INTRODUCTION
In 1793, returning from Great Britain’s first diplomatic mission to China, the envoy George Macartney traveled through South China. In his diary, Macartney noted his impression of the industrious agriculture of the region. Near the border between Zhejiang and Jiangxi, the Irish earl wrote that he “did not see a spot in the whole way that was not cultivated with infinite industry,” noting that “wherever the sides of hills admit of it, they are wrought into terraces, graduated with different crops” and that “the ponds and reservoirs are a public concern.” Finally, Macartney observed that “the mountains are all newly planted with trees, chiefly firs, a great many thousands of acres. This is the case almost the whole way from hence to Canton.”1 Twenty-five years later, the botanist Clarke Abel accompanied another British mission to China and left even more extensive writings on its forests. He, too, noted that the hills along the Yangzi River were covered in “plantations of oaks and firs.”2 In the accounts of these two travelers, South China was dense with trees, and specifically with plantations of young firs.
Two hundred years ago, these British observers saw something that modern scholars have often overlooked: mountains full of conifers planted by human hands. No less than the ponds and farms on the lower slopes, Abel and Macartney recognized these forests as products of human cultivation. The mountains were covered with trees, not through an absence of human action, but because people had put them there, blanketing the upland landscape from Hangzhou to Canton. In Europe, foresters began promoting this type of conifer plantation right around the time of their travels, but in South China, forests “newly planted with trees” were not a new phenomenon. The firs that Abel and Macartney saw were the clones and offspring of trees first planted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These were not just anthropogenic forests; they were forests that had been made and remade by human hands, repeatedly, for centuries.
Like any good story, the history of these fir plantations begins with a crisis. For hundreds of years, people had used and modified China’s forests without calamity, encouraging the growth of useful trees through controlled burning, selective cutting, and small-scale planting. But in the eleventh century, the customary measures governing these behaviors began to fail. Wood-hungry people stripped the most densely settled regions of useful trees, and even the heavily wooded borderlands reported excessive logging. As overharvesting threatened the stability of wood supplies, government administrators also faced escalating pressures to obtain even more timber for forts, cities, dikes, and ships. In response to this climax of demands, officials and subjects alike looked for new sources of timber and new ways to conserve. They tightened regulations on community woodlots, sought out new logging frontiers, and extended the purview of state and private silviculture. Given time, any combination of these strategies might have resolved the wood crisis. But they were not given time to mature. In the late 1120s, warfare and flooding brought chaos to central China. When the dust settled, private silviculture and commerce survived, but the nascent state forestry system was gone.
Over the next five centuries Chinese landowners elaborated and spread the forms of forest management first innovated in response to the wood crisis. Planting the fast-growing China fir (shan/sha 杉) noted by Abel and Macartney, they supplied wood-hungry markets with a reliable stream of timber rafts. But commercial fir planting did more than solve the immediate supply crisis; it also proved astonishingly responsive to changing needs. As demand grew and prices rose, more people planted more trees, and fir plantations spread from a handful of prefectures to cover much of the upland south. In addition to fir, forest owners grew a range of other commercially valuable woody plants, including pine and camphor for timber; bamboo for poles and paper; palm for thatch and fiber; tung, lacquer, tallow tree, and camellia for oils and resins; mulberry to feed silkworms; tea to drink; and a wide variety of species for fuel, fruits, and nuts. Starting in a handful of prefectures below the Yangzi River’s final southward bend, landowners replaced self-seeding woodlands with hand-planted tree farms, extending the intensive agriculture of the river valleys into an intensive silviculture in the hills. Over the following centuries, tendrils of tree plantations gradually extended as far south as Canton and as far west as the Yangzi River gorges.
