Abstract
Guizhou’s Yuqing county “lies in flat and harmonious mountains. There are no miasmas.” An unnamed 18th-century writer, probably a student, wrote this in his local gazetteer. His following description of the local climate conditions is filled with contradictions. The land is “poor and miasmic” but has “plenty of fruit.” The weather was suddenly scorching hot, then just as suddenly fiercely cold.
This seminar will untangle these puzzles to say something about how Yuqing’s local people approached the climate. Found far inland amid forests and hills and populated by non-Chinese peoples, this area belonged to China’s internal frontier. It had been organised as a Chinese county just a century before following a major rebellion. The local elites were protective of their place within the Chinese sphere. Using strategies broadly similar to their compatriots in other borderlands, they laboured to claim ownership over local spaces, rites, peoples, languages, riches – and the climate.
We will examine which role climate descriptions and weather prognostication practices played in informing local identity through a reading of the 1716 Gazetteer of Yuqing County in the context of relevant texts. This approach enables us to address questions like: what did the climate mean for communities across Late Imperial China? How did they describe and explain it? How did frontiers relate to the state and its culture? And what was life in Late Imperial China’s places where “the qi was different”?
About the speaker
Erling Agøy is an environmental historian of China. He holds a Ph.D. from the former Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo and has done postdoctoral research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Needham Research Institute as well as worked as a senior lecturer at UiO. His work was initially based broadly on the human side of climate change in 17th-century Jiangnan, East China.
Working comprehensively with large amounts of primary source material from across China, his research engages with a broad range of topics related to the intellectual history of how the early modern Chinese thought about their weather and climate. His current projects involve local climate descriptions, weather prognostications, war omens, concepts of local languages, and more.