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China has a vast written history that records the countless ways people have observed, transformed, and preserved their environments over the centuries. This sourcebook, the first ever to document China’s environmental history, presents translations of hundreds of texts spanning more than three thousand years, displaying the diversity of how humans have related to the world around them.
China’s Environmental History features texts translated from Chinese and eight other languages—most for the first time—in a wide variety of genres, including poetry, philosophy, official documents, religious tracts, travelogues, and oral histories. It has ninety-two short chapters, each containing primary source texts along with brief introductions and suggestions for further reading. Taken together, the chapters allow readers to study the many dimensions of environmental history in China, from the connections between resource exploitation and state power to the various forms of conservation and animal protection. Ideal for classroom use, this book shows how asking questions about the environment leads to new insights about the past and reveals the many threads of evidence waiting to be explored.
— Joseph Dennis, author of Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700
Brian Lander is associate professor of history and environment and society at Brown University. He is the author of The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (2021) and other works.
Peter B. Lavelle is associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (2020) and other works.