Environment and institutions constrained the making of these forests across several different scales. At each level of analysis, ecology was a key piece of the puzzle: vegetative processes guided tree-growth patterns, species interactions affected community composition, and climatic conditions limited the extent of the forest biome.3 Human actions also provided important building blocks at each of these scales: planters guided tree growth from seed to sapling to stump; they selected what trees to grow together and how to harvest them, affecting the age and species composition of each stand. Communal norms and commercial demand also informed where and when people chose to plant what trees. But if we want to explain the emergence of the regional forest biome, we must examine the keystones that held the forest assemblage together: the large-scale institutions that emerged to govern, document, and profit from commercial forests. In other words, we cannot understand China’s forests without exploring the dynamics of Chinese markets and Chinese empire.4
FORESTS, BUREAUCRACY, AND ECONOMY
At the largest scales, silviculture was driven by the demands of states and markets and by the institutions they established to govern the wood supply. As scholars of political ecology have demonstrated, states build power over the environment by specifying what forms of knowledge matter. By surveying woodlands and counting trees, states produce information about the land in order to extract more products, making “forests” that fit their needs for timber and fuel, and ultimately their desire for control.5 Commercial markets also transform the nature of woodlands, by turning the fruits of nature into discrete, fungible commodities. By cutting trees from their biotic communities, merchants and market regulators turn individual plants into interchangeable “timber.”6 By standardizing concepts and measurements, bureaucrats render woodlands and their products “legible” at ever-higher levels of abstraction, enabling centralized control and specialized expertise. By abstracting trees and timber from their social-ecological dependencies, these abstractions also do violence to the interlinked communities—human and floral—from which the wood emerges.7
But the processes that turn wood and woodlands into abstract objects are not historically constant. Administrative forests and commodity timber did not leap, fully formed, from the minds of Kafkaesque bureaucrats. Instead, the flattened representations of woody growth on paper ledgers developed only through erratic attempts to resolve new pressures, especially growing competition for fuel and building materials. In some conceptions, these processes were specific to the early modern period, an era that German sociologist Werner Sombart called a “wooden age.”8 And China was far from the only early modern empire to face a climax of wood demand—or to undergo a revolution in forest governance—in the middle centuries of the past millennium. The conditions during China’s eleventh-century wood crisis, including urbanization, military competition, and overseas expansion, were strikingly similar to those in Europe starting around 1500. In response to wood shortages, real or perceived, many European states also expanded their forest oversight, creating new forms of environmental governance and expertise in the process.9 The European experience is, in turn, central to our modern understanding of the relationships between forestry, bureaucracy, and economy.
Because the European experience is ancestral to our contemporary understandings of forest, it is worth examining a brief history of the development of European forestry. Domestically, forest surveys were a key tool that European rulers used to transform their medieval courts into early modern states. The word forest, and its cousins forst, forêt, and foresta, originated as administrative terms for sylvan jurisdictions controlled by noble or urban estates, some of which were not even particularly wooded.10 States expanded the purview of these forest jurisdictions, but only gradually. Venice was a key innovator in surveying its terra firma forests starting in the sixteenth century.11 In most of northern and western Europe, courts only surveyed forests beyond their royal estates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 It was this expansion of oversight, and of forest survey in particular, that transformed the administrative term forest into a near synonym for the descriptive term woodland. Forest, in turn, acquired its modern ecological implications only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as foresters used their newly founded professional journals and academies to develop ideas about climates, soils, and sustainability.13 In other words, the expansive meaning of the term forest tracks the growing ambition of European states to control natural resources, and ultimately to measure and manage woodland ecology. But forestry did not emerge as a purely domestic affair.
As Europe’s early modern forestry offices changed the administration of forests at home, their courts also sent surveyors, merchants, and botanists to traverse entire continents in search of even more materials. As they traveled, these agents sent home reports of new forests and new species in service of science, empire, and profit. Starting from the Rhine, the timber frontier moved north and east along the Baltic, then west to the Americas, and eventually south to Africa and Asia.14 But whether they represented scientific societies, official monopolies, or private interests, European surveyors were all looking for the same thing—timber that they could substitute for more familiar domestic supplies. In the process, they classified and commodified a cascade of tree species, from Norway spruce, to Riga fir, American white pine, and Indian teak.15 Europeans, most notably German- and French-trained foresters and Scottish surgeons and naturalists, left an indelible mark on forestry, botany, and environmental science.16 British botanists even named South China’s leading timber tree for one of their own, Scottish surgeon James Cunningham, who sent the first specimens back from Zhejiang in 1702.17 Their terms, concepts, and principles still inform the way we understand the natural world. Yet if we strip away the past two hundred years of development, and return to Europe’s forest oversight prior to 1800, China’s experience looks substantially less foreign.
