A sketch of basic geography and history

Last time I talked about Anthropology and its origins, paradigms, foibles... and it occurs to me that it might be useful to put today's subject matter into similar context. I tried to characterize for myself what seems to be the basic pitch of the disciplines we'll touch on today:

Physical geography

So many things in human activities are constrained and channeled by topography and climate that it makes sense to start with this realm, deep in the sciences and scarcely amenable to hermeneutical exegesis.

The Earth spins on its axis, and it's tipped relative to the plane of the ecliptic, by 23.5 degrees (approximately). That's what "makes" seasonal variation. Water and rock heat up and cool down at different rates (water 'stores' heat more efficiently).

The Asian landmass HEATS UP during the northern hemisphere's summer, and warmed air rises; air is DRAWN IN toward the Asian landmass, bringing with it the moisture that accompanies air over oceans. In the winter, when the Sun's rays hit the northern hemisphere more obliquely, the landmass COOLS DOWN and the flow of air is reversed: cool dry air flows outward. Words that go along with this annual flux of climatic energy are monsoon and typhoon... and we can find maps of annual precipitation for East Asia, such as precipitation and wind direction loop and temperature loop ..and China's annual precipitation

One vignette to indicate why and how the above matters: consider loess in China:

map and two remote sensing images
google image search
SO: wind blows OUT of central Asia in the winter, across the Gobi Desert, and transports dust... this has been going on for thousands of years.

And the waters of the Huang River and its tributaries cut through the deposited soils, eroding them and carrying a huge load of sediment:

The alluvial plains are characterized by modern floodplains and terraces. Terraces are abandoned floodplains formed when rivers flowed at higher levels than at present. Changes in river position within the valley occur because of changes in the major controls on channel gradients and patterns. In the Loess Plateau, it is probable that past changes in discharge and sediment load were induced by major climatic changes during the Pleistocene. The rivers responded by cycles of aggradation and degradation that were superimposed on the long-term trend of valley incision. Terraces formed when floodplain levels were abandoned by subsequent river incision.

Traditional opinion inside China, going back to at least 32 B.C., has consistently held that the loess is primarily an eolian sediment derived from the deserts to the north and west. Recent work has confirmed this hypothesis, showing that loess accumulation followed the desiccation of the high central Asian plateaus in the early Pleistocene. A severe periglacial environment prevailed during glacial periods, associated with prevailing northwesterly winds. The dust blowing from the cold dry plateaus was trapped by the southeasterly climatic gradient toward humid subtropical monsoonal areas of China...

Loess is perhaps the most easily erodible material available to moving water. As a result, the sediment loads of the Huang He are greatly in excess of those for any other large river in the world. Where it leaves the loess plateau, the Huang He is estimated to transport between 1.5 and 1.9 billion metric tons of sediment per year. Much of that load is transported to the Yellow River delta and the Gulf of Bo Hai. The Yellow Sea, of which the gulf is the western arm, derives its name from the immense load of sediment that is delivered to it.

Interestingly, the river delivers its immense load with a relatively small water discharge: 49 km3/yr or an average of 1550 m3/s (Milliman and Meade, 1983). This contrasts with the nearby Yangtze River (Chang Jiang), which does not drain loess. The Yangtze delivers less than one-third the sediment, but its discharge is nearly 20 times as great. The unique qualities of the Huang He give it the highest sediment concentrations of any major river. Average yearly concentrations of sediment in Huang He water are as great as 48 g/liter and average monthly concentrations can exceed 70 g/liter.
(from a now-vanished NASA geomorphology page, via google's cached documents)

...erodible soils including the loess belt of northern China. The Huang He (Yellow) produces 1080 million tons of sediment annually; 480 for the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), 460 for the Ganges, and 710 for the Brahmaputra...
(from http://www.gemswater.org/atlas-gwq/solids-e.html)

graph of variation over 20 years in suspended solids loads

The Huang He (Yellow River) in Northern and Northeastern China is the country's second longest river, with a drainage area of about 750,000 square kilometers. Its average annual runoff (66 billion cubic meters) is a small fraction (less than 7%) of that of the Yangtze. As indicated by its name, the Yellow River carries huge amounts of sediments, originating from soil erosion in the Loess Plateau in its upper and middle reaches. With an estimated 1.6 billion tons, the Yellow River has the highest sediment transport in the world. Most of the silt load is deposited in the lower reaches (25%) and the estuary (50%); only about 25% of the sediment load is deposited in the sea. This sediment transport is the prime cause of the disastrous floods in Northern and Northeastern China. The river floor is rising continuously due to sediment deposits. The Chinese have tried for centuries to confine the river to its bed by continuously raising the dykes. The Yellow River's water level is now up to 10 meters above the surrounding land in many places. Devastating floods occur when high precipitation raises the water level, causing the dykes to break. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Yellow River has extreme seasonal fluctuations in water flow: it can be as high as 22,000 cubic meters per second or as low as 250 cubic meters per second. For the agricultural areas on the banks and floodplains along the Yellow River, the continuous expansion and maintenance of dykes is therefore essential.
(from http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/argu/trends/trend_60.htm)

