomb of the First Emperor of China (map 1). In East Asia, the region is famous as the capital of China’s greatest empires under the Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties, which gives it a historical importance akin to that of Rome in Western history. The Guanzhong Basin is the most northwesterly of China’s major agricultural areas, a vast arable plain whose excellent natural defenses made it a great base for conquering rivals. This explains why it repeatedly became an imperial capital. The Yellow River valley is an ideal focus for a study of an early state because it is one of the few places on earth where agriculture and states evolved. As this book will show, building political organizations required reorganizing nature and society so that they could provide resources and labor to the state. Conversely, once these systems were established, they became powerful forces of environmental change. One reason humans have become the dominant species across East Asia is that their political systems have been so successful in expanding and sustaining agriculture.3
It is fitting that the word for “China” in most languages descends from the name of “Qin” (pronounced “cheen”) because Qin founded the imperial system that did so much to build the entity we now call China. Of course Qin’s sophisticated bureaucracy was the culmination of a long history. The origins of the political entity that became China can be traced to walled towns in the central Yellow River valley about four thousand years ago, from which arose the Shang-Zhou-Qin-Han lineage of states. There were equally sophisticated Neolithic societies in other places that are now within China’s borders, but it is anachronistic to call these “Chinese” because they contributed little to the initial formation of the Chinese political and cultural tradition. Those regions became “China” when they were later conquered and colonized. The formation of Chinese culture was always a process of hybridization between conquerors and conquered, but in the long run the imperial center tended to have the upper hand. These empires had a fundamental incentive to expand agriculture and played a key role in the domestication of East Asia’s landscapes.4
This book explores the ecology of political power from the origins of agriculture around ten thousand years ago to the fall of the Qin Empire in 207 BCE. I will leave the ecology of political systems to the next chapter. Here we will imagine the lives of ordinary people in four different periods in order to illustrate the changes that occurred over this time. We will see how agricultural systems improved over time, eventually becoming productive enough to create substantial and reliable surpluses. Political institutions gradually arose that used these surpluses to feed people doing nonagricultural labor, such as building infrastructure or fighting. Over time these institutions expanded to control more land and people. By the time this book ends in the third century BCE, states had grown large enough to mobilize the resources of millions of people. They used them to transform ecosystems in ways humans could never have done if we had remained in small, decentralized groups.
Our first stop is the village of Jiangzhai, near Xi’an, around 4500 BCE, which archaeologists call the Yangshao period. The village is situated in a grassy savanna with scattered patches of shrubs and woodlands. The Qinling Mountains tower to the south. The village is home to a few hundred people who live in wattle and daub houses arranged in a circle around a central courtyard. The only domesticated animals are dogs and pigs, which wander around freely. Human settlements are few and far between, and the landscape is home to dangerous animals like tigers and wild water buffaloes, perhaps one reason the village is surrounded by a deep ditch. Every year people burn patches of land around the settlement to plant millets, creating a patchwork of vegetation that attracts deer, making them easier to hunt. The residents also hunt various other wild animals that provide them with meat and with skins and furs of which they make clothes. They also weave hemp and other plant fibers into cloth. They catch plenty of fish, turtles, and other aquatic animals and gather a wide variety of wild plant resources for food, medicine, and materials. In the summer and fall they often take advantage of all the wild fruit and nut trees, and the seeds they discard around their villages often grow into trees. Later inhabitants of this region would be jealous of the variety of foods in these people’s diets.5
The long-term development of North China’s agricultural system is the subject of chapter 2. Over thousands of years people learned to raise more and more kinds of plants and animals. Each new domesticated species increased their ability to modify their environments, and people continued to develop better breeds and new techniques. Farming also allowed the human population to increase, so natural ecosystems were increasingly replaced with grain fields, orchards, and grazing land. Advancements in various sciences provide us with an increasingly good idea of what people ate and how they modified their environments. Soil research helps us understand the changing climate. Fossil pollen gives us an idea of the regional vegetation. Burned seeds and other macrofossils reveal what crops people were cultivating and the weeds growing among them. Animal bones tell us what animals they were rearing or hunting. Stable isotopes in bones give us an idea of what people ate, and the conditions of their skeletons tell us about their health. Ancient DNA analysis allows us to trace the genealogies of human populations and domesticated species. From all of these sources we know that the people of Jiangzhai and other Yangshao-era sites gathered food and materials from a wide variety of species, both wild and cultivated. This made them healthier than many of their descendants, though the wildness of the surrounding ecosystems also made it more likely that they would step on a pit viper or run into a bear.
