Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market by Meng Zhang (review)

Abstract

Published in the series “Culture, Place and Nature” by the University of Washington Press, Meng Zhang’s book Timber and Forestry in Qing China is praised in the foreword by the series editor as offering “such a vivid account of regenerative and production forestry in the modern period” (p. xi). The author adopts a people-centered approach to timber trade in the Qing dynasty, highlighting the experiences of tree growers, loggers, transporters, and merchants through an enduring timber-trade network, with a commodity chain spanning eastern and southwestern China. Zhang offers the first detailed portrait of the shared ownership of trees, market networks of merchants and sellers, financial arrangements, and dispute resolution in timber production and trade in Qing China. The study contributes original insights relevant today in market conditions and institutional mechanisms required in order to sustain forestry, a resource that has a long economic cycle. At a time when the market has been seen as a main culprit for resource degeneration, Zhang’s study offers an important opportunity for us to reconsider the market–resource relationship. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese history, economic and environmental history, Chinese geography, resource management, sustainable forestry, market–environment relationships, and related topics. The book includes five main chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction chapter introduces major themes, major players, as well as the book’s main contributions to the literature. By offering analyses and evidence of sustainable timber management and trade in the Qing period, Zhang challenges some prevailing views of long-range unsustainability of resources in Chinese history. She terms her approach “people-centered,” in that she focuses on people and institutions in the timber resource and trade network, and details how they managed to sustain the regeneration of timber forestry for market needs. The trees of the book’s focus are the China fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata) and the mawei pine (Pinus massoniana), fast-growing trees planted and logged for use as timber. Chapter  surveys the history of timber policy from the Tang period (–). It is important to note that by the start of the Song period (–), forests in the lowlands of the Yangzi delta (a.k.a. Jiangnan) had already been cleared for agriculture, and fir silviculture followed, where timber was seen as similar to a crop, taxed by the state and managed for the market. In the Ming period (–), the inland Southwest mountains were breached for their old-growth timber, first for the imperial court, then by merchants for the  China Review International: Vol. , No. , 