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The commercialized economy of late imperial China depended on efficient transport, yet transport technologies, transport economics as well as its role in local societies and in interdependencies of environments and human activities are acutely under-researched. Nanny Kim analyses two transports systems into the Southwest of Qing China through the long eighteenth century and up to the mid-nineteenth century civil wars. The case studies explore shipping on the Upper Changjiang in Sichuan and through the Three Gorges into Hubei, and road transport out of the Sichuan Basin across northeastern Yunnan and northwestern Guizhou into central Yunnan. Specific and concrete investigations of a river that presented extreme dangers to navigation and carriage across the crunch zone of the Himalayan Plateau provides a basis for a systematic reconstruction of transport outside the lowland centres and their convenient networks of water transport.
Price: $215.00
Pages: 622
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600-1900
Publication Date:
19 December 2019
ISBN: 9789004415096
Format: Hardcover
"In this learned opus, Nanny Kim explains the evolution of the transport industry. The result is a sometimes-stunning peek into the technological, organizational, and social innovations that enabled the Southwest borderland’s integration into eastern China’s wider trade networks.(...) it is a pioneering foray into late imperial transport infrastructure and should be a foundational text for those working in this important field." - C. PATTERSON GIERSCH, Technology and Culture 63/1 (2022)
"Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads provides a coherent and fresh account of transportation across these three provinces. Kim integrates her source materials to provide detailed analysis of the evolution of technology, the roles of people, and their associated skills. Her account offers valuable insights into the role played by state and private sectors in the development of long-distance commodity markets at this critical point in China’s economic history. % is book provides a clear pathfor scholars of mobility and transport to understand the complex interaction of human practice, natural environments, and technology, in the movement of goods and people, at the height of the Qing empire." - WEIPIN TSAI, Transfers, 11/1 (2021)
"Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads provides a coherent and fresh account of transportation across these three provinces. Kim integrates her source materials to provide detailed analysis of the evolution of technology, the roles of people, and their associated skills. Her account offers valuable insights into the role played by state and private sectors in the development of long-distance commodity markets at this critical point in China’s economic history. % is book provides a clear pathfor scholars of mobility and transport to understand the complex interaction of human practice, natural environments, and technology, in the movement of goods and people, at the height of the Qing empire." - WEIPIN TSAI, Transfers, 11/1 (2021)
Nanny Kim, PhD (2000) is a research fellow at Heidelberg University. She employs historical and geographical approaches in researching transport systems, mobilities, mining and landscape transformations with a main focus on southwestern China before the industrial period.