Visuals of the Logging Frontier
When writing Fir and Empire, I was taken aback by the stories in Gong Hui 龔輝, Collected Essays on Timber Rafting in the Western Regions 西槎彙草 (1533), but the limitations of the print format meant that it was impractical to include all of the stunning woodcuts. So I included what I found (at the time) to be the most interesting visuals, left the rest of them aside, and pretty much forgot about them. Then I did an exercise using the images with my class on forest history — an opportunity to have students engage with the images without necessarily having Chinese reading abilities (I translated the few captions in advance). The students brought up some really interesting interpretations, and the exercise forced me to come to terms with what these illustrations mean as images. I think this reveals some interesting things about descriptive conventions, as well as opening up some questions that I didn’t think about before.
Let me start with two caveats: I am not trained as an art historian, and the titles of many of these images are hard to read, with variant and illegible characters, so what I say here is provisional. Nonetheless I will make three overall observations about the images as a group and then follow with some specific observations about them individually.
First there is a clear narrative structure to these images: they start with the logging teams moving into the mountains and forests in the first image and end with the log rafts being transported out in the last image. This motion is also conveyed by the fact that movement into the mountains generally proceeds from right to left, corresponding with motion from east to west or from lower to higher elevation. Movement out of the mountains reverses direction and proceeds from left to right or from upstream to downstream and from west to east.
My students also understood the progression of images as presenting a narrative of loggers and officials overcoming a sequence of obstacles, including the environment itself, disease, attacks, and then coming up with technical solutions. Given the content of the text that accompanies them, I’m not entirely sure whether this makes sense as a narrative of technology in particular as the means to overcome the environmental difficulties. More broadly, I question the importance that many students and scholars attribute to technology before about 1840 — but that is a point for another time. But it does makes sense as an overall narrative about the logging process.
Second, none of the images are meant to provide realistic depictions of a single scene, instead they present a sort of tableau of all of the difficulties encountered, and some of the solutions. Almost every one of the difficulties that is mentioned in the text is illustrated in at least one image, but very few are duplicated, suggesting that the primary purpose of these images is to illustrate the text. The combination of movement through physical space and through a tableau of different activities seems to have some affinity to picture scrolls like the Song-era Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖 or the southern inspection tour scrolls of the Qing or but assessing the relationship between them goes somewhat above my head.
Third, I think it is important to account for these images existing at all. I was astounded to see them because this type of illustration seems to be comparatively rare in the Chinese context. For example I have struggled to find nearly any illustrations of many of the more mundane types of forestry that I described in Fir and Empire — activities that are comparatively easy to find depictions from England, Central and Northern Europe or Japan. In fact, the fact that these were almost the only depictions of forest-use led scholars of China (notably Joseph Needham) to assume that they depicted ordinary behaviors rather than the rather extreme case of the southwestern frontier between about 1520 and 1600. Gong Hui was clearly motivated by the extremes that he witnessed as logging supervisor to put these scenes into print.
The other contexts that seem to have merited visual depiction around this time were mostly examples of engineering. For example there was an interest in depictions of ships, bridges, dikes, fortifications and other engineering forms that appear in other, more or less contemporary texts. Like those texts, the illustrations of flying bridges and capstans shown here are clearly not useful as technical drawings, but are rather playing an illustrative role.
The other context that seems to mark these images as exceptional is the depiction of exotic environments and their exotic inhabitants — including both Indigenous people and snakes and tigers, which seem to inhabit almost the same category in the mind of the artist. This type of exoticizing gaze is clearly present in the genre of Miao albums that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, or perhaps earlier forms that depicted exotic people and locales, like the depictions of foreign emissaries like the Portraits of Periodical Offerings 職貢圖. Nonetheless I am struck by the fact that there are very few of these types of visual illustrations in the travel literature or pseudo-ethnographic literature from the Ming or earlier periods. These depictions of the southwest are therefore exceptional.
Enough of an introduction. Here are the images, in order, with light English annotations to translate the Chinese ones:
Here is the first specific to comment on in detail. Note the depiction of Indigenous people alongside the “snakes and tigers” noted in the title of this image. While not as detailed as in later Miao albums, these are clearly an attempt to depict the peoples of the southwest, particularly the Miao. The crossbow is the classic weapon of southwestern Indigenous people, so this is probably being used as an ethnic signifier. The juxtaposition of Indigenous people with snakes and tigers is clearly intended to represent barbarity.
Here is an example of how multiple activities and “difficult points” are juxtaposed in a single image. The action appears to roughly move from the top, where loggers are shown felling and barking trees, to the lower half and the right, where the problems — hollow logs, falls when attempting to lower logs from cliffs — are enumerated.
In this sequence of two images, we see first a solution — a “flying bridge” constructed across a chasm — and then the problem with this solution — bridge collapse.
Another depiction of attacks by Indigenous people, some of whom appear to have distinctive headgear or hairstyles that may also represent a particular group or groups, and who are seen taking captives from among the logging teams. I have speculated that the logging expeditions were a key cause of some of the “tribal rebellions” of the sixteenth century — a phenomenon in need of substantial rethinking with the additional context of what can be recovered of the Indigenous perspective.
The depiction of malaria is very interesting.The title suggests that this is a periodic occurrence - which is in keeping with early modern European terms for malaria like “ternary fever” that’s suggest the periodicity of its symptoms and distinguishes malaria from most other infections. The malarial nature of the southwest has been discussed in Chinese studies but I think demands further interrogation. In particular I suspect is that it was at the heart of the frequent attempts to use Indigenous rulers of the region to police their own because of the type of “seasoning” that would almost certainly be experienced by troops deployed from other parts of China.
Here is where my students thought we can see the depiction of a technical solution — where all the previous methods failed, now there is a engineering improvement. I’m not sure where I stand on this. The fact that there are a number of other images in between the previous depictions of engineering and this one leads me to doubt that it is being presented as the solution to those problems — just as a different approach. But interpretation seems open.
Capture and internment of prisoners raises the question of what labor pools were drawn on to do this work. My sense is that it was a combination of Indigenous labor and Han deployed from the interior — some as civilian laborers and some as military. An increasingly common criminal penalty in the mid Ming involved criminal transport to the military (充軍), an escalated version of which involved service in the malarial south. This makes me wonder how many of these laborers may have been criminals sent to the region specifically to work on the logging teams, and to what extent they were civilian corvee who ran away from the harsh conditions. Probably an issue worth more consideration.
This title alludes to the sale of wives and children, written in the accompanying text using the full 4-character phrase yuqi maizi 鬻妻賣子. It is a common trope that taxes were so high (especially on the military) that people resorted to selling their family members, but one that appears to have had some basis in reality. In particular, the second volume references selling wives and children to meet the provisioning needs and the cost (of logs?) 鬻妻賣子尅糧償值. I’m not sure how it relates to what appear to be depictions of workers building structures.
From the cover of Fir and Empire this clearly shows logs being received, measured, and tied into rafts in front of the watching official (middle, in cap and gown), but I can’t make heads or tails of what is going on with the people in front of the official at the page fold.
Finally the log rafts are sent on their journey.
This fuller account of the visual has made me return to some issues in need of further interrogation — in particular, the disease environment, Han-Miao relations, and the management of forced labor.
For more, you can find the originals at the World Digital Library, my summary of the southwestern logging situation at Arcadia, and Fir and Empire at the University of Washington Press or the usual places.