Let us jump 2500 years into the future, to 2000 BCE, the end of the Longshan period. Many things look the same as in earlier periods. Most people still live in small villages, dogs and pigs are still running around, and people are still wearing skins and woven hemp. But much has changed. The agricultural system has improved. People have bred more varied and productive types of millet. People still hunt deer, but there are fewer wild animals than there were in earlier periods. Where they previously ate only wild fruit, they now plant apricots and peaches. Domesticated cattle and sheep have arrived from Central Asia. They can subsist on dry grassy lands that were previously of little use to humans, but this requires people to travel far from their families with their herds. Where families in the Yangshao period rarely accumulated much more wealth than their neighbors, some are now much wealthier than others, owning livestock and riches like jades. People tend to have less diverse diets than their ancestors, and poorer people sometimes depend so heavily on millets that their health suffers. Malnutrition will continue to plague poorer farmers for the next four millennia. Walled towns, home to a few thousand people, have appeared. One of the larger ones, Taosi, has wealthy elites who live in a large walled compound, and own many luxury goods. Common farmers living around these towns must work the fields of their leaders and fight in wars against other walled settlements.
Whereas people in the Yangshao period had lived in relatively egalitarian communities, a few millennia later they had to pay taxes and do labor service to the state. How did institutions form in these towns to collect resources from their hinterlands? How did some families become hereditary elites while many others provided them with goods or labor? We do not know the details, but it did happen. Chapter 3 will explore how states formed in East Asia and how they gradually improved their capacity to extract surplus resources from larger territories and populations. It started in the Longshan period, when walled towns first formed and clear signs of class divisions emerged. The city of Erligang, modern Zhengzhou, was the first indisputable state in East Asian history. It flourished between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and its influence extended across an enormous area. It was succeeded by the Shang dynasty at Anyang (c. 1250–1046 BCE), which is famous as the first site with writing, horses, and chariots. In 1046 armies led by the king of Zhou (pronounced “Joe”) conquered much of the Yellow River valley and established a hierarchical alliance of polities across the region. Because its capital lay to the west near modern Xi’an, the first Zhou dynasty was known as the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE). In 771 the Zhou royal house collapsed and established a new capital to the east in Luoyang. This is known as the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 BCE), a time of conflict between and within the Zhou polities.
Let us now have a look at life 1500 years after the Longshan period. In 500 BCE the state of Qin has taken over the Western Zhou capital region in the Guanzhong and Confucius is teaching in obscurity in Shandong. Agriculture has improved over the past 1500 years. Cattle and sheep are much more common than they were in the Longshan period. Chickens have arrived from the south and are now running around villages along with dogs and pigs. There is a wider variety of vegetables in people’s gardens, and they grow various fruits and nuts in their settlements. It may be around this time that people begin to use oxen to plow fields.
Society is divided into rulers and ruled. Rulers have horses and sharp metal weapons that give them an advantage over common people that Longshan elites would have envied. Horses require grazing land, keepers, and people to maintain chariots, which makes it more expensive to be a member of the elite and differentiates those with wealth and power from those without. States in this period are quite decentralized, composed of various aristocratic lineages, or clans, each of which has full control over its own land and estates. Commoners have their own plots of land, but are also required to work on their lord’s fields and do other work for him, such as building and maintaining infrastructure. Men also have to serve in their lord’s armies during military campaigns, which are held regularly in the winter after the harvest. If there are no wars, they go on large-scale hunts and kill as many beasts as they can catch. Apart from those big hunts, common people hunt smaller furry animals that provide them with furs for winter clothes, as their ancestors have done for millennia.
Chapter 4 traces the six-hundred-year history of the state of Qin as it rose from irrelevance to hegemony. Qin’s history is the history of the Eastern Zhou period, a time of inter-state competition. Over the centuries, wars became longer and more expensive, forcing governments to find new sources of revenue. Their decentralized structure made them relatively weak, so these states worked to appropriate the tax income and corvée laborers of rival aristocratic lineages. As they did so, they grew in size and population and had to develop bureaucracies to administer their territories and subjects. Qin arose as a minor polity breeding horses for the Zhou, but after the Zhou kings fled the fertile Guanzhong Basin, Qin moved in and gradually built its power. Qin’s rise to pre-eminence began with state-strengthening reforms initiated in the fourth century BCE by its ambitious kings and its famous chancellor Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE). They established a system of ranks that commoners could obtain through military service: the higher the rank, the more land and privileges they were given. This radical reorganization of both society and the agricultural landscape made Qin the superpower of East Asia, and in 221 BCE it conquered the last of its rivals and founded the Qin Empire.