In China, it was a different interpenetration of bureaucracy and commerce that led to the transformation of the wooded landscape. While European states expanded their bureaucracies to oversee domestic forests and colonized abroad to expand their timber supplies, Chinese states largely did not. But the absence of bureaucratic forestry did not mean that Chinese states abandoned forest oversight entirely. Instead, administrators oversaw forests under their general-purpose supervision of taxable land, labor, and commerce. They surveyed forests in the twelfth century, five hundred years before similar surveys in Europe. They levied peasants to cut wood and ship lumber. They taxed and regulated timber shipments at the market. In the fourteenth century, they standardized shan 山 (literally “mountain”) as the single official term for taxable forests. But instead of developing an increasingly centralized, professionalized forestry service, Chinese states minimized direct forest oversight and focused on taxing and regulating private commerce in timber. Without the development of a forestry profession, “forest” (shan) remained an administrative category, specifying tax rates, but carrying limited implications for land cover, let alone ecology.
China’s limited, largely market-based oversight was nonetheless enough to provoke a silvicultural revolution. Despite the near-total absence of bureaucratic forest management, China’s general-purpose fiscal policies enabled an astonishingly productive commerce in timber and other forest products. Through experiment and accident, administrative reforms promoted exclusive land title, standardized timber grades and prices, and eliminated menial woodcutting corvée, freeing peasants to work in the commercial labor markets. While built on very different principles and institutions, they established what European thinkers might have called a “free market”—an arena of independent timber producers competing to meet wide-ranging demand. Officials intervened in this market to fill their own needs, and occasionally perverted it with harsh rules and excessive extractions, but for the most part they kept regulation to a minimum, and gradually reduced tax rates to nominal levels. Under these conditions, timber production boomed. Between 1200 and 1600, the acreage of fir plantations and the volume of the Yangzi River timber trade increased many times over, almost entirely due to the initiative of private loggers, tree farmers, and timber merchants.
In some ways, the timber markets that emerged under this benign neglect look astonishingly modern. As Joseph McDermott has shown, forest owners developed sophisticated mechanisms for dividing risk and return, effectively a futures market in timber.18 Officials supplied their construction projects through a fractional tariff on merchant timber and by purchasing supplies from the swelling trade in low-cost wood products. By the end of the sixteenth century, salaried workers, not corvée laborers, cut government fuel and built government ships and buildings.
Commercialization brought negative consequences as well, many of them familiar to the modern world. By maximizing the production of quantifiable commodities like timber, tree farmers caused a clear decline in unquantified ecological goods. They destroyed or degraded habitats for commercially marginal flora and fauna, especially large mammals like tigers and elephants.19 They also reduced land cover, leading to erosion of slopes and sedimentation of rivers and wetlands.20 By demanding exclusive ownership of forests, tree planters also dispossessed community members of their traditional claims to fuel, forage, and wild foods.21 They displaced upland, non-Han peoples from their lands and from their long-standing roles producing forest products to trade in the lowlands.22 All of these trends—good and ill—would emerge later in European states and their colonies.
The flip side of China’s precocious commercialization was that developments in state forestry were stunted. As detailed below, there were at least three intervals when Chinese states created or expanded their forest administrations, the first in response to the eleventh-century wood crisis, the second during the imperial buildup of the early fifteenth century, and the third during the bureaucratic revival of the sixteenth century. Yet choice and happenstance repeatedly shifted policy away from centralized oversight and toward indirect, largely market-based regulation. In Europe, civil servants trained as specialized foresters and botanists to staff government bureaus and conduct colonial surveys.23 These professions, in turn, were key to the development of forestry, biology, and environmental science.24 By contrast, the lack of a state forest service in China meant that silviculture was largely shunned by the educated elite, who treated it as a minor branch of agriculture and confined botany to tangential aspects of medical herbology and local geography. This is why the principal timber tree of South China was named by (and for) British botanists, not Chinese ones. The productivity of China’s private timber growers allowed the state to develop a very efficient, laissez-faire natural resource administration, but it also short-circuited the development of more specialized environmental expertise.
Whatever its eventual shortcomings, China’s forest system was innovative enough that it was also influential abroad, most notably in Korea and Japan. In Korea, the court specifically cited Chinese precedent when it developed oversight of timber forests in the fifteenth century—also quite precocious by world standards. Korean forestry subsequently diverged substantially from the Chinese model, but it continued to reference Chinese institutions and terminology.25 In parts of Japan, the forms of forest oversight that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also look astonishingly like Chinese silviculture.26 While there is not yet specific evidence of Chinese influence on Japanese tree planting, Japan adapted Chinese models for many other institutions and may have done so for forestry as well. Both Korea and Japan used the Chinese term shan 山 (Korean: san, Japanese: san/sen/yama) to designate their administrative forests.
