The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China

Tiger

The and the

Pangolin Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China

CHRIS COGGINS

The Tiger and the Pangolin

The

Tandiger the Pangolin Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China

Chris Coggins

U niversity of H awai‘i P ress H onolulu

© 2003 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chris Coggins The tiger and the pangolin : nature, culture, and conservation in China / Chris Coggins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8248–2506–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Nature conservation— China —History. 2. Wildlife conservation— China —History. 3. Ecology— China —History. 4. China —Civilization. I. Title QH77.C6 C64 2002 333.95'16'0951—dc21 2002004373

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Josie Herr Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

To the people of Meihuashan, for their kindness and patience, and to the landscapes and wildlife of the Southeast Uplands

Contents

Acknowledgments

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1 Introduction: A Short History of Nature Conservation

in China

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PART I The Southeast Uplands: People, Landscapes, and Wildlife 2 A Mountain Mosaic: Biological and Cultural Diversity

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3 Lord of the Hundred Beasts: A History of Tigers and

People in Southeast China

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PART II The Tiger and the Pangolin: An Environmental History of the Plumflower Mountains 4 The Wealth of Mountains: Settlement, Subsistence,

and Population Change in Meihuashan before 1949

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5 Three Rises, Two Falls: Political Ecology and

Socioeconomic Development in Meihuashan after 1949

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6 Burning the Mountains: A Historical Landscape Ecology

of the Meihuashan Ecosystem

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PART III Contemporary Village Resource Management and Nature Conservation Strategies 7 Habitat Conservation in the Post-Reform Landscape

161

8 White Tigers and Azure Dragons: Fengshui Forests,

Sacred Space, and the Preservation of Biodiversity in Village Landscapes

195

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CONTENTS

9 Eating from the Mountain: Hunting Traditions,

the Wildlife Trade, and Wildlife Management

216

10 Vital Connections: Linking Nature Conservation and

Cultural Ecology in Southeast China and Beyond

249

Appendix

285

Notes

291

Glossary

317

References

319

Index

331

Color plates follow page 148

Acknowledgments

This work has benefited from the support and inspiration of many individuals and organizations. First, I would like to thank Stan Stevens for his early advocacy of this research project when it was still in its infancy, and for his continuing moral support. Stan’s friendship and guidance have given me the confidence to pursue my dreams and to set high standards for field research, archival research, and writing. In his own life and work, Stan provides an example of scholarly excellence that I will always admire and strive to emulate. I would also like to give special thanks to Zhu Hejian, my academic advisor in China (under the grant regulations of the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China), and He Lian, a zoogeographer who assisted with field research. As the key player in my affiliation with Fujian Normal University, professor Zhu provided friendship and support while I worked in Fujian. In the field, He Lian was an invaluable friend and resource. His expertise on the wildlife and hunting customs of Fujian is unsurpassed, and I cannot thank him enough for being “in the right place at the right time,” even if he prefers to attribute it all to “yuanfen” (destiny). I thank Ruan Yunqiu, of the Fujian Forestry Bureau, and Li Shuqing, of the Fujian Provincial Museum, for their interest in the project. Ruan also helped me get official permission to conduct research in Fujian’s nature reserves. Professor Kam-biu Liu was helpful in the process of establishing contact with researchers in Fuzhou and Beijing. Qiu Honglie, his father, Qiu Shuangjun, and their family were also instrumental in my first trip to the interior of Fujian. Zhang Yongzu, of Academia Sinica, provided early encouragement for this research, and it has been a pleasure working with him on a related project. In the Meihuashan village of Gonghe, I was lucky to befriend Ma Shengxue and Ma Shulin, whose home I stayed in frequently and with whom I consulted—over tea, through dinner, and on many a mountain path. Ma Shengxue’s knowledge of wildlife and hunting in Meihua-

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shan, in tandem with his boundless energy and enthusiasm, are the very essence of community-based nature conservation. I thank Ma Shuwen for his friendship and wisdom, and for the generosity with which he shared his tremendous knowledge of local history and fengshui. This book could cover only a portion of the culture history that Ma Shuwen discussed with me in interviews, but I hope that these bits provide readers with some of the same pleasures of discovery that I found in the Ma household on many a cool mountain evening. In the other study villages, Guan Yanzeng, Luo Zhiming, Luo Changxiu, and Luo Ruiqing were also generous hosts, tireless guides, and special friends. I thank them and their families for the many hours they sacrificed in interviews and on trips through the mountains. Though I cannot list the names of all the Meihuashan residents who provided tea, food, lodging, friendship, and information, I thank them all. Luo Zhijian, Luo Bing, Luo Shunchang, Luo Shisun, Zhang Shisheng, and Luo Zhongkun will be remembered for their additional gifts of time and energy. The Meihuashan Nature Reserve directors and staff deserve special thanks for the hospitality and friendships that enriched my family’s life in the reserve. I would especially like to thank Luo Mingxi, Huang Chuguang, Fu Yongcheng, Wang Honggao, the Zhou family, Wu Jinping, Li Kaiming, and Chen Daoqing. Huang Zhaofeng, Lan Meiying, and Lan Xiaodan deserve special mention for their help and friendship over the years. I thank the Wuyishan Nature Reserve staff, especially Wu Haohan, and the Longxishan Nature Reserve directors and staff members, especially Xie Qiaosheng and Wang Guoliang, for their hospitality and generosity. Many people in the Southeast Uplands rendered aid and provided friendship, but special thanks go to Fu Qisheng, Fu Zhirong, Lai Chenghua, Liao Chunxiang, Lai Xiaobo, and Chen Xiangyi. Li Dengfa, Fang Pinguang, Lu Hongrong, and Han Liangfa were of great assistance in the libraries, archives, and special collections. Fang Pinguang provided a tremendous service in collecting gazetteer data for the study of humanwildlife encounters. I would also like to thank the U.S. institutions, staff, and faculty members that have made this journey possible. The Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University provided a grant through the Robert C. West Fund that allowed me to conduct

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

preliminary research in Fujian and Beijing. The Committee for Scholarly Communication with China provided generous funding and institutional support for one year of research. CSCC officers Joan Carey and Keith Clemenger were especially helpful and supportive. I thank L.S.U. professor Kent Mathewson for his enthusiastic backing of the project in its early phases, and William Davidson, the chairman of the Department of Geography and Anthropology, who offered timely support for cartographic revisions. I am especially indebted to cartographer Mary Lee Eggart, who saved the day by revising most of the maps and diagrams. Li Quan, the head of Save China’s Tigers, and Ron Tilson, of the Minnesota Zoo, have embarked on the most ambitious effort yet to help the Chinese government save the South China tiger, and I thank them for the information and support they have provided for this book. I thank the Caldwell family, especially Gail Harris and Muriel Caldwell Tillie, who invited me into their home in Tennessee and shared their fascinating family history. Here in the Berkshires, Miss Hall’s School and Simon’s Rock College have provided our family with two warm and caring academic communities during the writing period. I thank Pat Sharpe, the Dean of Academic Affairs, and Bernard Rodgers, VicePresident and Dean of Simon’s Rock, for providing me with fascinating work and bright students who make teaching a joyful challenge. I am especially grateful to Kathy Schmidt, who provided the spectacular rendering of the tiger and the pangolin in the frontispiece. My editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, Keith Leber, provided high-spirited support and guidance throughout the process of manuscript preparation and publication; it was a pleasure to work with him, with managing editor Ann Ludeman, and with copyeditor Jane Taylor. I also thank the geographers, Paul Starrs and Ron Knapp, conscientious reviewers who took the time to provide detailed and instructive suggestions for revision. Finally, I thank my parents, who have provided emotional support for my endeavors over the long haul, and I thank my in-laws for all their kindness. Above all, I thank my wife, Tanya Kalischer, and my sons, Aaron and Noah Kalischer-Coggins, for sharing the hard times and the high points with love, affection, and patience.

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Introduction Chapter Title A Short History of Nature Conservation in China

Before Liberation there were lots of tigers around the villages. They often roared at night and stole people’s livestock. There were few hunters and everyone was afraid. They had to use drums and gongs to scare the tigers off. Why were there so few tigers by the 1950s? It has to do with national fate [ guoyun]; the tigers knew that the luck of the country was changing. When the country was in chaos [luan], stealing and killing were common in the mountains, so tigers were everywhere. People say that after Liberation, the tigers went away because the government got better, the country settled down. . . . I believe this too. —A thirty-six-year-old Hakka man in Gonghe village, Meihuashan Nature Reserve, 1995

* * * * * Ni lianli Wo lilian Ni kai shan Wo zhong tian Ni gei wo chile Wo geng hui zhuan qian.

You’re a lianli [pangolin] I’m a lilian [reciprocally inverted nonsense word] You work the mountain I work the fields You let me eat you And I’ll make more money.

—Longgui village (Meihuashan) pangolin hunter’s incantation spoken before the kill, to guard against bad luck The Tiger and the Pangolin

The South China tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis) and the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), a scaly anteater, occupy ancient and important niches in the biologically diverse ecosystems of Chinese folk cosmology. Both animals are believed to have mysterious magical power and high

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medicinal value, and both are now under state protection. The two species have also been anthropomorphized, to varying degrees, representing two types of intelligent free agents with very different roles on earth. Until well into the twentieth century, the tiger was seen as a representative of heaven that could bring justice to the aggrieved, aid the righteous in times of need, or impose a reign of terror on wrong-doers. Good relations between people and tigers thus depended on how well the country was being governed—on the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) and on the degree of harmony in the terrestrial realm. The tiger appeared to come and go of its own accord, or by the will of heaven. Rampant tiger attacks during historical periods of social dislocation, interior migration, and massive deforestation reinforced this cosmological linkage; folktales and local histories portrayed the tiger as, among other things, a protector of the forest. Ironically, the virtual disappearance of the tiger in South China since the 1950s, a result of massive ideological changes, widespread habitat loss, and systematic persecution, is still attributed by some to the good government and relative societal harmony (or greater degree of social control) associated with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The magic of the pangolin, on the other hand, comes from its strange closeness to the earth. Its subterranean haunts have earned it the name “earth dragon” (dilong). Its peculiar fishlike scales have earned it the name “wears mountain armor” (chuanshanjia), or “carp” (linli or lianli).1 Like many upland villagers, it depends on the mountains for a living, and like the village shaman, it protects itself with secret powers, so humans who hunt it for the medicine of its delectable meat and potent scales must first speak to the pangolin and coerce it to submit to its “fate.” Tigers also eat pangolins, and when tigers were more numerous, their dens were a good place to find pangolin scales. Though the tiger has often represented celestial or divine imperial power, and the pangolin chthonic, terrestrial, and local power, these two levels of agency exist in a state of continuous interaction. In the interior frontier of the Southeast Uplands, imperial administrators (or in modern times, state officials) and mountain peoples (like the She, Hakka, and so-called Pengmin) have relied on their own, often separate varieties of power, and in the course of their inevitable struggles, both have been important in shaping the landscapes of southeast China in distinctive ways. As nature conservation has become increasingly important in the

INTRODUCTION

Southeast Uplands and in China as a whole, both tigers and pangolins are now protected by national law. The South China tiger is believed to be the rarest of five remaining subspecies of tigers, the one closest to extinction, with probably fewer than twenty individuals left in the wild, and the only subspecies endemic to China.2 For the Chinese people, no animal has greater value as a symbol for the country’s natural heritage, and saving the tiger is becoming a matter of national pride. To protect tigers and to safeguard other rare fauna and flora in one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, the Chinese government established hundreds of nature reserves and implemented a series of wildlife conservation measures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the scientific and legal aspects of wildlife conservation in China are still in their incipient stages of development, with many obstacles to overcome. Many of the nature reserves in China encompass settlements, farmlands, and locally managed forest lands. It remains to be seen whether the needs and aspirations of local people and the goals of nature reserves and other state-run conservation schemes can find lasting harmony. This book examines land use traditions, landscape ecology, environmental history, and indigenous conceptions of the environment and natural resources in three nature reserves of the Southeast Uplands region. It explores the relationship between cultural landscapes and wildlife habitats, and between local resource management systems and government control over natural resources. Focusing both on environmental history and contemporary nature conservation issues in a subtropical mountain region of the southeast, my goal is to initiate a more engaging and inclusive dialogue on the conditions of wildland resource management throughout China. Conceptions of Nature and Wildlife Conservation in China

New students of Han Chinese cultural tradition are apt to be drawn to many distinctive intellectual and aesthetic pathways that traverse the realm of “nature.” Those who journey on find views of the nonhuman world quite different from the ones typically associated with “the Western tradition.” We see human affairs diminished by mountains, streams, and sky. One may, for a time, experience humanity as part of nature, adrift in a seamless continuum, and one may ask if it is possible that this holism survives in Chinese culture, perhaps still sensible in rural landscapes and daily life. While such ancient Chinese philosophers, poets, and painters as Laozi, Zhuangzi, Li Bo, and Guo Xi beckon the reader

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farther along this sinuous track, we need only to examine the landscapes within a Chinese nature reserve at the close of the twentieth century to find ourselves far from any envisioned destination, still at the beginning of our quest, where “among thousands of crags and ravines the road meanders.” 3 Just as this line by Li Bo describes a fantastic and unreal landscape discovered in a marvelous dream, it is all too easy for an outsider to romanticize mountain village landscapes and, thereby, to essentialize their inhabitants. On the other hand, those familiar with pollution problems in urban China and with the severity of environmental degradation in much of the countryside may wonder where any “wild nature” survives in China. Experiencing the pall that enshrouds nearly every metropolitan area, you easily grasp the alarming fact that the country has five of the ten cities with the worst air pollution in the world. Seeing the fetid, stagnant condition of most any stream that passes through a lowland settlement will quickly make the statistics on water problems tangible: serious pollution affects 30 percent of the rivers and 90 percent of the urban water sources, and three hundred cities face water shortages. Desertification and deforestation rates are equally alarming. Human pressure on natural resources in China is without historical precedent, with more than one-fifth of the world’s population on roughly 6 percent of the earth’s total land area. The forest area per capita is one-sixth the world average, and strict forest conservation policy is, by necessity, becoming an integral part of the CCP’s long-range economic planning. 4 Still, much of interior China lies beyond the densely populated and heavily industrialized urban cores, and 90 percent of the population occupies less than a third of the total land area. The rugged mountain ranges and high plateaus, covering about 70 percent of the land, remain less densely populated, and few foreigners have been permitted to visit the nature reserves in remote areas until recent years. Protected areas, like the Meihuashan Nature Reserve in Fujian Province, where small villages have been part of the landscape for more than five hundred years, where tigers have survived at least into the 1990s, and where leopards and clouded leopards can still be found, challenge us to question conventional assumptions about where humanized landscapes end and natural landscapes begin. The people who live in and manage resources in these reserves also challenge us to consider alternatives to traditional Western, and especially American, traditions of nature conservation based on the “Yellowstone Model,” which dictates that large areas of “pristine wilder-

INTRODUCTION

ness” be kept free of human inhabitants so nature can remain “unblemished by man.” While the scale of ecological devastation in China calls for large-scale, strict nature conservation wherever feasible, this book demonstrates that the preservation both of vast wild areas and of smaller conservation lands requires ongoing negotiation between official conservation agencies, local people, and, in the near future, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Issues of ownership, stewardship, and even the meaning and significance of natural resources in rural China have long been contested and negotiated by state authorities and common people, and this will go on as nature reserves continue to spread and expand through China’s rural and peri-urban areas. In more general terms, you need not visit a Chinese nature reserve to find troubling differences between Eastern and Western conceptions of nature and its purposes. The subject has loomed large in heated international debates in which Western environmentalists castigate China and Taiwan for their involvement in the international market for endangered species, such as elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, leopards, and bears. Attempts to meet consumer demands for tiger bone, rhino horn, and myriad other products in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the mainland alone have catastrophically influenced wildlife populations throughout Asia and Africa, and have notably affected certain wildlife populations on other continents. In April 1994, the Clinton administration imposed trade sanctions on wildlife products from Taiwan after the Lee Teng-hui administration failed to curtail trade in rhinoceros and tiger parts despite warnings from the United States aimed at China and Taiwan. This was the first time in history that international trade sanctions have been used to protect wildlife. 5 It may come as a surprise to some that China has not yet exhausted its own wildlife populations, and the country still has 500 species of mammals and 1,200 species of birds, both groups representing 13 percent of their global totals. Four subspecies of tigers, the Indian elephant, and two species of bears are among several highly endangered large fauna in China that have extremely high (Chinese) medicinal value. In fact, the richness of China’s natural fauna and the cultural values that have developed around wild animals through the millennia of Chinese history largely explain the demands that Chinese consumers now place on wildlife populations throughout Asia and Africa. Increasing material prosperity in China is fueling the demand for domestic and foreign wildlife products. Families for whom meat was largely proscribed by poverty in decades

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past are now able to consume it on a daily basis. Added to this is a kind of culinary renaissance; wild game is in vogue both for the urban business elite and for the rural farmer, and wild game prices are five to ten times higher than for the same farm-raised species. Trade in illegal wildlife and medicinal parts appears to be on the increase, and in many provinces captive-bred animals receive no legal protection at all, despite recent legislative efforts by the central government. In the late 1990s, game parks and zoos in many tourist areas provided bloody entertainment and illegal tonics; after watching “ferocious” tigers kill live ducks, chickens, pigs, or cows, visitors could retire to a dining room to feast on tiger meat and drink tiger-bone and bear gall-bladder wine harvested from aged inmates. At the Xiongsheng Bear and Tiger Mountain Village, a privately run park in Guilin, this was done with official approval, under the guise of raising tigers for reintroduction to the wild. 6 The Chinese government is keenly aware of the international condemnation evoked by these cultural patterns. As with all other “internal matters” that become subjects for dissection in the international press (e.g., human rights issues and family-planning policy), wildlife conservation has become a political and diplomatic problem. In the 1990s, Chinese policymakers recognized it as an “image problem” that could affect foreign relations, jeopardize Permanent Normal Trade Status with the United States, and hinder other opportunities for international commerce. The political tensions resulting from such profound cultural conflicts, coupled with military incidents and allegations of high-level espionage through the 1990s and into the new millennium, have exacerbated antiforeign—and especially anti–United States—sentiment in China. In essence, Chinese cultural practices that have reemerged or intensified as a result of economic development and increased trade with the West have also become a source of conflict with the West. Some would argue that an emerging international community, which strives for consistent legal and ethical rules, and even a global ethos, cannot tolerate rampant environmental degradation in any constituent country. While a global environmental ethic may be justifiable on scientific, moral, and aesthetic grounds, however, it will not succeed if developed solely according to historical and cultural conditions peculiar to the United States, Western Europe, or any other individual country or region. The primary challenges facing nature conservation at the dawn of the twenty-first century are to integrate national and international legal policies for the protection of biodiversity, to recognize and

INTRODUCTION

nurture the multiplicity of cultural practices and perceptions of nature and conservation held by peoples and national states around the world, and to understand and alter destructive consumption and trade patterns that have accelerated the loss of species and habitats worldwide. There is growing recognition among conservationists that such terms and concepts as “nature,” “environment,” “resources,” and “spatial boundaries” are socially and culturally constructed and signify different things to different people. Furthermore, the meanings of such terms and their application to particular places are being negotiated continuously by individuals and groups according to their cultural traditions and political agendas. 7 Since the beginning of Communist China’s détente with the West, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wildlife conservation has been an important, if troublesome, aspect of bilateral relations. The World Wildlife Fund ( Worldwide Fund for Nature) panda conservation project, with field research directed by George Schaller, began in 1979 amid a series of misunderstandings and missteps on the part of Chinese and American participants. 8 In the mid-1980s, the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Man and the Biosphere Program (UNMAB) accepted ten of China’s nature reserves into the International Biosphere Reserve Network. Membership in the UNMAB helped bring China’s incipient conservation movement into the sphere of transnational conservation NGOs and funding agencies, from The Nature Conservancy to the World Bank, and there are many indications that foreign involvement in nature conservation and sustainable development schemes in China will continue to grow. Western involvement in nature conservation in China during the past decade has been substantial, but it has come at a much later historical phase than in other parts of Asia and Africa. The political geography of Western colonialism in China differed from that of India, British Malaya, East Africa, and other regions where colonial nature conservation schemes gained prominence, primarily because foreign power in China was concentrated in coastal enclaves, with commerce conducted under the policy of “extra-territoriality” (exemption of foreigners from the Chinese legal code). Under this regime, Westerners saw the establishment of nature reserves and other land management programs outside of the treaty ports as an unnecessary undertaking of little benefit to colonial interests. Big-game hunting by foreigners in China was not as prevalent as in India and Africa, and wildlife conservation was not as

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essential for maintaining foreign economic dominance or sense of place.9 Nevertheless, colonial contact with the West ushered in a new view of wild plants and animals as demythologized commodities, which could be harvested or even systematically exterminated with impunity in the name of God, science, sport, profit, or progress. 10 As political and economic conditions in China have changed over the past two centuries, so too have forest and wildlife management practices. In broad terms, there have been four historical periods in the development of wildlife resource exploitation and environmental perception since the late imperial era (1368–1911). They may be defined as (1) the period before significant Western influence, when local and national indigenous views of wildlife and resource management developed and prevailed; (2) the period of contact and exchange with Western missionaries and naturalists; (3) the period when Communist China closed its doors to the outside world, and the exploitation of nature in all forms became a heroic and patriotic quest; and (4) the current period of reopening to foreign contact and influence, which coincides with a deepening concern for nature conservation in the political and civil realms and an emerging grassroots involvement in environmental issues at the local level. Despite the fact that systematic nature conservation in China is in its infancy, many Westerners expect China to conform to Western cultural standards of wildlife conservation. This is not reasonable and may not be desirable. Even if the same legal and institutional management apparatus existed in China as in many Western countries (which is not possible in the near term), and even given the growth of an urban middle class— with rapidly changing values—different beliefs and knowledge systems concerning wild plants and animals can and will persist, especially in rural areas. Nature conservation in China, to be most successful, will have to develop a set of structural and cultural features suited to local and regional conditions. In today’s nature reserves, we see the emergence of such distinctive features, and it is important that we understand their historical origins as they continue to develop. While China’s government has begun to follow the lead of Western powers in establishing nature reserves and promoting an infrastructure of environmental beliefs and goals, some of these ideologies may be viewed as products of the world’s industrialized societies, with little resonance in the diverse belief systems of rural China. The practice of nature reserve establishment and management in China is based largely on Western

INTRODUCTION

archetypes, concepts, and values, and there were no national nature reserves or comparable protected areas in China before 1949. Though imperial hunting reserves and indigenous protected areas existed, they differed from modern nature reserves in fundamental ways. Recognizing the complexities of China’s environmental history and cultural geography is thus a critical foundation for developing regional conservation plans; this should be evident in a country with fifty-five officially recognized “national minorities” and numerous less-well-known ethnolinguistic subgroups. Though it would be a serious mistake to essentialize or caricature China’s emerging protected-areas system as inevitably bound to a set of structural features that are fundamentally different from Western conservation systems—and Taiwan’s protected-area system may provide a useful example for conservation efforts in sparsely inhabited areas of the mainland—prudent conservation planning must be based on existing socioeconomic and cultural conditions. 11 In most instances, especially in the mountain regions of southern China, reserves have been established in places occupied by peoples who have, over many generations, developed long-term natural resource management techniques and schemes. These include communal and familial cropland, forest, and pasture management; wildlife management; methods of gathering and processing medicinal and edible wild plants; and codes for protecting and maintaining commonly held sacred forests. Many land use and hunting practices reached an ecologically destructive level of intensity long ago, especially in the valleys and low mountains, where human population densities were high even in early historic times. But people in the mountains of western Fujian, who are the focus of this book, have long occupied and shaped biologically diverse upland habitats. In the process, they have developed a rich body of environmental knowledge and folklore through generations of hunting and trapping, through the eating of wild game and the preparation of animal-based medicinal products, and through the frequent contact with wild animals that comes with living in a remote mountain region. This study describes enduring cultural patterns pertaining to wild animals in the many guises that they have assumed in rural Chinese culture: food, quarry, medicine, bestial terrors, destroyers of crops, bearers of magic, and, most recently, protected natural resources. It reconstructs the history of wildlife depletion through habitat destruction, market hunting, government-sponsored “anti-pest campaigns,” “sport,” and “meat hunting.” Though environmental perception may be changing rapidly among

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peoples throughout China, traditional values, beliefs, and practices still affect land and wildlife management at local, regional, and even national levels. These have both negative and positive effects on the operation of nature reserves and the viability of bureaucratically administered wildlife management programs. For instance, local knowledge of animals does not always lead to a strong conservation ethic, and some people continue to poach to earn money in the black market for wildlife products. Others have worked with conservation officials to study and protect wildlife. China’s nature reserves are thus grounds of overlapping ideologies, patchworks of collective and familial lands inscribed with distinctive land use and resource conservation practices. Many such practices are rooted in the distant past but have recently been circumscribed by nature protection policies promulgated by distant regional and national authorities. Given enough time and concordance, these intersecting schemes may evolve into workable conservation arrangements. But in the Southeast Uplands, the questions remain—how much time is available to save habitat for such species as the leopard, the clouded leopard, and the Asiatic black bear? And can the South China tiger ever be rescued through habitat conservation and the reintroduction of captives to the wild? These are daunting challenges. Development of Wildlife Conservation Laws in China

The central government gained greater control over forest resources in China after the CCP came to power in 1949, but attempts to curb deforestation achieved mixed results, and there was little effort to protect wildlife or to develop a practical system of wildlife conservation. Not until 1988 did the first national wildlife protection law pass the National People’s Congress. The law, which went into effect in 1989, established that all wildlife was the property of the nation and must be carefully protected, actively propagated, researched, and exploited in a rational manner. The Ministry of Forestry and the Ministry of Fisheries were charged with directing the national management of terrestrial and aquatic species. The governments of each province, autonomous region, and provinciallevel city were ordered to coordinate wildlife management within their jurisdictions and at the lower administrative levels of the county and municipality. All unauthorized hunting and disruption of nationally protected wildlife was banned, and a system of punishments was imposed to deal with offenders. A rating system was initiated in which each species was given category 1 or category 2 national protection, based on rarity,

INTRODUCTION

economic value, or scientific value. Permits to hunt or otherwise utilize species designated category 1 were to be issued only by the national authorities; provincial and autonomous regional governments would be in charge of permits for hunting category 2 species.12 The apparent tardiness of this type of legislation does not mean that game laws have been nonexistent or that hunting has not been important in the lives of the ruling elite and rural peasants. Literary records and archaeological data indicate that the royalty of ancient China not only practiced hunting, viewing it as a means of demonstrating bravery and nobility, but also established protected hunting enclosures and wildlife parks. Rather than relying on unenforceable edicts restricting hunting throughout a particular administrative region, imperial rulers preferred to set aside large tracts of wild land, where wildlife and habitat were protected by remoteness from human activity, as well as by walls and guards. The Book of Songs (Shijing) describes a wildlife reserve established by King Wen, the legendary model ruler of the Zhou dynasty, in about 1150 b.c. One such enclosure during the reign of Emperor Han Wudi (236–290 c.e.) measured 50 kilometers (31 mi.) from east to west, and 25 kilometers (15 mi.) from north to south. In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Manchu royal family established an agency called the “Bureau of Imperial Gardens and Hunting Parks,” which managed 105 reserves in three categories. They were Imperial Hunting Enclosures ( Yuwei), Enclosures Designed to Provide for the Needs of the Imperial Household ( Wangduoluosuwei), and Enclosures for Military Training (Xianwei). As these categories imply, the reserves were designed to meet the cultural and political needs of the Manchu ruling minority. 13 Though there were imperial nature reserves, some exceptional administrative regions, and even historical periods in which certain types of hunting or the killing of certain species was restricted, most wildlife management in China was based on local custom. In the Southeast Uplands, local wildlife management systems were diverse and geared toward local conditions and preferences. A gazetteer account from Longyan, in Fujian Province, states: Folk customs relating to [wildlife] resource allocation were fairly complex, and regulations and restrictions, which varied in each locale, were diverse. Common regulations included rotating hunts from one village to the next and [a series of rules for dividing the quarry]. (Longyan Prefecture 1992, 1425)

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Hunting was often conducted by groups of men from different villages who assembled for game drives in specific places. Game was divided according to certain criteria, including who was hosting the hunt, who bagged the game, and who saw the quarry first. Those who heard the dogs and joined the hunt, and even those who heard the guns and rushed to the kill site, were often entitled to a share of the meat, bones, hide, organs, or blood. While social status could determine one’s share, the drawing of lots was frequently used to divide game as well. In rural areas, wildlife was a common property resource, and hunting was often limited to selected locales and particular times of year. Even when hunting was unregulated, the limitations of traditional technologies helped prevent the degree of wildlife decimation that occurred with the advent of modern guns and traps. 14 Magico-religious traditions also prohibited the hunting and/or consumption of certain animal species in certain areas, in certain seasons, or under certain conditions; in the eastern Min region of Fuqing County (south of Fuzhou), local hunters were forbidden by the god Hieng Tieng Siong-da from hunting on particular hills, believed to be inhabited by “fox spirits.” These spirits communicated through a female medium and, as one Western missionary and hunter wrote, “enjoy[ed] an immunity due to a superstition stronger than law.”15 After Mao’s ascent to power, CCP policies on wildlife were utilitarian at best but more often overtly hostile and aggressive. Government leaders at all levels organized extermination campaigns against animals that attacked livestock, ate grain crops, spread disease, or were generally perceived as a nuisance. Large livestock predators, such as tigers (which have a colorful history of dining on people in southern China) and wolves, were attacked systematically. Animals that posed a threat to grain crops were trapped, shot, and poisoned by the thousands. During the “Great Leap Forward,” the entire nation was mobilized to destroy “the four pests”: mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. In Beijing, for days at a time, in city streets and rural fields, people banged pots and lit firecrackers in a reputedly successful (if temporary) effort to drive away sparrows by wearing them out and giving them no place to land. Nature was viewed as an obstacle to progress. Traditional cosmologies, which prohibited the destruction of certain components of the landscape (sacred forests and spirit animals), were officially banned as “feudal superstition” ( fengjian mixin), and complex land use traditions practiced by rural people all over China were changed, perhaps irrevocably. An ancient parable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the

INTRODUCTION

Mountains” (“Yugong yi shan”) was used by the CCP to exhort all ablebodied people to attack and transform a resistant natural world, the final impediment to China’s modernization. The story tells of an old man who, possessed only of hand tools and help from family and friends, sets out to move a mountain blocking the way to his house. In Communist China, wild animals were part of that mountain, and they would be removed with no remorse, whenever and wherever it was necessary, but not without first serving the people. In the first three decades of communist rule, the utilitarian approach to nature gave peasants the ideological and legal carte blanche to decimate wildlife resources without fear of supernatural reprisal or punishment by the state. This trend, together with undying traditional Chinese beliefs in the medicinal value of wildlife and an international demand for fur, gave rise to one of the largest wildlife processing systems in Asia, if not the entire world. It is ironic that in its effort to “ban the old and embrace the new” (chu jiu bu xin), the Chinese government never attempted to alter the age-old popular perception that wildlife was endowed with healing properties greater than the biochemical sum of its parts. The harvest and consumption of wildlife was not completely exempt from centralized control, but because wild animals are mobile rather than rooted in the landscape, there were no clearly defined access rights and tenure arrangements of the sort that were central to the revolutionary redistribution of inanimate resources like arable soil, forest land, and water. A degree of government control was achieved by simply co-opting the retail function of local wildlife markets. Communes had “foreign export departments” (waimaozhan), which bought forest products, including wild plants and animals and their products (especially skins—it appears that in many instances, peasants used the meat, organs, and bones for themselves or sold them to others). Many of these products were stockpiled in coastal cities and then exported to international buyers. From a historical perspective, the comprehensive legal protection of wildlife implemented in 1989 is a highly significant event. In the late 1990s, important legislative commitments to the environment were made, most notably a ban on logging in the upper Changjiang (Yangzi River) and upper and middle Huanghe ( Yellow River) basin (the National Natural Forest Protection Project, 1998), and a clearly stated commitment to sustainable development initiatives in the Tenth FiveYear Plan (2001–2005).16 The real difficulty of enforcing game laws, however, has yet to be resolved, and in many areas, including nature

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reserves, unmonitored hunting, fishing, and plant gathering continue. In fact, with the development of free enterprise in China, the increased availability of guns, and the ever-increasing access to markets abroad, it appears that poaching for personal use and commercial markets has intensified. Development of a National Nature Reserve System in China

Unmanaged hunting, fishing, and plant gathering remain a serious problem throughout much of the country, but the development of protected natural areas in China has accelerated rapidly in the past twenty years. This trend is especially promising considering the difficulties that plagued the nature reserve system after its inception nearly half a century ago; these included constant administrative setbacks and even a period of complete disintegration. The country’s first nature reserve, Dinghushan in Guangdong Province, was established in 1956. Ten years later, there were nineteen reserves in the country. But during the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), many of these were dysfunctional, and no new reserves were created. During this ten-year hiatus, nature conservation was not a political priority, and even if it had been, local and regional political conflicts would have made protectedarea management difficult at best. 17 The late 1970s and 1980s marked the beginning of a renaissance for nature reserves in China. With the opening to the West, China’s environmental crisis became the focus of international attention. To stave off criticism and attract international funding, a tremendous effort was made to designate sensitive areas as nature reserves (ziran baohuqu, “nature protection areas”). The nineteen original reserves were restored, and by 1990, 289 Chinese reserves were listed on the United Nations List of National Parks and Protected Areas, with 285 type IV (partially protected) reserves and four type I–III (fully protected) reserves. The movement accelerated in the 1990s, and by 1995, 477 new reserves had been established at county, provincial, and national levels. In 1996, there were more than 766 nature reserves, including ninety state- (national-) level reserves, covering 6–7 percent of the total national territory. By 2001, the State Forestry Administration reported that there were more than 1,270 reserves covering 123 million hectares (474,900 sq. mi.), or roughly 1 2 percent of China’s total territory. These range in size from the more than 247,000-square-kilometer ( 95,367-sq.-mi.) Changtang Nature

INTRODUCTION

Reserve in Tibet, the second largest reserve in the world, to township reserves of a few hectares or less. 18 Though the establishment of hundreds of reserves within a twentyyear period represents a “great leap forward” for nature conservation in China, a survey of 159 nature reserves in 1993 showed that 44 percent had either no administrative bodies or no management staff. The same survey showed that nearly ten thousand people were living in each reserve, on average, and many more people were living outside reserve boundaries who depended on the natural resources within reserves for subsistence. With an estimated 7.6 million rural people in 769 reserves by 1995, it became imperative for county, provincial, and national administrative bodies to try to integrate nature protection with local economic development. Because there were only ninety national-level reserves by 1995, accounting for less than 12 percent of the total, coordinating management nationwide has been a difficult challenge. By 2001, most of China’s nature reserves were being run by county governments, and with decentralized economic and political power, it is nearly impossible for counties to raise the revenue needed to deal with such recurrent expenditures as salaries, and the basic infrastructural development to ensure that reserves are properly managed. In addition, local police, tourism, and other county and prefectural government organs frequently override reserve directors on land management issues inside protected areas.19 The 1994 Nature Reserve Law addressed many of the difficulties facing China’s nature reserve system by enacting laws for the solution of a series of complex and interrelated issues. These include local economic development, land use conflicts and reserve zonation, reserve establishment, administrative and bureaucratic ambiguities, reserve oversight, the development of tourism, environmental damage and mitigation procedures, and penalties for wrong-doers. The reserve system envisioned by China’s national assembly differs markedly from the U.S. national park system and resembles, in many ways, the United Nations Biosphere Reserve model. Acknowledging the difficulty of conserving nature in a country where high population densities require close cooperation between protected-area managers and local people, the Chinese Ministry of Forestry adopted a biosphere reserve model as the most appropriate approach to nature conservation. This means that nearly all reserves contain a strictly protected core area; most have buffer zones or transitional areas, where local residents are allowed to conduct carefully controlled

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commercial and subsistence land use; and some have research areas, where new types of land use and habitat management can be carried out on an experimental basis. The Nature Reserve Law has extremely important implications for the future of protected areas in China, calling as it does for the consolidation of nature reserve management schemes and local, regional, and national development planning. The success or failure of this undertaking will both shape and be shaped by the integration of nature conservation into the national identity (or identities) of a country with many peoples. With integrated conservation and development in mind, the government placed ten nature reserves in the UN International Biosphere Reserve Network, and this number had risen to nineteen by the year 2000. China also established a national system in 1993, the China Biosphere Reserve Network (CBRN), which included forty-five member reserves: ten international biosphere reserves and thirty-five at the national level. Membership had grown to eighty-one by 2000, with sixty-six national reserves and fifteen international biosphere reserves. 20 The main difference between current conservation practice in China and the UNMAB biosphere reserve model is in the degree of integration of local people into protected-area management and decision making. While “local participation” is the foremost of three strategies in the Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network Action Plan, the kind of local empowerment implied is subject to varying interpretation. Such provisions may be perceived by the government as a threat to state authority, especially in “sensitive” areas, where minority nationalities reside. The problem of political autonomy among local, especially non-Han, peoples may preclude such amendments from national legislation and regional application. On the Ground: The Political Ecology of Land Tenure in China’s Nature Reserves

The web of land tenure and settlement issues facing nature reserve managers, reserve inhabitants, and those living adjacent to reserves, complex in any particular instance, is further complicated by regional variation in land tenure conditions, traditional land use patterns, and environmental perception. This is evident in the mostly Han-dominated areas of eastern China, and probably will prove to be a chronic problem in non-Han areas of the west. 21 In southern China, conservation and development issues are com-

INTRODUCTION

plicated by land tenure regulations that limit the power of authorities to control land use within reserves. These regulations reflect differences in ancient land tenure patterns and communist-era administrative objectives for North and South China. In North China and the northeast, approximately 80 percent of the forested land is nationally owned in “forest areas” (linqu), and with the exception of former governmentsponsored forest laborers and their descendants, most nature reserves are devoid of long-term human settlements. In southern China, however, ancient settlements were merged to form larger village and township collectives ( jiti), which now hold land use rights over roughly 80 percent of the land, and nature reserve managers are partially responsible for the economic development of the communities within their domains.22 In addition, reserve managers must raise money for operating costs, and this typically involves “sustainable development” projects, in which reserve resources are harvested by residents and marketed under the direction of reserve administrators, who collect fees or taxes on resource use to ensure a steady supply of income for reserve budgets. 23 Under intense economic pressure, protected areas can suffer habitat degradation at rates exceeding those of adjacent areas under different management regimes. Research on habitat loss over a thirty-two-year period (1965–1997) in Sichuan’s world-famous Wolong Nature Reserve, which was established in 1975 to protect the giant panda, shows reserve residents causing an acceleration in high-altitude deforestation and a corresponding increase in rates of panda habitat degradation in the period after the reserve was established. The wild panda population has plummeted from 145 in 1974 to just 72 in 1986, at least partially as a result of upland forest loss. The increase in forest exploitation is the result of a 70 percent increase in population (75 percent of the local residents belong to the Qiang minority and other non-Han nationalities, and are not subject to the one-child policy), increased fuel-wood consumption, house construction, farming, and the timber demands of a burgeoning tourism industry.24 In Fujian’s Meihuashan Nature Reserve, the government has full jurisdiction over only 23.5 percent of the reserve. The rest of the land is under the control of the collectives, even though it is owned by the government. The collectives have rights to use the agricultural land (tuquan) and rights to use the forest land (linquan). Although forest use must conform to reserve guidelines, in the mid-1990s any family, collective, or government agency that practiced reforestation on wasteland could gain

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usufruct rights (shiyongquan) to the forests (while paying taxes to the government in the form of harvested timber). The unique land tenure rights and historical land use conditions affecting nature reserves in the Southeast Uplands merit close study. Not only do these factors largely determine the scope of sustainable nature conservation in the region, but they also provide a useful model for the study and implementation of community-oriented conservation in a variety of contexts, especially in developing countries, where local people make a living directly from the farms and forests of their home villages. The Research and the Study Area

This book describes historical and current relationships between people, ecosystems, and wildlife in the Southeast Uplands region, a rugged series of ranges running roughly north–south, mostly within Fujian Province. Centuries of anthropogenic environmental change throughout China’s subtropical south have left a legacy of distinctive landscapes and ecological conditions. Although I focus principally on forest resource use, economic development, and changing habitat conditions in the Meihuashan ecosystem of southwest Fujian, I have placed conservation efforts in this and other subregions (especially Longxishan and Wuyishan, which lie farther north) within the context of the environmental history and cultural ecology of the Southeast Uplands as a whole. Using this regional approach to examine nature conservation issues provides a preliminary means for discussing the human dimensions of habitat protection all over China. I have pursued as many sources of information on the subject as possible, delving into historical records; conducting wildlife habitat research; and holding in-depth, often outdoor interviews in the forests and fields with villagers and managers in three nature reserves. In the course of research, it was often necessary to take stock of what had been learned, what was missing from the puzzle, and what steps were necessary to fill in the gaps. For example, results from a survey of wildlife habitats in Meihuashan yielded important information about the negative effects of certain local land use practices. Surveys on village and household land use then focused on distal causes of environmental degradation, originating in the socioeconomic and socioecological conditions at the level of the household and village. These conditions were then related to larger-scale economic factors at the level of the township, county, and region. This research process, well known in the fields of cultural ecology and protected-area studies, applies a flexible perspective

INTRODUCTION

on ecosystem scales and boundaries to account for the multiple exogenous and endogenous factors involved in environmental change. The project has involved several years of archival research in China and the United States, combined with extended field research in southeast China. I conducted fieldwork in three phases. The first was a threeweek reconnaissance trip to Fujian Province in 1992–1993, during which I visited the Daiyunshan and Meihuashan Nature Reserves, in the interior mountain ranges of Fujian Province (fig. 1). The second phase was a year-long period of intensive research in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve in 1994–1995, during which I also conducted rapid comparative surveys in the Longxishan and Wuyishan Reserves, which lie farther north. The third was a follow-up trip to Meihuashan and Wuyishan with a small group of students from Simon’s Rock College for several weeks in the summer of 1999. The Meihuashan Reserve covers 221 square kilometers (85 sq. mi.) at the boundaries of Liancheng and Shanghang counties and the Longyan municipality, in Longyan Prefecture, southwest Fujian. While conducting preliminary research on tiger conservation efforts and protected-area management, I found the Meihuashan area among the most promising for wildlife conservation and for conducting research on the relationship between humans, forests, and wildlife in the region. Preliminary research on tigers, conducted by the World Wildlife Fund in 1991–1992, showed that tigers still inhabited Meihuashan (though the population was undetermined) and that the reserve and surrounding mountains were among the best remaining habitats for tigers in southern China. During initial field trips in the mountains, I observed ground scratches made by tigers and abundant signs of wild ungulates. A high percentage of broadleaf, bamboo, and pine forest coverage, interspersed with extensive montane grasslands and wetlands, provided good habitat for many species in the reserve and surrounding mountains. At the nature reserve headquarters, I saw a clouded leopard that had died in captivity after being confiscated from local hunters. The cultural landscapes of Meihuashan were no less remarkable. During visits to several mountain villages, I learned that the small, single-surname communities had a long history of collective and household-based resource management centered on bamboo cultivation, forestry, periodic burning, wet-rice cultivation, plant gathering, and hunting. In each village, I observed sacred fengshui forests, common property resources that had been protected by local custom for many centuries.