Look at a map: China:rivers
...and here's a paper I found: The River Runs Dry: Examining Water Shortages in the Yellow River Basin Eric Zusman

Throughout Chinese history, there has been a struggle with the Huang River: 900,000 died in 1887 and again in 1938 in floods... and "In 1938, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the destruction of flood-control dikes on a section of the Yellow River in order to flood areas threatened by the Japanese army. The flood did destroy part of the invading army, but also between 10 000 and 1 million Chinese people..." (from http://www.wateryear2003.org/en/ev.php@URL_ID=4682&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html) .

Efforts to control the Huang go back very far into the mists of Chinese history. Take the example of a discussion between a ruler and a hydrological engineer from 2nd or 3rd century BC...

That's quite a digression... but underlines how the interlinkages often complicate any attempt to tell simple stories...

So what are the physical elements, the physiographic pieces? It's practical to think of East Asia --or anyplace else, I suppose-- as a set of cells, regions that can be characterized as different from adjacent regions. In China, the physical units defined by mountain ranges break the nation into pretty distinct parts (a "checkerboard of anticlinal mountains and synclinal plains"), each of which has its own general character and distinct history. Robert McColl's Understanding the Geographies of China does a pretty good job of identifying some candidates:

(Each has unique features, important historical events, different arrays of peoples)

We should be able to do the same kind of regional geography for Korea and Japan...

for Japan, take a look at the clickable map [via Wayback] , and a slightly different version from japan-guide.com, and Wikipedia helps too

Korea is a bit trickier, but business-in-korea.com is helpful... see also provinces of South Korea and provinces of North Korea, though these are political/administrative definitions and may not reflect topographical considerations...

(R:\eastasia\admindiv.mxd)

OK... so we have some basic physiographic units. We need some way(s) to organize the epic of what has happened in this geography in the last few thousand years. We know (thanks to archaeology) that humans have been extraordinarily active here for quite a long time.

Consider the handout "Brief summary of Chinese history", which could start us into all sorts of digressions... and also the map which decodes the names of provinces (using the now-obsolete Wade-Giles system of Romanization)

The conventional way to structure historical time in East Asia is to identify dynasties, which ruled or controlled more-or-less specific areas at more-or-less specific times. The flux of dynasties (driven by invasions, rebellions, consolidations, conquests...) is a good place to start.

A dynasty is a more or less coherent period of political control, with emperor succeeding emperor --or that's the conventional image. The OED says "A succession of rulers of the same line or family; a line of kings or princes." The names of the emperors mostly don't matter to us (they can be looked up), but the overall pattern of dynastic cycle does, simply because it's been repeated so many times in Chinese history.

We deal here with an Empire that waxed and waned, was invaded repeatedly, had a state apparatus (court, bureaucracy, examination system...), collected taxes, received tribute, managed public works, struggled with rebels... A dynasty keeps records and often rewrites past history. To get some idea of how orderly and organized the Chinese were as much as 900 years ago, consider the detail shown in the Map of the Tracks of Yü the Great, ca. 1100 AD, and consider what European maps of the time looked like... (see also another rendering and Mapping China's World: Cultural Cartography in Late Imperial Times (Richard J. Smith) and The Transformations of Myths Concerning Yu the Great into Daoist Narrative and Ritual (Julius N. Tsai --Draft prepared for the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies)

Both Japan and Korea borrowed many elements of structure and operation, though they had their own unique versions... we'll be back to some of that, too.
The model of 'dynastic cycle' is a sine wave of up and down, but it's not regular and in fact it's just a sketch. The case that the interesting complications are at the macroregional level is elegantly made by G. William Skinner in his 1985 Presidential Address to the Association of Asian Studies: The Structure of Chinese History. Skinner characterizes dynasties as "dialectical episodes", emphasizing their dynamic character, but he says that the real tale is of the changing fortunes of component macroregions. [aside: what would I have to do to get everybody to READ the 20 pages of Skinner's article? It's really one of the best and clearest and most persuasive visions of History that I've ever encountered...]

So here's the Tale we tell ourselves about China's origins [and we might well ask what tales the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans tell themselves...]:

At the confluence of the Huang and Wei rivers, on the edge of the North China Plain, at least 3500 years ago, there were people who made a style of pottery called Yang Shao (after the village where the excavations were done in the 1920s), with unique shapes (example). Village agriculture on loess soils... and we infer non-agricultural peoples to north and west... and south and east too. Pigs, dogs, oxen (says the record of bones in garbage heaps). Slightly later, black wheel-made pottery, and sheep and horse bones added. That's what archaeological records are like: bits from which to reconstruct, but always a lot of outstanding questions.