Paradoxically, despite their related trajectories, Japan has often been upheld as an example of successful forest management, while China has been cited as an example of failed or absent oversight.27 The reasons for this discrepancy probably have more to do with their histories after 1800 than their achievements to that point. When Japan modernized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it integrated native forms of silviculture with German-derived scientific forestry, which it then exported to its colonies in Korea and Taiwan, as well as to mainland China.28 In the same interval, China experienced decades of warfare, rebellion, and revolution that undercut most attempts to modernize and badly degraded its woodlands. As a result, Japan’s modern forest transition was well ordered and well documented, while China’s was disjointed and poorly understood.
Without a clear chain of documentation, the first environmental histories of China largely assumed that it did not have an effective forest system and turned to other forms of evidence to explore ecological change. Mark Elvin, in his highly influential book The Retreat of the Elephants, uses elephants as a proxy for the woodlands they inhabited. Extrapolating from the “retreat of the elephants,” and a range of anecdotal evidence, he asserts that China’s forest canopy declined in the face of Chinese expansion toward the south and west.29 Other works, most notably Robert B. Marks’s Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, also rely on a combination of descriptive evidence and proxy data to make the case that uncontrolled growth led to catastrophic degradation, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.30 But is China’s catastrophic nineteenth century evidence of long-term environmental dysfunction or of a functioning forest system that collapsed under novel pressures? Without an alternative framework, and despite a lack of clear evidence of degradation prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Elvin’s long-term narrative has been accepted as evidence of a millennia-long tide of deforestation.
In this study, I revise this straightforward narrative of deforestation to tell the history of China’s distinct form of forest oversight. While China did not produce European-style forestry bureaus—at least not until the twentieth century—it did develop other institutions with jurisdiction over wood and woodlands. These institutions provide ample sources of evidence on social and environmental change. Government land surveys give a relatively broad view of China’s forest acreage, at least of those forests registered with the state for tax payment. Forest deeds, timber tariffs, and shipyard purchases can be used to estimate the size and growth of wood markets. There are also ample records of official corvée, including the local woodcutters levied to provide fuel to government offices and the massive expeditions that logged palace-building timber in the far southwest. While imperfect, these documents allow us to replace anecdotal narratives and indirect proxies with a more synoptic view of the forests.
Instead of deforestation, these documents give evidence of a massive transformation of China’s forests. Loggers did remove large swaths of the woodland canopy between 1000 and 1600, and even more thereafter. But the cutting of China’s old-growth woodlands did not entail a total loss of tree cover. Instead, strong demand for timber led planters to cultivate new trees to replace those they removed, rather than leaving clearances to waste or converting them to farmland. This entailed a reduction of ecological diversity and complexity, but it was a far cry from total deforestation. It was only in the nineteenth century that China’s forests began to face catastrophe, brought on by novel pressures that destabilized a formerly functional system. Despite major differences from the better-known European experience, and even the Japanese tradition, China had an effective system of forest oversight that supplied large quantities of commercial wood products and prevented catastrophic degradation, a system that provides ample evidence of institutional and environmental change across more than six centuries.
LANDS OF CAMPHOR AND FIR
The history of Chinese forest oversight is largely a regional one, a product of the South Chinese environment that transformed the nature and culture of the region itself. To understand the changes wrought by commercial silviculture, we must therefore consider its ecological and cultural precedents in the region. South China is largely defined by its northern border at the Yangzi River. North of the river is a vast sedimentary plain that was China’s historical heartland. South of the river—“Jiangnan” in Chinese—is a far more variegated landscape of coastal wetlands and rice-growing plains divided by mountains above five hundred meters and peaks above one thousand. Jiangnan had a long history as a salient of Han culture, home to refugees from North China who formed cultural hybrids as they mixed with the natives of the riverine south. Further south are steep river valleys descending to the southeast coast in Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong. Further west are the major rivers and seasonal lakes that feed the Yangzi River: the Gan River and Poyang Lake in Jiangxi and the Xiang River and Dongting Lake in Hunan. In these river valleys, creoles of Han culture had developed for hundreds of years, even as the highlands remained home to distinct, non-Han groups of hunters and shifting cultivators.31 Thus, while Jiangnan’s northern boundary was stable at the Yangzi River, its southern and western boundaries were unstable and fractal, with local and regional societies interpenetrating and mixing according to climate, topography, and changing institutions.