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Figure 1. Nature Reserves of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range. The Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan Nature Reserves lie in the heart of the Southeast Uplands region. These reserves, and the Daiyunshan Nature Reserve (northeast of Longyan), belong to the eighty-one–member Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network.

INTRODUCTION

The combination of good wildlife habitat and active, long-term human use and stewardship of natural resources convinced me that the Meihuashan region was a good field study area, an intriguing place worthy of extended field study in its own right, and a useful benchmark from which to measure processes of environmental change across the rugged terrain of the Southeast Uplands. With a grant from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, I moved to Meihuashan with my wife and young son in the fall of 1994, and began conducting field research. We lived in an apartment in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve headquarters, in the valley town of Gutian, the seat of Gutian township. I made frequent trips into the mountains, hiking from village to village along the extensive network of mountain trails, living in tents, village homes, a reserve management station, and a mountain observation post. In some villages, residents stated that I was the first foreign visitor ever to pass beneath the enormous Cryptomeria (Chinese cedar) trees in the fengshui groves that protect the village entranceways. If others had visited these villages before 1949, memories of them had long since vanished. In several other villages, there were photographs and fresh memories of an American wildlife biologist named Gary Koehler and his wife, Mona. Gary is a field biologist who conducted surveys on the South China tiger in four provinces for the World Wildlife Fund China Program in the early 1990s. Though more foreigners have visited Longxishan, and many more have been to Wuyishan (an International Biosphere Reserve in the U.N. Man and the Biosphere Program), I was surprised to hear that few had visited the villages in recent years. This seemed especially odd in Wuyishan, where elderly villagers spoke of the numerous European and American missionaries, naturalists, and specimen collectors who had frequented the area before 1949. Today, a church still stands in the village of Sangang, and crucifixes adorn the walls of Catholic homes in Guadun and Qiliqiao, where Masses have been held every Sunday—in secret during much of the Communist era —since at least the late eighteenth century. While vestiges of Western influence endure in the mountain villages of Wuyishan, much older, indigenous traditions have been maintained in the communities of Meihuashan and Longxishan. In both contexts, however, there is an overwhelming sense that many local customs will endure, whether indigenous or adapted from the outside, and that foreign culture and Western concepts of nature conservation are of little import in the everyday course of life.

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During most of my time in Fujian, I was permitted to work alone or with assistants whom I selected for specific tasks. In the fall of 1994, after conducting wildlife habitat surveys in Meihuashan with a friend and colleague from the Fujian Provincial Museum in Fuzhou, I was provided with a guide and assistant, an employee of the reserve who was to accompany me wherever I went. This young man was very capable, but since he was a reserve employee and not a local resident (he was from Baisha, two townships to the east), villagers were not always comfortable discussing sensitive matters in his presence. Because my assistant did not speak the local Hakka subdialects, and because many elderly villagers in Meihuashan can speak Mandarin, a language I can converse comfortably in, I decided to conduct all interviews and daily transactions on my own. My assistant was allowed to return to his regular duties, and I was permitted to travel wherever I needed to, inside or outside the reserve. Freedom of mobility allowed me to spend more time in village households, developing friendships with local people and relying on their expertise and local knowledge. I continued to work with reserve staff on certain projects, most notably broadleaf forest surveys, wildlife observation efforts, and interviews on reserve management and planning. My relationship with administrators and staff remained cordial throughout the research period, although the reserve directors were much more interested in learning more about the South China tiger than about land use patterns, environmental history, and other key features of my research. While they understood that I was not a wildlife biologist, they frequently urged me to “find the tiger” and photograph or video a living specimen. This is still one of the main missions of the reserve administrators, since the reserve was established to protect a species whose very survival in the wild becomes more questionable with each passing year. Most of my ethnographic research was conducted within five study villages, but I made an effort to learn as much as possible about land use and environmental history in all twenty-five villages in the reserve and several outside the reserve. To this end, I conducted interviews in thirteen additional villages within the reserve, and seven villages outside the reserve. In some instances, there were residents with expertise in certain subjects with whom I was advised to consult; in others, research was initiated for comparative purposes. During the summer of 1995, I traveled north to the Wuyishan and Longxishan reserves to conduct comparative research consisting of rapid assessments of wildlife habitat conditions and

INTRODUCTION

interviews on reserve management, village land use, and environmental history. The interviews were held with reserve administrators and with individuals and groups of local residents in eight villages (three in Longxishan and five in Wuyishan). My most recent work, in Fujian during the summer of 1999, included follow-up visits to Meihuashan and Wuyishan, where I collected additional information on changes in reserve conservation policies, village land use patterns, and the most recent trends in economic development. In the spring of 2001, I accepted a request from a resident of Gonghe village, in the Meihuashan Reserve, to help establish a community-based conservation plan. Throughout this time, I have maintained correspondence with Provincial Forestry Bureau and reserve administrators, staff, and residents. In a separate project in 2001, I worked with Zhang Yongzu, a zoogeographer in the Institute of Geography in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other Chinese conservation experts, to map the distributions and assess the current conservation status of the twenty-one species of primates in China. This work is preparatory to a primate conservation action plan for 2002–2006. A Final Foreword

Village settlement patterns, land use, hunting, and other forms of natural resource management in the Southeast Uplands have shaped montane landscapes and ecosystems for centuries. These cultural patterns and associated landscape features have also had a profound influence on environmental perception, indigenous conceptions of nature, and the development of a regional discourse on nature conservation. This theme has been explored in other regions of the world, and by the late 1990s, it was clear to many researchers that cross-cultural studies of nature conservation issues are essential not only for maintaining life on earth but also for examining and refining the definition of “nature” and reevaluating its relationship to what is “human.” 25 While much of my effort has been focused on documenting distinctive indigenous land use and hunting practices of the past and present, this investigation encompasses a wider spectrum of interrelated topics, principally political ecology, local knowledge, and the prospects for developing community-based conservation. I argue that villagers in the uplands region have continually adapted not only to local environmental variables but also to regional socioeconomic and ideological changes, political and military campaigns, and a plethora of government direc-

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tives. From an environmental-historical perspective, and one that takes local viewpoints into account, regulations on resource utilization imposed by nature reserve authorities are simply a new set of obstacles around which the stream of daily life must flow. Villagers recognize the power of reserve authority, but they will support reserves as institutions only to the extent that such bodies appear to serve local socioeconomic needs and to support indigenous cultural traditions. This pragmatic approach to state authority is rooted in painful memories of the brutal suppression of local customs from the 1950s through the 1970s and of the disastrous results of central planning, which held villagers in penury during the same period and brought mass starvation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, following the Great Leap Forward. The underlying ideology of such formal, authoritarian resource management schemes has been described by James C. Scott as a “hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.” 26 By exploiting or overriding indigenous, informal, flexible practices of adaptation and adjustment to local conditions, patterns that central governments cannot create or sustain, early CCP policies often failed their intended beneficiaries. After the economic reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which gave rise to a wave of entrepreneurial activity and market triumphalism that shows few signs of ebbing in the near future, the central government’s role in regulating rural resource utilization patterns has become less absolutist, but also less effective at mitigating environmental degradation. Rural expectations for ever-increasing prosperity require that government conservation schemes have at least the appearance of providing material benefits to local people over the long haul. In southern China’s vast subtropical zone, where hundreds of nature reserves contain ancient human settlements within their boundaries, conservation programs will increasingly depend on intensive, longterm land use planning and coordinated resource management. And though most reserves in China are less than twenty years old, many are already developing unique systems of integrated resource management based, in varying degrees, on older indigenous land use practices and land tenure patterns. As conservation biologists and advocates of “community-based conservation” debate the relative merits of large, uninhabited protected areas (known as “mega-reserves”), reserves that integrate subsistence and commercial land use and a greater share of management by local people, and conservation schemes adopting ever more fluid approaches to

INTRODUCTION

human resource tenure and management, there is a growing need for long-term studies of human-environment relations in biologically diverse regions. Greater recognition of both the variety and similarity of cultural variables and land use patterns contributing to habitat degradation and biodiversity may provide the foundations for more successful nature conservation. To this end, my study focuses on a region where land tenure conditions are relatively secure and stable. There are no large-scale migration streams of landless peasants entering the uplands in search of land (this took place long ago), and forest clear-cutting is no longer the main vector of environmental degradation. Unlike many areas in tropical and subtropical Southeast Asia and Latin America, where landless rural immigrants clear millions of hectares of forest each year, much of China’s subtropical highlands are an intricate weave of diverse vegetation types in different phases of succession and under different tenurial and managerial regimes. Groups and individuals have defined and evaluated these habitats, struggling and negotiating for particular territories and resources, altering and laying claim to the landscape for ideological and subsistence purposes, and these processes have led to complex cumulative ecological changes in the regional vegetation mosaic and the microgeographic land cover patterns that it comprises. China’s mountain regions are the final refugia for myriad species of plants and animals. Holistic interpretations of the environmental, cultural, and natural histories of these peripheral realms may give rise to appropriate guidelines for conservation, and I hope this and other studies employing integrative methods of geographic research will promote greater appreciation and respect for the tremendous biological and cultural diversity that remains.

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Part I The Southeast Uplands

People, Landscapes, and Wildlife

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A Mountain Mosaic Biodiversity, Cultural Diversity, and Land Degradation in the Southeast Uplands

Dark wind blows in the forest, crows and magpies mourn: People sense a ferocious tiger’s coming before it appears. Eyes burning bright, it crouches in the middle of the road; Once espied by the general, arrows fly off the bow. Homes plant thorny stakes as high as their door; Hogs and suckling pigs are corralled before sundown. How fierce indeed a tiger, yet all still rejoice If only it keeps to its swaggering far off in the mountains’ depths. — Gao Qi (1339–1374), “Ballad of a Ferocious Tiger”

China has been designated by the IUCN as one of the world’s ten most biologically diverse countries, ranking fifth in species richness for mammals, and the subtropical Southeast Uplands is an area of high value for mammal conservation. High biodiversity in the region is largely a function of the relatively sparse human population in the highlands, a feature that sets the region in sharp contrast with surrounding, densely settled coastal plains and river basins, where native species of wild fauna and flora have been greatly depleted. The Southeast Uplands region also encompasses tremendous ethnolinguistic diversity, with 104 local Han dialects in Fujian Province alone, comprising the greatest cultural variation of Han subgroups of any province. Centuries of forest resource management and tenurial control by villages, clans, and individuals have made the landscapes of southeast China a heterogeneous mix of successional forest and scrub interspersed with bamboo, tea, fruit orchards, and rice paddies. The assemblage of wild and domesticated fauna and flora found in this embroidery, and the landscape structure resulting from human modification of the mountain environment by such culture groups as the She, Hakka, and diverse dialect

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groups (e.g., the Minnan, Minbei, and Mindong), contribute to making the region geographically unique. A deeper understanding of the complex migration history and environmental consequences of upland settlement provides a foundation for a more critical perspective on the prospects for sustainable nature conservation in the region. Mountains, Forests, Plains, and People

Traditionally known as the Southeast Mountain Kingdom (Dongnan Shanguo), the Southeast Uplands consists of five ranges of the WuyiDaiyun Mountains of Fujian Province (see fig. 1).1 The mountain region, 150–200 kilometers (95–125 mi.) wide, runs parallel to the coastline (south-southwest to north-northeast) between 24° and 28° N, a distance of about 450 kilometers (280 mi.). The mountainous zone is extremely rugged; 95 percent of Fujian’s land area is mountainous or hilly land, and only 5 percent consists of alluvial plains. Though the ranges of the uplands region continue southward into northwest Guangdong Province, to the north they taper off just across the Zhejiang border. To the west, they form a distinctive barrier between Fujian and the interior plains of the neighboring province, Jiangxi. In the east, the region is bounded by the hills and the narrow coastal plain, where the mainland meets the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. The westernmost of these ranges is the Wuyishan (Military Safety Mountains). This long, linear range includes the highest mountains in the region; the highest, Huanggangshan, at 2,158 meters (7,078 ft.), lies on the Jiangxi border in northwest Fujian. The Wuyishan Range continues southward along the entire border between Fujian and Jiangxi. Farther east, forming the central axis of Fujian Province, are the Daimaoshan (Hawksbill Turtle Mountains) in the south and Jiufengshan (Vulture Peak Mountains) extending northeast. These ranges contain numerous mountains higher than 1,500 m (4,920 ft.), with the tallest peaks higher than 1,800 m (5,900 ft.). Along the southeastern edge of the upland region are the Bopingling (BeatenFlat Mountains) and Daiyunshan (Wearing Clouds Mountains), of comparable elevation with the two central ranges. East of these, and outside the Southeast Upland region, lie the foothills, which gradually descend to the narrow coastal plain and the bays, headlands, and rocky islands of the rugged ria coastline. These mountains were formed during episodes of volcanism and faulting, and the orientation of the ranges and valleys is the result of three fault systems. One controls the orientation of the ridgelines and valleys

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of the Wuyi-Daiyun mountain system, the other two intersect the mountain system perpendicularly (east-southeast to west-northwest), and the second at a more oblique angle (east to west). The intersecting faults form gaps and river valleys, which have facilitated immigration and settlement. The network of rivers is dense (.1 km/km 2 ), forming a trellis-shaped drainage pattern in alignment with the geological structure of mountain ridges and valley faults. The longest river is the Min (539 km, or 335 mi.), which though only about one-tenth as long as the Yellow River produces an annual discharge 16 percent greater, a result both of higher rainfall and steeper stream gradients within its drainage basin. Other major rivers include the Tingjiang (a tributary of the Hanjiang in Guangdong), the Jiulongjiang, the Pujiang, the Mulanxi, and tributaries of the Minjiang. Most of the 9.9 million (1993) inhabitants of the Southeast Uplands are concentrated along arable alluvial plains within these intermontane valleys and their tributaries. Large riverside settlements in or near present-day Longyan, Sanming, and Nanping had become administrative and trade centers between the second and eighth centuries, and today these cities are the capitals of prefectures bearing the same names. The Southeast Uplands region corresponds roughly to these three prefectures and several counties to the southeast.2 Rice, tea, bamboo, indigo, and timber (especially Chinese fir, Cunninghamia lanceolata), cultivated in the hinterlands, have long been the economic mainstays of the region. If you follow the short, swift rivers eastward to where they flow out upon the alluvial and marine terraces of protected bays and estuaries, you find a narrow coastal plain. Two-thirds of Fujian’s 30.9 million residents inhabit these bounded plains, where arable land, marine resources, and good harbors gave rise to the ancient urban trade centers of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Fuzhou, and Xiamen; today, Xiamen is a rapidly developing “special economic zone,” where the state has permitted free trade and foreign investment for more than twenty years. Economic disparities, sociocultural differences, and environmental contrasts have kept the coastal region and the mountainous interior distinctly different since historical times. The average population density in the Southeast Uplands in 1993 was 131 people per square kilometer (247 acres), while in the coastal region it was 452 people per square kilometer. Income disparities are marked as well; even in the agricultural sector, coastal families in Xiamen average twice the income per capita of farm families in Longyan Prefecture.3

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Compared with other land areas at similar latitudes, southeast China is unusually humid. The vast majority of the earth’s terrestrial surface between 20 and 30 degrees latitude is desert or semiarid steppe, and all the world’s great tropical and subtropical deserts lie at this latitude, but maritime tropical and subtropical air masses from the South China Sea make southeast China one of the largest humid subtropical zones on earth. High annual rainfall and the absence of soil-water deficit in any season allow two—and in some places three —rice crops to be grown on the alluvial soils of the valley lowlands throughout the region. Even on the poor, granitic yellow soils of the mountain slopes, abundant precipitation, warm temperatures, and intensive husbandry have allowed for the production of a wide range of forest and agricultural products over the centuries. Land use patterns depend, too, on location within the region, because the ranges form a barrier to monsoonal air flow from the northwest in winter, and from the southeast in summer. The southeastern slopes of the Daiyun Mountains are exposed to warm maritime air masses and are sheltered from continental polar air masses, and there is a marked north-south temperature gradient in Fujian, with mean annual temperatures varying from 14°C (57°F) in northern Fujian to 21°C (70°F) in the south. The mountains also give rise to a zonal precipitation pattern resulting from the orographic effect, with high western mountain areas receiving up to 1,200 millimeters (46 in.) more than the low coastal plains at the same latitude. The average annual precipitation in Fujian varies from 1,000 millimeters (40 in.) along the coast to 2,200 millimeters (86 in.) in the Wuyi Mountains. The highest mountain in Fujian, Huanggangshan (2,158 m, or 7,080 ft.), in the Wuyishan region, receives an average of 2,871 millimeters (113 in.) of precipitation in the form of rain and snow. Because of the distinct differences between the climates on opposite sides of the Daiyun Mountains, geographers place the area to the north and west in the central subtropical climate zone, and the area to south and east in the southern subtropical climate zone. The latter zone comprises about one-third of the province. This boundary is actually a transitional zone, or ecotone, between the two biophysical regions, and areas lying within this ecotone have ecological characteristics of both. Throughout the Southeast Uplands region, the rainy season lasts from March to June ( January to June in Meihuashan), with 50–60 percent of the annual precipitation, so that there is seldom a problem with the spring drought that affects other regions in China before the arrival of the summer monsoon. Typhoons in late summer and early fall bring

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some rain to the interior mountain regions, but September marks the return of cool, dry air from the Mongolian High and the beginning of a nearly rainless period lasting from October to February, with about 15–20 percent of the annual precipitation. 4 The predominant potential natural vegetation of the Southeast Uplands, though now highly disturbed and surviving only in remnants, is subtropical broadleaf evergreen forest. This can be further subdivided into southern subtropical monsoon rainforest and central subtropical broadleaf evergreen forest. The subtropical broadleaf evergreen forest was probably the most widespread forest type in southern China before extensive deforestation. These forests are composed chiefly of members of the oak-beech family, especially chinkapins (Castanopsis), Cyclobalanopsis, tanoaks (Lithocarpus), and Fagus; members of the laurel family (Lauraceae), such as camphor and other members of its genus; magnolias; camellias (especially Schima and Eurya); Altingia (a member of the witch hazel family—which includes sweetgums—Hamamelidaceae), and members of the Rosaceae. Many of these taxa have similar leaf types, characterized as cup shaped, ovate to lanceolate, leathery, and entire margined or slightly serrate. The forests are characterized by a relatively small number of genera, but each genus has many species and varieties. Coniferous genera are also well represented, especially Chinese cedar (referred to in this text by its taxonomic name, Cryptomeria), Chinese fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata), Fujian cypress, Keteleeria, two species of pines (Masson and Huangshan), golden larch, two species of hemlocks, podocarps, yews, and plum yews. 5 Because of the rugged terrain and long-term human effects on vegetation in the uplands, they exhibit marked zonation of vegetation types along an altitudinal gradient. Near the summits and on the ridges of the highest mountains (above about 1,400 m, or 4,600 ft.), subtropical mountain meadow is the predominant vegetation type. Downslope, there is a transitional zone of mountain bush and scrub or needleleaf forests predominated by pine, which may extend down to as low as 1,200 m (3,900 ft.). At lower elevations lie the subtropical broadleaf evergreen forests, mixed needleleaf-broadleaf forests, and mixed deciduous-evergreen broadleaf forests. Another distinctive vegetation type in the region is associated with montane wetlands, or dambos. These assemblages of grasses and forbs grow in and around bogs and ponds in alpine headwater zones and alluvial terraces.6 The Meihuashan ecosystem, which lies in the central Daimao Mountains, is in a transitional area between

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the central subtropical and southern subtropical climate zones. The southern subtropical zone resembles South China’s narrow east–west belt of tropical monsoonal rainforest, which stretches from southeast Tibet through southern Yunnan. Broadleaf forests in Meihuashan contain lianas and epiphytes, a characteristic of tropical rainforests, but the canopy is less complex, and such dendrologic features as plank buttressing and cauliflory are rare. Cultural and Biological Diversity

China is one of seventeen national states that the IUCN has called “megadiversity countries,” which together account for an estimated 60–70 percent of the world’s terrestrial species. Most of these countries are within the earth’s humid tropical centers of high biodiversity, but biodiversity in China, the third largest country in the world, stems from three primary factors: the multitude of biomes encompassed within the country’s borders; the heterogeneity of geomorphology and habitats within those biomes; and China’s paleo-historical role as an important center of mammalian evolution and dispersal. Preliminary surveys show that there are roughly 2,300 species of terrestrial vertebrates in China, or nearly 10 percent of all species of terrestrial vertebrates on earth. The mammalian flora of China is especially diverse, with five hundred species, and China ranks fifth in the world in diversity of mammals. Large mammals are especially diverse; for example, there are twenty living species of deer, or 41.7 percent of the world’s deer species. China provides habitat for about 10 percent of the world’s primate species, too. The foremost Western authority on mammals in China, George Schaller, writes that China “supports a diversity of wildlife unequaled by any country.” 7 High species richness for terrestrial vertebrates in China is partly the result of the country’s position as a transition zone between the tropical and subtropical fauna of the Indomalayan realm and the temperate fauna of the Palearctic realm. In other words, China has long been a mixing ground for fauna of the biologically rich, low-latitude Southeast Asian humid tropical rainforests and the less-rich, high-latitude temperate forests and grasslands of Eurasia. China is the only country in the world that encompasses an unbroken series of climate zones, with an extraordinary variety of biomes and ecosystems, from the desert basins of Xinjiang to tropical rainforests in southern Yunnan, and from montane tundra in the Himalayas to coral islands in the Nansha archipelago. Added to this regional diversity is the extremely rugged terrain in most of China.

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Mountains and hills more than 500 m (1,640 ft.) high cover 74.8 percent of the country. This topographic variety has resulted in altitudinal zonation of ecosystems, enhancing species richness at microregional scales. It has also been important in preventing biotic extinctions, by muting the destructive capacity of humans within natural ecosystems that is characteristic of China’s lowland plains and basins. The inherent difficulty of placing mountain lands under widespread, permanent cultivation, though not insurmountable, has prolonged the viability of wildlife populations in many regions that otherwise would have perished centuries ago. This is especially true in southern and eastern China, and in Sichuan Province, areas where population pressure has been greatest. Most terrestrial vertebrate species, especially mammals, have been wiped out by human inhabitants in the coastal plains and arable river basins of northern and central China, but mountain refugia continue to provide vital habitat, patchy though it usually is (fig. 2). 8 Within the biogeographic context of China as a whole, the biodiversity of the Southeast China Uplands is remarkable, especially given the high population densities of southern and eastern China. Fujian Province alone, which accounts for only 1.26 percent of the land area of China, has an estimated 110 species of mammals, accounting for 25 percent of the national total; more than 540 species of birds, 45 percent of the national total; 115 species of reptiles, 35 percent of the national total; and more than 5,000 species of insects, 20 percent of the national total. Regional patterns of biodiversity in the Southeast Uplands, as in China as a whole, exhibit an intriguing relationship to a complex of climatic, geomorphic, demographic, and cultural factors, with important implications for nature conservation. Predictably, indices of biodiversity rise with temperature and humidity, for tropical and subtropical broadleaf evergreen forests produce the most biomass and are the most ecologically complex terrestrial biomes on earth. In China, however, human population density is an important intervening variable, and mammalian species density values are highest not only in the tropical and subtropical humid climates of the south but also in mountain regions of relatively low population density in nearly every physical region of the country. The warm temperate humid to subhumid climates of northern China and the subtropical humid climates of central China (including parts of the Changjiang basin) no longer hold the vast deciduous, mixed, and evergreen broadleaf forests of historic and prehistoric times. The loss of forests and wildlife resulting from centuries of intensive land use in these regions, in conjunction with industrialization and serious pollution

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Figure 2. Natural features (top) and administrative regions (bottom) of China.

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problems, have reduced mammalian diversity to levels lower than those of the colder but less densely populated and less environmentally degraded mountain regions of the northeast and the northwest. In China as a whole, mammal species density values are highest outside the eastern coastal and river plains (China proper); that is, in non-Han areas (Tibet, Tianshan, Altaishan), border zones (western Sichuan, Yunnan, and southeast Tibet, the Daxinganling, and Changbaishan), and interior mountain frontier regions (e.g., the Southeast Uplands and the Qinling Mountains). 9 These regions also encompass the greatest cultural diversity in China. One form of cultural diversity can be gauged by the number of Han ethnolinguistic subgroups in an area, by far the greatest in montane regions of high biodiversity in the south and southeast (104 local dialects in Fujian Province alone). Non-Han peoples, China’s fifty-five non-Han nationalities, also represent great cultural diversity, comprising only 8 percent of the population but occupying approximately 60 percent of the land area. The tropical rainforest region of southern and western Yunnan exhibits the highest land mammal species density (one hundred) and the greatest cultural diversity in China. Geographers have commented on the correlation, or overlap, between high cultural diversity and high biological diversity in regions throughout the world.10 It may be argued that this pattern is merely a result of the territorial marginalization of minority peoples within remote mountainous or lowland rainforest regions, areas where obstacles to transportation and settlement have precluded cultural homogenization by dominant national groups until modern times. In many instances, however, indigenous conservation systems are also an important factor. In southern Yunnan and the Southeast Uplands (and probably many areas in between), evidence exists for traditional land use and resource stewardship that have allowed for the perpetuation of biodiversity through the conservation of forest and crop resources. The diversity of mammals in these areas is, in part, a legacy of this tradition of stewardship. Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Hakka Identity in the Southeast Uplands

In southeast China as a whole, language is the most important single variable in the establishment and differentiation of local and regional ethnic identity. The Southeast Uplands is no exception, and no place in China has such a diversity of Han subgroups. In the mid-nineteenth century,

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Westerners with a knowledge of Chinese began to recognize the intricacy of this cultural weave. After a trip from Fuzhou to Shaowu County, in northwest Fujian, in 1878, J. E. Walker wrote, “What a babel of brogues and dialects there is among those wild mountains! A native can hardly pass the limits of his own village but his speech will betray him” (Moser 1985, 165) Of this ethnolinguistic richness, Sowerby (1929) declared, “A traveler up the Min [River] will soon realize there are many types of people in this area, types as distinct as, let us say, the different races in Europe.” Later observers and researchers realized that ethnolinguistic diversity in Fujian (and Guangdong) was evident at microscales and macroscales, and that within each of Fujian’s roughly seven major dialects were numerous subdialects (fig. 3). The Fuzhou dialect, for example, though grouped with the Minbei (north of the Min River) dialects, was not understood more than 40 miles from the capital. Until the past fifty years, it was common to find people in adjacent valleys who spoke mutually unintelligible languages; in some instances, this was true of neighboring villages. Today, although putonghua (the common language, Mandarin), also known as guanhua (the official language), is the lingua franca of China and a unifying element in Han Chinese culture, dialects remain the most important markers of subethnic identity throughout China proper. In constructing regional, subethnic identities within a broader national context, peoples of the Southeast Uplands have long used Mandarin to strengthen their political, economic, and cultural ties to the political and economic core areas, while maintaining their local or regional dialects in daily life and, when faced with threats from other culture groups, as an assertion of being ethnically distinct. Moser (1985, 165) posits that the formation of Fujian’s ethnographic complexity stems largely from “the fact that there was no single, easy route of access for Han culture and people to enter the province.” Sinitic culture and language entered the region slowly, from different source areas and from different directions; it followed overland routes traversing mountain passes to the north and west, and it came by maritime trade routes to the coastal trade centers and up the large rivers that drained their hinterlands. Instead of mixing within a cultural and linguistic melting pot, many local cultural traditions and dialects persisted through the centuries. Indeed, certain areas exhibit notable examples of local adaptation to intra-ethnic strife that bespeak an acceptance of such

Figure 3. Dialect regions of the Southeast Uplands and coastal Fujian, by county. Meihuashan Nature Reserve is in the western Min Hakka region, Longxishan in the Hakka-related region, and Wuyishan in the northern Min region.

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conflict.11 The apparent stability of ethnolinguistic diversity is not therefore merely the result of physical isolation among constituent culture groups but also a product of the formation and alignment of social groups that encouraged the maintenance of lineage and ethnic differentiation.12 One of the strongest cultural characteristics of the rural peoples of the Southeast Uplands today is the persistence of lineage groups, which often define village social structure and relations between villages. In many mountain villages throughout the region, especially in areas occupied by Hakkas, single surname patrilineage villages are still common, and traditional delineations of kinship and ethnic identity are reinforced through ancestral records and oral histories, frequent rites and rituals, and patterns of daily social and economic interaction. Cultural identity is also inseparable from the strong sense of place developed within village landscapes through time; houses, temples, fields, sacred forests, and hinterlands bear the distinctive, collective imprimatur of people who have long claimed the land by shaping it to meet their social, economic, and cultural needs. The earliest Han settlers of Fujian did not enter an empty land and simply transfer their modes of living into a new environment. From the Pacific littoral through the interior of southeastern China, there were aboriginal people known by such names as Yue, Man, Wulingman, and Nanman who, by early in the first millennium a.d., had occupied the region for centuries, if not millennia. In prehistoric times, the Yue are believed to have inhabited the coastal zone, from Zhejiang (and possibly farther north) through Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, and into Vietnam. An Austro-Asiatic people, they are believed to have been linguistically related to the modern Vietnamese. In interior southern China, there were other non-Han tribal groups of hunter-gatherers and swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists (including the Man, or “Barbarians,” Wulingman, and Nanman), who were probably the ancestors of today’s minority nationalities known as Miao (or Hmong in Southeast Asia), Yao, and She (pronounced shuh). These nationalities share a complex of cultural traits; after migrating to different regions of southern China, probably escaping persecution by the Han, they developed distinct cultural identities.13 The ancestors of the She had migrated to the mountains at the borders of Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong by the Sui dynasty (581–618) or shortly thereafter. In the Southeast Uplands, they came into contact with Han settlers, including ancestors of the people who would later become known as Hakka, who arrived in substantial numbers by

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the late Song (thirteenth century). The Han referred to the indigenous people as She, meaning “swidden cultivation,” or She Man (“the Man who practice swidden”). The She and the Hakka have had a complex relationship of mutualistic cultural exchange, periodic open conflict, and a degree of intermingling that has given rise to long-standing debates concerning the origins of the Hakka as a distinctive ethnolinguistic group. Even with a history of “spasmodic inter-ethnic confrontation,” including a series of She revolts from the 1480s to the 1650s, relations between the She and the Hakka have long been close; She and Hakka communities were geographically interspersed; there may have been mixed communities, and intermarriage was probably not uncommon (this remains a subject of debate). Gradually, the She language became, by general consensus, a dialect of Hakka. Nearly all the 330,000 She who inhabit Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang (mostly along the coastline) speak Hakka dialects, even though many now live far from the linguistic source areas of these dialects. In the western Min region (Longyan Prefecture) are two She townships (Guanzhuang and Lufeng), both in Shanghang County. Other Fujian She communities in Fujian are found along the hilly northeast coastal counties of Fu’an, Xiapu, Fuding, and Ningde. In general terms, the She and their settlements are said to be indistinguishable from the Han, for the minority nationality has been thoroughly assimilated into Han culture. Ethnic discrimination against the She by the Han has lasted since the Yuan dynasty (1264–1368), and with most She preferring not to display their ethnic identity. This changed in the 1980s, with the announcement that national minorities would receive preferential treatment in family-planning policy, and each family would be allowed to have more than one child. One of the only distinguishing characteristics of the She today is that all, or nearly all, possess one of three surnames: Lan, Lei, or Zhong. Another common trait is that many She still follow the dietary proscription against eating dogmeat (in marked contrast to most Hakka, for whom it is a delicacy). Superficial appearances notwithstanding, She culture and ethnic identity are without doubt more substantial and more nuanced than they may seem. Though the Hakka arrived in Fujian somewhat later than the She, they entered the province by a similar route. Scholars of the Hakka diaspora from the North China Plain divide the southward migration into a series of three to five stages, or waves. Though the estimated dates of each stage often vary considerably, since they are based on family gene-

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alogies and other historical records, there is general agreement on the arrival of large numbers of Hakka in southeast Jiangxi and southwest Fujian sometime between the late ninth and late thirteenth centuries. The Hakka of the Southeast Uplands are distinctive because most belong to the so-called third-migration wave (having never made the fourthstage journey into Guangdong). In fact, it was the thousands of immigrant families that migrated farther south in the sixteenth century who were first labeled “guest people,” or Hakka, by the Cantonese-speaking natives (the so-called Punti, or native Yue-speaking Han) in southern Guangdong. Leong (1997, 43) argues that a macroregional economic depression in southern China from 1300 to 1500 prevented major Hakka out-migration from the mountain regions of southwest Fujian and northern and eastern Guangdong, and that a more significant expansion, which brought Hakkas into the low foothills surrounding major commercial centers in Lingnan and the southeast coast, did not occur until regional economic upturns began in the sixteenth century. While the origins and migrations of the Hakkas are a subject of ongoing scholarly debate, the assumption of ancient connections to the North China culture hearth is a fundamental part of Hakka cultural pride and an essential component of what could be called the “Hakka mystique.” Reviewing the historiography of the Hakkas, Leong (1997, 28–36) states that the “first and last scholarly investigation of the Hakkas” was Luo Xianglin’s study, entitled Kejia Yanjiu Daolun (Introduction to the study of the Hakkas) (published in 1933). According to Leong (1997, 28), the work became a “Bible for the Hakkas,” containing a comprehensive and definitive statement of their most cherished beliefs about their own cultural identity. Among these was a treatise on the Hakkas’ northern origins and a series of five successive southward migrations. Leong states that Luo’s work is “part scholarship and part ethnic rhetoric” and that it is based on a small sample from Hakka genealogies, which “pose serious problems of elite bias and reliability.” He adds that although numerous variations on the theme of the southward diaspora have been developed from Luo’s work, they provide few new insights on early Hakka origins and migrations. Moser (1985, 242) points out that the Hakka who never left the Southeast Uplands share most of the cultural traits of the Guangdong Hakkas, [but] “having remained in the land where their ancestors were long established, and not having suffered from treatment as outsiders, they understandably lack the sense of group identity that characterizes

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the [latter group].” Still, several traits commonly associated with Hakka culture and character derive from the difficulties of the diaspora. Most Hakka immigrants found that the best land had already been settled, and thus were forced to settle in the highlands and in mountain valleys. The long-term historical struggle to eke out a living on often marginal lands has given the Hakka a reputation for being hardworking, persevering exemplars of pioneer virtues. Moser (1985, 240) notes the following: The Hakka remained adept at the agricultural skills needed to glean a living from land that was considered insufficiently productive by other Sinitic peoples. Generally this meant hillside land and the Hakka were alert to new crops such as sweet potatoes and peanuts that could be grown on land previously unworked.

