FOREWORD

The Great Reforestation

PAUL S. SUTTER

As the field of environmental history has internationalized during the past two decades, few world areas have seen as rich a florescence of scholarship as has China. The attractions of China as a subject for environmental historians are obvious. One is an archival record stretching back for millennia, a record that, presuming one has the requisite language skills, can open up deep histories of human-environmental interaction that are difficult to recreate for most other parts of the world. Another, paradoxically, is a contemporary history of rapidly accelerating environmental change that has cemented China’s central place in an emerging Anthropocene narrative. As even a casual observer today quickly realizes—as I did when I first visited in the summer of 2019—China is at once a staggeringly old and a startlingly new place. Any satisfying history of China’s dramatic recent transformations, including its profound environmental transformations, must build upon an understanding of its deep history.

No historian has done more to establish a dominant environmental narrative for China’s deep history than Mark Elvin, whose magisterial The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (2004) used the decline of wild elephant populations as proxy evidence for what he saw as the defining trend in China’s environmental history: “long-term deforestation and the removal of original vegetation cover.” In 5000 BCE, Asian elephants inhabited almost all of forested China, but the disappearance of forest cover has forced their withdrawal to a few refugia in the southwest, hard against the borders with Burma and Laos, today. Elvin called this process “the Great Deforestation.” While he recognized that there were distinctive pulses of deforestation in Chinese history, including one during what he called the “medieval economic revolution” of a thousand years ago and another beginning in the seventeenth century that accelerated through the nineteenth century, he nonetheless assumed “the Great Deforestation” to have been relatively continuous across several millennia. And like the retreat of Asian elephants who relied on this forest cover for their survival, this “great deforestation” had a southerly direction.

Enter Ian M. Miller, who has produced a masterpiece of historical detective work that fundamentally transforms our understanding of China’s early modern environmental history. In Fir and Empire, Miller revises Elvin’s narrative of steady premodern deforestation in China by making innovative use of sources, many local and mundane, that provide him with indirect but nonetheless substantial access to the land use and land cover changes that marked South China’s forest history. In doing so, he shows that the dominant trend in the region between 1000 and 1600 CE—between the forest crisis of Elvin’s “medieval economic revolution” and the onset of profound changes beginning in the seventeenth century that led to another full-blown forest crisis in the nineteenth century—was, in fact, afforestation. Rather than Elvin’s “Great Deforestation,” Miller reveals, the period was marked by what we might call a “Great Reforestation.”

Before getting to the fascinating specifics that undergird this sweeping revision, it is important to make clear what Miller is not arguing. He does not dispute that a defining long-term trend in China’s environmental history has been the removal of what Elvin called “original vegetation cover,” a process that accompanied the spread of Han peoples. The retreat of China’s elephants was the result of real and transformative environmental changes that occurred across millennia, as China lost its wild forests and the creatures that called them home. Ecologically, the new anthropogenic forest biome produced by the great reforestation paled in comparison to what was lost. What Miller does want to disabuse us of, however, is the idea that these changes were synonymous with a vast loss of forest cover and, as importantly, that they somehow resulted from a centuries-long failure of environmental governance in China. Beyond his major point that the centuries between 1000 and 1600 CE saw South China reclad in plantation fir and other commercial species, Miller also argues that these centuries saw the emergence of a unique system of forest management that stands as an influential precursor to the modern forestry regimes that spread around the world in the centuries after his story ends. Fir and Empire not only upends our sense of Chinese history as a story of inexorable forest decline, then, but it also demonstrates that early modern China had a surprisingly innovative history of forest management.

For Miller, this story begins with a subtle but crucial change in tax policy at the beginning of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–79): the state, which to that point had only taxed agricultural land, began to tax forest lands (shan) as well. To do so, it surveyed and mapped these lands, and it required landowners to register their forest lands with the state. But it did not tax all of South China’s forested landscape. Instead, Miller argues, the Song only taxed those areas where landowners had planted trees. Indeed, these records serve as critical proxy data in Miller’s reconstruction of this new forested biome. To put it another way, this shift in taxation policy was not a process of the state coming into and regulating the forested commons. Rather, it was a story of the state recognizing that large areas planted in trees were effectively in a new kind of agricultural land use and should be taxed accordingly. Moreover, Miller suggests, for those who were working to regenerate South China’s forests, a modest tax was a small price to pay for the state’s legitimation of planted forests as a form of private property. The result of this shift was the development of a privatized and market-based forestry regime—an empire of forestry without foresters or a centralized forestry bureau—that produced a “silvicultural revolution” which quickly spread across South China. This revolution created not only a novel forest biome but also a distinctive zone of enclosure and environmental administration that sat between the agricultural lowlands and the still-unregulated highlands. So began the great reforestation.

Miller finds persistent evidence of this revolution in all sorts of other quotidian sources as well. He notes a shift during this period from the state’s use of corvée labor to gather products from commons forests to its imposition of silver taxes on workers, who then had to earn wages in the private timber market to pay their taxes. This, he suggests, was clear evidence of a transition from wild forests to planted forests, a change that meant far less commons forest was open to timber and other resource gathering. He uses forest deeds and tenancy contracts in Huizhou, the epicenter of this revolution, to show how private property holdings in planted forest lands, with their long-maturing trees, evolved in complicated ways across these centuries. He demonstrates how the state managed planted forests indirectly by imposing tariffs that claimed a portion of the private timber supply coming to market as an alternative to state-led timbering operations. And he shows how the substantial demands for timber from several ambitious shipbuilding campaigns, culminating with the construction of Zheng He’s famous fleet that explored the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea in the early fifteenth century, were met by relying on the private market in plantation timber, and the custom revenues it produced, rather than on a centralized forestry administration. Remarkably, Miller finds that these shipbuilding efforts produced no evidence of substantial stress on South China’s timber supplies. The only construction effort that this new forested biome could not accommodate was the Ming-era building of Beijing into an imperial capital, an effort that required large old-growth timber that could only be found in the recesses of the Yangzi River gorges.

By examining these various tax, deed, and timber market records, Miller is able to skillfully render a remarkable composite sketch of a forestry regime that was at once highly productive and relatively stable across centuries, a regime that a series of Chinese empires managed remotely and largely through the mechanisms of tax policy, property law, and market regulation. Precisely because there was no centralized forestry bureau, and the sorts of archival records such bureaus tend to produce, this silvicultural revolution had remained hidden from view. Miller’s signal achievement is its rediscovery.

This regime, and the estimated twenty million acres of planted forest land that it produced, came unraveled in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, just as various European nations, Japan, and the United States were developing modern, statist forestry bureaucracies. China’s nineteenth-century forest crisis was dire, and the absence of a forestry bureau to manage the problem seemed a conservation failure. Given that reality, it has been easy to assume that deforestation and weak forest regulation were timeless features of Chinese life. But it was not a crisis that had been building across a millennium in the absence of any effective state intervention. Rather, as Miller so persuasively shows, it was a recent failure of an innovative silvicultural system, indirect and market-driven, that environmental historians of China have largely missed. That system certainly had its social and ecological costs; as planted forests climbed the hills in South China after 1100 CE, they replaced natural forests and displaced native peoples who had relied on their commons resources. But those planted forests, which sprang from the tax reforms produced by the “Song wood crisis,” successfully supplied the considerable timber demands of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties. That was a major achievement. More than that, though, Miller helps us to see that this anthropogenic forested biome, planted and maintained by local landowners and their workers, was an unprecedented landscape transformation for a preindustrial state. By rediscovering the great reforestation of South China, and the administrative policies and practices that enabled it, Ian M. Miller has similarly transformed how we understand China’s early modern environmental history.