In addition to incorporating Han migrants and culture, South China had a long and distinctive political-ecological relationship with the north. North China, and especially its great plain, had been wood-poor since early history; by contrast, the south was often noted for its wealth of sylvan resources.32 So great was this association that for centuries the principal jurisdiction on Poyang Lake was named “camphor prefecture” (yuzhang jun).33 Even when different states controlled the regions north and south of the Yangzi, they were linked by trade in timber. This exchange was only strengthened when great empires unified North and South China.34 But the south was not evenly wooded, even in early historical time. Pollen evidence suggests that large parts of Jiangnan were cleared for agriculture by the third or fourth millennium BCE.35 The articulation of mountains throughout the region meant the south was riven with the borderlands, where highlanders traded forest products for the agricultural goods of lowland farmers. The effective boundaries of rule formed along topographical lines: while the lowlands were settled by sedentary farmers in Chinese-style states, the uplands long remained the territory of non-Sinitic peoples. In other words, the south’s famous sylvan wealth was the wealth of the upland south.
From its first appearance in a small corner of this diverse region, silviculture transformed the landscape of South China and further warped the complex gradients between regional cultures, highlands and lowlands. The principal species of commercial timber tree, China fir (shan/sha 杉, Cunninghamia lanceolata) is too widespread in cultivation to determine its natal habitat, but it is certainly native to South China, and probably to Huizhou, western Zhejiang, and Jiangxi, the same region that first attested to commercial timber plantations around 1100. Institutional developments only reinforced this early advantage. The first forest surveys, first licenses for timber merchants, and first reforms to end woodcutting corvée were all products of this general region, further reinforcing the reliability, legibility, and efficiency of its timber markets.
As the commerce in timber grew, each of Jiangnan’s major constituencies was involved in spreading silviculture into neighboring parts of the south. State surveyors gradually registered forests in Jiangxi and Fujian, and later in parts of Guangdong and Guangxi. Customs officials standardized timber grades and lowered tariffs throughout the extended Yangzi River market. Huizhou merchants promoted timber planting along the Yangzi River and the southeast coast. Porters from Jiangxi carried seedlings over the mountains to the far south and southwest. They collectively spread land title, commercial regulation, and silvicultural expertise together with the fir trees themselves, transforming diverse, distinctive, open-access woodlands into a blanket of privately owned timber trees. While important local and regional distinctions remained, these interconnected forest constituencies made the ecological and institutional landscapes of the south look increasingly uniform.
By extending the cultivated landscape from the river valley into the mountains, timber planters gradually shifted the boundaries between state and non-state space, and between Han and non-Han peoples. James C. Scott shows in his history of upland Southeast Asia that state actions like taxation and forced labor tend to partition the landscape between dominant ethnic groups occupying “state space” in the lowlands and other groups practicing the “art of not being governed” in the highlands.36 In keeping with this observation, the principal name that Chinese people used for themselves until the late nineteenth century was the administrative classifier “subject” (min), not the ethnic classifier “Han.”37 From the state’s perspective the difference between lowland “subjects” (min) and upland “barbarians” (man) was that subjects were sedentary and paid taxes through their individual households, while barbarians moved around and paid “tribute” (gong) through their tribal leaders. As David A. Bello demonstrates, this meant that the boundaries dividing “Hanspace” from other zones ran through ecotones, the borderlands where fixed-field agriculture gradually became too marginal to support.38 For centuries, these lines separated taxpaying rice farmers in the lowlands from non-taxpaying swidden cultivators in the uplands. Yet even within formal compliance to the state, there was substantial room for negotiation and resistance. As Michael Szonyi demonstrates in his study of Ming military households, subjects could choose when and how to submit to the demands of the state.39
South China highlanders long played an outsize role in southern timber production, logging large trees that they sold into the lowland economy. Until the advent of commercial silviculture, their activities belonged to the tributary economy, not the tax economy, and they were classified as tribal peoples, not as subjects. By allowing the farm-like cultivation of the uplands, tree plantations fundamentally transformed this equation. While distinct from grain-based agriculture, silviculture was nonetheless fixed in place and productive enough to tax, allowing “state space” (or “Hanspace”) to extend into the highlands. At the fractal borders between the Han lowlands and the non-Han uplands, a new region emerged, with its own distinct biome and institutions. In this Upland Jiangnan, centered on Huizhou, a new class of subjects planted trees like field crops, registered their forests to pay taxes to the state, and produced timber as a market commodity. Later, other groups of subjects emerged, most notably the Hakka (kejia, or “sojourner families”), who traveled out of the mountainous borderlands of Fujian, Jiangxi, and Guangdong to plant trees, tea, and other upland crops across South China.40 These former swidden cultivators made an uneasy place for themselves on the margins, considered less barbaric than the acephalous peoples who retreated further into the mountains, but too peripatetic and culturally foreign to be fully accepted into lowland society.