Leong has contributed new perspectives on the historical cultural ecology of the Hakka by asserting that as lowland Han immigrants to the Southeast Uplands, they had to learn to adapt to the unfamiliar constraints and opportunities of a tropical, upland environment—“an environment atypical for Han Chinese.” This, he says, was accomplished through long contact with the She, during the “Hakka incubation period” in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, when economic decline in surrounding lowland cores impeded out-migration, and the Han settlers, who would later become Hakkas, learned the special skills that allowed them to adapt to, and later to thrive in, what Leong calls a “peripheral ecology.” In agriculture, this would include a period of “borrowing from the preexisting practice of slash-and-burn agriculture of the She people before mastering irrigation using mountain streams and terracing,” and learning to manage a wide variety of crops suited to the marginal soil, climatic, and hydrological conditions of a rugged upland environment. Leong also suggests that the Hakkas may have developed their specialized skills in mining and stone cutting during this time, and that even the Hakkas’ gender division of labor—distinctive among the Han in that both sexes undertake an equal share of field labor —may have been adopted from the She (Leong 1997). A hardscrabble life did not detract from the value that Hakkas placed on education and a love of the great traditions of Chinese culture and learning. Even in remote mountain villages, where only footpaths linked villagers to the outside world, I have observed sacred “scholar peaks” (wenfeng), the summits of which were once made sharper with rocks and dirt to ensure that the village produced scholars. Concern with scholar-

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ship stemmed from a belief that the Hakka were true Chinese, superior to the Yue and Min southerners around them. Moser calls this “the northern mystique,” an important part of the Hakka self-image, which has served to downgrade ties with other local cultures and to connect the individual with the high culture of the nation. As the wenfeng example illustrates, however, veneration of national culture has not made the Hakkas any less attuned to the village environment and the substantial canon of local tradition. On the contrary, the “little traditions” have proved essential for maintaining the superstructure of clan organization and village cosmology. These might include the preservation of family genealogies, the worship of village ancestors and local gods, and the maintenance of good fengshui, all of which continue to be important in shaping the landscape ecology of Hakka villages in the Southeast Uplands today. Another facet of Hakka culture unique among Han subgroups relates to the status of women and the definition of gender roles. Hakka women have been characterized as more self-reliant and even more “liberated” than women of other Sinitic subgroups. These statements are debatable, but certain historical examples do distinguish Hakka women from their other Han counterparts. Hakka women were not subjected to the cruel tradition of foot binding. But the apparent freedom to retain natural feet (or “big feet,” in traditional Chinese parlance) probably resulted largely from the fact that no laborers could be sacrificed. Women have often had to do the work typically reserved for men. Indeed, in the household division of labor in Meihuashan today, many women work in the vegetable garden, the rice paddy, the collective forest, the bamboo forest, and the home. In the bamboo and collective forests, women cut and haul heavy poles and logs for hours up and down steep slopes. On reaching home, their work does not end but shifts to cooking and cleaning. Child care may be a daylong occupation, depending on the age of offspring, and women commonly are seen engaging in all kinds of manual labor with children strapped to their backs. 14 The Hakka emphasis on hard work, social insularity, genealogy, ancestor worship, and the importance of fengshui has led to the formation of distinctive village landscapes. In the long struggle to establish a sense of place, Hakkas in the Southeast Uplands have developed patterns of landscape signification and environmental perception with important implications for nature conservation. Villages within the three nature reserves in this study, for example, exhibit strikingly different land use

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and village structural patterns. While some of these may be viewed as largely a function of subsistence opportunities and adaptation to particular environmental conditions, many are more closely linked to cultural identity and environmental perception. The Meihuashan Nature Reserve lies at the edge of the Southwest Fujian Hakka region, where the Hakka-speaking counties of Shanghang and Liancheng meet the Longyan municipality, home to people who speak a southern Min dialect. The Longxishan Nature Reserve is in Jiangle, a county lying in the second ethnolinguistic area (Hakka-related people of Jiangle). The Wuyishan Nature Reserve lies outside the Hakka culture area (though it overlaps with Shaowu County), in the zone of northern Min speakers. Besides linguistic similarities, the Hakka villages of Meihuashan and Longxishan share certain cultural traits that are manifested in local landscape ecology. These traits are largely absent from the northern Min villages of Wuyishan. The first is long-established local patrilineages. Villages in Meihuashan are single-surname, patrilineal communities with a settlement history of between twenty and thirty generations of in situ habitation. The villages surveyed in Longxishan contain six to nine family surnames, each with lineages of three to eight generations. In Wuyishan, lineage histories were less clearly defined, but most villages have comparable numbers of surnames and generations with those of Longxishan.15 There are striking differences between the cultural landscapes of Hakka villages in the first two reserves, and those of the northern Min villages of Wuyishan. First, there are no rice paddies in the five Wuyishan villages, since all valley land has been allocated to tea cultivation, and slopes are devoted to tea and bamboo groves. Second, many houses in Wuyishan are composed of Chinese fir timbers with bamboo shingle roofs, materials not used in the other regions for decades. Third, and most significant, the Wuyishan villages lack ancestral temples, active earth-god shrines, and substantial sacred forests. Within these three reserves, which are the most important in the Southeast Uplands, the largest and most biologically diverse sacred fengshui forests are found in the villages of Meihuashan, where long-term landscape management by single lineages has ensured the preservation of some of the only patches of primeval broadleaf evergreen forest in the region. In Longxishan, despite the relatively recent arrival and higher degree of transience of family lineages, there are ancestral temples, local earth-god shrines, and fengshui forests of substantial age and areal dimension (though few can compare with those of Meihuashan). In Wuyishan,

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with a high degree of transience and less lineage stability, there are no ancestral temples in five villages surveyed, earth-god shrines have been abandoned, and fengshui forests survive only in vestigial remnants, if at all.16 As a reserve manager in Wuyishan explained, “There are no ancestral temples [citang] here because there are no Hakkas; the Hakkas preserve records and traditions.” While ethnicity may account for some of the cultural distinctiveness of Wuyishan landscapes, Christian missionary influence has led to the abandonment of many traditional cultural features among the villages. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Catholic and Protestant missionary efforts in the region were very active, and the old stone church in Sangang, built by American Dominicans, still holds a prominent place in the village landscape. Several villages in Wuyishan retained their Christian identity after 1949, holding secret Masses and prayer meetings even during the Cultural Revolution, and residents still consider themselves Christian. In some homes, crucifixes and other Catholic icons can be seen within ancestral shrines, having replaced Daoist and Buddhist deities. As one resident in the village of Guadun explained, “We have no village ancestral temple, no earth-god shrines, and no fengshui forests because we are Catholics.” Indeed, in 1995, a shady bamboo grove opposite the few scattered houses contained not the usual isolated stone or cement tumuli that each take advantage of a favorable location in the landscape but rather a cluster of wooden crosses forming a rustic cemetery. There is a correlation between Hakka ancestor worship, the building of ancestral and earth-god shrines, and the cultivation and maintenance of fengshui forests, but the connection between fengshui forest management and subethnic identity is less clear. Fengshui forests can be found in many areas throughout the Southeast Uplands, and their distribution in relation to particular subethnic culture areas is a question that remains unexplored. What is less obscure is that long-term settlement and lineage traditions among the Hakka correspond with intensive village landscape management based on fengshui. Fengshui forests are a persistent feature in upland Hakka villages. This is true not only in western Fujian but also among Hakka villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong. These settlements lie in rugged mountains, where fengshui forests are functional components of the soil and water conservation systems critical for sustainable wet-rice agriculture.17

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Historical Patterns of Land Degradation in the Southeast Uplands

In the early Holocene, an estimated 70 percent of the land in China was covered with forests, in contrast to 8 percent today.18 The accuracy of this estimate is debatable, but deforestation undeniably has occurred on a massive scale. When, where, and how fast it has occurred are important research topics for detailed regional analysis. Today, significant stands of old-growth forest are found only in the Da Xingan, Xiao Xingan, and Changbai Mountain ranges of the northeast, in remote areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Yunnan, and Sichuan, and in river valleys of southern Tibet. The most severely deforested regions are found in North China, especially the North China Plain and the eastern part of the Loess Plateau, areas once covered by deciduous forests. Seven thousand years of agriculture have left large parts of this area nearly devoid of natural vegetation. Another region almost completely deforested is the Sichuan basin. Once covered by subtropical evergreen broadleaf forest, this rich agricultural land has been under cultivation for at least two thousand years.19 The Southeast Uplands region is noted for its relatively high percentage of forest coverage. Fujian is purported to be the province with the highest percentage of forest coverage in China, estimated at 50,034 square kilometers (19,318 sq. mi.), or 41.18 percent. This figure may be attributed largely to the constraints of rugged terrain on traditional land use patterns. Mountains and hills make up 87.5 percent of the land area of the province, and in traditional times, approximately 85 percent of the rural labor force was concentrated on only 10 percent of the land, specifically the arable land in narrow valleys, basins, and plains where wet rice was cultivated.20 Twentieth-century Western observers have described Fujian’s landscapes as degraded, luxuriant, or, more accurately, as varying according to terrain and proximity to dense human populations. John Caldwell, son of the well-known missionary–tiger hunter Harry Caldwell, described this relationship in the first half of the twentieth century: “Americans think of China as a crowded land, with people packed like sardines. The human population is large, but it is concentrated in villages and cities. In Fukien, wilderness is always close at hand” (1953, 35). The persistence of primeval and secondary forest cover in the most mountainous parts of the province, even into the twentieth century, prompted renowned naturalist Arthur Sowerby to comment, “In spite

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of its comparatively dense population, Fukien is wild, inexpressibly wild, and over the greater part of the province the people live very close to the jungle” (Sowerby 1925 in Moser 1985, 163). Sowerby’s depiction of vegetation conditions is highly misleading, however, and there is evidence that widespread deforestation has been common throughout Fujian, even in parts of the more mountainous areas, for more than a thousand years. The severely deforested coastal hills of Xiamen’s hinterlands prompted tiger hunter William Lord Smith to make the broad generalization that “in southeastern China the forests passed ages ago, and there remains today a bare, low-lying country studded with bowlder-covered [sic] hills. Often these scattered rocks reach enormous size — twenty feet or more in height—and in the caves formed among these huge and tumbled blocks, the tigers live” (Smith 1928, 430). The degradation of mountain land in southern China is aptly described by Walter Parham: For a thousand years, soil erosion, landslides, unreliable water supplies, waterlogged soils, and sandstorms have led to the loss of wildlife habitat and extinction of certain animal and plant species. Loss of vegetation sets in motion a variety of interrelated changes that drive the degradation process: increased soil temperatures, reduction of soil organic matter, soil compaction, and erosion. (1995, 16)

These problems are compounded by the prevalence of granite bedrock and associated nutrient-poor soils throughout much of the Southeast Uplands. In the most severely degraded areas, a grassland-scrub vegetation complex characteristic of more arid regions becomes dominant and persistent. Caldwell (1953) provides a more geographically specific description of vegetation conditions in the province in the early 1900s: “Among the barren seacoast hills there are valleys and pockets of tall sword grass. As one advances inland the cover thickens until there are vast tracks of virgin hardwood-and-bamboo forests.” The uneven distribution of forests in Fujian is still evident, and 60 percent of the total forest area lies in the three prefectures of the mountainous interior, Longyan, Sanming, and Nanping. These are the prefectures that comprise the Southeast Uplands region. High forest cover in the interior mountains and some areas in the coastal hills results partly from a history of locally managed sustainable forestry. Indigenous for-

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estry systems based on Chinese fir (known in the region as “shanmu”) and pine (especially Pinus massoniana) account for substantial forest coverage in the Southeast Uplands, comprising approximately 22,876 square kilometers (8,832 sq. mi.), or 18.65 percent of Fujian’s land area and roughly 45.7 percent of the total forest area in 1988. 21 What simple statistics on forest coverage do not reveal, however, is the severity of forest degradation and loss of floristic biodiversity in the decades since 1949. Official records show rapid rates of deforestation in past decades. Forest destruction accelerated during a series of disastrous government movements and policies beginning with the “backyard iron-smelting movement” (daliangangtie) of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1959), which resulted in the famine of 1959–1961. During the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when Mao initiated the “grain first” policy, forest clearance for agriculture reached an all-time high. From the later years of the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of the reform period, deforestation in Fujian reached disastrous levels, and total forest coverage declined from 49.3 percent in 1973 to 39.5 percent in 1978. In the 1980s, market values for Chinese fir increased exponentially, and remote primeval forests in the Southeast Uplands, which previously had been too inaccessible to harvest, were devastated. In many areas of the Southeast Uplands, governmentdirected reforestation campaigns, beginning in the 1950s, helped stabilize deforestation rates through the aerial broadcast of pine seeds in tandem with the abolishment of an ancient tradition of clearing mountain lands with fire. Despite these measures, the quality of forest stands throughout the province has steadily degenerated since 1949. Broadleaf forest coverage, which amounted to 10,930 square kilometers (4,220 sq. mi.) (21.8 percent of the total forest area) in 1988, has continuously decreased, and reforestation schemes throughout the province have been limited to coniferous forest monocultures of pine and Chinese fir. The extensive fire-controlled montane scrub and grassland ecosystem, which covered vast areas of the upland region before 1949, has been succeeded in many areas by Masson and Huangshan pine forests, mixed needleleaf-broadleaf forests, and, to a much lesser extent, by stands of broadleaf evergreen forest. Conifer monoculture is widespread throughout eastern China, which has raised concerns about the ecological consequences, including podzolization of soils, loss of water storage capacity, and loss of plant and animal biodiversity. 22 Villages in the higher elevations of the Southeast Uplands have a dis-

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tinctive history of forest management that differs significantly from lower-elevation Chinese fir agroforestry systems. Lower populations and centuries of integrated agriculture and forestry in the high-altitude zones have given rise to a more intricate mélange of land use and vegetation patterns. The people of Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan have long relied on bamboo (and in Wuyishan, tea) for their economic survival, developing forest management strategies that maintained more diverse forest cover than what predominates at low elevations in the Southeast Uplands and other parts of southern China. A long-term historical view of highland-lowland differences in land and wildlife management makes it clear why state-sponsored nature conservation in southeastern China has taken hold first in the rugged mountainous interior, the realm of highest habitat heterogeneity.

3

Lord of the Hundred Beasts A History of Tigers and People in Southeast China

Chinese literature from the earliest times is full of tiger stories— man-eating tigers, weretigers, symbolic tigers, anti-tiger spells, tiger hunts—tigers in China are like mice in a cheese factory. — Edward Schafer, The Vermilion Bird

Han Chinese settlement of the mountains, hills, and basins south of the Changjiang occurred in a series of wavelike migrations, first from North China and then from the southeast coast. Escaping drought, famine, poverty, political persecution, or invasions by nomadic tribal peoples, individuals and groups left the North China culture hearth, seeking refuge along the coastal plains and interior valleys of the southern subtropics. The plethora of strange vertebrate species and indigenous peoples encountered by early civilian and military settlers as they opened the wild frontier contributed to the Chinese literary record on wild animals and “wild barbarians.” Literary research on wild animals and non-Han peoples in classical literature shows that there was a fine line between the observed and the imaginary, between wildlife, wild people, and wild chimeras. 1 Gradually, the South became the richest grain-producing region in the empire, and urban centers of political and economic power developed on the coast and along the large rivers of the interior. Some of the more remote interior highlands, however, remained unsettled until the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The pacification of wild nature and the removal of threats associated with fierce and deadly animals, such as tigers, were not complete until the 1950s. Even in the 1990s, villagers in the relatively wild mountain areas like Meihuashan viewed such species

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as wild boar, monkeys, and rats as a serious menace to their crops and to fruit, bamboo shoots, and other forest products. Through long contact with wild animals, upland peoples have developed a unique set of cultural values and techniques for wildlife management. These values, beliefs, and practices have developed from both Han and non-Han aboriginal traditions. The human influence on wildlife throughout China has been severe, and the influence of animals on Chinese culture has been vast. This chapter examines four aspects of this ongoing relationship: (1) conflicts that have arisen between humans and wildlife in southeastern China and their relationships to patterns of human migration, settlement, and resource exploitation; (2) methods of management and mitigation of attacks by tigers, Asiatic black bears, leopards, Asiatic dholes (red dogs), and wolves, and how these changed as a result of Western influences in the early twentieth century; (3) depiction of tigers in Chinese myth and folklore, and how this relates to perceptions of wildlife and management strategies past and present; and (4) historical and current significance of wild animals of the Southeast Uplands in Chinese medicine and in nature conservation. Nature conservation efforts include a scheme to save the South China tiger by a reintroduction program based at the Meihuashan Nature Reserve. In Western classical thinking, animals were part of a designed universe, of which humans were a natural, though superior, part. The teleological view of nature first espoused by Aristotle later was taken up within Christian theology, which modified it to assert that animals were placed on the earth to serve humanity. In this latter view, the taming of wildlands and animals, along with the conversion of pagans, were acts of godliness, services that returned Christians to a state of dominion over nature, to a paradise lost in the Fall. 2 This world view was resurrected by missionaries in the mountain landscapes of Fujian. Before this, wild animals were integral to Chinese systems of correlative thinking, and people of southern China have, from the period of earliest Han frontier settlement, used these belief systems, along with more physical and practical approaches, to deal with their fiercest and most colorful nonhuman neighbor, the South China tiger. With this historical background in place, we may begin to view post-1949 developments in environmental perception and nature conservation in a new light. Current efforts to establish nature reserves and protect key species will then be placed within the distinctive cultural context of the Southeast Uplands region.

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Human-Tiger Encounters in Southeastern China

Before the 1950s, the South China tiger ( huananhu) (Panthera tigris amoyensis) inhabited a vast area south of the Changjiang, with outlying populations farther north. The geographic center of its distribution lay in the provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan, and the greatest population concentrations were probably in the mountain regions, where wild ungulate prey was most abundant. Distribution boundaries proposed by Chinese biologists suggest that P. t. amoyensis was limited to subtropical humid central and South China, which extends from the Qinling-Huai River ecotone in the north to the humid tropical fringe of southernmost Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Yunnan. 3 In historical times, this range met or overlapped with those of the Siberian tiger (P. t. altaica) in northeastern China, the Indochinese tiger (P. t. corbetti) in the Southwest, and the Indian tiger (P. t. tigris) in southeast Tibet, but recent research shows that genetic differences between tiger populations are insufficient for classification by subspecies, and morphological differences between the socalled subspecies are now believed to be clinal; that is, phenotypic traits attributed to the South China tiger, such as pelage patterns marked by hollow stripes (in which the reddish yellow background is framed within stripes on the flanks), relatively small body size (second smallest after the Sumatran tiger), and distinctive cranial features may have varied gradually across the tiger’s range in southern China, with gradation into features like those of other tigers once classified as other subspecies. Before human disruption of the ecosystems adjoining their ranges, there were no major physical barriers between these regions (with the possible exception of the Hengduan Mountains between southeast Tibet and China proper), and some degree of genetic exchange occurred over a large part of East, Southeast, and South Asia. 4 Historical interactions between humans and tigers in southern China developed from prehistoric, pre-Han cultural foundations. Long before the first written records of tigers were penned by Han scholars in the early dynasties, tribal peoples living in the hills, mountains, and river valleys south of the Changjiang developed myths and tools to maintain peace, both spiritual and physical, with the great and formidable cats. Linguistic evidence and studies of folklore show that the so-called Man aborigines (ancestors of the Miao-Yao-She peoples), felt a deep cosmological affinity with tigers. According to the Houhan Shu (Book of the later Han dynasty), the Man of eastern Sichuan believed their primary

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ancestor turned into a white tiger after his death, and human sacrifices subsequently were offered to this tiger-ancestor. Archaeological finds from the Ba region show a preponderance of tiger motifs, believed to be associated with a tiger cult. Present-day Miao and Yao folklore contains stories of the transmigration of human souls into the bodies of bloodsucking were-tigers, and of the transformation of living people into tigers, a theme common in later Han folklore. Philologists also believe that the Mandarin word for “tiger” (hu, see glossary) may have derived from Austro-Asiatic and/or Miao-Yao-She roots.5 The most important technological innovation for managing tigers was another aboriginal invention, which appears to have diffused from the Miao and Yao (who are related to the She of Fujian) during the Warring States period (403–221 b.c.), when they began to be assimilated into the Chinese empire in the kingdom of Chu. The word “crossbow” in Mandarin (nu, see glossary) is the same or similar in Austro-Asiatic and Tai-Kadai languages, and probably diffused northward, along with the crossbow itself, into the Han Chinese sphere. The invention of the crossbow as a military weapon is attributed to the people of the kingdom of Chu, and it was first used by non-Han peoples there as a bow trap to kill game.6 In a remarkable example of cultural persistence, She and Han tiger hunters in the Southeast Uplands relied on crossbow traps as recently as the 1980s, when more modern technologies had long since become ineffective as a result of the rarity and reclusiveness of surviving tigers. As Han settlers gradually filled the southern frontier, aboriginal peoples in many areas were assimilated into Han culture, and settlements sprang up across mountain regions that previously had been wild and remote from lowland towns and cities. With this increased settlement came greater exploitation of mountain resources and a plethora of environmental disturbances that put humans in greater conflict with tigers. This can be documented through such historical records as local gazetteers (difangzhi), especially county gazetteers (xianzhi), to analyze changes in the distribution of the South China tiger and the nature of humantiger encounters through time. The compilation of gazetteer records first became systematized on a national level at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, in 1368, when local governments were required by imperial law to maintain records of important historical events, as well as economic, political, and demographic data. Since then, records of wildlife in the Southeast China Uplands have been fairly numerous. Though gazetteer records have been used for the study of Chinese environmental history

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and historical geography, this is one of the first attempts to analyze patterns of human-wildlife encounters in relation to anthropogenic environmental disturbance. 7 Gazetteer records of tiger problems in four southeastern provinces (Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Guangdong) provide what may be the longest written chronological account of humanwildlife interactions of any region of comparable size in the world. For this study, 511 records were gleaned from gazetteers in the Ancient Books Collection at Fujian Normal University. Many more gazetteer records on tigers probably exist in other collections in China and abroad. I focus on the tiger in part because it appears more frequently than any other species of wild animal in gazetteer records on the Southeast China Uplands. There are also records on Asiatic black bears (Selenarctos thibetanus), wolves (Canis lupus), red dogs (Cuon alpinus), macaques ( Macaca mulatta and Macaca thibetana), wild boar (Sus scrofa), and rats (among eight species of Rattus), as well as one mention of wild elephants (Elephas maximus). These species are mentioned only sporadically, and with the exception of perennial crop damage caused by wild boar and rats, they do not appear to have constituted a serious hazard to human welfare. Most of the wildlife records in the gazetteers tell of the appearance of tigers in human settlements, or of casualties to humans and wildlife caused by tigers. Casualties caused by bears, wolves, and red dogs, and crop damage caused by rats, boar, and monkeys, are mentioned as well, but with much less frequency. Though tiger attacks were sporadic, they often involved many human and livestock deaths and injuries. Along with sightings and other encounters, they were recorded in sections of the gazetteers called “shouzai,” or bestial disasters, which rarely lasted more than a few months to a year. This may indicate that a few problem tigers could cause a lot of damage, and as is well documented, certain individuals could become prone to preying on humans and livestock. 8 During the roughly 1,900-year period under examination, the data show that more than ten thousand people were killed or injured by tigers in the four provinces in question. This figure would be much higher, but 395 records did not specify the numbers of casualties. 9 Encounters occurred in 146 of 362 present-day counties and administrative cities (40 percent) from across the four-province region, and span the years 48 c.e. to 1953 (figs. 4 and 5). The records indicate that incidents involving tigers were taken very seriously by the government, and even the sighting of a tiger in or near a county seat was sufficient to warrant recording. Tiger attacks on humans and livestock were dutifully recorded, though with

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varying degrees of specificity and detail as to the number of tigers involved, the number of people involved, and the nature of the incident. All the records include the year(s) and location(s) in which incidents occurred. The very earliest record discovered, penned in Jiujiang County, Jiangxi Province, in the twenty-fourth year of the Han emperor Guangdi (a.d. 48), says simply, “[A] tiger[s] injured [a] person [people]” ( hu shang ren). Of the eight tiger records from the four provinces before a.d. 1000, seven describe sightings of white tigers. White tigers always have been extremely rare (only two recorded sightings after a.d. 1000), and their physical beauty secured them a central place in Chinese cosmology from early times. Records of white tiger sightings may well have had political or cosmological significance, representing a contemporary or imminent state of humane government and social tranquility. 10 The lack of evidence of tiger attacks or problems with tigers in general during the first millennium suggests that attacks on humans were much less frequent than in the following millennium, or that tiger attacks were not recorded as frequently. Tiger attacks possibly were not deemed worthy of inclusion in gazetteers because they were so common; also, before about the fourteenth century, the gazetteer record is simply too sparse to be reliable. Despite these and other limitations of the gazetteer record, cultural and environmental variables should not be ruled out as factors in the increase in recorded tiger attacks in the second millennium. Indeed, such attacks almost certainly derived from demographic and social factors that resulted in unprecedented degradation of wildlife habitat and that routinely placed people in closer proximity to tigers. While analyzing broad historical patterns of environmental change, however, we must bear in mind that individual records are themselves historical artifacts. As such, they are signs that can reveal as much about culturally constructed conceptions of nature as they do about the natural phenomena being described. Beginning in the mid-1500s, Han migrations to areas south of the Changjiang, along with natural population growth, caused an overflow of people from the original walled cities and other valley settlements into unsettled or sparsely settled uplands. Under conditions of burgeoning human population and the disruption of upland ecosystems, conflicts with tigers were inevitable. In fact, the records indicate that the highest incidence of human-tiger conflicts in all four provinces coincides pre-

Figure 4. A temporal profile of human-tiger encounters in Southeast China. Recorded incidents increased dramatically in the mid-1500s and peaked in the last quarter of the 1600s, with a smaller peak in the late 1800s. The first rise corresponds to a period of increased anthropogenic disturbance throughout the greater Southeast Uplands. Records of tiger depredation may have held political significance, peaking in periods of political instability in the late Ming, the early Qing, and, once again, the late Qing.

Figure 5. Distribution of human-tiger encounters in Southeast China. Records of tiger attacks and sightings form a widespread pattern across the greater Southeast Uplands. Interactions from the Wuyi-Daiyun core area are particularly numerous. The large number of encounters in Fujian Province reflects the location of the archives where data were collected.

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cisely with a period of unprecedented environmental disturbance from the mid-1500s to the 1800s, when montane forests were being cleared and settled by a massive wave of migrants and settlers. Of 511 incidents involving tigers, 363 (71 percent) occurred during the period between 1550 and 1850. The late Ming–early Qing immigrants were known as “guest people” ( kemin), or “shed people” (pengmin),11 because they constructed simple huts in the forests and scrub, and settled into the difficult job of transforming the rugged wilds into economic bases for the production of subsistence and commercial crops and forest products. While the macrohistorical conditions that led to this wave of internal migration are still under investigation, several scholars contend that the most important factors were the commercialization of agriculture along the coasts of Guangdong and Fujian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Commercial crops replaced food crops, and changing land tenure relations led to a concentration of land ownership, with the result that many previously land-owning peasants became tenants. Many of the migrants were compelled to leave their homes in the heavily overpopulated Fujian and Guangdong coastal plains because of shortages of arable land. Overpopulated areas in the interior basins and mountain regions provided another source area for impoverished migrants. The shed people were drawn to the abundant lands in sparsely populated highlands of the same or neighboring provinces. An entry in a Nanjing County (Fujian) gazetteer (n.d., Morita in Averill 1983, 90) describes this population of wanderers: [Those who] depend on the mountains and ravines, cut grass, bind it into dwellings and live [in the grass huts] are called shed people. . . . They are mostly from Ting, Chuan, Zhang, and Yong [areas of southern Fujian; that is, present-day Changting, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Yongding]. After three or four years the land’s fertility declines and they often move elsewhere.

Besides commercialization and the divestment of peasants from their lands, Averill (1983, 87) lists other “push factors” for migrants from the large population centers: “large population[s] pressing on limited food supplies, unsettled political and social conditions, and government resettlement policies.” The political and social unrest that swept the southeast coast during the Ming-Qing transitional period was largely the result of the activities of anti-Manchu rebels, such as Zheng Chenggong and Wu Sangui, who fought off Manchu domination until the 1680s. Political

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chaos and social dislocation were intensified by rampant piracy and a reactionary government policy of forcing people out of the most fertile and populated coastal areas, which might invite the depredation of pirates and rebels. Displaced peoples had little recourse but to cross the South China Sea to Taiwan or Southeast Asia, or to journey to the interior, where wild, unsettled, or sparsely populated mountain land was abundant. 12 Leong (1997, 98) gives an alternative explanation for the diaspora, hypothesizing that “pull factors” may have been more important than “push factors.” According to this theory, three converging forces were behind the interior migration: (1) a regional economic boom created surplus capital in the southeast (especially in the Zhangzhou and Tingzhou regions) for investment in cash crop farming; (2) surplus labor became available in southwest Fujian and northeast Guangdong, where Hakkas, who had long been accustomed to using She swidden techniques for clearing land, sought economic opportunities beyond their increasingly crowded homelands; and (3) depopulation of certain interior zones as a result of harsh treatment by local power holders made peripheral mountain zones available for productive commercial enterprises. In addition, many remote areas of the interior highlands south of the Changjiang were designated “government lands” (guantian), and this was true of most of the Southeast Uplands region of Fujian. These areas were largely ungovernable and ungoverned, and as Menzies (1988a, 89) notes: Neither the Ming nor the Qing governments seem to have had an explicit policy with regard to [southern] wildlands. Agriculture, the economic foundation of the Chinese state, was seen as the highest and best use for land. Wildlands were of interest in so far as they posed a threat to orderly government as a refuge for unruly elements such as the Shed People or rebels, or when flooding and siltation, presumed to be the result of upland forest clearance, threatened the irrigated agriculture of the lowlands.

