Environments, people and mining in the Far Southwest of China since 1500: Cross-disciplinary explorations

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At their southeastern end, the Himalayas form a much folded mountain zone that separates China from Indochina, descending from the top of the world to tropical jungles. The Far Southwest of China is the highland part of this zone and roughly congruent with modern Yunnan province. The area, which is about the size of France, contains plateaus that have been centres of human cultures since prehistoric times and rugged hinterlands that into the twentieth century were little influenced by human activities. For its cultural richness as well as its biodiversity, the region is predestined for research on interactions of human societies with their environments. Factors creating different dynamics and transformations include natural and cultural barriers, a variety of land use systems, compartmentalized diversification, far-flung commercial networks, and migration and economic penetration that was often driven by the exploitation of mineral resources.The core of the proposed project is the analysis of the environmental history of three mining areas through the last five centuries. Contributions to research on the history of technology and the environment consist in advancing knowledge on an under-researched regional history that is of comparative interest as a non-European case of preindustrial mining on a large scale. A methodological contribution will be realized in the development of applied methods for researching environmental history under conditions of data scarcity that are expected to permit calibrated comparative analyses of developments in different periods and world regions.The project applies an inter-disciplinary approach that combines historical and geographic methods. The applicant has developed and tested the approach in collaborative projects with Hans-Joachim Rosner (geography, Tübingen University) and Yang Yuda (historical geography, Fudan University, Shanghai) during the DFG research group Monies, Markets and Finance in China and East Asia, which Hans Ulrich Vogel directed from 2005 to 2011. It overcomes limitations due to the scarcity and one-sidedness of predominantly Chinese materials and widens the basis of sources beyond traditional written sources to data from dendrochronology and stratigraphy, as well as from fieldwork and oral histories. By localizing data sets, it employs a new tool of data cross-checking, correcting, confirming and falsifying. In this process, specific questions can be addressed by targeted search for decisive evidence and interpretations tested in models of landscape change.The project aims at attaining specific and falsifiable results in environmental history and ultimately at identifying factors that tip the balance between sustainable, unsustainable yet relatively stable, and degrading systems. It thus expects to achieve a reassessment of cultural preferences, system trends and technological options historical environmental change and hopes to contribute to ongoing environmental issues.