A Mushroom’s Perspective on Chinese Environmental History

What environmental histories can Mongolian and Manchu archives of the Qing empire tell?  This talk finds an answer in a curious and forgotten event: the rush for wild steppe mushrooms in nineteenth-century Mongolia.  In the 1820s, thousands of undocumented workers crossed the internal boundary from China to Mongolia in search of mushrooms.  As the booming trade transformed the land, field reports poured into Beijing: not only did mushroom pickers violate imperial law, they allegedly destroyed a pristine environment.  As tensions rose, the Qing state mobilized around a dramatic response: a “purification” campaign to repatriate undocumented Chinese, investigate Mongol collaborators, and restore the steppe to a timeless state.

Historians usually describe Qing Mongolia as an agricultural frontier.  Based on Mongolian, Manchu, and Chinese language archives in Ulaanbaatar and Beijing, this talk points to a more complex story, in which a series of resource rushes, rather than homesteading, drove environmental change, as the question of pristine nature moved to the center of Qing politics.      

Jonathan Schlesinger is a historian of China and the natural environment.  His research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a rush for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers.  His current book project, The Qing Invention of Nature, reveals how Qing subjects, amidst this ecological upheaval, reimagined nature itself.  Drawing on extensive archival research in Ulaanbaatar, Beijing, and Taipei, the book’s multilingual approach re-envisions the construction of frontier and metropole, nature and material culture, and artifice and purity in the Qing empire. Jonathan received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2012 and is an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University – Bloomington.  While at Yale, he will be completing his book manuscript, haunting the libraries, and teaching an undergraduate seminar, “History and China’s Environment.”

Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by 11/4

Light lunch will be provided.