In effect, the extension of human control to earlier stages of tree growth transferred the forest trades from the upland complex of logging and shifting cultivation to the lowland complex of sedentary agriculture. The newfound conformity of silviculture to the norms of taxation and property law allowed the extension of state surveillance into the uplands of South China. But forest peoples negotiated their own terms in the new administrative bargain. Some, like Huizhou merchants and landowners, became state subjects par excellence, keeping the best records in China, submitting to regular taxation, and mediating many of the state’s interactions with the forest economy.41 Some, like Hakka tree planters, accepted only provisional forms of state sovereignty. Even as they registered their households and submitted taxes, their mobility and distinctive practices enabled greater avoidance of official oversight and left them open to suspicions of heterodoxy.42 Most of the upland south lay between Huizhou and the Hakka heartland and fell somewhere along the continuum between these two political strategies. This region represented a novel biome where human behavior toward woody plants was the primary factor promoting the growth of fir and other commercially valuable species. It also represented a novel administrative zone, a part of the empire where forests were integrated into official land oversight, and where forest peoples negotiated new terms of administrative subjecthood.
THE WOOD AGE IN CHINA
I end this introduction by suggesting that the spread of silviculture across South China forces a reconsideration not only of South China’s ecology and society but also of the periodization of Chinese history itself. Traditionally, historians of China have divided the period between 1000 and 1600 according to the three major dynasties that ruled. The Song dynasty controlled most of China between 960 and 1127—a period known as the “Northern Song”—and continued to rule the south until 1279—the “Southern Song.” It is known for particular achievements in trade, education, government finance, and technology. This was when printing became widespread, when the government was first staffed by examination, when China produced the world’s first paper currency, and when it innovated gunpowder weapons and the mariners compass. But the Song is often considered a weak empire, constantly beset by stronger, non-Han rivals, including the Khitan-ruled Liao; the Tangut-ruled Xi Xia; the Jurchen Jin, who took North China from the Song in 1127; and the Mongols, who conquered the rest of Song territory by 1279.
The Mongol’s East Asian empire, known after 1271 as the Yuan dynasty, is traditionally considered a period of harsh, foreign misrule, but also of dynamic exchange between China and other regions. Initially, the Yuan was quite powerful, defeating rival Mongol claimants, sending fleets to Japan, Vietnam, and Java, and incorporating large portions of inland Southeast Asia under its suzerainty. But it declined rapidly in the mid-1300s under a succession of weak rulers and a climax of natural disasters and unrest, culminating in the millenarian Red Turban Rebellion. In 1368, the armies of the Ming dynasty, an offshoot of the Red Turbans, forced the Mongols to retreat onto the steppe.
The Ming dynasty ruled a large empire for a long time, from 1368 until 1644, yet is often considered a weak state, especially by comparison to its successor, the Manchu-ruled Qing (1644–1911). Under its first and third emperors, the Ming had major achievements at home and abroad, creating a new tax system and law code, restoring the Grand Canal, building Beijing, and sending the famous Zheng He fleets to the Indian Ocean. But after the death of the third emperor in 1424, the court was ruled by a succession of incompetent emperors and eunuch dictators and largely retreated from engagements with the outside world. Starting in the late fifteenth century, a massive influx of silver buoyed markets, but also destabilized fiscal administration and eventually led to social unrest. In 1644, with Beijing occupied by peasant rebels, a border general opened the gates to the Manchus, who would go on to build their own dynasty that ruled an even larger empire for two and a half centuries.