Ironically, some coastal emigrants found free land in areas that had been designated “closed mountains” ( jinshan) during the Ming, where cultivation and settlement were forbidden because of the prevalence of bands of outlaws. Many highland areas were as politically and economically unstable as the coast, and some were overpopulated as well, contributing to a continuing stream of vagrants in need of land. Consequently, the shed people were not defined by a single ethnicity or dialect

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group, but comprised Han peoples (including the Hakkas, Minbei, and Minnan peoples) and non-Han peoples (including the She, Yao, and Miao). Many shed people practiced short-cycle pioneer swidden, especially in the early stages of mountain clearance, cutting and burning the montane vegetation, planting crops, and moving on after the soil was exhausted. Hakka migrants often moved in tandem with She swidden cultivators, who excelled at clearing wild forest land and planting the first crops. As the migrant population increased, large tracts of montane forests, scrub lands, and meadows were heavily degraded. Erosion and siltation of streams that fed irrigation systems in the long-established valley settlements often led to violent conflicts with local inhabitants, who regarded the itinerant shed people as intruders. In other instances, mountain lands were rented to the shed people under long-term lease agreements that gave the tenant usufruct rights to the surface, or “skin” (pi) of the land, while the owner kept the “bones.” This was common in Fujian, where it was known as the “One field, two landlords” (yitian liangzhu) system. Typically a “mountain lord” (shanzhu) controlled the land, while shed people had usufruct rights to all the resources that grew on the land. Gradually, many shed people were integrated into the various societies and economies of the mountain regions where they had first settled, and they came to be seen by many locals as important agents of landscape reclamation. A passage from an eighteenth-century Funing prefectural gazetteer shows that local officials had discerned an important connection between land tenure conditions and the degree of destructiveness of land use practices: Most of the land in Fujian is crown land, with no prohibition on cutting timber. Any branches or twigs that grow are burned or taken away, and they even dig up the roots to use as cooking fuel so that nothing can grow again and the mountains become barren. However, where the mountain is owned, industrious owners plant pine, Cunninghamia [Chinese fir], tung oil, and tea oil, earning themselves considerable profits. (Menzies 1988a, 89)

As shed people began to settle into more permanent forms of sedentary agriculture, pioneer swidden became less common, and farmers had to occupy themselves with controlling crop and livestock predators. Records from a Nanjing County (Fujian) gazetteer show that subsistence

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and commercial crops of both New and Old World origin were important components of the new economy, and that removing wildlife from the immediate vicinity was one of the first steps in the cultivation process: [The shed people] bring the seeds of maize, sweet potatoes, tong [tung] trees, tea, cedar, lacquer, indigo, yams and potatoes; cut the thorns and brambles; drive out the foxes [denoting species of the dog family, small wild cats, weasels, mongooses, and civets], and plant. (Morita in Averill 1983, 90)

Averill (1983, 93) points out that the diversity of crops shows that there was “much more to the settlement of the Yangzi highlands than peasant realization of, as Ho (Ping-ti, 1959) phrases it, ‘the economic advantages of maize and sweet potatoes.’” In fact, as Averill shows, the earliest shed people, arriving in the mid-1500s, served as a catalyst for regionwide (and, I would add, national and international) interest in mountain resources of all types. Examples from the relatively remote areas where the nature reserves in this study are found today provide a case in point. In Meihuashan and Longxishan, this was the period when bamboo paper production reached its zenith; in Wuyishan, tea production for foreign markets expanded rapidly; and in Daiyunshan (Dehua), porcelain china made from local kaolinite was produced at unprecedented volume (largely for European buyers). These products were important in domestic trade and in world markets from Southeast Asia to Europe and the Americas. Though each of these areas experienced dramatic increases in resource exploitation, there was variation in the immigration, settlement, and land tenure patterns of shed people. As a result, the kinds and severity of land degradation varied from place to place. 13 Dehua County, in Fujian Province, suffered some of the earliest effects of widespread destruction of montane wildlife habitat, and as a consequence, some of the earliest disastrous tiger problems occurred there. The following account, written in the early Ming dynasty, provides a glimpse of what would later occur in many other counties: In the 20th year of Hongwu [1387], in Dehua County there were tiger problems. There were black [melanic] tigers [heihu] all over.14 In broad daylight, they ate people in their own homes. At night, they pushed open doors and entered houses. When people were killed in one house, they fled to other peoples’ homes. Crops were abandoned and returned to the wild. (Dehua County 1940, 16)

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According to the records, by the fifteenth century, “tiger problems” ( huzai, huhuan, or hubao) were becoming increasingly common in all four provinces of the southeast. Widespread deforestation in the mountains is known to have caused increases in flooding and erosion, but it also appears to have brought about an increase in tiger attacks. In Fujian, tiger problems were widespread, especially in the Wuyi-Daiyun Range. The northeast coast, too, appears to have had a particularly high frequency of attacks, with Ningde (formerly Funing) County having the highest number of incidents in this survey (twenty-one). This may have been because of the terrain, since the region contains a mountain corridor extending out upon a broad coastal plain, where extensive agricultural land surrounds peninsulas of montane habitat. The disruptive human onslaught into the marginal uplands of interior southern China led to an increase in tiger attacks not only on village peoples and their livestock but also on walled towns and cities. In Jiangxi Province, for example, there were high frequencies in the relatively densely populated alluvial plain of Lake Poyang and the Gan River. Similarly, in Hunan, tiger encounters were widespread throughout the province, but a high number of incidents is reported in the Lake Dongting–Xiang River basin (Changsha, Liuyang, and Hengyang). By contrast, events in northwest Hunan, a rugged and sparsely populated region dominated by Miao and Tujia nationalities, may have been underreported and/or remained beyond the wave of massive Han frontier settlement. In Guangdong as well, the estuaries of the Pearl River’s deltaic plain, Guangzhou and Shunde, continued to record as many conflicts with tigers as did more remote mountain zones. As with Hunan, a dearth of data from the western and northwestern border areas of the province, where Yao and Zhuang minorities predominated, may reflect a gap in record keeping, less-intensive Han settlement, less environmental disturbance, or some combination of these factors. From these records, we can surmise that beyond the most densely populated urban areas and intensively cultivated plains, human interference had not yet caused a decrease in regional tiger populations in the seventeenth century. Instead, there was an increase in man-eating behavior and attacks on livestock, and tiger populations in rural areas did not diminish as long as there were nearby hill or mountain refugia. 15 The following passages illustrate the magnitude of the periodic crises that faced settlements throughout the region:

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In the third year of Ming Tianshun [1459], tigers attacked the villages near Beiyi Mountain in Xinghua County [Fujian]. Human and livestock casualties numbered in the hundreds. In the daytime, some people ventured abroad in groups, and even some of these were attacked. In the mountains, all travel ceased. (Fujian Gazetteer 1490, Juan 81, 24b) In the fourteenth year of Qing Shunzhi [1657], in winter, there were many tigers in Tiaohua township in northwestern Ningxiang County [Fujian]. Over 100 people were eaten. The fields were abandoned and returned to the wild. (Ningxiang County 1941, 14a)

In many areas throughout southeastern China, tiger attacks continued through the mid-twentieth century, though they were probably underreported during the tumultuous first half of this century, when ongoing warfare and social dislocation may have precluded careful record keeping. Westerners’ accounts of the Southeast Uplands region during this period show that tigers were still a serious threat throughout Fujian Province. John Caldwell, son of Methodist missionary and tiger hunter Harry Caldwell, describes the county seat of Fuqing (on the coast south of Fuzhou) in the early 1900s with a stark explanation of the need for security against the wilds: The walls were high and the gates were closed for another reason. Fuqing lies in the heart of the south China tiger country. Every home outside the city was locked at night, the cattle, pigs, and precious water buffalo brought into the inner court for safety. Even so there were years when the annual toll from tigers ran to over five hundred people in Father’s four districts. (Caldwell 1953, 28) 16

Even with high walls and sometimes with moats around towns and cities, tigers often found a way inside. In 22.5 percent of the gazetteer records, tigers entered large human settlements, many if not most of which were walled. Foreigners in Fujian at the turn of the century state that tigers entered villagers’ homes with some frequency. Another phenomenon frequently mentioned in the gazetteer records that contradicts “normal” tigrine behavior is the presence of “groups” (qun) of tigers. The Caldwells observed the same phenomenon, however, and on one occasion they saw five tigers together in Fuqing County, Fujian. The majority of human casualties was probably attributable to one or a few man-eaters hunting individually. A particularly ferocious man-eater was

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said to have killed 250 people in Gutian County (presumably within a period of a few years), and Caldwell’s description of the carnage, as well as the fear that spread among the people, is reminiscent of many gazetteer records of earlier centuries: “Men tending their herds or walking along the trails disappeared, or were found mangled and half eaten. Crops were going untended; paralysis began to settle on the hills. . . . People were afraid to stir from their houses” (Caldwell 1953, 38). Strategies for Tiger Management Documented in the Gazetteer Records

Through time, tiger management strategies were developed in response to crises that threatened the orderly functioning of villages, towns, and cities. Methods of mitigating disasters or preempting them at an early stage were often decided on by local government officials. Management tools included spontaneous efforts by groups of local people to drive away a marauding tiger; organized reconnaissance and counterattacks by local military forces or conscripted militias; enlisting hunter-specialists (or sorcerers) to trap or kill tigers; and offering prayers, usually by local officials, to local gods of the city, town, or mountains. As with other forms of natural disaster, local officials were held responsible for mediating with heaven to bring an end to tiger attacks. As a nexus between heaven and earth in the Chinese state religion and a representative of the emperor, the county or prefectural magistrate was expected to uphold the Mandate of Heaven. Good government meant a harmonious and prosperous peace between people and nature. A Confucian proverb stated that “an oppressive government is worse than a tiger.” 17 And Hammond (1991) notes, “Many Chinese, influenced by practices and beliefs that linked rulers and other authority figures to religious forces, supposed the statement to mean that a ruler’s subjects would be free of the depredations of tigers if the ruler were truly benevolent.” That the burden of responsibility rested at least partially on the shoulders of government officials is attested to by their involvement in about one of every ten recorded cases. The very act of keeping official records of tiger encounters was part of an effort to monitor and manage a natural (or supernatural) hazard. 18 If we consider the increased frequency of records on tiger depredation shown in figure 4 from the perspective of the record keepers, some interesting patterns emerge. The climax in tiger depredation in the late 1600s coincided not only with increased internal migrations (and envi-

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ronmental disruption) but also with the disintegration of state control under the Ming and a transition to foreign rule under the Qing. Problems of state legitimation may have impelled the local literati who made and transcribed the record to include more natural disasters, for these were signs of cosmological disharmony that had serious implications for the maintenance of political power. In fact, gazetteer research on the frequency of typhoons in Guangdong Province reveals a peak in the late 1600s, resembling the pattern of tiger attacks described above.19 Records hinting at a connection between seemingly causally unconnected physical events, such as typhoons and tiger attacks, may indicate an effort by local officials to promote the notion that the Mandate of Heaven did not favor the new Manchu rulers of China. The number of cases in which officials offered prayers in response to serious tiger problems (6.4 percent of all records), and the high rate of assumed efficacy (about 73 percent), reveal the extent to which tigers were viewed as part of an active and purposive cosmos, a cosmos that often responded, for better or worse, to the prayers and actions of human beings. Some records even state that tigers submitted to the entreaties of local authorities by “leaping” into bamboo or granite tiger traps (see pl. 4), or by walking into ground-set bow (pl. 1) or gun traps, to be killed in a kind of suicide (zibi). The following cases from Fujian show how official prayers, forceful action, and divine intervention were often combined to restore order: In spring of the seventh year of Ming Chongzhen [1634], in Pinghe county, there were tigers on the rampage in the mountain forests. . . . There were countless attacks on people and livestock. . . . The county magistrate pleaded with the city god and the mountain spirits for mercy. As a result, one tiger was killed, two tigers sacrificed themselves [zibi], and two tigers fled. The disaster was then quelled. The local person, Zhu Longxiang, had a tiger-destroying sign (miehuji). 20 (Pinghe County 1719, Juan 10, 1 2a) In the 39th year of Ming Wanli [1611], in Luoyuan county, a bunch of tigers attacked people. The county magistrate, Chen Liangke, prayed to the gods and enlisted a She [nationality] person to use poison arrows [a crossbow trap with poison arrows]. [The hunter] killed four tigers. The terror came to an end. (Luoyuan County 1722, Juan 29, 1b)

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These accounts demonstrate that there was a perceived connection between the moral rectitude of officials, as shown in their pious petitions to heaven, and their ability to halt the depredation of nature’s fiercest beast. If the tiger answered to heaven (tian), then according to this belief system, we might reasonably ask why heaven from time to time was determined to destroy so many people. Was the tiger an agent of righteousness, carrying out the will of the gods; a henchman for “mountain devils” (shanxiao); or an animal that acted on its own volition but could be swayed by greater powers? Chinese tiger folklore shows that tigers played all of these roles and more. The Tiger in Chinese Cosmology

The tiger has left a deep and lasting impression on Chinese culture for many reasons, not least of which are its size, its beauty, and the relative frequency of its predation on humans and livestock under conditions of environmental stress. Somewhat like the lion in Western tradition, the tiger was known as “the king of a hundred beasts” (baishouzhiwang, see glossary). Dominion over other animals was not the only thing, though, or even the primary thing, that gave the tiger such preeminence in traditional cosmology and lore. In medieval Europe and post-Columbian North America, large predators until the late twentieth century have commonly been viewed as an evil scourge, to be wiped out without hesitation, apology, or reflection. As we have seen, in southeast China depredation by tigers (as well as leopards, wolves, and red dogs) was a serious problem. These animals, however, were not viewed simply as large, sinister menaces to humans and livestock, as were grizzly bears and wolves in European and Euro-American culture. Though near-extermination has been the final outcome in the last phases of the ancient and ongoing human-tiger relationship in China, the cultural significance, especially the high aesthetic, totemic, spiritual, and medicinal value of the tiger in China, has had no parallel in the belief systems of Christian Europe or Euro-America. 21 According to the Huhui, or “Tiger Compendium,” a sixteenth-century collection of centuries of tiger lore, tigers were both feared and revered. It was commonly held that tigers, like people, could think rationally, and tigers sometimes were held responsible for their crimes. Tiger calamities were seen either as a natural manifestation of poor government, an idea related to the Mandate of Heaven concept, or as the

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just dessert of the victims, who in many instances had offended local, regional, or universal deities through wanton acts of forest cutting or other transgressions.22 According to legends in the Huhui, less-righteous tigers were sometimes taken to court and tried for their crimes against humanity, and some stories hold that they were required by heaven to pray for divine permission to kill humans.23 One management strategy for problem tigers, an approach that shows Daoist sensibilities, was to leave them alone —they supposedly would go away of their own accord. 24 The legendary ferocity and righteousness of tigers has made them a popular talisman throughout China (and in many Asian cultures), and the power of tiger representations depends on the presence of the character for “king / lord /emperor,” the imprimatur of heaven, emblazoned in the stripes on the tiger’s forehead. Hats with tiger-face motifs were and still are, though less frequently today, worn by babies in China to ward off illness. A doting parent would bundle up an infant or toddler in layer upon layer to keep its body warm, and seal its head with a tiger cap to ward off evil spirits. The front of the cap bore the intricately stylized face of the beast, with fangs bared and eyes burning. On the tiger’s forehead was the character for “wang” (see “wang” character in “baishouzhiwang,” in glossary), denoting the animal’s royal supremacy in the animal world. Some caps picture another tiger, lilliputian, sitting on the forehead above the character for “lord,” and if one looks carefully at the forehead of this tiny tiger, there is another, even more minute version of the same character. This stylistic reiteration amplifies the power of the tiger icon. The three horizontal bars and one intersecting vertical line of the “wang” character represent not only one who rules but more precisely one who mediates between, and ultimately unites, heaven and earth by holding an axial position between heaven above and earth below. The importance and persistence of the tiger-as-king myth is exemplified by Harry Caldwell’s account of the evaluation of dead tigers by local literati, who were often on hand with other villagers to inspect tigers he killed in Fujian in the early twentieth century: The Chinese character meaning “lord” or “emperor” must also be found in the markings of the face of a tiger if it is to be a real tiger of whom devils and demons are afraid. I had shot one handsome male tiger with two horizontal and one vertical white lines in the forehead not exactly to the liking of the scholars, and this animal too was dis-

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credited. Such a one is said never to have been born of tiger parents, but to have emerged through some strange metamorphosis from some animal or fish living in the sea. (Caldwell 1924, 47) 25

The tiger guardian is an important motif in vernacular architecture in China, too, found in protective roof figurines and amulets hung on walls and above doors. 26 In the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, I observed a tiger talisman sculpted out of clay hanging on the wall of a rammedearth house in the village of Zhongping. Villagers told me it was there to scare away evil spirits (pl. 2). Two final additional locations where the tiger symbol appears in Chinese cosmology are in geomancy ( fengshui or dili) and in toponyms (place-names). In fengshui, the white tiger is associated with a hill or mountain west of an ideal site (with the green dragon to the east). Rural villagers still commonly refer to this symbol in locating propitious sites for graves, houses, and temples. Finally, place-names that include the word “tiger” can be found in virtually every county across southern China, especially in reference to mountains and other geomorphic features. In Dehua County, Fujian, there is even a village named “Fierce Tiger” (Menghu). The tiger’s presence in cosmology and everyday life, from fengshui to talismanic iconography, in religious symbolism, literature, fine art, and place-names, gives it a very different position in relation to Chinese culture from that of the gray wolf, grizzly bear, or any other wild animal in relation to traditional Judeo-Christian European and Euro-American cultures. For instance, after the rise of Christianity, no mere animal could serve the will of God by enforcing celestial laws, as did the tiger in numerous examples from Chinese folklore. 27 Another aspect of the traditional relationship between humans and wildlife in China, and one persisting to the present, is the importance of wild animals in Chinese medicine. Though medieval Europeans also believed that particular parts of certain wild plants and animals held medicinal value, this belief did not develop into the complex, systematic ethnoscience that Chinese medicine has become. This system of knowledge was collected in such classics as the Herbal (Bencao), and in recent times has been propagated and institutionalized through governmentsponsored scientific research and writing in such books as The Guide to Economically Important Animals of China (1962) and The Guide to Medicinal Animals of China (1983). 28 The tonic, curative, or empowering effects

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believed to come from ingesting the meat, bones, fur, or organs of wild animals represent natural power in its purest form. Tiger-penis soup, which now fetches more than $100 (here and throughout, dollar amounts are expressed in U.S. dollars) a bowl in Chinatowns around the world, is consumed by males to increase sexual virility. Tiger-bone wine is ingested to treat rheumatism, weakness, or paralysis. Whiskers are used for toothaches, eyeballs for epilepsy, brain for laziness and pimples, and the tail is thought to be good for various skin diseases. On a more fundamental and abstract level, ingestion of tiger has long been seen as a way to reconnect with the cosmos. Within the correlative thinking schemes and empirical processes through which Chinese medicine developed, this paradigm has become highly elaborate, and the human body has been viewed as a microcosm of the universe, each organ associated with one of the five elements (wuxing), a certain color, certain sounds, and in the wild pharmacopeia, with particular parts of certain animal species. Despite ongoing efforts to find more scientific rationale for the use of wild animals as medicine, correlative thinking and cosmological harmony remain seminal subtexts. This holistic approach to health and the body has considerable appeal to many people (including New Age Westerners), but the global commercialization of wild medicinals has had grave consequences for wildlife conservation worldwide. The Bible, the Gun, and the Butterfly Net

Given the kind of reverence for (or ambivalent obsession with) the tiger that is evident in Chinese art, literature, folklore, and medicine, we might ask, what caused the extermination of the “lord of one hundred beasts” throughout most of its range? Tiger parts were highly valued as medicine, and man-eating tigers were often killed, but would total destruction of the species have been a human prerogative, or even a conceivable event, according to traditional Chinese views of nature? The settlement of large numbers of Westerners in China, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a profound influence on indigenous views of nature and natural resources and, ultimately, on the treatment of wildlife. Perhaps the first written Western account of the Southeast Uplands and the South China tiger came from the legendary Marco Polo. In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Polo allegedly journeyed overland from what is today Zhejiang Province into the mountains of what is today northern Fujian. He followed the pass that leads to the

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Jianxi River and boated to the Min River at Nanping, which was the main trade route to Fuzhou. Of the Min Valley hinterlands of Fuzhou, he wrote: “Over hills and along valleys, you continually pass towns and villages, where the necessities of life are in abundance, and there is much field sport, particularly of birds. . . . In these parts there are lions of great size and strength” (Marsden 1961, 300–301, in Moser 1985). 29 Missionaries and specimen collectors in Fujian during the early twentieth century have left accounts of the natural history that far exceed mere descriptions of an exotic landscape and its inhabitants. Harry Caldwell, a Methodist missionary from Tennessee who was also a hunter and naturalist, wrote a detailed narrative of his experiences with the people and wildlife of western and central Fujian from around the turn of the century to the 1920s (figs. 6 and 7). His autobiographical book, Blue Tiger, provides useful information on the South China tiger and many other species of mammals and birds. It also describes local perceptions of

Figure 6. Methodist minister Harry Caldwell, with a tiger he killed in Fujian. He wrote of this specimen, “I shot the animal with a .22-caliber high-power Savage rifle at close range, after the animal had charged me from a long distance. This is a bit of real missionary work I have greatly enjoyed, and incidentally have found most helpful in the preaching of the gospel.”

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wildlife, including the “superstitions” that Caldwell vowed to destroy through preaching the gospel and hunting. The book provides a record of the encounter between Western and rural Fujianese concepts and practices of wildlife management. It also reveals how advances in weapons technology and the desacralization, or at least demystification, of wildlife could precipitate a major shift in ecological dynamics, changes that resulted in the virtual annihilation of large carnivores like the tiger. Until the 1950s, tigers were common from the Changjiang south to Guangdong Province, and hunting took place mostly in mountainous areas devoid of forest cover. Man-eating was common in many areas and provided a convenient excuse for Westerners to impress locals with their superior weaponry. Caldwell tied live goats to stakes, usually near densely vegetated ravines in an otherwise treeless landscape, to lure tigers within rifle range. He viewed tiger hunting as “a means for advancing the knowledge of the Christian God in the heart of Asia” (1924, 13). In the Fuzhou–eastern Min region, he sought to refute local beliefs about

Figure 7. Harry Caldwell and friends with quarry taken in Nanping (Fujian) in December 1921.

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so-called spirit cats, which were protected by local deities.30 These animals were thought to be imbued with spiritual powers, which made them impervious to bullets or dangerous for humans to harass, and were part of a shamanistic religious cult. Caldwell noted that the magico-religious prohibitions against killing the animals were stronger than game laws would have been, had they been part of the legal code. Blind to any possible conservation functions in these customs (despite being an ardent and gifted naturalist himself ), the minister sought to portray local mores as aberrant superstitions: These so-called cats include the civets, wild dogs, and foxes, all of which have worked great havoc among the small pigs and poultry of the peasant people. Porcupine, pangolin, and small deer are also here in abundance, all with marked medicinal values, so it is safe to say that at one time hunters frequented this region with bow and gun. But things suddenly changed one day; the gods changed them, and finally established the fact that these animals were not flesh and blood at all, but evil spirits incarnate in the denizens of the wilds! . . . Since that day in the long ago the superstition about spirit cats has grown as mold grows, until the very life of the ignorant people of this part of China has become blighted. The woman into whom has entered one of these spirit cats is as popular as the priest and must be consulted on every imaginable occasion. She is a diviner of spirits and interpreter of omens and dreams. Unto her is committed the fate of the living, and in her is the voice of the dead. As Saul consulted the witch in the days of his trouble, so do the people of China commit their all into the hands of her into whom has entered the spirit of a devil cat. This female conjurer and spirit medium decides the destinies of millions of people, while foxes and wild cats enjoy an immunity due to a superstition stronger than law. (Caldwell 1924, 26)

Caldwell ridiculed the local belief system that gave these animals “immunity,” and he set out to prove that his gun and his god provided immunity from superstition about devils, shamans, and the magic powers of animals. Accompanied by the naturalist Arthur Sowerby, he agreed to observe the “spirit cats” on a certain sacred mountain only under the condition that if he could successfully kill one (which local hunters said was impossible), the people would have to abandon their belief in the

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“fox devils,” and “were never again to consult the temples and shrines in order to ascertain the will of the gods regarding the hunt.” Needless to say, Caldwell prevailed in this mission. Caldwell was not alone. Another Westerner, William Lord Smith, in an article in Natural History magazine in 1928, tells of a tiger drive near Xiamen in which locals, armed only with tridents, encircled a tiger at its den in the boulder-strewn montane grasslands, where the author finished it off with a bullet (fig. 8). Other foreign naturalists were also active in the Southeast Uplands at this time, including the director of the Asiatic Expeditions for the American Museum of Natural History, Roy Chapman Andrews (for whom Sowerby worked). Many new species of birds had been discovered in Wuyishan by French naturalist Père Armand Davids, 31 and European naturalists of less renown continued to work with and employ local peo-

Figure 8. Trident-bearing Minnan hunters with quarry taken in Nanping [Fujian] in December 1921. The photo was made near the tiger’s lair, in a typical mountain landscape of granite boulders and caves. William Lord Smith, who organized the hunt and took this photograph for an article published in Natural History in 1928, finished off the tiger with a rifle shot.

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ple, collecting specimens there through the first half of the twentieth century. 32 In fact, all the naturalists mention that local people were employed as hunter-guides and specimen collectors. From about 1900 on, there was a transfer of values and technology, as well as the formation of a new market for wildlife parts and specimens. This period marked the beginning of a transformation in local perceptions of wild animals— from supernatural beings to natural objects for scientific investigation, and from a source of sacred medicine sold in local and regional markets to commercial commodities to be sold in a growing international market. The vast environmental changes to come as the Chinese Communist Party attained power were driven by new definitions of “natural resources” and a revolution in the speed and thoroughness with which natural resources could be exploited. Wildlife and other forest resources became commodities, the sole purpose of which was to serve the economic needs of “the people.” Before assessing the damage of the post1949 period, however, a reevaluation of habitat conditions in the region in the early part of this century will be helpful. One might easily conclude that most of the forested land in the Southeast Uplands was destroyed during the early decades of CCP rule, and that tigers were pushed to the brink of extinction as a result of habitat loss starting in the 1950s. While habitat destruction was, by all indications, a critical factor in the extinction process, one must consider how adaptable tigers had been to the extremely degraded habitats that for centuries had prevailed over much of the region. Virtually all the Western naturalists’ accounts from the early part of the past century comment on the fact that tigers were still abundant in the barren and anciently deforested hills and mountains. Even today, in western Fujian—with its relative abundance of forest cover—it is still commonly believed that tigers, in their regal vanity, prefer grasslands and avoid forests because once under the trees, their coats might become soiled by bird droppings. Tigers survived in degraded grasslands and scrub for hundreds of years, making dens in the dense foliage of ravines and preying on muntjacs, wild boar, serow, and crested deer. Most of the time there was little conflict with humans, even though the landscape had long since been shaped by fire, agriculture, small-scale hydroengineering, and commerce. In areas where the vegetation was a mosaic of forests, agricultural crops, and montane meadows, ungulates were probably at maximum density, and the same was likely true of tigers, as has been observed in India. 33

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Problems arose when wild ungulate (hoofed animal) populations were inadequate, or when tigers suffered from diseases or other conditions that altered normal predatory behavior patterns. Under these circumstances, tigers entered towns or villages and ate dogs, pigs, or people. An impoverished prey base could result from overhunting or the destruction of ungulate habitat from intensified land use at all elevations. Judging from current patterns of ungulate habitat preference, however, the most prolific ungulates, especially wild boar and Reeve’s muntjacs, can maintain viable (if not dense) populations in extremely degraded habitats, even in the hills and mountains outside large cities, where hunting pressure and habitat loss are often severe. In remote mountainous areas like Meihuashan, which had relatively sparse human populations, relatively high amounts of forest coverage, and a fairly abundant ungulate prey base, it appears that tigers were less prone to predation on humans and livestock. Few villagers in the reserve remember having had tiger problems, and tigers have not attacked livestock there since the 1930s and 1940s. In the lower valleys near Gutian, however, tigers attacked humans in the 1940s and, less frequently, in the 1950s. An estimated four thousand South China tigers existed in the 1950s. How and when did the population crash? If you ask a villager in Meihuashan, you may well receive the same answer I did from a man in Gonghe: “After liberation, the whole country was in order again, there was peace and stability, and the tigers went away. I don’t know where, they just left.” Perhaps the Mandate of Heaven is alive and well. The People’s War on Wildlife: Wiping Out the Four Pests

During the 1950s, predator control was carried out with revolutionary and patriotic zeal. Teams of peasants and soldiers encircled tigers in their mountain lairs, but by then the weapons of choice were grenades and machine guns. The extermination of tigers through systematic hunting was part of a national movement to conquer nature. Anti-predator campaigns, like the Kill the Tiger movement (Dahuyundong), with its slogan kill the tiger, banish evil (dahu chuhai), were part of the national policy of “bending nature to the will of the people,” a refrain that played almost daily in the national press. The decimation of the South China tiger was set in motion when Western naturalists and missionaries entered the Southeast Uplands and introduced modern weaponry, modern science, Christianity, and new modes for exploiting, processing, transporting, and marketing natural resources. The extirpation of tigers

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was not merely a matter of technological innovation but resulted also from the introduction of new conceptions of nature, ideological developments that culminated in the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist doctrines of using nature to serve the needs of the people. The hunting techniques of such early–twentieth-century Westerners as Harry Caldwell were a catalyst for more systematic extirpation campaigns against tigers. If the people of Fujian were awed by Caldwell’s impressive firepower in the 1920s, they proved that they could achieve the same results on their own after “liberation.” But in contrast to Caldwell’s intense fascination with the natural history of the tiger, a love he expressed in the peculiar idiom of scientific interest mated to religious fundamentalism and tempered by “sportsmanship,” the Chinese government was singularly committed to the permanent removal of the tiger from the stage of human progress. Wild animals became targets in a Maoist ideological war on nature. Peasants became crusaders in countless “battles” against the wild, the uncultivated, and the unsettled. Wildlife conservation, never a well-articulated agenda, was relegated to the realm of bourgeois capitalist ideology, a null concept, and the 1950s marked the beginning of the end for much of the faunal wealth of China. The Kill the Tiger movement rallied teams of farmers, hunters, and former soldiers who used traditional muzzle loaders, modern rifles, machine guns, grenades, and other weapons widely available during the war and its aftermath to extirpate the big cats. Guns provided for the local guard (minbing) battalions, in which all adult males were expected to receive training annually, were used more for hunting than for military action. One of many such stories comes from rural Dehua County in Fujian, where a child was killed and much livestock was lost. Local people complained to the new government that they could not go into the mountains, and they asked for official help. A former revolutionary guerrilla named Mao Piao, who is now known locally as “Mao the Tiger Team Captain” (Mao Laohuduizhang), recalls how in 1956 a squad of more than thirty local men was enlisted by the county government. Because of his military experience he was made the leader of what was officially designated “The Fujian Green Mountain Hazard-Elimination Hunting Team” (Fujian Qingshan Chuhai Daliedui), a group whose responsibility was to exterminate the tigers of Dehua and Yongchun counties. The team pursued tigers nonstop for three months, but to no avail. Under intense pressure and increasing criticism from the government, and under the scrutiny of the national news media, they finally succeeded in

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locating a tiger in Yongchun County.34 In hot pursuit among the granite boulders of the grasslands, they shot the tiger in the leg, and it retreated to a nearby mountaintop. Unable to see the tiger, the men hurled grenades into the grass and slowly closed in to find their prey. The tiger’s body was taken to the local township government office, dressed, and hung up for display for three days: a 220-pound female, pregnant with two cubs. In the aftermath of numerous local, state-sponsored anti-predator campaigns like this one, tigers were increasingly confined to isolated highlands, where only traditional crossbow specialists were capable of locating and killing them. To make the best use of wildlife, which was being killed off at unprecedented rates—partly because of a massive increase in military weaponry among the peasantry— the government set up a system of foreign trade stations (waimaozhan). By the 1970s and 1980s, these trade stations were scattered across the Southeast Uplands in virtually every commune, even in the remote mountain highlands. Every county had a foreign trade bureau (waimaoju) to collect products from stations in the hinterlands. There were no prohibitions against the sale of any kind of animal. Trade in furs and skins (as well as wild and cultivated plant products) was fueled by international demand. From the Meihuashan foreign trade station, in Buyun, and hundreds of other stations across the Southeast Uplands, furs were transported to cities like Xiamen, where many were shipped to other nations. Government data collected from eight provinces in central and southern China between 1951 and 1981 show how an estimated population of four thousand tigers was rapidly decimated. From 1951 to 1955, the official average annual production was four hundred tiger pelts. From 1961 to 1965, this figure decreased to 152 a year, leaving an estimated one thousand tigers in the wild. As tigers became scarce in the early 1970s, annual production dropped to one to two in most provinces, and to five in Henan and Hunan. 35 In the 1990s, the enforcement of wildlife laws was still spotty, and even in Beijing, Tibetan street vendors could be seen hawking musk deer glands, artificial forelegs of “tigers” (constructed from ox bones, claws carved from hooves, and fur of unknown origin), and several other animal parts. Pharmacies and restaurants throughout the country continued to sell illegal wildlife parts in the new millennium, and a backwoods game trade still prevails in mountain regions throughout the country, where the absence of fixed business venues makes it extremely difficult to control.

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Saving the Lord of a Hundred Beasts

Biologists in China in the 1980s began to call on the government and the people to take rapid action to protect the South China tiger. These specialists declared that the subspecies was on the verge of extinction, with thirty to fifty tigers inhabiting widely disjunct pockets of wild mountain habitat across the Chinese subtropics from Fujian to Guizhou and Guangxi. It seemed clear that the remaining tigers would not survive without immediate intervention by the government, lasting cooperation from local people, and technical aid and expertise from abroad. 36 By 1990, the Chinese Ministry of Forestry and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-International) were working together to ascertain the status of the South China tiger in the wild. In 1990–1991, the WWF and the Wildlife Protection Associations of the Forestry Departments of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, and Hunan conducted a series of field surveys in mountainous areas of those provinces to locate tiger tracks and ground scrapes (characteristic territorial markers made by large felids), and to tabulate these and recent sightings. The primary goals were to determine the overall distribution of tigers and the approximate population and age composition in each survey area, and to determine if reproduction was still occurring. The researchers assessed the status of prey species and of other large felids, too, especially the leopard and the clouded leopard. Gary Koehler, the American wildlife biologist in charge of the surveys, relied heavily on the knowledge of local people who until the 1970s had hunted tigers: Hunters not only possess the skills for identifying tracks and marking scrapes but they knew areas that tigers had frequented and areas where tigers had scrape marked in past years, sites which were often still used by tigers. Tiger sign was frequently observed during the survey at sites where hunters had killed tigers 30 years ago. A technique employed by some hunters . . . was to construct tilled dirt pads about 30 cm in diameter in the center of a wild animal trail. This method was used successfully by the survey team in Fujian to collect impressions of tiger tracks. (Koehler 1991, 5–6)

The survey team discovered the most tiger signs in nature reserves and wildlands in two regions: first, the Southeast Uplands (especially Meihuashan and Longxishan) and second, at the borders of southwest Jiangxi, northern Guangdong, and southeast Hunan, where the Nanling

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and Luoxiaoshan mountain ranges converge. The data were insufficient for accurate population estimates, but recent sightings of cubs in certain areas (including Meihuashan) indicated that reproduction was still occurring. Koehler proposed several measures to protect the South China tiger: enforcing bans on trapping ungulates in areas where clouded leopards and tigers live; possible bans on guns in these areas; initiating ungulate habitat protection; protection of tiger habitat; establishing adequate-size nature reserves; developing public education and information programs; continuing research on tigers and their prey; developing, if necessary, programs for reintroduction of captive-bred tigers to the wild; and an international commitment of funding and expertise. No field studies have been conducted on how much habitat is sufficient for the survival of a viable population of the South China tiger, nor are there adequate data on the home range size of a single individual, but Koehler found that few reserves in the four provinces were greater than 400 square kilometers (154 sq. mi.), and that only Wuyishan (560 km 2, or 216 sq. mi.) and Hupingshan (Hunan) (400 km 2, or 154 sq. mi.) were possibly adequate for tiger conservation. For this reason, he recommended that existing reserves should be enlarged, combined, or connected by corridors where human disturbance is minimal. He also noted that local people could contribute to conservation practices and to wildlife research. He recommended that future studies include assessments of the habitat needs of prey and of the influence of human management practices on habitat; the effects of seasonal vegetation changes on ungulate habitat use; the use of fire in grassland maintenance; and the importance of grasslands for ungulate populations. Though the report was cause for some optimism, subsequent tiger sightings have been scant and widely isolated. Undaunted by long odds, the State Forestry Administration pressed ahead, and in the Forestry Action Plan for China’s Agenda 21, in 1995, saving the tiger was a priority action. In its latest incarnation, the tiger had become a “mysterious and beautiful animal,” and a matter of national pride. Though there was little promising evidence of viable populations surviving in the wild in the 1990s, and though no officials have seen a wild tiger in more than twenty years, reports of sightings continue to trickle in, and by May of 2000, the State Forestry Administration claimed to have compiled two thousand bits of information on sightings, roaring, tracks, scratches, and the remains of prey killed by tigers.37 Official reports no longer hazard an

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estimate of how many individuals might be left in the wild, but the Chinese government is promoting a large-scale plan to revive the South China tiger. By 2000, the State Forestry Administration had completed the “China Action Plan for Saving the South China Tiger,” which includes specific measures to expand and link existing nature reserves and restore habitats in four areas: eastern Jiangxi Province ( Yihuang N.R.); Zhejiang Province (Fengyangshan N.R. and Baishanzu N.R.); Fujian Province (Meihuashan N.R.); and the Luoxiao Mountains from northern Guangdong Province (including Chebaling N.R.) north to western Jiangxi ( Jiulianshan N.R. and Jinggangshan N.R.) and eastern Hunan (Taoyuandong N.R., Hupingshan N.R., and Guidong-Bamianshan N.R.) (fig. 9). All told, the plan calls for the “rehabilitation” of 170 square kilometers (65 sq. mi.) of agricultural lands for wildlife habitat, the relocation of 3,900 families (roughly 19,500 people), and the protection of 12,800 square kilometers (4,942 sq. mi.) of mountain land where tigers can range freely— enough territory to support 90 to 130 tigers. 38 The most ambitious tiger recovery work is under way at Meihuashan. In September 1998, the nature reserve received support from the Longyan prefectural government and provincial and national forestry officials to begin a captive breeding program. Three tigers, two males and one female, were transported by airplane and truck from the Suzhou Zoo in Jiangsu Province to a new facility at the Meihuashan Nature Reserve headquarters. The young tigers, all aged two to two-and-a-half, were part of the first generation in a long-term program designed to reintroduce the species to the wild. The three were to remain in captivity in pens, with regular access to a 20-hectare ( 50-acre) outdoor activity area, where they were learning how to hunt (pl. 3). By 1999, they had learned to kill live chickens. By 2001, three more tigers were brought to Meihuashan, and all six were moved to a new captive breeding and retraining facility built on land purchased from the villages of Liling and Mafang. The 332-hectare (820-acre) enclosure encompasses a representative array of habitat types near the southern boundary of the reserve, and the tigers have regular access to outdoor zones, where they are learning to kill mammals, including captive prey. A deer farm was established to raise sika deer (or “plumflower” deer in Mandarin, the same meihua as in Meihuashan) as prey during the training period and to attract tourists. The hope is that the tigers will produce at least ten cubs by 2007, and that this second generation will learn to hunt by following the example of their parents. By 2010, when managers hope the tigers will be capable of

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Figure 9. Protected areas designated as tiger reserves for tiger habitat rehabilitation and reintroduction.

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bringing down large prey and surviving in the wild without direct human intervention, the doors of the enclosure will be opened. The tigers will be released into a special tiger reserve, projected to be 600 square kilometers (231 sq. mi.) in area, or nearly three times larger than the present nature reserve, and they will have continuous access to the security, and food, of their enclosure. If the first reintroductions succeed, additional tigers will be trained and released in Meihuashan and perhaps other reserves. 39 In July 2001, a female gave birth to three healthy cubs, and project manager Huang Zhaofeng reported happily that the adult tigers had learned to kill live goats and wild boar piglets. Unfortunately, the population may already be dangerously inbred; in 1995, the forty-eight captive tigers in China were descended from only six wild-caught tigers, with 62 percent of the genetic material in the population originating from just two of the founders. For genetic viability, 120 tigers descended from thirty wild-caught individuals would be closer to the ideal. Of eleven tigers whose semen was analyzed by a team of American experts, only four fell within the average range for sperm concentration, and the concentration of normal, highly motile sperm was low for eight of these males. In the same year, Chinese researchers found that 65 percent of all sperm samples had morphological abnormalities, and perhaps most disturbing of all, 90 percent of all cubs born in captivity died soon after birth. Though the sample population from which the genetic material has come may be too small to be definitive, these problems taken as a whole suggest serious inbreeding depression in the captive population. 40 Compounding the difficulties is an official confidence in technological fixes to revive nature, and a corresponding disregard for sociocultural variables; a new and in many ways admirable agenda is cloaked in an old, familiar technocratic hubris that has caused disasters in China before, and may yet again. In 1999, when asked if Meihuashan villagers had been notified about the plan to reintroduce tigers and whether there would be educational programs to explain the reintroduction process, a reserve administrator responded that there was no need to do so: “If there is enough wild prey in the reserve, there will be no conflicts between people and tigers. There is really no need for special programs like this.” In what will be a 600-square-kilometer (231-sq.-mi.) reserve with about ten thousand residents, this may not be the most prudent approach, but the “China Action Plan for Saving the South China Tiger”

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shows that the government may have an additional surprise for the people of Meihuashan in the near future, as it calls for the relocation of three hundred families from the larger tiger reserve area to rehabilitate tiger habitat. Western conservationists’ responses to the Meihuashan reintroduction plan range from cynical skepticism to guarded optimism. In the spring of 2001, an American official from the World Wildlife Fund China office, who doubted that the tigers were being raised for anything more than show, stated, “Having a bunch of inbred, hungry, chicken-eating tigers on the prowl is not in anyone’s best interest.” But others find hope in the Chinese government’s stubborn commitment to saving the tiger, and the latest turn in the human conception of the tiger may prove to be what allows the cat once again to reign as king in the mountains of southern China. While the most common apposition for the South China tiger in the past twenty years has been “the most endangered of five remaining subspecies of tigers,” geneticists and zoologists who specialize in tigrine diversity now argue that little molecular genetic evidence exists to support the idea that so-called tiger subspecies are significant evolutionary units. Morphological and genetic diversity in tigers is low, and differences between regional populations is thought to be clinal (as stated), meaning that there are gradual changes in genotype and phenotype across the species’ geographic range, rather than abrupt, genetically significant boundaries. These differences reflect adaptation to different climates and habitats over the past ten thousand to twenty thousand years rather than longer-term subspeciation. 41 This reconceptualization of tiger diversity has tremendous potential to revitalize tiger conservation efforts. As Andrew Kitchener suggests, “Critically endangered South China tigers could readily be genetically reinforced by animals from northern Southeast Asia and possibly the Indian subcontinent. The most important conservation outcome is that tigers continue to survive in China, where they continue to perform their vital role as top predator.” With this idea in mind, Ron Tilson, who specializes in the genetic and demographic management of captive populations of tigers and has years of field research experience in Southeast Asia with the Sumatran tiger, has become the first non-Chinese tiger specialist who is firmly committed to helping the Chinese government save tigers in southern China from almost certain extinction.42 Several years after completing research on captive tigers in China, which led to the publication of a South China

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Tiger Studbook Analysis and Masterplan in 1995, Tilson was asked to help with a census of wild tigers in southern China. Finding very little evidence of tigers in the wild, he has concluded that the genetic stock of China’s tigers must be reinvigorated, and he believes that the best source areas will be Laos and Cambodia, which share more ecological similarities with southern China than any other region in the tiger’s current range.43 In the summer of 2001, Tilson expected this proposal to meet with strong resistance from Chinese authorities. As he put it, “The tiger is not a biological unit, it is a biopolitical unit. The people of India do not want a Sumatran tiger, the Chinese do not want a Southeast Asian tiger.” Whether this is the end or a new beginning for the tiger in southern China may hinge on a struggle between nationalistic concerns about the purity of China’s nature, on the one hand, and a pragmatic grasp of scientific evidence suggesting (in broad terms) that “a tiger is a tiger,” on the other. Will tigers reintroduced in Meihuashan survive and reproduce in the wild? Will their offspring disperse along mountain corridors to habitats outside the reserve? Will dispersing tigers reestablish a viable population along the length and breadth of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range and across the mountains of southern China? The answers lie decades ahead, but there is strong political will and a growing ideological momentum for tiger restoration. An essay written by the eleven-year-old daughter of the captive tiger management program director in Meihuashan and published in the Minxi Daily on April 3, 1999, describes the return of tigers in language that seems to answer back across the decades with a soft but unwavering response to the fierce rhetoric of the tiger-killing campaigns of the 1950s: I’ve lived in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve Headquarters [almost] twelve years, and I’m familiar with everything around here, but the day they brought three South China tigers from Suzhou was the most exciting day of all. It was a bright and beautiful day. I got out of school and headed home, and before I was through the garden gate, my mom told me that the tigers had been brought in. I couldn’t suppress a gleeful shout; my heart was already flying to the tiger enclosure and I couldn’t stand to wait around, so off I dashed. When I got to the enclosure, I saw three tigers locked in separate cages. Seeing so many strangers, they looked really vexed; they kept circling round

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and round, two had scuffed their hindquarters and were soaked with blood. It was truly pitiful.

