Human activity has eliminated many of the natural lowland ecosystems of the Middle and Lower Yellow River Valley, and has modified the rest, making it difficult to understand what species are native to the region. As a step towards the reconstruction of these lost environments, this paper employs zooarchaeological and other evidence to identify the native mammals of the region. We provide basic ecological information about these animals and discuss controversial or difficult cases in more depth. Our goal is not only to study China's environmental history, but also to make clear that conventional understandings of species ranges are based on the distributions of animals in the modern period, when many had already been eliminated from large areas by human activity.

This article examines the creation, preservation, and destruction of the defensive forest that the Northern Song built in Hebei along the Song–Liao border. Created as a landscape barrier against the Kitan attacks, this forest established the necessary strategic depth between the capital city and the northern frontline of the Song empire to compensate for Kaifeng's geographical vulnerability. While the Song government painstakingly maintained this forest throughout most of the dynasty, Liao troops, Hebei borderland residents, and many Song officials had nonetheless posed incessant challenges to this military forestation project. In 1122/23, at the onset of the war on the Liao to retrieve the Sixteen Prefectures, the Song army removed this borderland forest that blocked their northern expedition. The destruction of this defensive forest, which could have had thwarted attacks from the north, dismantled the strategic depth between Kaifeng and the Hebei borderland and henceforth presaged the fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the Liao's successor, in a few years. I argue that this strategic depth was not only a physical distance, but also a diplomatic, sociopolitical, and military link that connected the ecology of the Song's northernmost periphery and the fate of the entire empire.

This article explores the understudied issue of urban problems in pre-modern China and examines the responses to the negative impact of urban development on life in the populous city of Kaifeng in the Northern Song (960–1127). Although writers, painters, and historians have portrayed the capital city's splendor for centuries, various urban problems emerged as medieval China became a more urbanized society. This article investigates Ouyang Xiu's (1007–1072) accounts of how extreme weather conditions adversely affected the lives of Kaifeng residents. These experiences, which he discussed in letters and poems, are associated with longer trends that result in climatic anomalies and disasters in the city. Ouyang Xiu also complained about living costs and medical services in Kaifeng. These reflect the difficulties in maintaining good urban provisions and services in a city of this scale.

In 1782 acting Shaanxi Governor Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–97) submitted an exemplary memorial to the throne that concisely outlined the provincial administrative view of the proper order of relations between people, cultivars, livestock, climate, and water in northwestern China. He began with ostensibly human relations. His premise was that imperial official identity was ultimately formed through its connection to the food security of the general populace: “The root purpose of appointing officials is to prioritize the devotion of effort to civil affairs, and its main end is to put food sufficiency first.” Bi Yuan, like most of his contemporaries, unquestionably valued agriculture as the general and “main source” of food. By virtue of his posting to a China-proper province whose northern reaches lay along an ecotone with the Mongolian steppe, however, Bi Yuan was also distinctively aware of pastoralism as what he called the “second” source. While he made it clear that agriculture was certainly preferable, he was equally plain that human agency's range of choice was quite constrained in large parts of his jurisdiction, primarily by scarce water and cold climate. “Places in the northern provincial prefectures of Yan'an 延安 and Yulin 榆林, like Suide 綏德 and Fuzhou 鄜州, have land full of sand and gravel. Each is a high, cold frontier area where rainfall and ponds are scarce and inhibited, so that at harvest there is concern about shortfall.”

The North China Famine of 1876–1879 has received some attention recently, but little of this work has focused on the north-western province of Shaanxi. This imbalance is reflected in the local histories that devote far more space to the documentation and commemoration of the Hui rebellion than to the famine. This paper argues that the drought of those years and the ensuing famine is historically much more significant than this biased documentation would suggest, and that the rebellion can only be fully understood by paying attention to the environmental and social conditions in which it unfolded. Further, the paper engages with Mike Davis’s argument that portrays the famine in China as part of a ‘late-Victorian holocaust.’ While persuasive, his focus on outside forces is problematic as it ignores the history of the Qing Empire as an expanding force in itself and inadvertently reinforces the victimization narrative that dominates modern Chinese historiography.

Tianjin is the largest port city in Northern China and a major hub for water and land transportation. For geological reasons, the city has long been troubled by water drainage problems. To remove wastewater from within its walls, the city developed a drain system which relies on human labor and a series of variously sized ditches. Unlike the modern sewage system, which simply discharges wastewater into surrounding rivers and the sea, Tianjin's traditional wastewater disposal system worked in concert with an urban manure collection system. Urban wastewater was recycled as fertilizer, a valuable resource for the surrounding rural area. In tracing the origin, evolution, and influence of urban wastewater disposal in Tianjin, this article aims to reveal the potential value in Chinese traditional waste management practices. Contemporary urban waste disposal systems might benefit from a better understanding of the relationship between urban and rural areas that characterized these traditional practices.

Tonio Andrade's The Gunpowder Age is a big book. It spans roughly 800 years, in both China and Europe. Its boldest claims concern China, but Andrade delves into European history as well, making it a challenge for any one scholar to assess his evidence and arguments. Because China specialists would want to know how historians specializing in European warfare and in Western science and technology evaluate Andrade's challenges to received wisdom, the Journal of Chinese History’s editor and editorial board invited historians outside the China field to contribute to a joint review. We succeeded in recruiting a distinguished panel, all of whom have written extensively on these issues: David Parrott, author of such books as The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe; Philip Hoffman, author most recently of Why Did Europe Conquer the World?; Stephen Morillo, author of War in World History, among other books; and Ian Inkster, author of Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial Development, among other books. This introduction provides an overview of the discussion so far, and a few additional observations from a historian who has also tried his hand at Sino-European comparisons.