Tracing changes in 16th century forests, in three maps
Having spent six years (or more) researching forests and land rights in Ming-Qing China, it’s strange that I never spent much time with the Huizhou cadasters. Well, I finally pulled them out last December.
You don’t have to do much reading between the lines to see traces of the two most important changes in Ming forests: how they were claimed (i.e. property rights), and how they were used.
Map 1: Graves and Forest Rights
One of the major arguments of my dissertation/book is that some critical shifts in Yuan jurisprudence made it possible to claim land by putting graves there. This is not the place for a detailed defense of that argument. But do take a look at this map, from a Wanli-era (1572–1620) “fish-scale” cadaster from Xiuning County (萬歷休寧麟字號魚鱗攤僉冊). I’ve colored it in to make things easier to see: light green for paddy fields (田); yellow for dry fields (地); dark green for forest/mountain plots (山); grey for wasteland (荒); purple for garden/orchard (園); and red for graves (墳).
Note that graves are anchoring many of the forest plots. I’m going to assert that the titles to some of these plots were in fact derived from these graves, probably during the fifteenth century. Again, you’ll have to wait for the book for more evidence.
Maps 2 and 3: Changes in Land Use
The second major claim I make about the Ming is about changes in land use. I argue that we can see increased human intervention into semi-wild forest. And we can see forests being cleared for farmland. This latter trend is widely asserted in vague terms in the scholarship, but I have only recently (like in the last month or so) gathered enough evidence to convince myself.
In the first map we can see some dry-fields (and an orchard) in the middle of forest plots. These were almost certainly carved out of the forests for more intensive planting — perhaps of grain, but more likely of commercial crops.
The second map makes this process even more clear.
Here we have a bunch of very large forest plots right at the boundary between Xiuning and She Counties (歙縣, red line). There is a single house in the mist of this great forest (orange, just above county line). Increasing numbers of fields have been carved out of the forest, perhaps by the family living in this house. We might speculate that these are bondservants (火佃) of the forest owners, on hand to watch the forests, and who cultivate the farmland for their own subsistence.
A third map seems to record the traces of how fields were been carved from forests:
Here we see a central stripe of farmland between two streams (or irrigation canals). There is also a block of mixed-purpose fields in the upper right corner.
On either side of the stripe of paddy fields, we can see tendrils of medium green working their way into forests. These are paddy fields that I believe were carved out of the forests. Also note that in several places (the right-most tendril on the bottom, the third-from-left on the top) there are dry fields added at the margins of paddy. I would argue that we can see the traces of a process whereby these fields were carved out of the forest, one at a time. First the land was cleared for dry-farming, then terraced for paddy rice. For irrigating the rice terraces, ponds were constructed at several locations.
Finally, note the graves on either side of the bottom-middle tendril. Were these graves used to anchor the overarching land claim that led to ownership of the forest, and subsequently the terraces carved out of it? Or did the graves protect the forest from being cleared and carved into fields? Or both?
Given that these forests are almost always on sloped land, these are almost certainly stair-step terraces, like these ones I photographed in another part of Huizhou (Wuyuan 婺源) in 2011:
In any case, these maps were a fun find, and I think coloring them in really makes the historical landscapes come to life.