The essay goes on to describe two subsequent visits, relating how the tigers adapted to their new surroundings and learned to kill live chickens dropped into their cages by the keepers. The keeper (tiger-raising uncle) explains how his charges gradually will regain their “wild nature” as they are subsequently released into larger and larger enclosures and learn to kill larger animals. Once they learn to fend for themselves, he says, they will be returned to the wild. The essay closes with a gentle but stirring call to action: “The tiger-raising uncle also told me that the South China tiger is extremely rare in China. If we do not save it as quickly as possible, it could become extinct. As I left the tiger enclosure, the tiger-raising uncle’s words were still echoing in my ears.” 44

Part II The Tiger and the Pangolin

An Environmental History of the Plumflower Mountains

4

The Wealth of Mountains Settlement, Subsistence, and Population Change in Meihuashan before 1949

The Ting, the Nine Dragons, and the Min River, The headwaters of the three rivers lie here. Tingzhou, Zhangzhou, and Fuzhou Prefecture, The wealth of the three prefectures arises here. — Qing dynasty verse describing Meihuashan

The Meihuashan Nature Reserve, where tigers soon may be reintroduced to the wild, is also home to more than three thousand people in more than two dozen villages, and most of these communities are between four hundred and seven hundred years old. Villagers’ attitudes toward nature conservation in Meihuashan have developed, in part, from the region’s distinctive historical patterns of resource utilization, socioeconomic change, and landscape transformation. These phenomena are best reconstructed at the village level, and a composite view of the historical human ecology of Meihuashan, fascinating in its own right for what it reveals about local cultural identity, can also provide a broader and deeper perspective on the nature conservation issues that have recently come to define the area. If the Plumflower Mountains are to regain their “wild nature,” it will not be without the long-term cooperation, or at least compliance, of the Hakka villagers who have long called the area home. The Meihuashan Reserve was established in 1985, with a mandate to protect the South China tiger, a subspecies then believed to have fewer than forty individuals surviving in the wild, and today believed to number fewer than ten. The region also supports populations of leopards, clouded leopards, golden cats, Asiatic black bears, and Asiatic dholes (or red dogs). These animals require large areas of relatively undisturbed habitat and, with the exception of the black bear, an adequate prey base of ungulates and smaller mammals. But human pressure on these species

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exists even inside the nature reserve. The 221.75-square-kilometer (85.6sq.-mi.) Meihuashan Reserve provides natural resources for more than thirty-five hundred people, more than three thousand of whom live in twenty-five villages situated entirely inside the reserve’s boundaries.1 The government has complete jurisdiction over roughly 23 percent of the reserve, mostly in the 59.6-square-kilometer (23-sq.-mi.) core area, where economic activities are forbidden (fig. 10). The buffer zone (known as the “experimental zone,” shiyanqu), which comprises 162 square kilometers (62 sq. mi.), or 73.1 percent of the total reserve area, has been formally divided into land use zones, including protected subareas (baohu xiaoqu, 86.5 km 2, or 33 sq. mi.), scientific experimental subareas (keyanqu, 6.6 km 2, or 2.5 sq. mi.) (not yet demarcated), and (economic) land use areas (liyongqu, 68.9 km 2, or 26.6 sq. mi.). Hakkas arrived in Meihuashan between five hundred and seven hundred years ago, settling in the flats and hollows of narrow valleys at elevations between 700 and 1,300 meters (2,300 and 4,265 ft.), building terraces for rice cultivation, and exploiting the abundant forest resources. All the extant reserve villages have had single-surname, patrilocal lineages through the twenty to thirty generations since their establishment (though many villages have been settled by different lineages at different times). The insularity of these settlements within the rugged Daimao Mountains has maintained local dialects and traditions, and the people of Meihuashan are culturally distinct from non-Hakkas in villages and towns of the Longyan municipality, to the east. 2 The economic mainstay of Meihuashan has for centuries been the indigenous giant bamboo, known as mao (fur bamboo, also known as brush bamboo; Phyllostachys pubescens), and until the 1980s, the region was renowned for the quality of its bamboo paper, which was exported through Guangdong Province to markets in Southeast Asia as early as the mid-1700s. Since the 1980s, villages with access to mountain roads have sold unfinished poles for use as scaffolding in urban construction. Today, a typical Meihuashan village is surrounded by a patchwork of family-managed dooryard vegetable gardens and rice paddies, a series of sacred forests in and around the village proper, family-managed bamboo forests, remote rice paddies, and collectively owned forest lands (fig. 11). Nearly all the villages in Meihuashan, and many villages in the Southeast Uplands as a whole, developed at or near the heads of small, high valleys, where streams converge to provide a steady supply of water for

Figure 10. Meihuashan Nature Reserve. The twenty-five natural villages in the reserve are clustered mainly in the south and east, at elevations lower than the mountainous west and where suitable agricultural land is abundant. Most of the mountains higher than 1,300 meters (4,265 ft.) are in the central and western parts of the reserve, which have been designated as the core area.

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paddy irrigation. Sacred fengshui forests are of two general types, broadleaf forests along the valley slopes and village center, and groves of ancient, towering Cryptomeria, purported to have been planted by the first ancestors, most commonly where streams flow into or out of the village. This prototype of village settlement exemplifies a regional pattern of ecological adaptation that follows the guidelines of fengshui and the hydrological demands of wet-rice agriculture. As a common pattern of village land use, this configuration is found within a highly complex matrix of montane forests, scrub, and grasslands, which led me to conduct field research addressing the following four questions: How have local people, as bearers of particular cultural traditions, perceived and shaped the structure and function of habitat configurations and patterns of biological diversity through time? How have subsistence and mercantile resource use, in tandem with ideological forces, shaped local land use patterns within the larger political economic trajectory of late-imperial, prerevolutionary, and Socialist China? Does the present configuration of vegetation patches help maintain mammalian biodiversity, and if so, how? And how does the present system of nature reserve management articulate with the contemporary suite of local land use conditions and environmental values? The relationship between population density, natural resource consumption, and infrastructural development is critically important in a nature reserve where local people depend on agriculture and forestry for a living. In Meihuashan, the populations of the twenty-five natural villages have fluctuated dramatically through the centuries in response to prevailing subsistence, socioeconomic, and political conditions. Each village has been shaped by internal (village and intervillage) social and ecological forces, and by external (national, regional, and microregional) political and economic forces. Though this may seem axiomatic, it is important; lineage relations within and between villages are often the “push and pull” factors leading to migration. With fengshui as a primary means of regulating land and lineage relations, endogenous forces can appear more idiosyncratic and are more difficult to predict than phenomena more tangibly linked to larger historical patterns. In short, villages have their own histories. 3 With this caveat in mind, it is safe to say that there also has been a high degree of correspondence between periods of immigration, economic prosperity, and peace (at least locally) on the one hand, and emigration, economic decline, and political and social

Figure 11. Village land use in Meihuashan. Typical land use and cover patterns (from the village center outward) consist of a dense cluster of houses, temples, and other buildings; rice paddies and vegetable gardens (the latter not shown); old-growth broadleaf and Chinese cedar fengshui forests; householdmanaged bamboo forests; and collectively managed forest, scrub, and grassland.

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turmoil on the other. Starvation, economic decline, attacks by marauding bandits and soldiers, and combinations of these factors have resulted in decreases in village populations at least twice in the twentieth century. Large population swings have led to dramatic variation in the amount of pressure on natural resources. By linking episodes of population fluctuation to specific historical events and processes, we can gain an understanding of some of the primary forces behind anthropogenic ecological changes in the nature reserve and throughout the Southeast Uplands. We can also gain insight into the relationship between external political forces and agencies represented in the title by the “tiger,” and internal adaptations made by local people whose collective capacity to adapt to the montane environment and to state directives may find its best metaphor in the oft-harried but ever-enduring pangolin. Ethnolinguistic Diversity in the Meihuashan Region

The Qing dynasty verse in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter alludes to the fact that Meihuashan encompasses the headwaters of the Nine Dragons River ( Jiulongjiang), and major tributaries of the Ting River (Tingjiang) and Min River (Minjiang). The high peaks of Meihuashan (Gouzinao, 1,811 m, Miaojinshan, 1,735 m, and Youpoji, 1,777 m) form a triple divide, with streams flowing north to the Shaxi (Sand River) and then into the Min River, east into the Nine Dragons River, and southwest into the Ting River drainage system, a part of the Han River (Han Jiang) drainage, which flows into the South China Sea near Shantou (in Guangdong). The mountains of the Daimaoshan Range also form an ethnolinguistic barrier within the western Min region. This region has two major dialects ( fangyan): the southern Min dialect (or interior-southern Min), spoken in the Longyan municipality and Zhangping County, and the western Min Hakka dialect, spoken throughout the other five counties in Longyan Prefecture. Because of diverse migration streams, long-term insular village settlement, and the difficulties of travel within the western Min Hakka dialect region, there are twenty mutually unintelligible subdialects (hua) of western Min Hakka, and these are divided into fortythree regional accent sections ( fangyinpian), with 1,792,000 local speakers as of 1985. Despite such a high degree of linguistic diversity, all western Min Hakka trace their ancestry back through the “gateway” of Ninghua County, just north of Changting, before later settlement in

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Tingzhou Prefecture (which included what are now the five counties of Changting, Liancheng, Yongding, Shanghang, and Wuping). Today, the Changting subdialect is held as the standard representative of the western Min Hakka dialect as a whole. 4 The Meihuashan Nature Reserve lies within the Hakka-speaking culture region, and residents of all the surrounding townships speak the western Min Hakka dialect (even those in the neighboring Longyan municipality to the east). The Meihuashan high mountain region (encompassing the nature reserve and surrounding townships) is a fracture zone between the Gujiao subdialect (Gutian accent) to the south, the Wenxiang subdialect (Luxi accent) to the northwest, the Wanan subdialect to the northeast, and the Shuangche subdialect to the southeast. Though categorizing the reserve villages by subdialect is difficult, and all residents of the reserve share mutually intelligible speech, speakers from different villages can be distinguished from one another according to accent, grammar, or lexicon. Linguistic relationships in Meihuashan are complicated by the fact that villages sharing common surnames, and migration histories are spread across the reserve and are interspersed with other villages of quite different origins. Resident family surnames from the five study villages of Gonghe, Guizhuping, Majiaping, Taipingliao, and Longgui (see fig. 10) are Ma, Guan, Luo, Luo, and Luo, respectively. The other natural villages depicted on figure 10, and their family surnames, are (1) Mawu, surname Ma; (2) Jiaotan, surname Lin; (3) Wulang, surname Wu; (4) Daxie (abandoned), surname Guan; (5) Dapingshan, surname Guan; (6) Zhongxing (Zhongcun), surname Guan; (7) Qiushan, surname Guan; (8) Guanfuban, surname Ma, and Luo (across river); (9) Chenyikeng (Chenerkeng), surname Chen; (10) Dagaoxie, surname Li; (11) Qingcaoyuan, surname Chi; (12) Xiebei, surname Chi; (13) Chijiashan, surname Chi; (14) Xiaogaoxie, surname Chen; (15) Beikeng, surname Wen; (16) Huameng, surname Yang; (17) Dutou, surname Huang; (18) Baijinshan, surname Luo; (19) Baishuizhai, surname Yi; (20) Daguan, surname Luo; and (21) Mengjue ( Wuku), surname Luo. Village Administrative Status and Settlement Histories

The regional administration system of China encompasses two types of villages (cun): natural villages (zirancun) and administrative villages (xingzhengcun). The five study villages in this research (Gonghe, Guizhuping,

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Majiaping, Taipingliao, and Longgui) are natural villages, meaning they are more or less discrete settlement units. For administrative purposes, they have been grouped with other villages within four administrative villages. An administrative village consists of two or more natural villages; for instance, the natural villages of Guizhuping and Gonghe together comprise one administrative village known as Guihe (a name derived from characters in the names of the two natural villages). Several administrative villages comprise a township (xiang or zhen). The administrative system in Meihuashan is complicated by the fact that the reserve straddles two counties (Shanghang and Liancheng) and one municipality (Longyan). Furthermore, the twenty-five natural villages of the reserve are grouped within nineteen administrative villages, in seven townships. Before 1936, Meihuashan was an administrative area (qu) called Changtiequ, which lay within Changting County (formerly Tingzhou Prefecture). The area was later divided into smaller administrative areas, and these became communes in 1957. In 1981, the communes were dissolved, largely replaced by townships, which, in Meihuashan, continued to manage the same areas. Given the complexities of the administrative system, it is more instructive for cultural historical research to focus on the natural village as a settlement unit rather than on the administrative village. This is because the natural villages have a much higher degree of historical homogeneity and structural integrity than the administrative villages (especially since the latter are often groups of natural villages with different lineages, settlement histories, and traditions). Meihuashan’s natural villages typically are composed of discrete clusters of houses and other buildings nestled in high, narrow valleys (Gonghe, Guizhuping, and Majiaping), clumped on high promontories (Longgui), or arrayed along sloping mountainsides following small streams (Taipingliao). Their structure could best be described as compact, though a few riverside settlements in the reserve are elongated or linear villages. Dispersed villages were observed only in Tongxian and Guanzhuang townships in Shanghang County and in the Wuyishan Nature Reserve. All the natural villages in Meihuashan and most of those in the surrounding highland areas are composed of single-surname lineages, which are further subdivided into descent groups with residences that exhibit some degree of within-village residential clustering. The structural features of the study villages— single lineage (with multiple descent groups), natural (as opposed to administrative), nucleated, compact, interspersed with vegetable and rice crops, and surrounded by rice

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paddies and managed forests— made them useful settlement units for analysis and comparison. The reserve area can be divided into four traditional hinterland tributaries to four or five different market towns, with which there has long been a reciprocal relationship of mountain-valley trade. Villages in Buyun township (Shanghang County), in the southern part of the reserve, trade in the periodic market in Gutian, which occurs on every day in the lunar calendar with a date containing the number 4 or 9 (4, 9, 14, 19, etc.). Villagers in Gonghe recall making the trip down to Gutian on foot (a distance of about 16–18 km, or 10–11 miles, by trail) loaded with trade goods in four to five hours, and returning late at night. In the northwest, villagers of Zhongping and Majiaping have traditionally traded in the town of Miaoqian (west of the reserve in Liancheng County), though Majiaping people now also buy and sell products in the coal-mining center of Jiangxie village, which is 7.5 kilometers (4.6 mi.) distant and on the way to Miaoqian. People from Longyan villages (Chenyikeng, Dagaoxie, Qingcaoyan, Xiaogaoxie, Beikeng, and Dutou), along with residents from Liancheng County villages (Chijiashan and Xiebei), trade in Wanan township (in Longyan municipality) or in Meicun village, northeast of the reserve. Those who live in villages in the northern part of the reserve (Taipingliao, Baijinshan, Daguan, and Wuku) use the market in Luxi, northwest of the reserve (in Liancheng County). All five of the study villages are between five hundred and seven hundred years old, with an average age of 610 years. Like most villages in the area, they were settled by Hakkas during the southern Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties, and most of the people of Meihuashan trace their lineages back to Ninghua County (in Sanming municipality, north of Longyan Prefecture), an important stepping-stone in the Hakka diaspora. Ma, Luo, and Guan are all common surnames in the area, and many villages whose members share surnames share ancestral origins, too, as shown in ancestral records. Some villages were settled by families or groups other than those present today, meaning that the number of generations of a lineage that have resided in a particular village today does not always reflect the age of the village. Several villages also probably belonged to the She before Hakka gained control of the area, as suggested by the history of Majiaping. Although many detailed records of village history were lost during periods of turmoil between 1911 and 1976, some ancestral records (zupu) were carefully protected and even secretly preserved through the Cultural Revolution (as in Gonghe). These records

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document the names, dates of arrival, and numbers of early settlers.5 Even in villages where ancestral records were destroyed, certain middleaged or elderly people know their village history well, having become familiar with the genealogies and village oral histories before the subject was forbidden in the 1960s. In some villages, these data can be corroborated with historical records at the county and township levels. The settlement history and present conditions within each of the five study villages are described below. The greatest historical detail is provided for Gonghe, where I had access to ancestral records. This written record provides a brief but fairly detailed glimpse of the historical migration patterns that lie behind Hakka village settlement in Meihuashan as a whole. 6 Gonghe

Gonghe (Common Peace, or Republic) village, is an enclave of the Ma family. The village has developed on a narrow alluvial terrace in the bottom of a high, narrow valley running north-northwest to southsoutheast. The plain is less than 500 meters (.3 mi.) wide and lies at an elevation of about 1,200 meters (4,265 ft.). Houses, temples, gardens, mushroom sheds (built since 1998 for commercial production), and some of the village rice paddies are clustered along both sides of a small stream, a tributary of the Malinxi River (itself a tributary of the Nine Dragon River, Jiulongjiang). On a low hill in the eastern part of the village is a forest that is crescent shaped when viewed from above. This is the fengshuilin ( fengshui forest), which protects the main ancestral temple. A high ridge to the southwest runs parallel with the valley; its steep flanks are covered with bamboo forests, and its saddles hold groves of towering Cryptomeria trees. These, too, are fengshui forests. Up the valley, about a kilometer away, is the village of Guizhuping. Down the valley a couple of kilometers is the village of Liling, which is outside the nature reserve. Although the Ma family ancestral record traces the forebears back to several prestigious military leaders in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, during the later Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms era (a.d. 25–280), the record of their southward journey is unclear until about four centuries later. Like many other Hakka, the Mas were in Fujian by the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618–907), when the brothers Ma Falong and Ma Fawang settled in Zhuangyuanfeng village, in Ninghua County. Ma Falong sired nine sons, some (or all) of whom moved to Majiawei village, in Liancheng County, before the end of the Tang. In the Song dynasty, some (or per-

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haps all) of Falong’s descendants moved to Sibaomawu (now known as Sibao), in the northwest corner of Liancheng County, where today there is an ancestral temple that descendants return to each year at Qingming (what Westerners call “Grave-Sweeping Day”) to offer prayers. One of Falong’s grandsons produced nine sons, one of whom, Ma Zhiyuan, moved from Sibao to Lingfang village during the last years of the Yuan dynasty (ca. 1368). Zhiyuan’s descendants occupied several villages in the Meihuashan area before settling in Gonghe. These were, in order: Luxi, Mawu, Tieshanluodi, Majiaping, Zhongmenqi (no longer extant), and Guizhuping. In the course of field research, I visited all these villages. Only Mawu is today inhabited by Mas, and from what is known of the history of other villages in Meihuashan, it appears that the Ma family may have coexisted with other families in at least some of these villages before moving on en masse or in segments. The first Ma ancestor to settle in Gonghe was Ma Wangfu, who arrived during the Ming dynasty, in about 1444. On arriving in Gonghe from neighboring Guizhuping, the Mas built an earth-walled house (tulou) or fortress (baoweizhai) on a hill called Longjianzhai (1,247 m), just southeast of the village. Like the tulou in Yongding, Nanjing, and other areas of Minxi that remain today, this was a defensive structure. Soon, however, they found that the wind was too strong on the hilltop. Because this was not good fengshui, the villagers moved down to Fufengtang, where the main ancestral temple is today. 7 The fengshui of that location was good, and soon there were many male offspring. As the main informant on village settlement history stated while interpreting the ancestral record, “Fengshui is serious; you can’t live long as a village if it’s bad. There are only certain places [in the landscape] where you can live” (for comparison, see notes on Majiaping below). The danger of attack by bandits or even marauding soldiers was another problem for villagers in Gonghe, as it was throughout Meihuashan and in other remote mountainous areas of the Southeast Uplands. At times, the villagers had to take dramatic precautionary measures to survive such depredation. In the late Ming dynasty, during the Hongxiu reign, troops under general Hai Kou launched attacks in the area (for unspecified reasons). Once again, the villagers retreated to fortified earth-walled houses built on hilltops around the village. After twentytwo generations, some 550 years since its founding, the population of Gonghe is about 232.

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Other Study Villages (Guizhuping, Majiaping, Taipingliao, and Longgui)

Guizhuping (Cassia Bamboo Flats) has been occupied by the Guan family for twenty-two generations. Though the village is at the head of the same valley as its neighbor, Gonghe, it is only 10 meters (33 ft.) higher in elevation (1,210 m, or 3,970 ft.), and it lies along a different tributary of the Malinxi. As a result of stream capture, both villages are now situated at the headwaters of southeast-flowing streams, and today only an irrigation ditch shunts water from the upper village to the lower. The village is similar to Gonghe in many respects, and given the close proximity and strong physical similarities between the two, locals are as likely to refer to “Guihe” (the administrative village encompassing both villages) as they are to “Gonghe” or “Guizhuping.” Guizhuping is nearly identical to Gonghe in areal size, occupying the highest alluvial plain in the valley large enough for a settlement. Its roughly forty-three families comprise a population of about 230. As in Gonghe, the twenty-five houses of the settlement are tucked into the narrow valley bottom and backed by steep mountains, which are covered in a green carpet of bamboo and sacred forests. Though Chinese cabbage crops, mushroom sheds, home gardens, and rice paddies surround the buildings in Guizhuping, the majority of Guihe’s rice paddies are on gentler slopes east of the valley, toward the villages of Mawu, Jiaotan, and Wulang. A couple of kilometers by cobblestone trail northwest of Guizhuping village, you pass through a pine-covered saddle at an elevation of roughly 1,600 meters (5,249 ft.). The spot marks a gap in the major drainage divide of Meihuashan, a place known locally as “fenshui ao” (divide water gap). Another kilometer through the dry, mountain pine forest brings you into Liancheng County, and after another couple of kilometers the trail descends along a rushing stream through dense broadleaf forests. About 10–12 kilometers (6–7.5 mi.) from the divide, along the old stone trail, lies the isolated village of Majiaping (Ma Family Flats). The village is at 770 meters (2,526 ft.), in a small alluvial basin where four swift streams converge and plunge through a steep gorge to the north to enter a tributary of the Tingjiang River. Mountains embrace the village on the south, east, and west, and only the north is open to a lower valley. These remote, rugged slopes contain the greatest expanse of broadleaf evergreen forest in the reserve, and when viewed from the high pass to the west, the village is a small clearing in a U-shaped valley, surrounded by billowing green mountains.

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Though the village received its name from the Ma lineage, who settled there for a time, probably six hundred to seven hundred years ago, it is now occupied by the Luo family, who settled in Majiaping eleven generations ago (they say roughly 260 years). The first people known to have lived in the village were She tribal people named Zhong. They lived by the stream in the western part of what is today’s settlement. After the Zhong family came Han families named Zai and Lou. The Ma family, ancestors of the Mas of Gonghe, came next, settling in the house that still marks the southeasternmost corner of the village. Majiaping is one of four natural villages with lands in the reserve that until the end of the 1990s still lacked access roads for transporting bamboo and other products to the outside. Two of the other three villages, Yanbei and Zhongping (which still lack roads), with Majiaping form the administrative village of Yanbei. Because the three natural villages are so remote and two lack even a “tractor road,” the Yanbei administrative village is the poorest of the twenty administrative villages in the reserve, with an official average annual income of 486 yuan ($58) in 1994. The village of Taipingliao is divided into an upper and a lower village, both inhabited by the Luo family. The village extends nearly a kilometer along the north bank of a mountain stream that descends west to east down a steep mountain slope from its source, at about 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.). Houses face down the valley to the east. The highest houses of the upper village, in the west, lie at an elevation of about 970 meters (3,200 ft.), and the lowest houses in the lower village, in the east, are at about 770 meters (2,500 ft.). The village is striking because of its conformity to the precipitous terrain, and to the large, primeval fengshui forest that separates the upper and lower residential areas (pl. 4). The main trail is a stone staircase, which winds up the steep slope, weaving in between the houses and drying platforms. The youngest of the roughly 220 inhabitants of Taipingliao represent the twentieth generation of Luos in situ. Though the village is more than seven hundred years old, having been established as Heyuan Lower Village during the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279, the Luo family settled there about 450 years ago. Who inhabited the village for the first two hundred years of its existence is unknown, but the word “liao” in the village name suggests they may have been She people. Longgui (Dragon Turtle) village is known in local dialect by its older name, Broken Caldron Hollow (in Mandarin, Podingkeng). The latter name is attributed to an accident of long ago, in which a person selling

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the three-legged cauldrons or sacrificial vessels known as ding slipped down a ravine in the village and broke some of his merchandise. The village is situated on a north-facing slope, with the highest row of houses on a platform at an elevation of 740 meters (2,400 ft.). A lower cluster of houses lies across a ravine at 700 meters (2,300 ft.). About five hundred years ago, the first Luos to settle the village were one couple with five children. Today, roughly one hundred people live in Longgui, making it one of the smallest natural villages in Meihuashan. Longgui is also the richest village as measured by annual per capita income, with an average of 1,761 yuan ($210) for the two natural villages of the Yunhui administrative village (Longgui and Qiushan) in 1994. This is 82.6 percent higher than the average income of all twenty administrative villages in Meihuashan (970 yuan, or $115), and 382 percent higher than that of the poorest villages, in the Yanbei administrative village. Longgui’s relative wealth is the result of its low population coupled with the large area of village lands devoted to legal timber harvesting through the mid-1990s, which was especially lucrative because of large quotas and logistical support from the nature reserve management. Qing Dynasty Socioeconomic Climax

From a historical perspective, the Meihuashan Nature Reserve’s current population is not high (2,718 in 1991). In 1994, the average population of the five study villages was 191, and aggregated with figures from seven other natural villages where this information was sought, the average village population was 180. In contrast, informants in ten of twelve villages stated that at one time in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), village populations were 50–1,000 percent greater than today. 8 By the late Ming, bamboo paper production and related industries were the economic mainstay of most villages in Meihuashan. When the paper trade reached its zenith, in the Qing, the population of Meihuashan was probably at or near its all-time high. Local economic growth probably attracted clan members and unrelated migrant laborers (such as the shed people) from other areas of Fujian, and villages grew by in-migration as well as by natural increase.9 Economic depression in the southeast coastal population cores would have provided a large pool of such itinerant laborers, while the simultaneous cycle of economic growth in the Lingnan region (southern Guangdong and Guangxi) provided a high demand for paper.10 Taking advantage of their location in the upper reaches of the Han River basin, the people of Meihuashan sold paper to

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traders based in the Guangdong Province entrepôt cities of Chaozhou (near Shantou), where the Han meets the South China Sea, and Guangzhou, the preeminent port in the region. Paper that was not used in China was exported to urban markets in Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of Southeast Asia. In this way, Meihuashan experienced a demographic inflorescence, while the densely populated urban areas in coastal Fujian experienced severe decline and out-migration. Popular examples of how Meihuashan communities burgeoned in the Qing are recounted by village elders and recorded in family genealogies. For example, in Taipingliao, more than one thousand inhabitants lived there during the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong periods (1661– 1722), and local legend holds that the village of Jiaotan, which had an official population of 111 in 1991, reached a peak of 999 people in the late nineteenth century. Not wanting to let the opportunity for demographic greatness slip away, the villagers of Jiaotan bought a person, who was kept in the village as the thousandth resident. A critical feature of the economic boom was that it did not signify the end of the subsistence economy; there is no indication that food demands were matched by food imports, and subsistence was still a major concern. Such conditions exemplify what Marks has called “commercialization without capitalism,” a characterization that would hold true for most mountain communities in many parts of the Southeast Uplands in the same period and even, to a certain extent, from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. 11 Assuming the population in the villages of today’s reserve area were five times greater during the mid-to-late Qing, overall population would have been roughly 13,600, and population density (12.2 people/km 2 in 1991) would have been 61 people per square kilometer. This would have caused much greater pressure on local subsistence systems, and ultimately on the natural environment. The lower yield per unit area of traditional breeds of rice could not sustain villagers through the year, even at population levels of the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, even without a precise figure for the population during the Qing, forestry-based commerce flourished and the demand for laborers drew a much larger population to Meihuashan than the local grain supply could sustain. The supply of rice was inadequate to feed such a large number of people, even though the area of rice paddy was much greater than it is today, and the roots of wild plants served to fill the gap in carbohydrate-rich staple foods. These subsistence challenges had dramatic and lasting effects on the landscape ecology of Meihuashan.

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Political, Military, and Economic Factors in the Population Decline of the Early Twentieth Century

Because village populations in Meihuashan, as “low” as they are today, have been increasing since 1949 (with one setback resulting from nationwide famine in the early 1960s), some intriguing historical questions come to mind. How could a flourishing society of mountain communities collapse in the late Qing or early Republican period and fail to fully recover within a century? When did demographic and socioeconomic conditions reach their nadir and at what level of population? What were the effects of such depopulation on the landscape? And, projecting into the future, is the peak population density described above likely to recur? As to the first two questions, it is clear that throughout the twentieth century, there has been a direct relationship between political, military, and economic disruption at national and regional scales, and demographic and socioeconomic conditions in Meihuashan villages. Village histories of Taipingliao and Longgui provide abundant evidence of this relationship and illustrate the catastrophic local ramifications of the political and social chaos that swept China in the first half of the twentieth century. In Taipingliao, population growth was spurred by the development of the village’s bamboo paper industry during the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1661–1722). Like many other villages in the region, Taipingliao capitalized on the growth of an extensive foreign trade network, which included the transport of paper from the Minxi region to other parts of China, especially Guangdong, and from that province to overseas markets in Southeast Asia. The village developed its own paper workshops (zhichang), porters carried the merchandise out to local market towns (Luxi and Meicun), and the local economy grew. With the development of a more vibrant cash economy came an increase in the division of labor and a diversification of commercial industries. Like the large villages and small towns in the low valleys outside the reserve today, Taipingliao was large enough to support several producers and vendors of locally consumed goods, such as tofu, rice wine, and peanuts. The population, which peaked at more than one thousand, crashed at the very end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republican period—from 1910 to 1915 (the exact population just before the decline was not determined). By 1920, the population was down to about one hundred people, and by 1949, it was just over seventy. Whether the decline began earlier and was actually less rapid is unknown, but villagers say the causes were manifold and included emigration, a higher death

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rate, and an increase in the selling of women and children to other villages, problems that were all connected to a rise in opium addiction, the protracted civil war of the twentieth century, and long-term social upheaval. In Taipingliao, as in Gonghe, Majiaping, and other villages where the subject was discussed, opium was widely used in the villages until about the 1920s, when it became unavailable because of government control. In Taipingliao, opium is said to have caused serious social problems associated with addiction, including the early death of addicts, the selling of wives and children to support the habit, and, it may be inferred, an increase in violence associated with the activities of opium dealers and other outlaws (tufei), the latter of which were numerous in Meihuashan during this period. 12 Though social dislocation may already have hindered economic sustainability in the villages of Meihuashan by the late Qing, the most serious threats to survival came when China’s civil war spread into the Minxi region. All the villages of Meihuashan were forced to align either with CCP insurgents or Nationalist Party (Guomindang) forces, and neither side could guarantee safety or security from attacks by the other, or from the depredations of local bandit gangs. During the first half of the century, the village of Pingshui (between Longgui and Chijiashan) was a bandits’ lair, and bandits (tufei) made frequent attacks on surrounding villages. In the 1920s, the village was wiped out by nationalist forces, and has never recovered; today, only the columns of a former official’s house remain. Taipingliao was under the control of the Guomindang but supported the communist guerrilla brigades (youjidui) led by the regionally famous martyr Luo Buyun and others, and was the scene of intense fighting until 1948, when the village was “liberated” by communist forces. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), stability returned, the population began to increase naturally, and Taipingliao was named a “key revolutionary village” (geming jidian cun). The civil war had dramatic effects on Longgui village as well, causing its near-annihilation and long-term evacuation. As a center for CCP guerrilla activity by the early 1930s, Longgui provided foot soldiers and spies for the communist cause. With the execution of Luo Buyun, in the mid-1930s, the guerrilla brigade disbanded until 1939, when a new leader was sent to Longgui. By then, ten Longgui residents (from a population of roughly sixty people) were guerrilla soldiers and others were spies, communication specialists, and propagandists. They served under two different leaders until 1944, when turncoats reported their activities to

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the Guomindang. About a hundred nationalist troops stationed in the nearby village of Shangche attacked Longgui, and all the residents fled. Faced with constant pursuit by the soldiers, the villagers were forced to set up temporary encampments above village paddy fields in the mountains between Longgui and Taipingliao. These “zhai” served as home (reminiscent of Gonghe during military attacks in the Ming), and villagers secretly tended their crops to survive. After the turncoats revealed the encampment to the Guomindang, soldiers attacked it, killing two people and capturing four (who later were tortured and killed). With no means of subsistence and under constant terror, the villagers dispersed to many separate villages in the region, and only one old couple remained, surviving as beggars. After the guerrilla brigade was routed, the village was virtually empty for three years, until 1947–1948, when the Red Army regained control of the region and villagers could safely return. By 1949, the population had rebounded to its previous level of more than sixty people. After the Communist victory in 1949, the villages of Meihuashan enjoyed a respite from war. Peace was gained, in part, through an unprecedented degree of government intervention in every aspect of daily life. It soon became evident that the absence of warfare did not ensure a lasting peace. For almost three decades, Meihuashan, and indeed all of China, were to endure a new variety and a new scale of authoritarian rule as villages both adopted and adapted to the tools and techniques of “permanent revolution” (yongyuan geming).