This dynastic periodization, with its focus on emperors and high officials, misses great continuities in local administration of forests. There were periods when the court itself was concerned with forest administration. Between 1102 and 1120, grand councillor Cai Jing established state forest oversight in counties throughout the Song empire. In 1391, the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, ordered thousands of trees planted near Nanjing to provide naval stores. Between 1405 and 1424, the Yongle emperor sent enormous detachments of loggers to the west to cut timber for the Ming palaces. But these instances of direct court intervention were largely exceptional. Indeed, the two intervals when high politics had the greatest impact on the forest economy both involved the end of official oversight. The first was 1127, when the retreat of the Song court from North China left its nascent forestry system in disarray and cleared the board for the rise of private silviculture. The second was in 1425, when the Ming state shuttered dozens of bureaus with natural resource oversight following the death of the Yongle emperor. For the most part, it was low- and mid-level officials, not emperors and high councillors, who created the policies that most affected forest administration, and these policies largely persisted across dynastic transitions.
In addition to overlooking the persistence of local norms, the dynastic periodization misses major continuities in South China’s commercial networks spanning the mid-twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. As silviculture developed, merchants and landowners built connections across the different stages of timber production, from tree planting to logging, rafting, and wholesale markets. Changes in dynasty could affect these commercial webs in various ways. When the Southern Song capital at Hangzhou fell, Huizhou merchants redirected timber from the Hangzhou market to Poyang Lake. When Zhu Yuanzhang cracked down on commerce in the 1380s and 1390s, timber markets declined.43 But in an industry where tree-planting investments took decades to mature, stakeholders were not ready to abandon their connections overnight. Instead, commercial networks gradually expanded over time, encompassing greater territories and more tree farms. Richard von Glahn, in his recent survey of China’s economic history, calls the period from 1127 to 1550 “the heyday of the Jiangnan economy.”44 More broadly, von Glahn and Paul Jakov Smith argue that the greater “Song-Yuan-Ming transition” should be treated as a unified historical interval, not a period of disruption.45 This is certainly true when we discuss the forest economy.
Finally, due to the extended lifetimes of woody plants, there was great continuity in the landscape itself. Newly planted fir trees took at least three decades to reach commercially viable dimensions; left unmolested, they would keep growing for a century or more. Unlike an abandoned grain field, which would quickly revert to grassy waste (huang), an abandoned forest remained a forest. Conversely, owners generally replanted their forests after logging. Timber prices were consistently high enough that tree planting remained a worthwhile investment, especially on mountainous land where there were few viable alternatives. In the mountains of Jiangnan, generations of forest owners replanted the same plots for hundreds of years. It was only at the margins—where natural growth was plentiful or land title was insecure—that forests were logged and not replanted. Even here, norms generally shifted within one or two generations, as locals moved from permitting open access to natural woodlands to jealously guarding exclusive access to the trees they planted.
Just as Jiangnan’s forest plantations emerged by replacing other forms of upland cultivation, their sustainability was eventually challenged by the arrival of a new suite of mountain crops. American sweet potatoes and maize allowed upland cultivators to vastly increase their per-acre food production.46 Tobacco also competed with timber for slopeland plots, as did commercial crops like indigo and tea, all of which saw booming demand.47 The descendants of the same Hakka migrants who had spread fir planting in the sixteenth century spread New World staples and commercial crops throughout the upland south in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The increased productivity of mountain lands, in both calories and cash, enabled a massive population increase. Because these were annual crops, they also deprived sensitive mountain soils of cover for much of the year, leading to increased runoff that depleted the upper slopes and clogged the streams below. The nexus of land scarcity, population pressure, and ecological degradation fed a spate of conflicts between upland cultivators and their lowland neighbors.48 These conflicts were key contributors to China’s extended crisis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Taiping Rebellion and the Communist Revolution both emerged from the upland south and featured a disproportionate number of Hakka leaders.49 In other words, we should interpret China’s nineteenth-century crisis alongside its eleventh-century crisis, as bookends to a period of remarkably consistent forest oversight and comparatively stable ecology.
This book tells the story of silviculture across multiple institutions of government and economy. Chapter 1 begins with the story of the opening crisis and is called “The End of Abundance.” From antiquity until at least the eighth century, I posit a period of regulated abundance, when simple customary regulations were generally enough to prevent people from overharvesting the “bounties of the wilds” (shanze zhi li). Around 750, a slate of new pressures began to emerge, peaking during the Northern Song (960–1127). In response, I argue that government and populace innovated new forms of oversight that profited from scarcity.