Let us now imagine life in the Guanzhong of 210 BCE, at the height of the Qin Empire. Only three centuries have passed since the time of Confucius, but the world has been transformed. The people of the Guanzhong now live in the capital region of a huge empire, and the state is a major factor in their lives. The grassland mosaic we saw in the Yangshao period has mostly been replaced with farmland. Even the saline lands of the northeast Guanzhong are being colonized after Qin built a massive canal system to drain and irrigate them. Wild ecosystems have disappeared from the lowlands of North China, though there is still plenty of wildlife in the mountains. Even in the wilder mountains and wetlands, people increasingly forage and hunt to supply urban markets. Millets remain the key grain, but people also grow soybeans, wheat, rice, and a wide variety of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Iron tools are becoming more widely available, but most farm tools are made of wood and stone. Most farmers have pigs and chickens, but cattle are too expensive for many since they require grazing land. Goats and donkeys are becoming more common, and people from the deserts of the far northwest sometimes arrive in the capital with camels. Men must serve in the military, and it is not uncommon for them to be sent very far away, perhaps never to return. But some are enthusiastic about joining the army because those who fight well can expect substantial rewards, including larger farms. Once young men reach adulthood, the state encourages them to marry and form their own separate families, a practice that has eliminated most of the larger clans that were common a few centuries earlier.
The Qin Empire reached the zenith of its power during the reign of its First Emperor, who reigned from 246 to 210 BCE, and it collapsed soon afterward. Chapter 5 analyzes the ecology of Qin’s political system at this time. Its power was based on the taxes paid in grain by farming families. This grain was stored in granaries throughout the empire and used to feed the people, horses, and cattle who labored on the empire’s various projects. Qin not only required most men to do corvée and military service; it also exploited the labor of convicts on a large scale. Much of this labor was used on infrastructure like roads and water systems that sometimes also benefitted local people. Qin also built megaprojects like the first Great Wall and the First Emperor’s tomb complex, which is now famous for its terracotta army. Qin’s huge armies conquered wide swaths of the subcontinent. The empire extended over such a large area that it could take months to travel from the capital to its most distant conquests. Officials kept control of this system with a bureaucracy that administered local society by sending enough information to the capital to allow central officials to make decisions about how the resources and labor were to be used. This gave them enormous power to shape the ecosystems of the subcontinent. They exploited forests while also issuing laws aimed at conserving them. As they had done since the time of Shang Yang, Qin officials put agriculture at the center of their system: the more farmers there were on the state registers, the more grain taxes they could collect and the more men they could mobilize for the army. Qin’s extractions did not make it particularly popular, and it was overthrown in a popular uprising.
Qin’s bureaucratic government and agricultural emphasis were inherited by the Han Empire, which endured for four centuries and was around the same size as the contemporaneous Roman Empire.6 The Han was the first to establish lasting peace across most of the fertile river valleys of East Asia, from the Korean Peninsula to Vietnam. Like the Roman Empire, the Han established a political model that subsequent leaders sought to emulate. But European rulers never managed to re-create the Roman Empire, while China’s centralized bureaucratic empire has been rebuilt over and over. The People’s Republic of China is its most recent version. Even northern pastoralist groups who conquered China quickly learned that their new subjects already had a well-established system for extracting surpluses from the laboring masses and adopted much of it. Regardless of who was in charge, the power of Chinese states was based on farming, so they had a fundamental motivation for expanding cultivation and increasing populations. The power of these states was quite limited by modern standards, but they maintained some level of peace across large areas for centuries at a time, making it easier for the human population to grow and to convert virtually all of the subcontinent’s lowland ecosystems into farmland.