5

Three Rises, Two Falls Political Ecology and Socioeconomic Development in Meihuashan after 1949

In the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, the conditions of agricultural production are characterized by a lack of diversification. Aside from the commercial value of timber and bamboo exchanged each year in outside markets, production not only fails to meet commercial demands, but only partially meets the needs of daily life. Production is underdeveloped, production forces weak; to a large degree these are the characteristics of a self-sufficient, natural economy. — Comprehensive Research Editorial Team, 1991

The above description of conditions in Meihuashan in the early 1990s, though highly reductionist and narrowly focused on classical notions of development, encapsulates several salient features of the local economy and human ecology of the time, especially for people who lacked road access for transporting goods to and from outside markets. Several households were still without electricity, and only by the end of the decade had some villages begun to use electric power in the manufacture of bamboo finished products. There was, and still is, a high level of reliance on local natural resources to meet basic needs for food, shelter, medicine, and other subsistence requirements, with virtually all commercial activity centering on household bamboo production, limited village-based forestry, and small but growing systems of commercial agriculture. Though the low level of economic development places these among the poorest villages in Fujian, the past two decades have brought greater wealth to villagers than most ever expected, and local economic growth rates have been unprecedented. To understand the social and ecological significance of these changes, we can examine patterns of demographic and socioeconomic growth and decline over the past fifty years, guided as they have been by centrally inspired ideological move-

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ments, all of which have combined to shape village land use and local conceptions of “nature” and “economic development.” And though the population of Meihuashan may never again reach the levels of the Qing dynasty, rapid economic development in the past twenty years has changed village landscapes and livelihoods in dramatic, fundamental ways. With the new roads and new systems of energy production and use, not only are individual households and entire villages undergoing profound structural changes, but relationships between individuals, communities, and the natural environment are being redefined. Rapid economic development during the 1990s was facilitated by the construction of dirt roads and hydroelectric power stations, and by the end of the decade, increased access to telephones and television promised to bring ever greater social and cultural changes to the villages. Though road building and the construction of hydropower systems have helped integrate mountain communities with lowland market zones, without careful planning the ecological costs may outweigh the benefits. The unique cultural landscapes of Meihuashan may also suffer the effects of modernization. Architectural innovations reflect the local demand for the trappings and conveniences of modernity, and traditional house types and other distinctive features of the cultural landscape may soon become the exception rather than the rule. Despite these changes and their potential influences, the current era of capitalist development in China has taken place on socialist foundations, and the villages of Meihuashan exhibit resource utilization and land tenure patterns unique in the world and to this period of Chinese history. Socioeconomic conditions, cultural landscapes, and patterns of natural resource management have been profoundly influenced by a half-century of Chinese Communist Party rule, and the legacies of Mao and Deng are visible in the landscape ecology and nature conservation practices found in Meihuashan today. Demographic and Socioeconomic Change Since 1949: Effects of Communist Land Tenure and Resource Management Systems

Since 1949, Meihuashan villages have undergone alternating periods of socioeconomic development and decline. These cycles have closely paralleled the course of nationwide socioeconomic development and the political movements and programs that gave rise to them. Still, there have been important local exceptions within the Minxi region as a whole and within the villages of Meihuashan collectively and individually. The oscillating pattern of changes in living conditions in the reserve (and

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presumably those of China as a whole) have been described as “three rises, two falls” (san qi er luo). 1 The first period of resurgence after the long period of wartime poverty occurred from 1949 to 1958. This was far from a peaceful transition to “normalization,” however, even in the exceptional case of the Minxi region. In the PRC of the early 1950s, land reform and the creation of a classless society were viewed as fundamental for national development. In rural areas, these goals were expressed in the well-known slogan, “Overthrow local despots and redistribute the land” (Dadao tuhao fen tudi). In parts of the Minxi region, like Meihuashan, however, land reform (tudi gaige, or simply tugai) was first carried out without violent class-leveling (pingjieji) actions. This was because of the relative success of the reform movement in Minxi before 1949, and the powerful influence of the mastermind behind it, a man from Jiaoyang township (Shanghang County) named Fu Baicui. Fu, who was a lawyer and social reformer, initiated local and regional land reform in Jiaoyang and Gutian townships, in Shanghang County, during the 1920s–1930s. In September 1950, when the “land revolution movement” (tudi geming yundong) began in Shanghang County, Jiaoyang and Gutian (and part of Baisha) townships did not have to participate (having already achieved some degree of land reform under the leadership of Fu Baicui), and still other townships in the Minxi region were allowed to divide the land without undergoing “class leveling”— the redistribution of other forms of wealth, such as houses and personal possessions. 2 Land reform was not enacted in Meihuashan until 1952. A resident of Gonghe recalls county officials entering the village that year and determining that two families qualified as landlords (dizhu) and three qualified as rich peasants ( funong). In the villages of Meihuashan, as in many other small settlements of the uplands, class distinctions were not always evident from the amount of land owned. Nearly all privately owned land with some degree of economic value consisted of rice paddies and bamboo forests. These were held by families on the basis of land deeds (tudizheng). Other forest and grassland areas were communally held by the villagers, with open access for fuel-wood gathering, cattle grazing, the taking of wildlife, and the gathering of wild plants and other resources. Fengshui forests were communally owned and protected, and resource use within them was restricted to varying degrees. In some villages, like Gonghe, rice paddy and bamboo forest lands, while not evenly distributed, were not predominantly in the hands of the wealthier villagers.

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These villagers owned more land than many others, but only slightly more. Before 1949, each natural village had a committee of elders, composed of representatives of each household or extended family. These representatives were known as fangzhang (household elder or chief ). Some families had more than one fangzhang, depending on the relationships between different segments of the family and their land tenure status. In Gonghe, about eight fangzhang participated in land use conflict resolution ( jiufen tiaojie) and other important decisions. The representatives generally came from middle-income and rich families, which in Gonghe constituted most of the population, since there were nine paper workshops (many similar-size villages had just one or two workshops). In 1952, the rich peasants and landlords in Gonghe were distinguished from middle peasants (zhongnong) and poor peasants (pinnong) mostly by their material wealth and control of the work force. Landlords were defined as those who did not have to work. They hired year-round laborers to work in their fields and their households. The landlords were moneylenders, who, in many instances, owned or controlled a large portion of the village papermaking industry. Rich peasants, on the other hand, were defined as those who worked but who also hired laborers and loaned money to other villagers on a regular basis. Middle peasants owned land and were self-sufficient. They did not hire other laborers. Poor peasants had no land and worked for others, often under various sharecropping arrangements. In Meihuashan, class differentiation and land tenure systems varied markedly from village to village. In Gonghe, the two families classed as landlords and three families classed as rich peasants (in a village of twenty-seven families) earned about 40 percent of the village’s income. Guizhuping did not have any landlords, but it did have three families of rich peasants, whose landholdings were comparable to those of the other villagers. One landlord in Longgui owned 40–60 percent of the productive land. In Majiaping, one landlord owned all the productive village land and six of nine local paper workshops.3 Taipingliao had one landlord (the same person as in Longgui), but he did not own much land. In that village, many people rented and owned land, and a village rule stated that large amounts of land could not be amassed by one person or one family. During the land reform campaign, lands belonging to landlords and rich peasants were divided among the middle and poor peasants. Middle

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peasants were allowed to keep their old land deeds, and new deeds were drafted for the poor, rich, and landlord classes. The goal was to provide each family in the village with equal amounts of bamboo forest and paddy land or, given significant differences in soil fertility and site conditions, equivalent amounts in productivity. This was deemed more or less successful. Rich peasants and landlords still hired some extra labor but not as much as before, exploitation was significantly reduced, and the village environment was safer and more stable. The relatively peaceful nature of post-1949 reforms in Meihuashan had changed dramatically by 1955, when Minxi officials implemented the “Democratic Revolutionary Reeducation (or Remediation)” (Minzhu Geming Buke) movement. CCP officials decided that certain areas in Minxi (especially those that had been under the command of Fu Baicui) had not been thoroughly revolutionized according to class distinctions and political affiliations. The geming buke movement was intended to complete the work of identifying and reforming enemies of the people. Besides isolating landlords and rich peasants, officials also targeted “counter-revolutionaries, traders, and bad elements.” By 1953, the heads of the two families in Gonghe labeled “landlords” had been executed (one for his alleged association with bandits in Luodi, the other for reasons undetermined). The Remediation movement in the village focused mainly on the confiscation of houses, gold, cattle, and other possessions of rich peasant and landlord families, and the redistribution of them to other villagers or to the government. A landlord’s son in Gonghe recalls that landlords’ houses were little different from most of the others. After his father’s execution, however, the family was forced to move into a house that was filthy and dilapidated. The movement is seen by villagers in retrospect as having been unnecessarily harsh, especially since it involved the persecution of kin. With preliminary land reform efforts complete, and with firmer government control over the region, the mid-1950s was a period of relative stability. Government support for public health and education brought improved living conditions. Rice production and traditional commercial activities, such as papermaking, were resumed. Through the 1950s, the economy grew and the population increased. In 1957–1958, the collectivization ( jitihua) movement swept through China, and all the recently divided private paddy and bamboo forest lands in Meihuashan reverted to joint ownership by administrative villages, which were called collec-

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tives, or “production brigades” (shengchan dadui). A group of collectives formed a commune (gongshe), which was the equivalent of a present-day township. As members of these village collectives, villagers ceased to produce food and forest products for their own families, serving instead as laborers for the communes and collectives within smaller work units, called “production teams” (shengchandui), two to three of which absorbed the entire work force of one natural village. The first post-liberation disaster in the villages of Meihuashan resulted from the reckless policies of the Great Leap Forward (Dayuejin), in 1958. The nation was swept up in a political movement that aimed to make a rapid transition to industrialization and to a kind of communism in which the proletariat consisted of industrial workers. In Meihuashan, villagers were ordered to hand in their woks and other iron implements to local cadres for smelting in small blast furnaces in the valley towns. Luxi township (Liancheng County) had more than twenty such smelters. Agriculture was poorly managed, as villagers were put to work in the smelters, in lumberyards, on road-building teams, and on other large projects designed to spur rapid economic development through industrialization. This occurred throughout China, and from 1959 to 1961, several years of mismanaged collective agriculture and drought in northern China resulted in the well-known famine that has been deemed the worst in human history, resulting in untold suffering and thirty million deaths. 4 Each village responded to the crisis in its own fashion, adapting according to local ecological conditions and economic opportunities. Many people resorted to old subsistence practices, gathering wild plants, trapping, and hunting. Others, lacking access to forest resources, suffered more casualties. As a result, there was considerable variation among villages in the number of casualties during the famine and the several years afterward that it took to recover. In Longgui, Gonghe, and Majiaping, meager rations of watered-down rice gruel and rice bran or chaff (mikang) were supplemented with wild herbs and nuts, and wild game. People in Longgui ate chinkapin nuts (Castanopsis) gathered from the surrounding broadleaf evergreen forests, and herbaceous plants like “revolution spinach” (gemingcai). In Gonghe and many other villages, people returned to the ancient practice of digging up the rhizomes of bracken fern ( juecai; Pteridium aquilinum), which they pounded into a powder called shanfen (mountain starch, or mountain flour). This powder was made into balls

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and steamed, boiled, or fried like glutinous rice or bread. Villages outside the reserve in deforested areas, which lacked natural resources and wild foods, suffered the heaviest losses. In Beiyang administrative village, for example, which lies in a dry, deforested, piney area southeast of today’s reserve and had a population of a few thousand, people were forced to eat tree bark. In thousands of desolate villages, such as Beiyang, which lacked wild sources of food and economic opportunities, there were periods when a few people starved to death during the course of a day. In contrast, Majiaping village was not adversely affected by the famine at all; in fact, the villagers prospered and even benefited from the plight of others. During the Great Leap Forward, while other villages responded to official orders to grow rice collectively and provide laborers for industrial projects, the people of Majiaping were left alone or were unresponsive. Geographic remoteness from central authority, coupled with a tradition of independence, played a part in their choice to continue producing rice for their own families, a decision that allowed them to maintain normal levels of grain production during “the three bad years.” While other villages lost people to death and emigration, Majiaping thrived. As a result, children from other villages were sold to families in Majiaping, and young women were given in marriage to available men in the village in a last-resort effort to help them survive, or because they were viewed as a burden. The famine of 1960 –1961 decreased the population and slowed further population growth in Meihuashan for several years. In 1962, villages began to reinvigorate traditional agricultural and forest production, along with papermaking and other local industries. The population slowly began to increase, though many people died of malnutrition-related diseases contracted during the famine. But a second socioeconomic plunge came in 1966, with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The national movement to “take grain as the key link” (yiliang weigang) impelled county and regional officials to demand that peasants produce as much rice as possible. In tandem with national movements to “cut off the tail [or last vestiges] of capitalism” (pou zibenzhuyi weiba) and to cleanse China of all elements of the old society, widespread social chaos erupted. Red Guards and party leaders led a campaign of destruction focused on temples and religious icons. In the Southeast Uplands (and in most regions of rural China), centrally inspired attempts to reform Chinese society in toto spelled the end of all but the most basic economic activi-

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ties. In the villages of Meihuashan, which traditionally produced one crop of red rice a year, the movement forced a transition to two crops a year. With the colder water of high-elevation streams feeding the rice paddies, the increased expenditures of capital, and the relatively sparse labor force, commune leaders soon discovered that at elevations above about 750 meters (2,500 ft.), two crops a year was an unfeasible regimen, producing less grain than one well-managed crop. Only in the mid1970s were the villagers allowed to return to the more productive practice of growing one crop a year, and in early 1981, rice paddy and bamboo forest lands were once again distributed to families with incentives for better management. This was implemented under the national program known as the “household mutual production contract responsibility system” ( jiating lianchan chengbao zerenzhi). Since then the third “rise” has been marked by continuous economic and population growth. The first wave of economic growth in the post-reform period came with an explosive rise in timber values. Within one year, the price of a cubic meter of Chinese fir rose from 3–5 yuan ($.38–.63) to 45–50 yuan ($5.62–6.25). Suddenly, the rush was on to cut and sell Chinese fir as fast as possible. Meihuashan did not have any Chinese fir plantations, but very large Chinese fir trees grew there in family-managed bamboo forests, in remote parts of collectively owned old-growth broadleaf and mixed forests, and in a few fengshui groves planted long ago. With the exception of those few growing in fengshui forests, virtually all these large, ancient trees were removed and trucked out to Guangzhou and other coastal trade ports by the end of the decade. Several families grew relatively wealthy from the timber boom. A few in Gonghe and Longgui (among the only villages with roads) even bought trucks to haul bamboo to the coast, cutting out the middlemen altogether. New houses were built, and a new phase of capitalism was under way. As a result, very few large Chinese fir trees remain in Meihuashan, aside from those in the sacred forest in Lingbeixie village, where giants of the species have thrived under village protection for centuries. The 1980s and 1990s have seen a corresponding growth in population. Recent Population Trends

Population growth in Meihuashan after 1949 was slow at first, accelerating only after the Cultural Revolution. Not until the early 1970s did the population rise to the same levels as in the early 1950s. The relatively slow growth could not reverse an inexorable expansion, however. From

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1951 to 1994 (disaggregated data on natural villages’ populations in the 1960s–1970s are not available), the population of each of the five study villages had grown from between 47 percent (Longgui) and 250 percent (Majiaping), with an average growth of 144 percent. The population of all twenty-five natural villages in the reserve increased from about 1,400 in 1949 to 2,718 in 1986, an increase of 94 percent. This is in contrast to a 126 percent increase in population for the Longyan region as a whole. Though more recent population data for each of the natural villages were not available, village population figures were derived from the number of households in each village in 1994 (multiplied by an average of five people per household— the reserve’s official estimate in unpublished data collected from surveys). The estimated populations of 9,640 for the eighteen administrative villages and 3,120 for the twenty-five natural villages within the reserve should be viewed as rough approximations only. Derived from the 1994 estimates, the population densities were 25.6 people per square kilometer in the eighteen administrative villages, and 14.1 people per square kilometer in the reserve. By 2001, population in the reserve had not changed significantly, according to reserve records. 5 Because violations of the two-child policy were the norm in the 1990s rather than the exception,6 close scrutiny of village population figures by outsiders appears to be a source of uneasiness and an occasion for practiced dissemblance or genuine uncertainty. In the mid-1990s, many (if not most) married couples in Meihuashan appeared to have more children than the law permitted, and they were willing to pay fines for “extra” sons. In fact, it is not uncommon to encounter families with three boys or a total of four or five children. Unwanted newborn baby girls are left at the front gates of wealthier peasants’ houses or at the township government headquarters in the dark of night, giving the unwanted children at least a chance to survive in another family or in an orphanage. Though the ancient concept of “zhongnan qingnu” (to look highly on males and lightly on females) persists in the rural agrarian sector of society, girls may be regarded as good laborers (since women do all types of physical labor in the forests and in the home), and in the future, bride prices may be an increasing incentive for raising girls (in addition to less pecuniary motives, one hopes). In small patrilineal and patrilocal village societies as found in Meihuashan, however, the “zhongnan” syndrome is severe and may persist longer than in other parts of rural China. By 1995, the government of Longyan Prefecture, realizing that family planning had largely failed, stepped up its efforts to control the popu-

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lation. All women over age thirty who already had the legally sanctioned number of children were required by law to undergo tubal ligations. Violations of the law led to stricter punishment, including the destruction of family property, usually houses or furniture, carried out by the township or county family-planning committees. These punitive actions have led to increasing animosity among villagers toward government authorities. While I was conducting field research in Meihuashan in 1994–1995, a family-planning worker was murdered in retribution for his participation in smashing the roof of a violator’s house in Luodi village (a place with a history of outlaw violence). The severity of punitive measures and the bitterness of the conflicts between reproductive traditions and state authority do not presage an easy transition to a state of population stability in Meihuashan. Probably the only hope for stabilizing or decreasing population growth without continuing to resort to draconian measures lies in economic development, education, and the possibility of an approaching “demographic transition,” a process in which couples will choose to have fewer children, as the cost of raising children will outweigh the benefit of having more family laborers. Many young couples in Meihuashan are concerned about raising their annual incomes and are conscientious about providing for the needs of their children, and though there is a dearth of available data on village population structure, economic and educational development planning policies will be the most effective approach to population control. More critical than the absolute population density, however, is the population distribution across the land area of the reserve, and how residents use village lands to make a living. In fact, with a transition to a less land-dependent economy, the villages of Meihuashan may have a less severe effect on the landscape than today, even with moderate population increase. Still, population monitoring is no less critical for an understanding of the relationship between demography, land use, and environmental degradation. Equally important for the future of nature conservation in the reserve is the development of relations between its inhabitants and the outsiders who try to control their land use decisions and direct their political and economic conditions. Meihuashan villages have a long tradition of enlisting outside help when it is strategically important, while avoiding involvement with the outside when possible. This bimodal approach is part of a larger and more uniform strategy to maintain the de facto autonomy that

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mountain villages have long held. Land use patterns in Meihuashan have long reflected the fact that villagers must simultaneously produce subsistence crops in an environment where constraints on agriculture are significant, and extract forest products for commercial exchange. These ancient imperatives and their effects are still manifest and still developing in the Meihuashan landscape. Infrastructural Development and Changes in Income Since 1949

Since 1949 the villages of Meihuashan have been forced to adjust to waves of political and economic changes, events that have transformed all of China. But alterations in traditional political and trade relations within and among the mountain communities and between the villages and the “outside world” have also led to manifold changes in resource management practices, land use patterns, and local human influences on the environment. Beginning in the 1970s, a series of infrastructural modifications ushered in a new phase of development and brought a new visage to the mountain enclaves: the construction of winding dirt roads and narrow tractor paths; the advent of electricity via hydropower; innovation in architecture and the access to new building materials; the use of motorized vehicles, such as motorcycles and tractor-carts; and, in recent years, the arrival of television. These developments are occurring in an uneven fashion, but all the villages in Meihuashan are in the incipient phases of integration with outside markets and information systems. Today, the most vivid impression of village transformation during the past half-century comes from the mélange of house types. Village architecture in the Southeast Uplands reflects the economic and cultural changes that are transforming rural landscapes throughout China. In part because Meihuashan is located in a remote mountain area with poor access to construction supplies, it is a repository for traditional architecture; but many traditional architectural features, particularly those associated with timber frame construction, are being lost. This marks a significant change in the cultural landscape in villages throughout Meihuashan. Though the newcomer may perceive the cluster of houses and other buildings in a particular village as being ancient and apparently unchanged for centuries, three types of building materials represent three architectural periods. For the people of Meihuashan, these three house types represent three stages of economic progress and a rational response to the decreasing availability of once plentiful timber supplies.

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The oldest houses, built of broad, dark planks hand-hewn from huge Chinese fir trees that once were common in the mixed forests, represent the ancient past of the old society ( jiushehui). In Meihuashan, these simple, elegant structures are one-story, with rooms surrounding an open, sunken patio paved with granite stones at a depth of roughly 30 centimeters (1 ft.) below the plane of the floor. The open courtyard, known as the “skywell” (tianjing ), permits the entrance of natural light and fresh air into what would otherwise be a gloomy interior. Many houses may adjoin one another, creating a honeycomb of residences, with multiple families separated only by wooden walls and connected by hallways and patios, as in Majiaping (pl. 5). From the 1950s to the 1970s, a new type of house became popular— the earth-walled house. Rammed-earth (hangtu) houses in other parts of the Minxi region have become world famous, especially in Yongding and Nanjing counties, where many are round, multifamily fortresses (tulou), in some instances housing more than 150 occupants. In Meihuashan, the earth-walled houses are typically two-storied, rectangular, and house just one extended family. The walls are built by pounding a mixture of water, red clay, and sand into wooden wall frames about 40 centimeters (15 in.) wide. The frames are removed after the walls dry. The resulting earthen walls are thick enough to keep out winter cold and hold in cool air during the summer. For these reasons, and because of the extreme scarcity of large Chinese fir trees, villagers favor these houses to the older wooden ones, and have rapidly adopted them as replacements or additions to their original homes. In the mid-1980s, after the nationwide economic reforms, a third kind of house became popular— the brick house, or the further modified and flat-roofed brick, cement, iron, and tile house. During the past decade, this house type has become more common, but only the relatively affluent can afford the materials and specialized labor to build in the new style. Though many aspire to own such houses, earth-walled houses are still far more numerous. This may change in the coming decade, as more families find the means to purchase materials and pay for construction costs. As a rough indicator of village-level economic conditions and transportation constraints, examine the percentage of the various house types in particular Meihuashan communities. In Majiaping, which has no cement or brick houses, about three-quarters of the houses are earth-walled (or earth-walled and wood hybrids), and about onequarter are wooden. At the other end of the income spectrum is Long-

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gui, which by the mid-1990s had only one remaining wooden house, three mixed brick and earth-walled houses, and the rest (seventeen) earth walled. By 2002, several Longgui families even had built houses in the new style. Other structures in the villages include storage buildings; ancestral temples (citang); earth-god or Taoist-Buddhist temples (including temples built on bridges, qiaomiao) ( pl. 6); small shops selling basic necessities (sometimes these are located in a spare room inside a house); and schools (which may double as assembly halls). From a distance, stores, schools, and some temples may be difficult to distinguish from houses. Many are made of the same materials as surrounding houses. Ancestral temples and bridge temples, however, are the most striking components of the built environment, often distinguishable by elaborate woodwork, stone masonry, and stylistic features, which have, in many instances, survived the ban on religious activity that spanned from the early 1950s to the early 1980s. Some temples have been rebuilt, though it appears that few were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, when they were used for storage or for domiciles. Small, man-made ponds in front of the ancestral temples serve a fengshui purpose but also are used to cultivate duckweed and other aquatic plants for fodder, and sometimes fish as well. Large, wooden, covered bridges invariably house Buddhist and local Daoist icons and thus are “bridge-temples.” They are the loci of powerful fengshui, religious worship, transportation nodes, and shelter during severe weather. Earth-god shrines (tudimiao) are another important feature of the built environment. These small stone dolmens or simplified replicas of temples are rarely more that half a meter (20 in.) high, but they are commonly nested within a raised, circular or semicircular stone base of up to 5–6 meters (16–19 ft.) in diameter (pl. 7). The shrines are placed by trails at the entrances to the village, especially where a stream enters or leaves the village. They may also be found in the saddles of mountains above villages. The religious architecture and sacred forests associated with the shrines are an attractive and intriguing aspect of the Meihuashan village environment that deserves further study and careful conservation. Hydropower Because of the abundant rainfall and rugged terrain in Fujian, the province has been deemed one of the most promising areas in China for hydropower development. In Meihuashan and other parts of the Minxi

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region, the power of mountain streams has long been harnessed to propel waterwheels attached to streamside mills. The mills polish rice, pulverize bamboo for paper production, and powderize the wood, leaves, and roots of trees and herbs for making incense and other products. Meihuashan, with its abundant rainfall, favorable geomorphic conditions, and dense vegetation, has great potential for hydropower development. The reserve has an estimated 320,000 kilowatts (kW) of hydropower potential, which could be used to bolster village sideline industries, such as bamboo processing, and to decrease reliance on fuel wood, thereby decreasing deforestation. These possibilities must be carefully weighed against the potential ecological damage caused by small reservoirs, aqueducts, penstocks (cement channels and pipes that carry water down steep slopes to turbines), and the power stations themselves. Rapid development of energy resources has already taken place in Meihuashan, an area where villages began to install their own streamside hydropower generators only in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1991, there were nineteen such units, most of which produced only 5.5–10 kW, and the largest of which produced 40 kW. In the five study villages, Majiaping produced 5.5 kW, Longgui 5.5 kW, and Gonghe and Guizhuping 10 kW each (there are no 1991 data for Taipingliao, though today it receives power from outside stations). Of these five, the three natural villages of Buyun township (Gonghe, Guizhuping, and Longgui) soon went online with the newly constructed, 1,200 kW hydropower plant in Qiushan (Longgui’s partner village in the Yunhui administrative village). In the early 1990s, seven other small industrial hydropower stations were built in and around the Meihuashan Reserve, with funding from county and township governments and private sources. In 1995, Majiaping was the only village where I observed small-scale hydropower generators in use. In that year, there were three generators in the village, each producing about 2 kW, but only about two-thirds of the villagers in Majiaping had electricity in their homes. The generators cost about 2,000 yuan ($250) and were shared by a few families. Electricity was used almost exclusively for light bulbs; there were only three televisions in the village, with limited or no reception. Power generation in the village had changed little by 2001, even as three medium-size hydropower stations were built with reserve financial support in the villages of Jiaotan (1,200 kW), Fukeng (1,200 kW), and Daguan (10,000 kW). Two types of industrial hydroelectric production systems operate in

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Fujian: reservoirs with dams, and large penstocks. The latter are composed of cement channels that divert water to large pipes constructed on steep mountain slopes. Water rushes down the slope to turbines in a power station below. Four hydropower reservoirs are located near the Meihuashan Reserve; one of them was generating electricity in 1994, and the other three began operation in the late 1990s. At least two industrial penstock generating systems are located in the vicinity of the nature reserve, one in Shangfu (Buyun) and one in Qiushan. Though it appears little concern is expressed about the potential ecological damage caused by hydrogeneration, critical issues should be addressed, namely: how the water is used to produce energy, how the energy is used in the villages, and the implications of such usage for the protection of natural resources. The creation and maintenance of dams and reservoirs is usually the more destructive of the two methods of power generation. The construction of a reservoir at Dayang, within the southwest border of the reserve, is especially unfortunate from an ecological standpoint, because it was sited in wetlands along the middle reach of a mountain stream that descends from the heart of the core area of the reserve. The best montane wetland habitat is found in a large riparian headwater area a few kilometers upstream, at a place called Xiaoyang. The Xiaoyang wetland lies in a basin between the highest peaks (Gouzinao, Youpoji, and Miaojinshan) (pl. 8). The dam, which provides power for Gutian township, stands 45 meters (147 ft.) high and has flooded more than 20 hectares (49 acres) of wetland, pine, and broadleaf forests in the extreme southwestern part of the reserve’s core area (where the reserve boundary and the core area boundary coincide). In 1995, construction workers and managers at the dam site said that boar, muntjac, and other wildlife had been abundant in the area until 1992, when the project began. Forest clearance, dynamiting the land, and dam construction had scared the animals away. Reserve authorities contend that only the reservoir (and not the power station) lie within reserve boundaries, and that effects on wildlife are minimal. As recently as the mid-1980s, tigers were seen in the area and in nearby Dayuan village; some of the last tigers to be shot in Meihuashan were bagged in the early 1980s. In 1991, tree scratches made by a tiger were discovered near Dayuan as well, and Gary Koehler believed that the best tiger habitat in Meihuashan was in the southwest part of the reserve. For all these reasons, conservation goals for the area in question are incompatible with such a destructive dam project unless the quality of ungulate

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habitat can be restored. Reserve administrators and regional planners should explore ways to mitigate the damage, restoring and protecting watershed forests and grasslands as the project nears completion. Penstock systems for channeling water to fall pipes can be destructive too. In Qiushan, a waterfall has been created by overflow from a channel leading water to a power plant. The fall has caused serious slope erosion, and the reduced flow in the river below results in stagnation and eutrophication in the fall dry season. The massive pipes that descend the mountain slopes are a couple of meters in diameter and hundreds of meters long. Their visual effect, at least by current Western standards for “wilderness” areas, detracts from the beauty of the landscape. They may also be a barrier to the movement of wildlife. On the other side of the hydropower issue is the question of how energy is used in the villages today, and what benefits it is likely to bring in the future. In the mid-1990s, the majority of energy used in the villages of Meihuashan went to electric light bulbs (replacing kerosene lamps), with minor amounts used for the few fans, televisions, tape players, rice steamers, and other electric devices used in some village homes. By the end of the decade, at least one or two households in most villages had begun to use electricity for household manufacture of bamboo products. In the mid-1990s, industrial activities that added value to forest products, thereby increasing village income, were limited to a woodcarving factory in Gonghe, which provided few benefits to the majority of the villagers. Machine processing of bamboo, a prominent and prosperous activity in Wuyishan, had just begun in the Meihuashan Reserve in the late 1990s. The most energy-intensive household activity in Meihuashan is food preparation. Meat and vegetables are stir-fried in large woks, on rammedearth or brick ovens, which are heated with fuel wood collected from surrounding forests. Even more energy is required to cook rice — eaten at every meal— which is steamed in traditional bucket-shaped wooden steamers placed inside the woks. The large, wooden steamers are especially favored by large families, because much more rice can be cooked all at once in the traditional fashion. Though there was no shortage of bamboo and dead branches for fuelwood in the 1990s, much of the wood used for cooking came from trees illegally felled in the bamboo forests. The use of hydroelectric power in the reserve has been well-developed but has yet to reach its economic potential. Recent developments in bamboo processing constitute a major improvement in economic

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returns for energy use. Villagers still depend on fuel wood for their daily energy needs, though, and studies to assess the environmental effects of household fuel consumption are needed. Roads Paths and roads are a component of the cultural landscape in the Southeast Uplands that reflect ongoing cultural and historical change. Regardless of size, whether narrow mountain footpaths or paved highways, they are all called “roads” ( lu), which indicates the importance of the network of small trails that have served as transport routes throughout the South since ancient times. In general, the Southeast Uplands has four types of roads: (1) mountain footpaths (shanlu), which can be subdivided into trails paved with stones (stone roads, shilu) and unpaved mud paths (nilu); (2) narrow dirt “tractor roads” (tuolajilu), which support small, four-wheeled tractors, the most important vehicles for agricultural transport in China; (3) dirt roads wide enough for car or truck transport (simple roads, jianyi gonglu); and (4) paved or well-graded roads (gonglu). Since 1949 the road network in China has expanded at an unprecedented rate, and road construction has been so squarely equated with economic development that it has been impossible for reserve officials to prohibit the construction of access roads in an effort to protect natural habitat. Increased vehicular traffic could prove to be one of the most destructive aspects of human habitation in the reserve, and may become a more contentious issue in the future. Throughout South China, stone roads were for centuries the major routes for land transportation. Footpaths were painstakingly paved with stones across miles of remote terrain, to prevent the muddy mires and erosion common in areas with heavy precipitation and subtropical soils. Human beings were the draft animal of choice. The use of horses and donkeys was impractical under these conditions, and they were (and still are) virtually unknown in the Southeast Uplands. Many of the narrow stone paths were designated “official roads” (guanlu), connecting important centers of trade and political power. In Meihuashan, stone paths can be found in every part of the reserve, and at least one of these, from Gonghe to Majiaping, was an official road during the late imperial era, a section of the key transport route between the regional administrative centers of Longyan and Changting (formerly Tingzhou). The labor resources and organization required for the construction and maintenance of these roads through what are today wild, seldom-traveled

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mountainous areas demonstrate their past importance for commerce and communication. They represent both the extension of centralized political authority into the hinterlands and local desire to maintain connections with trading centers in the lowlands. A network of mountain trails is still the most important transport system between many villages inside the nature reserve, but links to market towns outside the reserve have developed rapidly in the late 1980s and 1990s, and some interior footpaths are falling into disrepair. The past decade has brought an increasing orientation toward radial connections to the lower-elevation market towns surrounding Meihuashan, and a decrease in travel and transport along certain interior routes between mountain villages. Road building has changed the lives of many villagers, making it possible for some to reach market towns—by tractor, truck, motorcycle, or bus—conduct their business, and return to the village all in one day. New roads have made it possible to transport larger quantities of goods than before, and much heavier items from the highlands to the lowland market towns and vice versa, with less expenditure of labor. This has made possible a virtual revolution in the quantity and type of consumer goods and building materials entering some villages and in the quantity and variety of natural products being exported. Road transport thus has been the first step in a new phase of economic growth and regional interconnection, and access to roads has become an important determinant of community prosperity. To understand how rapidly roads have changed daily life in these mountains, consider the fact that until 1978 not a single dirt road reached any of the reserve villages, and all transport depended on strong backs and legs. On market days in village townships, which long have been held every five days, villagers or hired porters set off hours before dawn with shoulder poles, bearing reams of bamboo paper to sell at market. At the end of the day, people routinely made the long return trek to their home villages. The return load often consisted of daily necessities and powderized limestone, the latter being the primary ingredient in soaking pits, where bamboo strips were softened before being pulverized and made into paper. By the year 2001, all the villagers had access to tractor roads or dirt roads that reached the villages or those nearby, but well-graded roads that qualified as “gonglu” were limited to about 12.2 kilometers (7.6 mi.) in the southeastern part of the reserve. These have made it possible for Longgui and Qiushan villagers to reach the market, the nearest hospital, and the nature reserve headquarters, all 30 kilometers (18.6 mi.)

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away in Gutian, in little more than one hour. Other roads in the reserve are steeper, rougher, and more prone to erosion, with stretches that become streams during rainstorms. Among the best of these is the road from Buyun to Gonghe, over which jeeps or cars can make the trip from Gonghe to Gutian in about one hour and ten minutes. Most of the villages in the reserve rely on tractor roads, which are too narrow for cars, trucks, or buses. The economic and ecological ramifications of new roads and motorized vehicles are vast, and villagers see a clear connection between road access and wealth. For these reasons, road construction has at times become a contentious political issue in the reserve. Longgui village is the richest natural village in the reserve, largely as a result of the road access it gained in 1978, and its establishment of a timber area before the reserve was established in 1985. In addition, its low population and the reserve’s slow action in curtailing the village’s timber quotas have helped some of the Longgui villagers become quite prosperous by local standards. Similarly, in Gonghe village, certain people were quick to take advantage of their new transport link, the construction of which coincided with national market reforms and exponential inflation in timber values; many new brick and cement houses were built with money made from the harvest of old-growth Chinese fir. The advent of truck and tractor transport led to even more profound land use and economic changes when the export of bamboo poles replaced paper production as the primary source of income for mountain villages. Until the early 1980s, the local economy was based on the export of paper made locally from bamboo culms. Motorized transport made it possible to export unprocessed poles for use as scaffolding in urban construction, a more lucrative and efficient use of the resource. The dwindling paper industry had come to an end by the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the nature reserve prohibited the activity because of water pollution associated with the flushing of lime and other substances from soaking pits. By the mid-1990s, no paper workshops were operating in the reserve, though the ruins of rammed-earth buildings used for this purpose can still be found even in remote sections of the core area. In stark contrast to the relatively wealthy villages with a history of road access are villages like Majiaping, which had no access road until 2000. Because of the steep terrain surrounding the basin where the village lies, the 7.5-kilometer (4.6-mi.) trail to the nearest road, in Jiangxie, took villagers nearly three hours to traverse on foot without heavy loads.

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Bamboo poles could not be carried out economically, even by paid porters, and bamboo was converted to chopsticks for transport. In the mid1990s, residents of Majiaping, one of the poorest villages in the reserve, were extremely frustrated by the geographic features and political forces that hindered their access to goods and services. Several villagers stated that they would not hesitate to set fire to reserve forests if they did not receive permission to build an access road. Reserve administrators, on the other hand, had privately vowed to relocate the village outside the reserve if such a measure became necessary to prevent the road, which would provide access to the largest remaining stands of broadleaf forest in Meihuashan. By 1999, however, a road was being constructed to Majiaping. There was insufficient legal precedent to support the reserve’s argument, and Liancheng County officials cited the village’s fundamental rights to road access, sanctioning the village’s decision to link up with a new road to Yanbei village, which lies outside the reserve to the north. Telecommunications In the mid-1990s, none of the villages in the reserve had telephones. Ironically, until the initiation of economic reforms in the early 1980s, one-way phone and /or loudspeaker communication did exist in each village. One-way systems were used by central authorities to issue commands and maintain contact with cadres. Phones were used in medical emergencies and (at least in some villages) by private individuals for personal calls. With the decline in government-funded infrastructure in the 1980s, the phone lines were not maintained. By 1995, villagers were growing impatient with the lack of what has become a basic amenity in most of eastern China, and they sought the aid of the reserve in restoring the phone system. By 1999, all the villages except Majiaping had regained phone access, and by mid-year at least ten households in most of the villages had their own phones. By continuing to help provide access to telephone services, and other benefits that have no direct adverse environmental consequences, the nature reserve can improve its relations with villagers. Effects of Forest Conservation Policies

Perhaps the greatest differences between village land use patterns in Meihuashan and those of outlying areas is that outside the reserve there are fewer restrictions on the harvesting of timber on collective lands. This simple difference has had vast consequences. When the reserve was

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in the earliest phases of establishment and planning, in the early 1980s, this problem was anticipated, but twenty years later it remains unsolved. The people who first worked to establish the nature reserve included researchers and bureaucrats from the Fujian Provincial Forestry Bureau, Xiamen University, Fujian Normal University, Academia Sinica, and the Longyan Regional Forestry Committee. When they began to delineate the boundaries of the reserve, they proposed that it cover an area more than five times that of the present, totaling more than 1,000 square kilometers ( 386 sq. mi.). When representatives from Shanghang and Liancheng Counties, Longyan municipality, and Laiyuan township (in Liancheng) convened to review the plan, they decided that only the least-populated central area would be included in the reserve. These officials feared that if timber cutting were restricted in the areas of high population density, like Gutian, Laiyuan, Wan An, and other townships, there would be too many people with no means of economic survival. The paradox of this decision is evident. The dilemma lay between limiting the size of the reserve to allow a greater range of land use in more densely populated areas, or expanding the protected zone to ensure that more people practiced good resource stewardship over a larger geographic area. Huang Zhaofeng, a reserve forester-administrator described the situation aptly: It’s hard to know whether it would have been better to include them [people in the greater area] within the reserve. On the one hand, nature protection is all of society’s business. On the other hand, people have to have an income. People understand the protection concept as a whole, but as individuals they have to protect themselves. It’s easy to do the “concept work” with the peasants [laobaixing]; the hard part is the policies— how do people survive? (Huang Zhaofeng, pers. comm.)