The rest of the book tells the story of the period that ensued, which can be roughly understood in two parts. First came a golden age of silviculture lasting from 1127 until 1425. Throughout this period, both state and market tapped the growing timber supply to build fleets to ply the South Seas, construct massive public works projects, and erect monumental architecture. Spanning the Southern Song, the Yuan, and the reigns of the first three Ming emperors, this was a time of both commercial and imperial growth, reinforced by an expansionary paper currency and the personalities of several powerful emperors and khans. Yet outsize ambitions ultimately destabilized this period of growth. The golden age ended with the death of the Yongle emperor, who had inflated the currency and depleted the labor supplies of his empire and caused a deep depression.
Following this expansionary period was a literal “silver age,” when the forest economy recovered, buoyed by an influx of silver specie. But while commerce expanded between 1425 and the early 1600s, the Ming state went into an extended period of retrenchment and reform, ending its expansionary ambitions and learning to live within its means. A reduced state presence—coupled with an expanding economy—inevitably meant that a growing share of commercial activity fell outside the auspices of official supervision. This was a period when private landowners and merchants developed oversight with far less state intervention. It ended around 1600 with the clearance of the last major old-growth woodlands in the Yangzi River watershed, leaving the diminishing Ming state almost entirely reliant on the commercial timber supply.
The six chapters covering this extended period are structured thematically around the institutions that allowed silviculture to flourish. Chapter 2, “Boundaries, Taxes, and Property Rights,” addresses how forests fit into the Chinese system of land oversight. It starts with the first surveys to record forests in government land registers in 1149, proceeds through the fourteenth-century accounting reforms that standardized shan as the term for taxable forests, and ends by using sixteenth-century land records to assess the spread of forest administration across South China.
Chapter 3, “Hunting Households and Sojourner Families,” details how Chinese states regulated forest labor like hunting and woodcutting. It follows a major expansion in the number and variety of households registered to specific forest trades in the Yuan and early Ming, before showing how 1425 marked a turning point in labor oversight. Thereafter, reforms to the corvée system gradually rendered most specialized forestry households obsolete, leading them to enter commercial labor markets.
Chapter 4, “Deeds, Shares, and Pettifoggers,” turns from the state to the commercial economy, looking at how landowners and laborers used contracts to divide the risks and rewards of timber planting. Using evidence from Huizhou, it shows how landowners modified forest deeds from simple evidence of ownership to encompass complex shareholding, and how they innovated other forms of contract to address problems specific to forest management. It then turns to private litigation manuals (songshu), which developed the types of specialized forest law that the dynastic codes overlooked.
The next two chapters tell the story of “Wood and Water”—the mutual reinforcement between wood markets and maritime activity. Chapter 5, “Tariff Timber,” shows how the state used a fractional levy on commercial shipments to obtain a persistent supply of timber. Chapter 6, “Naval Timber,” details how this timber was used to underwrite the cost of fleet construction. Both chapters show a major turning point between the proactive use of timber markets to provision expansionary states in the Southern Song, Yuan, and early Ming and the conservative focus on sustainability and cost cutting that dominated after 1425.
Chapter 7, “Beijing Palaces and the Ends of Empire,” provides both thematic and chronological closure to the book. It follows the expeditions that supplied palace building in Beijing by logging in the last old-growth forests in the Yangzi River watershed. Loggers felled hundreds of thousands of giant logs between 1405 and 1425, when the palaces were completed, and projects shuttered. But when emperors revived old-growth logging in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries, they increasingly failed to obtain meaningful yields, marking the effective closure of the Yangzi River timber frontier.
The failure of imperial logging did not end the expansion of timber markets, but it did signal another fundamental shift. From this point forward, merchants, planters, and officials took further steps to consolidate and expand the timber trade, but there were no more easy gains. The silver-buoyed markets of the eighteenth century were still enough to float thousands of timber rafts, and the wood trade continued to expand through the chaotic nineteenth century.50 But starting around 1800, just as Macartney and Abel traveled through China, the well-ordered forest system of the previous six centuries began to exhibit the first inklings of social-environmental crisis. By the 1850s, local disorders broke into a century of warfare and disaster, leaving a lasting impression of disorder and decline. But before this collapse, South China had an extended period of order, a period when fir silviculture dominated its forests, feeding the growth of markets and the expansion of empires.