Fast-forward to excavation at Anyang, the capital of the Shang civilization/state/culture (ca. 1200 to 1000 BC), where we find bronze ritual vessels (the same shapes as the earlier pottery), tombs with fancy grave goods, and oracle bones --which may be the "main source book of history before 1122 BC" in the words of TR Tregear.

We also have semimythical personages, like Yu the Great of the rather murky Xia dynasty (there is archaeological evidence, fairly recently). And this is where water control and iron and wall-building start to become part of the story...

Anyway, we see perpetual tension and interdependence between settled agricultural peoples, surplus producers, and nomadic "outside" peoples --barbarians, mobile raiders. And a bit later we see evidence of expansion of "Chinese" civilization and technologies toward the southern frontiers --colonization by village agriculturalists, and slov Sinicization processes... some of that tale we'll have to leave to others.

But the point I'd like to make is that our conventional tale tends to speak of 'China' as one big thing, implying a degree of homogeneity that has never been true, or useful. What are really the dimensions of variation, and the relevant units of analysis, if we're trying to find a reasonable alternative to the unitary view of 'Chinese' society? I'll go with Skinner and say that they are the physiographic macroregions, each of which has [interlinked, to be sure] developmental cycles. So our geographical puzzle pieces are more numerous than we might at first have thought...

The 'Chinese Civilization' view emphasizes the so-called Great Traditions and the cultural materials of social elites, usually at the expense of notice for the (messy variety of) village-based Little Traditions. Concentrating on the elites in the upper reaches of the society has some inherent problems, and it's a nice corrective to look at the model of traditional Chinese society sketched in 'Skinner's Onion', noting also that the width is not really to scale --there are lots of Peasants, and it should be obvious that there's a great distance between the peasant cultivators who make up most of the Empire's subjects and the actors in dynastic dramas.

So how does this society actually work? Skinner identifies macroregions based principally in physiography, and sees them as structured in urban hierarchies. We'll take the Southeast Coast macroregion (essentially Fujian Province) as an example, and the map shows a regional metropolis (Fuzhoufu), several regional cities, and several 'greater cities' ...each of which can be thought of as having tributary cities, each of which has associated market towns, each of which serves a rural hinterland.

Going back to the Onion: market towns have gentry resident in them, or at least associated with them ("those who lead local political systems"), as of course do the 'greater' and the 'regional' cities. The officials of the central government reach down to ...well, which level? Certainly the 'regional' cities, and maybe the 'greater' cities too. A county had a yamen, a government office staffed by bureaucrats, and connected to other hierarchical levels by 'yamen runners' (essentially messengers). But social control in localities was (ideally, and usually) managed by local gentry.

Think about those cities for a moment, and their morphology. The essence is WALLS, and that should remind us also of the Great Wall, actually a complex of walls built at different times. See walkthewall.com, and also geography.about.com. Both of these came from a Kartoo search...

East Asia presents many complexities that we'll slide over and leave for actual History courses, and for some allusions in later classes... in the interest of getting to recent times. A LOT of the outlines are well presented in China and East Asia Chronology from North Park University, and in sources like A Brief Chinese Chronology from CUNY, and in topical summary in the table of contents of Patricia Ebrey's Chinese civilization : a sourcebook (DS721 .C517 1993) ...among others.

To get to some of the issues that connect up with the modern world, and eventually with the realities of the beginning of the 21st century, where we'll spend most of our time this term: slide ahead in time to the late 18th century, a time of great expansion for European interests, and look at the example of an episode of contact between a British emissary and the court of the Qian Long (Ch'ien Lung) Emperor (Letter to George III). At that time, Japan had been closed to all but a tiny trickle of outside contact (the Dutch, on the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor) for about 150 years, and Korea had been closed entirely to Europeans. In the 19th century everything changed, first with opening of trade in south China, then in 1854 with Commodore Perry and the "opening" of Japan, and then in 1866 with a failed attempt to "open" Korea. The events of the 19th century in East Asia are a soap opera on a grand scale, and we'll be back to catch some of the action in other connections, but by about 100 years ago China's Manchu dynasty was in tatters, Japan was in control of Taiwan (from 1895) and Korea (from 1905), and had fought and won the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905... Japan continued to expand its influence, invading and occupying northeast China (Manchuria/Manchukuo) from 1931, and occupying much of China by 1938...

...and slide ahead again to 1949, and the founding of the People's Republic of China. In the last 50+ years, still more grand-scale fantastic tales from China and Japan and Korea, of economic changes and growing importance on the global stage.

The most we can do is vignettes of some episodes from this menu, and even choosing which to look at is hazardous, since it means overlooking others. The Country Studies series can help us fill in a lot of basic details: China, Japan, North Korea and South Korea