To make up for the low incomes and lack of timber revenue anticipated in the interior of reserves, the Provincial Forestry Bureau planned to offer a 120-yuan ($15) subsidy for each cubic meter of standing timber volume. The payment was never made, and inhabitants of the reserve have not forgotten it. Within the reserve, timber and bamboo cutting on village lands is now controlled by quotas set by the nature reserve, and all timber and bamboo sales must be made through the Meihuashan Forestry Development Office (Meihuashan Linye Kaifagongci), in the reserve headquar-

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ters. Outside the reserve, timber quotas are managed by the Longyan regional forestry committee (diqu linwei). Of the useful timber tree species, reserve villagers can sell only pine and Chinese fir, and quotas for these grow smaller each year as logging within the reserve boundaries is gradually phased out altogether. There is no legal cutting of broadleaf trees more than 30 centimeters (1 ft.) dbh (diameter at breast height) inside or outside the reserve, and the forestry bureau stopped issuing sales permits for hardwoods of any size in about 1990. Aside from camphor (zhang; Cinnamomum camphora, which is used to carve Buddhist and Daoist icons), Schima (mu he; Schima superba), and a few other species, broadleaf trees are not seen as having a great deal of economic value. Low demand for broadleaf no doubt has saved many remaining patches of montane forests in the Southeast Uplands from rapid conversion. In 1994–1995, only Longgui, Dapingshan, and five or six other reserve villages in Liancheng County were issued permits to cut pine. Except for Longgui, which has a special forest road (aside from the village access road) for cutting and hauling timber, only villages with newly established roads were given cutting permits. 7 Villages without roads cannot get permits because there is no truck access, and villagers who have had road access for several years have already exhausted the legal timber supply. In Longgui, pine was sold for 250 yuan ($31) a cubic meter in 1995. In coastal markets, logs more than 40 centimeters (15 in.) dbh could be sold for more than 900 yuan ($112). When pines are removed from mixed forests, it must be done without cutting down other trees. A recently logged broadleaf forest in Longgui appeared to be recovering quickly, and removal of pine may have accelerated its succession to a more mature broadleaf community. In 1994, logging was prohibited on slopes visible from roads or streams, a restriction designed to protect both scenic integrity and watershed quality. Outside the reserve, most villages still receive yearly permits to cut pine and Chinese fir, which they then replant from seedlings. This disparity has caused resentment among reserve villagers; it also has made bamboo management a high priority. Through superior bamboo management, reserve leaders hope to close the slight income gap between the interior and surrounding mountain villages. Because Chinese fir is the most important source of lumber in China, its market value is much greater than pine. At the village level, sales value was between 400 and 500 yuan ($50 and $62.50) a cubic meter (coastal sales values were not determined). There were no legal sales of Chinese fir in 1994–1995, however, and there may not be for many years. With

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almost all the naturally occurring Chinese fir removed, and most of the planted stands being less than twelve years old, there will be few permits for Chinese fir for another decade or so, if cutting is not phased out entirely. Though there were no legal sales of Chinese fir in the mid1990s, some villagers capitalized on the market rates by operating illegal logging and transport networks. In remote valleys, such as Qikouping, in the core area of the reserve, several large Chinese fir trees were scattered through the broadleaf and mixed forests. Villagers from Tieshan Luodi, a settlement just northwest of the reserve with lands in the reserve, set up a camp in Qikouping and built trails through extremely dense forests across difficult terrain, to haul logs out of the reserve on foot. All the roadside forestry checkpoints were easily bypassed. On several occasions, I encountered log porters while hiking with a forest manager in the northwestern part of the reserve. Once, on a trail above Luodi, the sight of us caused a group of about twenty porters, male and female, to disperse into the woods. In the early 1990s, several villagers, many from Luodi, were arrested for such activity, which has caused tremendous resentment toward the reserve. Illegal timber cutting in Meihuashan is a serious problem, and relations between reserve managers and local people, though outwardly stable, are strained to the degree that local cooperation is based mostly on passive acceptance of legal authority and the varying degrees of regulation and enforcement that it imposes. Present-Day Labor and Income Structure

Bamboo pole processing and export are the most important sources of income for nearly every family in every natural village in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve. In 1995, no families earned enough money running shops or other local enterprises to cease bamboo production, and still fewer had established businesses outside the reserve that freed them from primary sector activities in the home village. In each of the five study villages, informants responded that virtually 100 percent of the work force was engaged both in rice cultivation and bamboo management, with the few exceptional individuals (one to two in some villages) who had moved outside the reserve to engage in business or to work in another work unit (danwei). By 1999, commercial production and labor patterns had begun to undergo significant shifts. First, because of a dramatic increase in the number of young males who found employment outside the reserve — working in construction, industry, or the service sector; second, because several villages in the southern part of the reserve

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had begun large-scale production and marketing of mushrooms and vegetables. While villages in the eastern part of the reserve had sufficient levels of production to continue to rely solely on bamboo, and a growing number produced and marketed finished bamboo products, villages such as Guihe and Daxie had begun to produce shiitake mushrooms (xianggu) for export to Japan. Guihe, Jiaotan, and Luodi had begun to grow Chinese cabbage, too, transporting it to markets in metropolitan coastal areas, such as Xiamen and Shantou (in Guangdong Province). When viewed within the larger economic realm of the Southeast Uplands, the villages of Meihuashan appear to be on middle ground, geographically situated between the widespread poverty in Jiangxi Province to the west, and the rising wealth of Fujian’s coastal metropolises to the east. Despite the economic constraints associated with primary sector economic activities, a steady stream of immigrants, mostly from Jiangxi, enter certain villages each year to work as hired hands. These “outsiders” (waidiren) are men who work for local families. They cut bamboo on family-managed lands and haul it to roadheads, where the poles are loaded onto trucks or tractors and transported to the lowlands. The laborers may work for a particular family for a few days, weeks, or months before helping another family in the same or another village. On holidays, the men return to their families, taking their cash pay. 8 East of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range, however, in the coastal cities of Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, economic growth rates rival those of southern Guangdong. As a result of more rapid growth along the coast and in certain montane hinterland areas, the Longyan administrative region is the poorest of the nine administrative regions and cities in Fujian Province. Government surveys of sample populations showed that the average per capita rural income in Fujian in 1993 was 1,211 yuan ($151). Official reports noted this was the first year that average income in Fujian had “broken through the 1,000 yuan [barrier]” (increasing 226 yuan [$28] from an average of 984 yuan [$123] in 1992, an increase of 23 percent). 9 For comparative purposes, I calculated average rural incomes for all the counties and municipalities of Fujian, based on total rural income (chunshouru) divided by total rural population. The average rural income in Fujian was 1,530 yuan ($191), and the Longyan administrative region had the lowest per capita income in Fujian, averaging 1,087 yuan ($136). Rural income in the hinterlands of the Xiamen Special Economic Zone ( Jingjitequ), a day’s drive from Meihuashan by car, was more than twice what it was in the Longyan region.

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In part because of its location at the boundaries between the Longyan municipality and the counties of Shanghang and Liancheng, Meihuashan lay somewhere toward the middle of the economic spectrum of the Longyan administrative region in the mid-1990s. Of the seven administrative regions and municipalities in the region, the Longyan municipality ranked first, with an average of 1,389 yuan ($174); Liancheng County ranked fourth, with an average of 1,080 yuan ($135); and Shanghang County ranked fifth, with an average of 969 yuan ($121). In 1995, per capita incomes in the villages of Meihuashan were beginning to surpass the 1,000-yuan ($125) mark, though there was substantial unevenness in economic development between administrative villages, and even between natural villages in the same administrative village. 10 A large disparity also existed between rich and poor households in each village. Income differences among the five study villages were substantial, especially since these included natural villages from the wealthiest and poorest administrative villages. Longgui, with a stated per capita income of 1,000 yuan ($125), is in the Yunhui administrative village (along with Dapingshan), which had an official per capita income of 1,761 yuan ($220). Majiaping, on the other hand, had a stated per capita income of 255 yuan ($32) in 1994, and the administrative village of Yanbei (which includes Majiaping and two villages outside the reserve) had an official per capita income of 486 yuan ($61). The stark contrast in income among these villages is largely the result of the one key geographical factor that affects the economies of all the natural villages in Meihuashan: access to roads. Road development is a catalyst, both for habitat destruction and for economic growth. In the Southeast Uplands, it is viewed as an absolute necessity to economic development, and even nature reserve administrators often allow villages to develop roads where footpaths have sufficed for centuries, as long as the roads connect a village to the larger road network. The economic primacy of Yunhui administrative village (Longgui and Qiushan) is a constant reminder to the people of Meihuashan that mechanized transportation can lead to wealth. Road access beginning in 1978 in Longgui and in the mid-1980s in Qiushan gave the Yunhui administrative village an early advantage as nationwide economic reforms opened new trade opportunities. Abundant natural resources, low population, and the opening of a timber area on village lands allowed for rapid economic development, and by 1986, annual per capita income in Yunhui (859 yuan, $107) far exceeded that of all other villages in the

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reserve. By the late 1980s, one villager had became well known in the region for his wealth, having made large profits from investment in cement plants in Gutian and other areas, as well as from starting his own plywood factory near Fukeng. He subsequently moved down to Shangfu village (outside the nature reserve), the administrative center of Buyun township, where he built a two-story, cement-and-tile house complete with a courtyard and fountain. In 1995, he was probably the only native of the reserve area who owned a car. While his example is exceptional, other villagers in Yunhui and other villages enjoyed considerable windfalls by trading Chinese fir (during the 1980s price hikes, before the large trees were completely removed from the reserve), by producing Cryptomeria carvings for sale to Japan, and through the simultaneous pursuit of numerous sideline activities, which in the late 1990s was becoming the norm in Meihuashan. Another village lacking direct road access is not as seriously impoverished as Majiaping. Chijiashan village, with an average annual per capita income of 623 yuan ($78) in 1994, has a low ratio of population-to-bamboo forest area; in fact, it is the most extensive area of well-managed bamboo forest in the reserve, belonging to a community of about 220 people. Labor requirements exceed the capacity of the work force, and Jiangxi migrant workers are a critical supplement. By 1994, villagers had anticipated the trend of the future by adding value to bamboo before exporting it. Poles were cut into chopsticks or flat, thin pieces (zhupian) used in the manufacture of car seat covers, couch covers, and other portable, partially finished products. Just as Yunhui provides an example of the benefits of modern transport, Chijiashan stands out as a model of the benefits of effective bamboo management. With a long history of careful bamboo management, the village has overcome its limited access to transportation in recent times. Ironically, bamboo was cultivated more assiduously in that village in earlier times because it had a comparative geographic advantage in the dried bamboo-shoot trade at a time when goods could be transported to the Malinxi River and by boat to Wanan. At present, the economic development of villages within the nature reserve is constrained by land use regulations, especially those limiting timber harvests and prohibiting the disturbance of broadleaf forests. This is perceived by villagers in the reserve as a handicap, inhibiting their economic competitiveness, and has been a source of serious conflict between the reserve administration and reserve residents. The future economic well-being of the villages of Meihuashan is largely contingent on at least

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five conditions: (1) that bamboo management be improved so villagers can increase the density of plants per unit area, thus increasing overall bamboo culm production without significantly increasing the area under cultivation; (2) that villages or townships develop the capacity to process bamboo, thus adding value by creating marketable finished products (as is done in Wuyishan); (3) that bamboo lands be redistributed equitably among families at periodic village meetings as household populations change (some villages do this and others do not); (4) that village and regional economies become more diversified; and (5) that villagers become the main operators of an emerging service and technical economy associated with reserve management, research, and strictly managed tourism in and around the nature reserve. The two-edged sword of tourism and commercialism will require conscientious management if environmental destruction, landscape degradation, and economic inequity are to be avoided. With the development of a capitalist economy, there is also the danger of an ever-weakening centralized welfare system. Villagers complain that education, health care, and (until 1998) telecommunication services have declined. With the reserve divvied up among seven townships in two counties and one municipality, there is a serious lack of coordination between government bureaus in the provision of social services, law enforcement, and general planning. This is a source of acrimonious controversy, as villagers accuse the reserve of backing out on pledges to provide funding for poverty relief and capital investments for the production, processing, and marketing of bamboo, livestock, and other primary sector commodities. Enforcement of game and forestry laws thus has become extremely contentious. Over the centuries, the dual imperatives of subsistence and economic survival in a mountain society with trade connections extending beyond the borders of China have caused fluctuations in village populations and in the intensity of pressure on local natural resources. Social and environmental instability resulting from famine, banditry, military invasions, and national political movements often culminated in periods of depopulation through death and out-migration. Still, the villages in the nature reserve today are inhabited by direct descendants of the early settlers. The history of their land and resource use is critical to their identity and to understanding the ecological conditions in which indigenous wild plants and animals exist today.

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As China begins its first experiments with democracy, by allowing villagers to elect their own leaders, the long-term human inhabitants of places such as Meihuashan should be considered stewards of the land. Striking a balance between the national (and international) values, goals, and regulations of nature conservation, on the one hand, and local traditions and economic interests, on the other, is the main challenge confronting both the inhabitants and the management of Meihuashan and other nature reserves in China. Understanding the effects of current land use practices on landscapes and ecosystems requires a clearer view of the cumulative effects of village land use over the course of centuries.

6

Burning the Mountains A Historical Landscape Ecology of the Meihuashan Ecosystem

In Meihuashan lie eighteen basins, in each basin lie eighteen marshes, in each marsh lie eighteen coves, in each cove lie eighteen crannies, in each cranny lie eighteen golden armchairs. — Ancient ode to Meihuashan

Vegetation patterns in Meihuashan today are the result of centuries of landscape modification by Hakka villagers and probably by earlier aboriginal inhabitants as well. As the Hakka came to dominate the region, they continued to transform the once ubiquitous, subtropical broadleaf forests into a patchwork of cultivated, semicultivated, and wild habitats. With more than five hundred years of Han settlement, rice terraces crept up the valley sides, fire scoured montane meadows to the highest peaks, bamboo forests covered the slopes, and sacred broadleaf forests or cultivated groves of Cryptomeria trees rose above the villages, blocking fierce winds in the water gaps and covering low knolls among the houses and temples. China’s transition to socialism led to a series of changes in local resource management patterns and accelerated the rate of landscape transformation, and though government directives often have called for uniform approaches to resource management, environmental change in Meihuashan since 1949 has been highly complex. In the past fifty years, a Western-influenced, scientific-utilitarian view of “nature” and “natural resources” has been propagated, and new conservation techniques have been introduced, along with the beginnings of industrialized agriculture and forestry. With the establishment of the Meihuashan Nature Reserve in the late 1980s, still other goals and values were instituted, most notably those related to wildlife conservation. Through all the changes of the past half-century, however, some of the oldest local land

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use traditions continue, and certain ideologies and social structures developed in conjunction with the primary goals of settlement and subsistence have persisted and even found renewed vigor in recent years. Even government-led reforestation schemes, deemed largely unsuccessful in most of China by foreign critics, have had dramatic, if not always ecologically favorable, results. The simplistic notion that deforestation and land degradation have been the predominant trend in rural China since the 1950s is challenged by the evidence gathered from this field investigation. Though there have been numerous negative effects on wildlife and habitat during the past half-century, there have also been changes in land use patterns that have led to greater forest coverage, especially in conifers on the high mountains. The Meihuashan landscape is a mosaic of vegetation types, in different phases of succession, each associated with particular elevation zones and particular sets of land use practices and indigenous perceptions. Traditional views of these vegetation and land use zones, based on local knowledge, are reflected in the history of their anthropogenic formation. As perceptions have changed, the landscape has changed, and vice versa. Investigating both the ecological and ethnohistorical dimensions of landscape change will lead to an understanding of the causes and consequences of this panoply of human influences on the environment through time. Contemporary Land Use Patterns in and around Village Nuclei

With the population of Meihuashan being clustered in twenty-five natural villages, the land use patterns surrounding these settlements is the critical link between human influence and habitat conservation. Current land use patterns concentrate most human disturbance on the valleys and slopes closest to the villages. Beyond the village nucleus and its rice paddies, vegetable gardens, and sacred forests are extensive stands of bamboo, as well as broadleaf, pine, and mixed forests. There are also lessextensive grasslands, which can be divided into two types: first, low-elevation grasslands (so-called montane wastelands, huangshan), where rice terraces have been abandoned or where grazing pressure has prevented reforestation; and second, high-elevation grasslands on the ridges and summits above 1,700 meters (1,860 ft.), where conditions are unsuitable for pine forest succession. On these more peripheral village lands, residents extract forest resources for subsistence and commercial purposes. Bamboo forests are divided into plots, with usufruct rights granted to

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individual families under the “household responsibility system,” in a fashion similar to the allotment of rice paddy lands. Most of the pine, broadleaf, and mixed forests are jointly owned by the collective ( jiti), which in Meihuashan consists of all members of a particular administrative village. Substantial areas of forest have reverted to complete government jurisdiction (totaling 23 percent of the reserve area), typically as the result of unresolved intervillage land tenure conflicts. Traditional Food Ways and Subsistence Patterns in Meihuashan

Since the early 1950s, dietary regimes in the villages of Meihuashan have changed dramatically. The transformation in local food ways has occurred in tandem with developments in agriculture, animal husbandry, and transportation, all of which have increased local food production. The Chinese “green revolution” has increased the availability and affordability of new varieties of grain, vegetables, and livestock. This has profoundly affected land use patterns and has led to an apparently irrevocable dependence on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Local people — especially hunters— have noticed the devastation to wildlife populations caused by chemical contaminants, but the problem remains largely unexamined by the scientific community. On the other hand, the advent of hybrid rice has led to much higher productivity per unit area, and therefore much less land is now devoted to agriculture; forest succession is occurring in many relict rice paddies throughout the reserve. Higher grain production per unit area has further obviated the traditional need to burn large land areas to produce starch-rich wild plants, thereby eliminating a major source of vegetation disturbance. From these trends, we can see that the development of more “modern” subsistence practices, which correspond to a change in diet and consumption patterns, has had both positive and negative effects on wildlife and habitat. Before 1949, Meihuashan villagers subsisted primarily on rice, vegetables, starch from the rhizomous roots of bracken ferns, and other wild edible plants and animals. Because villagers did not have cooking oil, they steamed or boiled these foods. And though they raised pigs, pork was eaten only about twice a month, when a pig was slaughtered, and then only in small quantities because one family’s pig was divided and sold to the rest of the village. Most people ate more fat than lean meat, which often appears to be the custom today as well. Chickens and ducks were raised by individual households, providing eggs, but their meat was eaten only during celebrations and holidays. Bean curd (doufu) was another

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source of protein. It was produced in the market towns and sometimes in the villages themselves. The meat of wild animals provided an important supplement to the local dietary regime. Many families trapped bamboo rats (zhushu; Rhizomys pruinosus), forest rodents resembling large guinea pigs (with long tails) that feed on bamboo. Dried bamboo-rat meat is a famous local specialty, and the trapping and consumption of the rats is still commonplace. Frogs (shiren, or shidong) captured in mountain streams are another traditional delicacy, as are, to a lesser degree, certain species of turtles in riparian habitats.1 The hunting of large mammals, though typically practiced by only a few males in each village, provided the meat of muntjacs, wild boar, and other animals. Some additional animals and birds that have long been captured for food and medicine include pangolins, porcupines, badgers, civets, mustelids, wild cats, bears, red dogs, pheasants, and other gallinaceous birds. Even in the 1990s, when people in Meihuashan are no longer under dietary stress, they will eat virtually any animal, even those killed serendipitously, including owls and other nongame birds. In the mid-1990s, hunting, trapping, and the consumption of wildlife, though not critical for subsistence, remained an important part of upland culture. Though wild plants and animals have for years been consumed on a frequent basis for medicinal and food purposes, village dietary regimes have been based predominantly on agricultural products, especially rice and vegetables. Three types of rice have figured prominently in the diets and cultivation systems of Meihuashan: glutinous rice (nuomi), white rice (baimi), and red rice (hongmi; also known as heimi, black rice). Glutinous rice traditionally comprises between one-quarter and one-third of each family’s total annual rice crop. As the primary ingredient in rice wine and ceremonial foods, it has great cultural significance. Most families use their glutinous rice stocks to make rice wine (mijiu), which is ritually consumed at meals. Though the frequency and volume of consumption varies among families, males typically drink one or more servings from their rice bowls before rice is served at a meal. This is done mostly at lunch and dinner, but sometimes at breakfast as well. Some people prefer to drink rice wine instead of eating rice, even in times of grain scarcity, such as the early 1960s. Within the past fifteen to twenty years, the average person’s daily rice consumption is reported to have decreased by nearly one-half. Though this statement is difficult to verify and still more difficult to prove in a quantitative fashion, there are compelling reasons for a decline in starch

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consumption. Villagers attribute the change to three factors: first, a decrease in the metabolic energy requirements of laborers since the advent of roads and vehicular transport of goods to and from the montane villages; second, a shift toward more sedentary work modes— more business dealing, less hard labor, and the hiring of waidiren (outsiders) as laborers; and third, the availability of a much greater variety of locally and regionally produced food items, which have partially replaced rice and other starches in the diet. The transition from a diet predominated by starchy staples, cereals, and root crops, which are the cheapest available plant foods, to a diet more balanced with other, more expensive animal and plant foods has been observed in developing countries and regions around the globe. Because of a shorter growing season, more extreme cold events, and cooler year-round temperatures, as well as soil and hydrological limitations, Meihuashan does not produce the array or quantity of vegetables common in lowland and southeastern hill areas of Fujian. Most of the vegetables consumed by Meihuashan villagers are grown in household gardens interspersed with houses and other buildings throughout the village. Before the 1950s, these consisted mostly of taro (Colocasia esculenta —many varieties of wet- and dryland types), five to six varieties of peas and beans (including Phaseolus vulgaris, Pisum sativum, and Vigna sinensis), four types of squash (including Cucurbita moschata, Cucumis sativus, Momordica charantia, and Benincasa hipida), Chinese cabbage (qingcai and xiaobaicai; Brassica spp.), canna ( jiaoyu; Canna edulis) and sweet potatoes (Ipomea betides). Taro has been grown in small plots within the villages of Meihuashan for many centuries. Along with rice and bracken root, it was an important source of starch in the local diet. The most favored varieties are those that produce drier roots. These types include both dry and aquatic types. Though there was no mention of upland taro cultivation in historical times, and there is no evidence of this practice today, it is possible that taro was cultivated in mountain plots during periods when high populations created a greater demand for starch. Sweet potatoes, introduced in Fujian by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, do not appear to have revolutionized subsistence practices in Meihuashan as they did in many other montane areas of southeast China. In Meihuashan, villagers had no success with germination from tubers. 2 Bamboo shoots are another traditional food of high nutritional value, and these are gathered between March and May in the managed forests of mao bamboo, as well as in stands of wild bamboo, especially nude-

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sheath bamboo (stone bamboo, shizhu; Phyllostachys nuda) and “water bamboo” (shuizhu; P. heteroclada). Bamboo shoots have long been considered both a delicacy in times of plenty and an important local staple during food shortages. By the 1970s, many cultivars were introduced to the vegetable plots of Meihuashan, including hot peppers, bell peppers, potatoes, new types of squash and cabbage, and fruit crops, such as peaches and pears. An improved hybrid variety of sweet potato led to the introduction of a variety with a shorter, fatter tuber, which was hardier at high elevations and could be germinated successfully. For the first time, villagers could produce their own seedlings for new sweet potato crops each year. Today, more than thirty types of vegetables are grown in Meihuashan; they fall in three broad categories: Cruciferae (cabbages and other green, leafy vegetables), roughly ten kinds (including species and varieties); beans, roughly ten kinds; and tubers, about eight kinds. The general pattern of household vegetable cultivation today is very similar to what it was before 1949. The soil is prepared in March and seeds are sown in early May. Fertilizers are made from cow and pig manure (and to a lesser extent, human nightsoil) composted with the ashes of grass and ferns. When the plants are in the seedling stage, a mixture of water and human urine (at a ratio of 2:1) is applied weekly, and as the plants grow, a higher concentration of urine is applied. Vegetables are harvested through the summer, fall, and— squash and cabbages— into the winter months. Traditional Rice Cultivation and Its Environmental Consequences

The villages of Meihuashan are distinctive in having relied on rice cultivation for subsistence through most of their history. This is not typical for all high-elevation areas of the Southeast Uplands. Few Wuyishan villages produce any rice, because the scarce alluvial cropland in the mountain villages has been devoted to producing tea and bamboo products, and cash from these exports has been used for the purchase of grain (and many other necessities) from surrounding settlements in lower valleys. Though yearly grain production in Meihuashan consistently failed to meet annual needs until the 1980s, rice cultivation has for centuries been the most fundamental part of local subsistence strategies. Terraced rice paddies, some perhaps as old as the villages themselves, are a defining element of the cultural landscape, with dramatic long-term effects on montane hydrology and ecosystems. Even after terraces are abandoned, the restoration of geomorphic patterns and vegetation assemblages can

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require several decades. At least two historical episodes of extensive terrace abandonment, one around the turn of the past century and one during the past fifteen years, have led to old field succession to broadleaf (and mixed) forest and to low-elevation grassland, respectively. Present-day agricultural conditions in Meihuashan provide a reference point for viewing the past. In 1986, the total area of cultivated land (including vegetable plots and rice paddies belonging to settlements outside the reserve) in the reserve was about 7.4 square kilometers (2.8 sq. mi.), comprising about 3.3 percent of the total land area. More than 95 percent of the cultivated land in the reserve consists of rice paddy. Most rice paddies are on montane terraces, and most terraces are narrow (some hold only two rows of plants). Paddy lands are typically small and scattered through the rugged terrain at elevations up to 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.). Most are found at around 800 meters (2,500 ft.), though in the Guihe-Jiaotan area, paddies average about 1,000 meters (3,300 ft.) in elevation, and Mawu village has paddies at 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.). Even large terraced areas are rarely more than 7–10 hectares (17–24.7 acres) in area (with exceptions, especially between Guihe, Jiaotan, and Mawu). Many are isolated patches surrounded by mature broadleaf, pine, bamboo, or mixed forests. Some are up to 10–12 kilometers (6–7 mi.) from the nearest village. Isolated paddies a long distance from villages are especially susceptible to depredation by wild boar, monkeys, and rats. Natural conditions in Meihuashan are not ideal for rice production, and most paddy land is considered low in productive capacity. The area receives an abundance of precipitation—200 centimeters (79 in.) of rain a year on average, with up to 220 centimeters (87 in.) in wet years. Because most of the paddies are fed by the natural flow of groundwater and runoff, or by small bamboo-pipe aqueducts, large-scale irrigation ditch systems are unnecessary. Despite the favorable precipitation, there is a relatively long frost season, extending from mid- to late November to March or early April, a period of 140–150 days. Early frosts are a threat to late-season rice crops, and given the short frost-free season, double cropping of rice is not feasible. Double cropping was attempted in Meihuashan only during the “high production” (gaoshengchan) campaigns of the Cultural Revolution, and in some years, annual production fell below single-crop levels. Other impediments to rice cultivation include thin soils (because of steep slopes) and lower than optimal water temperatures. Cool paddy water temperatures result from cool air temperatures, short daily insolation periods, steep slopes, and poor circulation.

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The current scale of agriculture in Meihuashan also prevents its mechanization. Rice paddies are small and remote, many are far from roads, and economic returns are so small that mechanization would not be cost effective. Even water buffaloes, common in the region at elevations below about 750 meters (2,500 ft.), are not found in the reserve. Their absence is the result of several possible factors; the mountain rice terraces are too steep and narrow to support their weight, and the animals are too large to negotiate the mountain trails or to turn around within the small, terraced paddies. One local man stated that the lack of standing water and slow-moving rivers (water buffaloes’ favored habitats) in the high-elevation villages is another important limiting factor. For these reasons, locals have long relied on the much smaller yellow cattle for draft animals, and each natural village has between five and thirty head. A distinguishing characteristic of traditional agricultural in the Meihuashan region is the burning of straw, ferns (chiefly Dicranopteris dichotoma), and other herbage for fertilizer. This is done in the fields or in concavities on mountain slopes, from which ashes are collected and spread over the paddies. A field fertilized in this manner was known as a she tian (local pronunciation “xie”; see glossary), meaning “burnt field.” Because of this cultivation method, many mountain villages in the region contain this character as an element of their names, including the reserve villages of Daxie (Big Burnt Field), Dagaoxie (Big High Burnt Field), and Xiaogaoxie (Little High Burnt Field). A historical and etymological connection may exist between this practice and early swidden cultivation by the She people, whose name is represented by the same character (see glossary). In fact, the practice of burning field stubble or wild vegetation and using the ash as fertilizer probably developed from long-cycle swidden practices of the She people. 3 The influx of Hakka settlers to southwest Fujian no doubt altered indigenous mountain land tenure patterns, and swidden systems eventually gave way to sedentary rice cultivation. Before the introduction of hybrid rice (zajiao shuidao), a product of the Chinese green revolution, Meihuashan villagers (and millions of other peasants throughout southern China) cultivated varieties of rice much taller than those used today— meter-high plants were common. Hybrid varieties of high-yielding rice developed by the International Rice Research Institute and designated “IR-8 dwarf indica,” were propagated throughout southern China by the mid-1970s. Traditional varieties of red rice, white rice, and glutinous rice yielded much less grain per unit area than the modern hybrids. Traditional rice yields in Guihe

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are believed to have reached 3,000 kg /ha (3 tons/2.5 acres) (before drying) at maximum, whereas hybrid rice production in the village can reach a maximum of up to 5,250 kg/ ha (6 tons/2.5 acres) on the best paddies today. 4 Today’s higher yields per unit area are attributed to closer spacing of the seedlings in each row, and to closer spacing of rows. Although dwarf hybrid rice plants are only about half the height of traditional varieties, they have the same number of grains per plant (about 180– 200). Smaller plants of equal productivity are planted closer together, producing more grain per unit area. Hybrid rice first reached Meihuashan in the mid-1970s but not all villages had adopted it until the early 1990s. Some villages, like Majiaping, resisted the adoption of hybrid rice for more than a decade. Among the reasons cited for this decision were the prohibitive expenses of purchasing and transporting seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides to the village, and unwillingness to make a potentially risky transition into an unknown system of agriculture. Although villagers have now made a full transition to hybrid rice, several serious drawbacks to its production persist. First, the required additions of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have negative effects on local ecosystems; second, farmers are dependent on outside sources of fertilizer, pesticide, and seeds, expenses that are making grain agriculture uneconomical; and third, hybrids are causing the disappearance of traditional varieties of rice, which were better adapted to local soil, climatic, and ecological conditions (including the depredation of insects and other pathogens). Traditional agriculture in Meihuashan was completely organic and sustainable as long as it was limited to a relatively small areal scale. It is axiomatic that deforestation was a prerequisite of wet-rice agriculture in tropical and subtropical forest ecosystems, and that the cultivation cycle, including the construction and maintenance of terraces, perpetuated agricultural disturbance patches indefinitely. Under traditional cultivation schemes, however, disruptions to the hydrological, pedological, and ecological systems of the area were limited mostly to the agricultural plots themselves. Anthropogenic soils were developed through careful stewardship, and seasonal inputs of ashes, composted plant materials, human and livestock wastes, and other organic fertilizers were required to maintain fertile paddy lands. Because water is abundant, hydrological alterations were comparatively minor, except in areas of extensive terracing, where three to four villages shared abutting terrace lands (as in the Guihe-Jiaotan area). In many paddy lands, ecological conditions may actually have been enhanced in certain ways.

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For example, mature rice crops have extremely high forage value for ungulates, especially wild boar and Reeve’s muntjacs, and for rats; even during the fallow season, small, remote paddies provide prime open grazing land and edge habitat for ungulates and other large and small herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores. Rice Terrace Abandonment

Before exploring the combined effects of rice cultivation and other land use activities, it is helpful to try to ascertain the historical areal maximum of terrace land and to have some sense of its configuration. There are no reliable estimates of the rate of rice terrace abandonment since the Qing, but abundant visible evidence of abandoned terraces, now in many different stages of succession, corresponds with oral histories indicating that the phenomenon has a long history and many causes. The population of Meihuashan was much greater (possibly as much as five times greater) during the mid- to late Qing, while grain production per unit area was much lower—perhaps half the present level at best. Therefore, the paddy area required to feed the local populace (assuming contemporary levels of demand) would have to have been roughly ten times greater than at present. Though traditional rice production was insufficient to feed the population through the course of a whole year, the presence of abandoned rice (and perhaps taro) terraces in many broadleaf, mixed, and bamboo forests all over the reserve (and outside the reserve) reveals that significant attempts were made to match the demand. Observations in the study villages and in other parts of the reserve reveal that while paddy lands may never have reached ten times their present extent, they probably spread over an area several times greater than the present. According to villagers, terraces were abandoned for one or more of the following reasons: a decrease in population in one or more of the adjacent villages, which meant a decrease in subsistence demands; population decreases, which diminished the agricultural work force necessary for maintaining paddies, aqueducts, and other components of the irrigation system; terrace expansion into less-suitable lands (those at higher elevations, farther from villages, with thinner soils, colder water, and an insufficient water supply), which reached a point of diminishing returns, with repeated years of low productivity; and finally, depredation by wild boar, monkeys, and rats, which greatly decreased productivity in remote paddies. Today, abandoned terraces sit on forested slopes around all the study

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villages and in all other natural villages where such features were investigated or inquired about. Abandoned terraces are found, too, in some areas far from any existing villages. Similarities in the chronology of terrace development and abandonment in all five study villages suggest a regional rise and decline in population and socioeconomic conditions during the Qing dynasty, when a population surge created increased food demands. Rice croplands expanded again in the 1960s, when government policies fostered higher grain production rates through collective agricultural development. Since the reforms of the early 1980s, terrace abandonment has continued even as the population has grown (pl. 9). This is because of the following factors: first, inputs of chemical fertilizers (and pesticides) and the cultivation of modern hybrid rice varieties allows for more grain production within less paddy space; second, rice is used for family subsistence only (in nearly all instances), and is no longer economically sound for market or to meet government quotas (taxes are paid in cash, rather than a grain tax); and third, the depredation of rats, boar, and monkeys make rice cultivation in remote paddies especially problematic. While cropland probably reached its maximum area in the Qing, accounting for between 6 and 10 percent of the present reserve area, paddies were mostly small and dispersed. This amount of agricultural clearance might not have significantly affected local ecosystems, at least while nonagricultural lands on high mountain slopes and summits, and in remote valleys and wetlands, retained sufficient forest cover. Rice cultivation fell far short of meeting human subsistence demands, though, and the production of other starchy staples affected a much larger proportion of Meihuashan than did rice cultivation. Just as the shetian rice cultivation system made use of fire to create ash for fertilizer, which was then spread over the rice paddy, another starch-production practice involved the widespread firing of slopes, ridges, and summits to enrich otherwise uncultivated mountain soils. The burning of the mountains for the production of starch-bearing wild plants (among other motives) effectively kept most of Meihuashan cleared of forests, and this clearance was maintained for centuries. A Supplementary Source of Starch: The Bracken Root–Fire Complex

The use of fire as a tool for landscape management in South China is well documented in local gazetteers and by environmental historians and ecologists. While Averill (1983), Chandler (1994), and Menzies (1988b)

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have focused on the use of fire as part of indigenous agricultural and forestry systems, especially the cultivation of Chinese fir and associated intercrops, Marks (1996), in writing about the Lingnan region (Guangdong and Guangxi), comments on the historical Han and Yao custom of burning noncultivated upland areas on an annual or biennial basis. The history and raison d’être of cyclical shrub and grassland burning have been sparsely investigated. Coupled with the dearth of historical analysis of this problem is a lack of recent ethnographic fieldwork on the local oral history of fire use in grass and scrub management in South China. Marks (1996) implies that the origins of mountain burning in the Lingnan region lie in swidden cultivation patterns developed by Yao tribesmen (who often replanted trees) and were altered by the Han into a nonagricultural land use practice. By the twentieth century, and possibly much earlier, this practice was ubiquitous: In Lingnan, at least in the twentieth century, peasants habitually burned off the hills every year or two, not only rendering the hills unfit for replanting, but also preventing trees from growing. In Guangxi, Albert B. Steward observed that the peasant farmers “habitually fire most of the burnable slopes in the vicinity of the homes during the dry season each year. The continuation of this practice tends to destroy the majority of the species of woody plants and change the aspect of a once richly forested country to that of a hilly or mountainous grassland.” In Guangdong, according to Fenzel, Chinese farmers “annually burn down the grass covering the mountains.” (Marks 1996, 71)

In the course of field investigations, Fenzel (1929) and Pendleton (1933) asked farmers why they burned off the hills on a regular basis. Pendleton was told that ashes from the burned slopes washed down and fertilized agricultural land in the valleys, a phenomenon in some ways comparable to the shetian system in Meihuashan (and observed in other parts of the world), but one that Pendleton found unlikely because contour ditches ran along the slopes to carry water and eroded materials away from the paddies and to prevent flooding of the rice crop. Fenzel (1929) received a different response to the question of why montane grasslands were burned: “To deprive the robbers, tigers, and snakes of their dens.” The annual burning of the mountains in the Southeast Uplands before the 1950s is partially explained this same way by farmers there today as well, but animal control is only one of four common explanations given.