This is the first English-language monograph on the environmental history of early China, but it builds on a long history of scholarship. In the 1920s, Karl Wittfogel combined the ideas of Marx and Weber to develop influential theories on environmental aspects of political power. I first encountered these ideas in Joseph Needham’s brilliant history of water control in China. Mark Elvin’s pioneering The Retreat of the Elephants argues that warfare was an important driver of environmental change in early China, an idea elaborated at length in this book. Despite these influences, states and wars were actually far from my mind when I began this project. I was initially inspired by the American field of environmental history and by Chinese historical geographers, especially Shi Nianhai, who wrote histories of land use and soil erosion on the Loess Plateau. But when I set out to study early China’s environmental history, I found few relevant written sources on early environments, and plenty on political organizations. It was the sources that prompted me to think harder about the nature of political power in early China. James Scott’s work on the logic of state power was very helpful in thinking through these questions. His work and Donald Worster’s critique of an earlier draft of this one—pushed me to recognize the limits of the time-honored American mistrust of government and acknowledge the many ways in which states have created stability and prosperity in human lives. Though rarely addressing the ecology of political systems, scholarship on the environmental history of the ancient Mediterranean has served as a model and an inspiration.7
This book synthesizes a lot of data excavated and published by archaeologists in China. Archaeologists have excavated an enormous volume of materials, and the quality of this data has improved dramatically over the past two decades as the government has poured funds into the sciences, including environmental archaeology and paleoecology. This has allowed me to write a book that it would not have been possible to write a few decades ago. However, archaeological research on the Neolithic period has been considerably more innovative than research on historical periods, and the different research priorities of prehistoric and historical archaeologists in China have shaped this book’s organization. Archaeologists in China working on the period before texts (roughly before 1300 BCE) have always paid careful attention to subsistence and environment, and recently they have embraced scientific methods and begun to publish in international journals. In contrast, archaeologists of the historic period tend to base their research on historical texts, many of which have a strong elite bias because they were written by—or at least for—the rich and powerful. Historical archaeology has vastly improved our understanding of China’s early history, not least by proving that early texts contain a lot of accurate information. But the focus of these archaeologists on cities and tombs has provided little insight into the lives of the rural farmers who were the vast majority of the population. We know much more about the Neolithic village of Jiangzhai than we do about any village from the 800-year Zhou period. This is why the discussion of Neolithic agriculture in chapter 2 is so detailed, while the subsequent chapters that focus on the Zhou period are mainly concerned with politics and administration. Luckily, excavated administrative documents do provide us with a wealth of details on mundane affairs.8
Given that this book focuses on the period when the classical texts of the East Asian intellectual tradition were written, I should explain why ideas play such a small part in this story. Most English-language scholarship on the Zhou period focuses on texts and ideas. The materialist focus of this book is intended partly as an antidote to this overemphasis on what elite men thought and wrote about. More importantly, though, I do not think that the abstract ideas people hold about nature ever made much difference to the ways their societies actually treated their environments. All early Chinese thinkers shared the belief that the expansion of agriculture and the human population was a good thing. Calls for the more sustainable exploitation of natural resources were not recognitions of the inherent value of nature, but simply rational analyses of how best to manage ecosystems for human benefit. Scholars interested in the ecological implications of early Chinese thought tend to be attracted to proto-Daoists like Zhuangzi, but I believe that the thinkers whose ideas made the most difference in the real world were political theorists like Shang Yang.9
I am very conscious in writing this book that some may perceive it as yet another work laying blame on China for the world’s environmental problems. However, as chapter 1 demonstrates, premodern China’s political systems were not fundamentally different from those elsewhere. They were relatively effective and enduring, but were still quite weak by modern standards. Moreover, the more I have learned about the ecology of China’s empires, the clearer it has become that my own middle-class Canadian life was made possible by the Anglo-American empire’s coercive transformation of the world’s ecosystems. I have had the luxury of traveling and learning about the world because Europeans conquered so much of it, displacing people to provide land for settlers like my family and reorganizing economies to channel resources to us. European empires built a global system of industrial capitalism so effective at enriching themselves that colonized peoples have no choice but to adopt their profligate ways if they are to escape subordination. Westerners often criticize the People’s Republic of China for its resource-intensive growth model as if we had not invented it ourselves and put China in a position in which it had little choice but to adopt it. As this book will show, rivalry between armed states has been a key driver of environmental destruction for millennia.10
I doubt my twenty-one-year-old self would have found this book very “environmental.” It is too focused on human societies. But the two subsequent decades have taught me that the story of our environments is the story of our societies themselves. Since economic productivity is the basis of political power, states have a fundamental incentive to promote economic growth, which means using more resources. Even though fossil fuels have given us much more energy to work with, plants remain our main sources of food and resources, and growing those plants requires land. If we are to reduce the destruction of the earth’s biosphere by human societies, we will have to design political systems that can prioritize long-term sustainability over economic growth. This means we will need a better understanding of what our political institutions really are. That is the topic of the next chapter.