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In interviews conducted in thirteen study villages, in three nature reserves, spanning roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) along the axis of the Wuyi-Daiyun Mountains, I found that all the villages had a history of annually burning extensive tracts of surrounding uplands. In Meihuashan, Longxishan, Wuyishan, and areas between the reserves, I sought reasons for grassland burning. In all but three of the thirteen study villages, one of the primary reasons for burning was to enhance the growth of bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum var. latiusculum), or juecai, the rhizomes (or underground water and carbohydrate storage organs) of which were used to produce edible starch powder, called shanfen (mountain flour) or, less commonly, juefen (fern flour; see glossary for terms in Chinese). 5 In these high mountain areas, which lie mostly between 650 and 1,800 meters (2,100 and 6,000 ft.), rice production was low or nonexistent, and sweet potatoes were less common than in lower mountains and hill areas farther east. Villages in Meihuashan and Longxishan did not produce enough rice each year to meet subsistence needs, and Wuyishan did not have any rice cultivation. In all three areas, the production of starchy staples was insufficient to sustain the population, and bracken fern roots provided a much-needed supplementary source of starch. In Fujian, bracken fern grows mainly on barren hills and mountains or along the edges of forest or scrub. Only by burning the mountains during the dry season (in late fall or winter) did bracken fern grow in sufficient abundance, and with roots large and starchy enough to warrant the arduous efforts of root collecting and processing. Fire kept dense grasses (maocao) cleared to promote the growth of the heliophytic ferns, and laid down a yearly layer of ash for fertilizer. As one Jiangdun ( Wuyishan) villager stated, “Without burning, there was no shanfen.” The effects of fire on fern growth were visible on steep slopes outside the Meihuashan Reserve near Gutian, where a Chinese fir plantation had been clear-cut and burned in preparation for replanting tree seedlings. Bracken ferns were among the first pioneers on the slopes in spring, with the shorter and more leathery Dicranopteris fern (Dicranopteris dichotoma), or mangqi, becoming ubiquitous only in later stages of succession, when it forms dense green mats in the pine forest understory. In Meihuashan, burning was extremely common and, apparently, not managed with much rigor. No groups or individuals were designated fire managers, and burning apparently was restricted by very few regulations. Timing was important, however, and the shrub-grasslands customarily were burned

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after the “first day of winter” (lidong yihou, after the first day of the first winter period, one of twenty-four seasonal periods in a year), which normally falls on November 7 or 8. By then, the vegetation was still dry enough to burn but not dry enough to allow the fire to spread into bamboo forests, sacred forests, or village settlements, areas that were off limits to burning. Within the vast area of montane shrub and grasslands, one villager said, “Anyone could burn anywhere. As long as you did not burn a village’s bamboo forest nothing mattered, no one cared.” Fires spread easily across the montane meadows. Because burning was frequent, fuel did not build up enough to give rise to a catastrophic fire, which could threaten bamboo groves or sacred forests. Remnants of broadleaf forests were fairly fire resistant in this regime, since they held moisture much more effectively than did other types of vegetation. Though such forests could be cleared and burned with some effort, as under a swidden cultivation system, fires set in the grasslands did not easily invade broadleaf forests or riparian broadleaf shrub thickets within the grasslands. A burned area would provide plenty of bracken fern for about two years. The ferns, which grow to more than a meter high, could be harvested in the fall and winter, between August and December. In Meihuashan, people from many villages could harvest in the highest mountains (Gouzinao, Youpoji, and Miaojinshan) without triggering land use conflicts. Blatantly harvesting within another village’s lands, however, was generally prohibited. Wuyishan, too, had no known land use conflicts related to shanfen collection, since the population density was relatively low, especially in high grasslands where the ferns were gathered. One person could gather about 25 kilograms (55 lbs.) of fern roots in a day. The roots were washed and then beaten with a wooden mallet on a stone slab until they were soft. This stage was often completed in the mountains, on granite boulders near where the ferns were picked. In the village, the roots were washed in a bucket and beaten again repeatedly until the water in the bucket turned white. The water was then dumped into a bamboo basket, which was suspended over a wooden tub. The watery paste drained into the tub, and water was added to the basket until all the paste had sifted through. The dregs from the basket were disposed of. After sitting in the tub for a day and a night, excess water was dumped out, and the paste at the bottom of the tub was placed in the sun to dry. The resulting flour could be stored for a long time. To be cooked, it needed only to be put into a wok with water and stirred, or kneaded into a hoecake and fried. A day’s collection of 25 kilograms of roots could be

Plate 1. A granite “tiger closet” tiger trap. This trap is near a recently reconstructed ninthcentury Buddhist temple on Jiuxian Mountain in the Daiyunshan Nature Reserve. Measuring roughly 5 m long by 1 m wide (16.5 x 3.3 ft.), 2 m (6.5 ft.) high in front and 1 m (3.2 ft.) high in the rear, the trap is reputed to be as old as the original temple. Plate 2. A tiger talisman in Zhongping village, Meihuashan, north of Majiaping. This clay tiger face and similar icons are attached to house roofs and walls to ward off evil spirits.

Plate 3. A tiger in the captive breeding facility at Meihuashan. Plate 4. (Right) A Cryptomeria stump in a Guizhuping windgap fengshui forest. This tree was cut by local entrepreneurs, who used it to produce decorative carvings for sale in Japan.

Plate 5. (Below) Majiaping village (viewed from the west). This highly compact village consists of traditional timber-frame houses, many of them connected.

Plate 6. (Top) A cantilevered bridge-temple in Jiaotan village. Because they are critically important for transportation, these traditional folk structures have survived decades of political chaos. Restoration of religious relics inside the bridge-temples has occurred in the past decade. Plate 7. (Lower) An earth-god shrine in Guizhuping village. Each village in Meihuashan has several earth-god shrines. Most are located in or near fengshui forests.

Plate 8. The Xiaoyang wetland, in the core area of the Meihuashan reserve.

Plate 9. Abandoned rice terraces in Meihuashan. Thick grass covers old paddy in the foreground. Two active terrace systems are separated by a series of abandoned terraces, in the background.

Plate 10. (Top) A bamboo grove on Guizhuping village lands. The carefully cleared understory provides little browse or cover for wildlife. Characters on the culm at lower right mark the boundary between two households’ bamboo lands. Plate 11. ( Lower) Bamboo-walled mushroom sheds in Guizhuping village. In the late 1990s, these structures sprouted like mushrooms, covering former paddy lands in Guihe, Dapingshan, and Gonghe. Reserve managers predicted the mushroom industry would soon die, as the required supply of sawdust from hardwood trees harvested outside the reserve began to dwindle. By 2001, villagers had begun producing common “store” mushrooms, which can be raised in rice straw.

Plate 12. Cryptomeria trees in the Mawu village watergate fengshui forest.

Plate 13. (Below) A broadleaf fengshui forest in Taipingliao village. Situated between the upper and lower villages, it is a watergate forest for the upper village and a headwater forest for the lower one.

Plate 14. The traditional crossbow and tripline method used by tiger hunters. The bolts are placed on the cocked crossbow, and the tripline is set across a game trail. The bow’s spring action comes from flexible multi-ply strips of mao bamboo.

Plate 15. A crossbow bolt. Huang Zaiqiu ( pictured), one of the last crossbow tiger hunters in the region, does not reveal the ingredients of the poison that was applied to the iron heads.

Plate 16. A bamboo bow trap in Meihuashan. These traps are used for small animals, such as bamboo rats, bandicoot rats, partridges, pheasants, and small Indian civets.

Plate 17. A stick snare trap on a trail near Guadun village, in Wuyishan. The trap is powered by a bent sapling.

Plate 18. Short-barreled and standard long-barreled muzzle-loaders in Meihuashan. Found in nearly every village household in the 1990s, they are used primarily to kill wild boar.

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made into about 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of starch powder, a ratio of about twelve-to-one. Bracken fern is distributed in temperate and tropical regions worldwide. It was one of the most important (if not the most important) subsistence food items among the Maori in New Zealand until well into the nineteenth century, even in areas where sweet potatoes and taro were cultivated. It was consumed as a staple by aborigines in Tasmania, too, and by Native Americans in California. Like the peoples of the Southeast Uplands, the Maori burned large areas in the hills every one to three years to ensure that starchy rhizomes were produced. These were pounded into a flour, shaped into bread, and cooked. 6 Bracken fern grows all over China, but most abundantly south of the Changjiang. Although bracken root consumption in the Southeast Uplands is well known, there appears to be little information on the geographical distribution of this practice in other parts of China in historical times. The fact that it was common throughout the Southeast Uplands has important implications for understanding the use of fire throughout China, especially south of the Changjiang. Based on interviews in the three nature reserves, there was remarkable similarity between mountain communities in different subregions in the use of shanfen as a supplementary source of starch. Probably all the villages in both Wuyishan and Meihuashan were self-sufficient in the production of shanfen. In Aotou village (in Wuyishan) before the 1950s, villagers ate more shanfen than rice, and some villages in Wuyishan and Meihuashan produced enough of the starch to sell it or trade it for rice to outsiders in nearby market towns. Though this subsistence complex was widespread before 1949, central authorities of the communist regime moved rapidly to prohibit the burning of the mountains. One Wuyishan resident stated that even local representatives of the nationalist government had attempted to ban mountain burning by the late 1940s. The relationship between forest coverage and water conservation was well understood by central authorities, and the first significant forest conservation efforts in Longyan Prefecture revolved around fire prevention and reforestation. By the early 1950s, prefectural forestry authorities were drawing up yearly reforestation plans, establishing reforestation zones, “mobilizing the masses” in reforestation efforts, administering an aerial broadcast program to grow pines in rugged mountain zones, and prosecuting those who continued the ancient practice of firing the uplands. But the use of fire was deeply

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ingrained, and there were many conflagrations as villagers, for various reasons, continued burning the mountains. Gazetteer records show that seven of the nine largest forest fires in Longyan Prefecture since 1949 occurred before 1965 and were set intentionally for subsistence purposes, including: clearing land for growing taro, burning fields to clear weeds, burning to promote the growth of bracken ferns, and burning to make fertilizer. The largest forest fire on record, which occurred over a twoday period beginning on December 31, 1960, burned 84,000 mu (56 km 2, or 22 sq. mi.) of mountain land at the border of Shanghang and Liancheng Counties (near the present reserve boundaries). The fire was set by a man named Fu Guiyang, who was burning to promote the growth of bracken ferns, so he could “dig for fern flour” (wajuefen). The event says more about local and national history than first meets the eye. Though mountain burning for this purpose had subsided in the late 1950s throughout the province, 1960–1961 saw a resurgence in bracken starch consumption as villagers struggled to survive the famine. Many villagers recount the events of this period when they discuss the bracken subsistence system, for it was then that many younger people gained experience collecting roots and processing the flour. During the famine, bracken was regarded as key to survival in many villages. 7 Though large forest fires were much less common in the Longyan region after the mid-1960s, smaller fires were frequent. Many were set in or near rice paddies to clear weeds or to make fertilizer, and later spread out of control. Some, however, were illegally set in the mountain grasslands and pine forests. Of 2,409 forest fires recorded between 1977 and 1984, the purported (official) reasons for starting the fires were as follows: 16.2 percent were set for making fertilizer (in mountain concavities); 16 percent were set to clear weeds from rice paddies (and went out of control); 11 percent were set to clear mountain land (kaihuang); and 5.7 percent were set to “burn the mountain” (lianshan). Other alleged reasons for setting the fires included burning rice stubble, burning debris, burning pastureland, making charcoal, making saltpeter (shaojian), worshipping (burning sacrificial paper money and incense), and burning to drive off wildlife. 8 In Meihuashan, these traditional uses of fire have shaped the landscape and daily life in innumerable ways. The annual or biennial burning of large tracts of mountain land before the 1950s served many physical functions beyond the bracken root subsistence scheme. The most important purposes related to wildlife management, clearing high-eleva-

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tion cattle grazing areas, and facilitating off-trail overland travel (mostly for collecting juecai, hunting, and herding cattle). For wildlife management, the rationale for burning the grasslands each year was to keep the vegetation as sparse as possible, thereby destroying habitat and removing cover for many species of mammals. Wild boar, monkeys, rats, and other animals often caused serious crop depredation, which continues today. In some villages, fire was used as a retaliatory measure immediately after boar or monkey depredation. Villages also faced the threat of attacks on humans and livestock by tigers, leopards, and red dogs, which provided another reason to use fire liberally. Even the frequency of snake bites and bandit attacks was thought to decrease after foliage was removed and not allowed to regenerate. Even with all these reasons for yearly or biennial burning, the practice possibly served multiple psychological, cultural, and physical functions in perpetuating a desired montane grassland landscape. The smooth, grassy aspect of the hills may have had a certain aesthetic appeal for local people, or at least signified that theirs was a domesticated landscape: well-managed, accessible, productive of food, and relatively free of marauding tigers, bandits, and other dangerous enemies. Given the ancient ritual importance of fire as an agent of symbolic purification, burning the mountains may have had great significance on deeper perceptual, psychological, and cultural levels as well. Daily ritual in many villages still requires that three rockets, or other pyrotechnic devices, and wads of fake money be ignited early each morning. Ceremonial “firepit crossings” (guohuokeng) take place irregularly, too, on the recommendation of local gods who speak through shamans during village seances. I participated in one of these ceremonies in Longgui, in April 1994. Whatever the motives held by people of different regions, ethnicities, clans, or villages, the annual burning of the grasslands was encouraged as a multipurpose management strategy all over southern China. In bamboo paper producing or bamboo shoot producing areas, which included most of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range, mountain fires had only to be kept out of bamboo forests, sacred forests, and buildings in the village settlements. In Meihuashan, annually burned grasslands once extended over the entire area that today is covered in high grassland, shrub, and pine. It also included parts of what today are bamboo, mixed, and broadleaf forests. At present, pine forests cover an estimated 30–45 percent of the reserve area, and judging from oral historical accounts, the vast majority of this area was put to the torch regularly. In the aggregate, informants

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from the five study villages stated that annual or biennial burning was carried out in virtually all areas (excluding bamboo forests, cropland, broadleaf forest, and settled areas) of the high mountains. Most of the former montane grasslands have become dense, nearly impenetrable forests of short Huangshan pines above 1,250 meters (4,000 ft.), and Masson pines and mixed forests at lower elevations. This is largely the result of aerial pine seed broadcasting in 1957, a program implemented by central authorities to reforest the denuded uplands. The natural regeneration of broadleaf taxa in the montane grasslands is occurring only along streamside ravines, where broadleaf shrubs and trees form dense, linear thickets in the pine-grass-shrublands above about 1,400 meters (4,600 ft.). In the high mountains, where the soil layer is thin, the wind is strong, and winter frosts are frequent, reestablishing mixed coniferousbroadleaf forest (the representative natural vegetation of the region) may take many, many decades. Cartographic data provide further evidence of the areal extent of vegetation clearance from annual burning in the Meihuashan and Longxishan landscapes before 1949. In 1942, the Fujian Provincial Land Survey Bureau prepared 1:50,000 topographic maps of the province. In 1955, the U.S. Army Map Service revised these maps using aerial photographs of certain sections. The maps, available in the U.S. Library of Congress, provide the best possible synoptic view of land use, village sizes, and vegetation cover in the 1940s and 1950s. They are a useful guide to placenames, too, many of which have changed in subsequent decades. The maps may not accurately delineate small agricultural plots, but they do show larger patterns of montane land use and vegetation coverage, especially the ratio of montane forest to scrub and grassland. The maps were used during interviews with local people, especially those old enough to discuss land use and vegetation changes since liberation. The maps provide dramatic evidence of the degree of forest fragmentation that annual burning in the Meihuashan landscape caused through time. Forest patches shown on the map correspond closely to the distribution pattern of broadleaf forests of the present (fig. 12). This is probably because the remaining broadleaf forests were the only forests left. Other forests, if they existed, were probably sparse or small in area, and so were not mapped. Broadleaf forests did not burn as easily, and it makes sense that they withstood the traditional firing regimen. The largest patches shown on the forest fragmentation map are those surrounding Majiaping, those south and east of Taipingliao, scattered patches from north of

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Guizhuping to southwest of Longgui, and patches along the north-central border of the reserve. According to Longgui natives, there was more broadleaf forest near that village than is shown on the map. From this evidence, the map likely does not show all the forest stands that existed at the time. There was little evidence, however, that the forest area was much more extensive than the map indicates. Data on forest stand ages also indicate a significant degree of correspondence with the cartogographic data. The Provincial Forestry Bureau has determined the approx-

Figure 12. Forest fragmentation in Meihuashan. U.S. Army topographic maps show that in 1949, only fragmented patches remained from what once were extensive broadleaf forests in Meihuashan.

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imate ages of all the vegetation stands in the reserve, based on average ages of selected trees and shrub. According to this system, most of the broadleaf forest stands corresponding to the forested areas shown in the 1955 maps are today between about forty-five and sixty-five years old. These are the oldest vegetation stands in the reserve (many individual trees within these stands are much older). Traditional Commercial Forestry: Bamboo Cultivation, the Paper Industry, and Sideline Cottage Industries

Widely used over the millennia by diverse peoples throughout the Asian tropics and subtropics, bamboo has been critically important in the culture history of China. Its rapid growth, high productivity, and physical properties—strength, lightness, and flexibility—make it one of the most useful plants on earth for the construction of buildings, boats, fences, and a wide variety of weapons, tools, utensils, and other products. Its edible shoots have long been used both as a subsistence food source and as a much sought-after delicacy. The long-term interdependence between people and bamboo has contributed to the spread of certain bamboo species. Of about one thousand species worldwide, more than three hundred are found in China. Roughly 80 percent of the total area of bamboo forest in China, however, is dominated by mao bamboo. In Meihuashan and throughout the Wuyishan Range, mao bamboo has been the most important forest product for centuries. From an economic standpoint, it is the most important bamboo species in China. Mao bamboo is cultivated most widely in subtropical China, south of the Changjiang. It grows at elevations between 100 and 1,500 meters (328 and 5,000 ft.) but is most productive when grown in hollows or on lower slopes, between 300 and 800 meters (984 and 2,600 ft.). These lower-elevation sites are protected from wind and have relatively thick, soft soils, with more humus and higher water content. In Fujian, with more land area in mao bamboo forests than any other province, the most extensive bamboo forests are found in the central and western mountains, from Daiyunshan west to the Wuyi Range, along the entire northeast-southwest axis of the province. Because natural conditions in the Wuyi-Daiyun Range are superior to those in other parts of the province (and because the terrain allows for few economic alternatives), the mountain prefectures of Longyan, Sanming, and Nanping produce most of the province’s bamboo. In 1994, these three (of nine) prefectures produced 63.3 percent of Fujian’s bamboo.9

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Mao bamboo can spread from roots without sexually reproducing. In fact, in favorable soil, water, and climatic conditions, the plant can go without flowering for up to a hundred years. So long as the culms do not flower, new shoots break through the soil surface each year or two, rising from a complex, rapidly growing underground root system. Once the plant flowers it dies, causing large areas of bamboo forest to wither away all at once. To encourage the spread of bamboo, the grower needs only to ensure that existing culms are surrounded by enough open space to spread roots and enough good soil for sprouting shoots. When these requirements are met, mao bamboo spreads rapidly. With several climatic, soil, and anthropogenic factors affecting the nutrient storage and physiology of mao bamboo, shoot growth is often most prolific in alternating years. In spring, a particular stand or forest of bamboo will produce many shoots, to be followed the next spring by little or no shoot growth. The productive year is called a “big year” (danian), the unproductive year a “little year” (xiaonian). As with flowering, a fairly extensive area is affected by the same conditions, and typically the cycle is synchronized over large areas. Mao bamboo is a heliophyte, growing best in areas where there is little or no underbrush over the shoots, and no canopy cover above the mature culms. Through the centuries, humans have fostered the spread of bamboo by clearing adjacent trees and understory plants, which could inhibit the growth of new shoots and eventually overtake the bamboo forest. Under these conditions, it has formed pure stands, in some places covering many square kilometers of mountain land. Following the decollectivization of bamboo forest lands in the early 1980s, the practice of manual defoliation (or “cutting,” pi ) has intensified, as families strive to increase the density and area of their newly acquired bamboo stands (pl. 10). How many centuries ago people began to promote the spread of bamboo forests in Meihuashan is unknown. Probably aborigines and early Han settlers favored bamboo as a source for building material, tools, and shoots. Certainly by a.d. 1000, bamboo was an important part of the local and regional economy. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), bamboo paper production was the most important industry in southwest Fujian. By the Ming (1368–1644), locally produced Minxi paper (Minxituzhi) was being exported to countries throughout Southeast Asia. During the reign of the first Qing emperor, Shunzhi (1644–1661), paper from Liancheng County was presented as tribute to the emperor in Beijing. By

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Figure 13. Altitudinal land use zones and historical change in vegetation in Meihuashan.

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the end of the Qing, so-called jade-button paper (yukou), produced in Changting (which included Meihuashan), was being exported to India, Japan, and other countries. 10 Before 1949, each village relied on bamboo to different degrees; some specialized in the production of certain types of paper, others in the production of pulp, which they traded with villages more skilled in paper production; still others may have had no processing capability, choosing instead to sell bamboo shoots, poles, and other forest products. Even in villages where paper was manufactured, some households supplemented their income with other types of forest resource extraction and trade, including the production of saltpeter (made from water mixed with the ashes of green bamboo), mushrooms, and products woven from mat sedge (Lepironia), especially beds, bags, and sandals. Synopsis of Long-Term Anthropogenic Vegetation Change

Changes in the Meihuashan landscape have been dramatic, and the trajectory of change has been directly related to resource management practices in specific elevation and vegetation zones (fig. 13). The period before numerous permanent Han or She settlements were established was probably preceded by a time when the vegetation was less disturbed by human activity. The date of the earliest anthropogenic vegetation change is unknown, but palynological data from Daiyunshan shows that the first massive forest clearance occurred about one thousand years ago. The onset of intensive disturbance was perhaps similar for the Meihuashan region, for it is likely that before Han settlers established villages in the mountains, aboriginal inhabitants were driven into mountain refuges in sufficient numbers to affect the forest cover through repeated firing. Before burning was carried out on a sustained and widespread basis, the mountains supported extensive stands of primeval broadleaf evergreen, deciduous evergreen, and mixed broadleaf-needleleaf forests. From the earliest period of Hakka settlement, late in the southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the landscape of Meihuashan was transformed to meet the subsistence and commercial needs of village communities. Extreme population growth in the Qing dynasty placed an unprecedented demand on the land to produce food for basic subsistence. The primeval forests were transformed by Hakka settlers into agricultural, forestry, and grassland extraction zones. Lands in the 400–1,250 meter elevation range were

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converted to rice paddies, bamboo forests, and needleleaf forests of pine and Chinese fir, although certain patches of broadleaf forests in this zone were preserved as village fengshui forests. Above about 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.) (and much lower in remote western parts of the reserve), ridges, slopes, and wetlands were burned annually or biennially, and a montane grassland-shrub meadow was maintained. In these meadows, fern rhizomes were gathered for subsistence purposes, and small herds of yellow cattle shared grazing land with wild ungulates. Burning was probably also intended to keep predators away from villages and mountain footpaths, to drive out tigers, leopards, dholes, monkeys, rats, and wild boar, and to remove the high grass and shrub vegetation where these species could find cover. Ironically, where a mosaic of different vegetation types persisted, the burning of montane grasslands helped provide good grazing land for ungulates, the primary prey for tigers, leopards, and other large cats. In the 1950s, afforestation schemes, including the prohibition of burning, led to the growth of Huangshan pine forests in the former highland meadow zone, and the regeneration of mixed forests in many areas. Masson pine spread into many lower-elevation grasslands. The period from 1949 to the 1990s saw extensive rice paddy abandonment. After the economic reforms of the early 1980s, there was a rapid clearance of mature Chinese fir trees from different stand types throughout the region and an areal expansion of family-managed bamboo forests. Most of Meihuashan’s ancient sacred forests remained intact.

Part III Contemporary Village Resource Management and Nature Conservation Strategies

7

Habitat Conservation in the Post-Reform Landscape

When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster. —Laozi, the Daodejing

During the first thirty years of communist rule, an unprecedented degree of government intervention in village land tenure relationships, subsistence patterns, and cottage industries brought massive change to the traditional social and economic order of village life. As Chinese Communist Party leaders carried out land reform, collectivization, and communization, family-based commercial paper production was transformed to a communal enterprise geared toward meeting quotas set by local and regional cadres. State control over rice and bamboo production transformed villagers into government laborers on their own lands. Except for the period of the Great Leap Forward, most of the local labor force was intensively concentrated on the relatively small area of preexisting rice paddies and bamboo groves. Though new paddy land had to be developed (sometimes on long-abandoned terraces), bamboo groves were sufficiently large to meet the needs of the command economy, and not much additional forest clearance was necessary. Patterns of ecological change in Meihuashan during this period were different from those in surrounding mountain and valley areas at lower elevations. While rampant deforestation during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution left devastation across vast tracts of the Southeast Uplands region, Meihuashan lacked the requisite network of serviceable roads (and many villages lacked the large streams) to support such enterprises until the late 1970s and early 1980s. For these reasons, the most dramatic change in the vegetation patterns of Meihuashan was the disappearance of widespread montane grasslands under a virtual sea

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of Huangshan and Masson pines. Pine seeds were aerially broadcast in anthropogenic grassland zones throughout the Southeast Uplands, and human-influenced succession occurred in highland areas across the region. Meihuashan is exceptional in that the logging of mature forest stands was not as severe or systematic during this period as it was elsewhere. The government prohibited the use of fire to clear the grasslands, and with some relatively minor exceptions, village customs prohibiting the cutting of trees in the fengshui forests were strictly upheld. The existence of these forests is testimony to the power of village forestry traditions, especially since there were periodic efforts to cut them down. After the Cultural Revolution, and especially after the economic reforms of the early 1980s, land use changes were largely in response to new opportunities, market forces, and technological change. The Individual Responsibility System brought a series of economic and political freedoms that had mutually amplifying effects on land use and resource extraction. For the first time since the early 1950s, families had virtual ownership of rice and bamboo plots, and could make their own decisions regarding production and marketing. Newly adopted hybrid rice varieties led to self-sufficiency in rice production for the first time in history. New roads put an end to paper production, as the demand for poles for scaffolding in urban coastal construction projects increased. Collectives gained rights to sell timber under a quota system, and the value of Chinese fir (also for construction) rose exponentially in the early 1980s. The advent of more powerful and destructive technologies has put tremendous pressure on wildlife habitat throughout the Southeast Uplands. The speed with which humans can transform the environment has increased, and only proactive conservation has the potential to hold environmental degradation in check. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution some of the most devastating local and regional examples of degradation include rapid expansion of the road network; increased cutting of primeval stands of Chinese fir, Cryptomeria, Chinese hemlock, and other tree species (even within sacred forests); increased use of agricultural chemicals and rat poisons (which have risen through the food chain); increased use of firearms and headlamps in hunting; and increased use of electric shock devices for fishing. The growth of a capitalist economy has both increased market demand for a wide variety of natural resources and created an expanding web of economic pressures and opportunities for mountain people. Hakkas and other upland peoples have long specialized in converting

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montane resources, such as bamboo, into cash income, and new patterns of resource extraction have given rise to new and ever-changing patterns of landscape and resource delineation. In Meihuashan, where village resource management on collective lands is now circumscribed by a growing array of harvesting restrictions, land use conflicts with reserve managers and land tenure conflicts between neighboring families and neighboring villages are becoming common. At the village level, household land tenure in bamboo groves provides fertile ground for bitter disputes and inequity, on the one hand, or for equitable resource tenure and periodic redistribution of land resources, on the other. Many remote mountain regions in China face similar problems, and nature reserve managers are charged with protecting wildlife and habitat in areas that are still being shaped by human activity. Local residents, though, must cope with restrictive land use policies that often threaten the viability of their communities. In the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995, I conducted research on the frequency of bird and mammal activity in ten vegetation types, in a preliminary effort to determine the value of each type as wildlife habitat. This basic delineation of the landscape ecology of the Meihuashan Reserve provides insights on the ways wildlife has adapted to anthropogenic ecological change, and the ecological implications of current land use patterns. Although the villages of the Wuyi-Daiyun Mountains rely on bamboo as the primary source of household income, this study shows that managed bamboo forests are the least valuable vegetation type for wildlife. Surveys of land use and resource tenure patterns in five Meihuashan villages also indicate that bamboo management practices in the past twenty years have accelerated the conversion of valuable broadleaf forests into bamboo, and have intensified competition for forest resources. The assessment that follows will address the habitat quality of ten major vegetation types in the Southeast Uplands region, discuss the status of large carnivores and omnivores in the region, and conclude with an examination of the linkages between present household and collective land use patterns and habitat conservation. Wildlife Habitat Surveys

Analysis of wildlife habitat preference was based on track and sign surveys in ten representative vegetation types (table 1). The objectives of this research were (in order of importance) first, to measure habitat use by five species of ungulates (hoofed animals); second, to measure habitat use

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by other mammal species for which data could be collected; and third, to measure habitat use by birds. With a zoogeographer from the Fujian Provincial Museum and the assistance of local villagers, I conducted thirty-seven stratified random trail sample surveys of wildlife signs in ten vegetation types, to determine the relative density of wildlife signs in each. Walking a total trail distance of 35 kilometers (22 mi.), we recorded the tracks, scats, feeding signs, and nesting (or bedding) signs of five species of ungulates as indices of the density and frequency of each species across the vegetation mosaic. We also recorded signs of other mammals and birds (classifying the latter simply as pheasants or nonpheasants and field-dwelling or forest-dwelling).1 The five ungulates surveyed were the wild boar (Sus scrofa), the common or Indian muntjac (also known as the barking deer, Muntiacus muntjak), the Chinese muntjac (or Reeve’s muntjac, Muntiacus reevesii ), the serow (a type of mountain goat, Capricornis sumatraensis), and the crested deer (or tufted deer, Elaphodus cephalophus). (The physical characteristics, life histories, and conservation status of each species, in Meihuashan and in China as a whole, are provided in the appendix.) These species were selected because they are abundant enough to provide an adequate data base, their signs are plentiful and discernible for research purposes, and they comprise the prey base for such important large carnivores as tigers, leopards, and clouded leopards. Table 1 shows how each vegetation type has been ranked according to the average number of tracks, signs, and sightings recorded per kilometer of trail distance. Landscapes of High Habitat Value: Montane Wetlands; Small Clearings of Young Tree Plantations, Orchards, and Rice Paddies; and Broadleaf Forests

The montane wetlands are grassy bogs in the high-elevation Huangshan pine (Pinus taiwanensis) and scrub zone (1,300–1,800 m, or 4,250–5,900 ft.). Most are small (1–5 ha, or 2.5–1 2.5 acres), 2 elongated, peat-filled depressions in subalpine headwater zones surrounded by high mountains. They are far from the highest villages, and contain seasonal or permanent pools and plenty of tender grasses and forbs for foraging herbivores. At dawn, dusk, and dark, muntjacs and other ungulates graze along the edges, where adjacent pine or broadleaf forests provide protective cover. Most of the surveys were conducted in the fall, and these data may reflect habitat preferences during the dry season more than in other seasons. Montane wetlands may be critical dry-season watering areas, as is

Table 1. Meihuashan Habitat Survey: Vegetation Types by Ungulate Sign Density

Vegetation Type

Estimated Area (ha)

Montane wetland < 220 Cunninghamia plantation 220 Fruit orchard 1,000 Unknown Total broadleaf forest 5,320 Montane grassland 890 –2,200 Pine forest 6,650–9,980 ‡ Mixed forest 2,220 Broadleaf forest Zhou Yuesong. 1986. “Conversion of subtropical forests to coniferous forests difficult to monitor” [Yaredai diqu senlin zhenyehua qingxiang bu rongyi shi]. Forests and Humanity [Senlin yu Renlei] 3:2. Zhu Hejian, ed. 1994. Studies on Soil and Land Resources in Fujian Province, China [Fujian turang yu tudi ziyuan yanjiu]. Beijing: Agricultural Publishing House. Zhu Kezhen, ed. 1979. Physical Geography of China: Zoogeography [Zhongguo ziran dili: Dongwu dili]. Beijing: Science Press.

Zimmerer, Karl S. 2000. “The reworking of conservation geographies: Nonequilibrium landscapes and nature-society hybrids.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2): 356–369.

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administrative village (Xingzhengcun), 95 agriculture: commercialization, 192 –194; sustainability, 261–263, 313n. 9; swidden (“slash and burn”) and She people, 305n. 3. See also pesticides; rice; rodenticides; vegetables Altaishan Range, 36, 37 altitude and land use (zones), 156 ancestral records (family genealogies — zupu), 97–98, 301–302n. 5; and village fengshui, 308n. 7 ancestral temples (citang), 46, 119, 281; and fengshui forests, 203, 207; in Gonghe, 302n. 7, 308n. 9 Andrews, Roy Chapman, 74 Aotou Village, Wuyishan: bracken fern and, 149; Western naturalists in, 299n. 32 Aristotle, 52, 298n. 27 arrow-shooting trap, 225, 310n. 5 Asiatic dhole (red dog, chai), 52, 55, 89; wild dogs, 73 Austro-Asiatic people, 40, 54 Baishouzhiwang (tiger as “Lord of a hundred beasts”), 67–68 Bamboo, 50, 90, 154; allocation and management, 177– 185, 254–256; as commercial forest crop, 175; coverage in Meihuashan, 176; coverage in Southeast Uplands, 277; desertification, 175–185, 254, 256–258, 313n. 6; distribution, 154–155; ecol-

ogy, 155; edible species, 139 –140; finished products, 175; forest tenure, 177–180; harvest quotas, 127; and household economy, 129, 175–185, 254–256, 306n. 4; and household income, 176–177, 254–256; household management of, 90, 136, 155, 176–185; Pl. 10; in Longxishan, 274–275; poles, 175; processing and addition of value, 133, 256; rate of spread, 175–176; reproduction, 155; shoots as food, 139 –140; tax revenues from, 253; in Wuyishan, 270–271, 314n. 18 bamboo paper production, 62, 90, 102–104, 155–157 bamboo rats (Rhyzomis pruinosus): as food, 138; trapping of, 224 Bamianshan Nature Reserve, Hunan, 81–82 banditry (and outlaws — tufei ), 105, 303n. 12 bears (Asiatic black bear), 52, 55, 89; feeding nests, 174–175; in Wuyishan, 272 biological diversity, 34–3 7; Fujian, 35; Southeast Uplands, 35 biosphere reserve (international biosphere reserve), 7, 16, 21 bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum): as food, 112–113, 147–149; juefen (fern flour), 317; propagation, 147–150; shanfen (mountain flour), 317; world distribution, 149 bridge-temples (qiaomiao), 119, Pl. 6

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INDEX

broadleaf forest, 49; conversion to bamboo, 175–185; and ecosystem restoration, 259 –260; in Longxishan, 273; as wildlife habitat, 164–165, 168, 169 –170; in Wuyishan, 272 Buddhism, 46; and Cultural Revolution, 205; icons, 128; temples, 119; and tourism at Matoushan (Horsehead Mountain), 267 buffer zones (in nature reserves), 15, 90, 91 burnt fields (shetian, xietian), 142, 145 Caldwell, Harry, 47, 64, 68, 69, 71–74, 77, 299n. 30 Caldwell, John, 47, 48, 64, 65 camphor (Cinnamomum camphora, zhang), 128 carnivores: evidence in Meihuashan, 172–175; montane wetland habitats and, 172. See also clouded leopards; leopards; South China tigers; tigers Central Min dialect, 39 Changbaishan Range, 36, 47 Changjiang ( Yangzi) River, 13, 35, 36, 56, 62 Changtang Nature Reserve, Tibet, 14–15 Chebaling Nature Reserve, Guangdong, 81–82 Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network (CBRN), 16; Longxishan, 273 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 24, 105–106; and forest conservation, 4; and nature, 2, 12–13, 75; and tiger problems, 1, 297n. 18; and tiger reintroduction, 266 Chinese fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata), 31, 45, 49, 50, 61, 114; accelerated harvest, 162; market value, 128–129; timber quotas, 128. See also wildlife habitat Chinese medicine, 5–6, 69 –70, 248;

and animal farming, 312n. 16; snake wine as, 271 Christian missionaries, 8, 46, 52, 70–74, 76; Catholic and Protestant, 46 Christian theology, 52, 69, 71–72, 76; animals as exempla, 298–299n. 27; and destruction of sacred groves, 295n. 2; and loss of sacred groves in Wuyishan, 202, 308n. 8 chuanshanjia. See pangolin CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), 291n. 16, 300n. 35 clouded leopard, 89; evidence in Meihuashan, 173–174 collectivization, 111–112 communes (gongshe), 112 conceptions of nature, 8; colonialism and , 7–8, 23, 70–76; CPC and, 75– 78; wildlife conservation and, 3–10, 266 Confucius, 297n. 17. See also Mandate of Heaven ( Tianming) Conifer monoculture, 49 core areas (in nature reserves), 15; Longxishan, 274, 275; Meihuashan, 90, 91; Wuyishan, 269 correlative thinking, 52, 203 crested (tufted) deer (heiji, maoguanlu), 317; appearance (morphology), 287; grassland habitat, 168, 287; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 287; pine forest habitat, 169; population, 287 crossbow. See ground-set crossbow trap Cryptomeria (Chinese cedar), 93, 98, 135; in fengshui forests, 201–204, 207, 209 –210, Pl. 12; illegal harvests and marketing, 132, Pl. 4; insect pests, 188 Cultural Revolution, 14, 46, 49, 97, 113–114; agricultural production in, 141; destruction of fengshui forests during, 204–205

INDEX

Daimao Shan Range, 20 Daiyunshan Nature Reserve, 19 –20 Daoism, 46, 68; charms and icons to ward off wildlife, 66, 242, 297n. 20, Pl. 2; and Cultural Revolution, 205; icons, 128; Laozi and Zhuangzi, 3; temples, 119 Davids, Père Armand, 74; discoveries in Wuyishan, 299n. 31 Daxinganling Range, 36, 37, 47 deforestation, 25, 48, 75, 296–297n. 13. See also illegal logging Dehua County, 62, 292–293n. 2; porcelain production and forest disturbance, 296–297n. 13; tiger hunting documentary, 77–78, 300n. 34 diet and subsistence, 137–140. See also bracken fern Dinghushan Nature Reserve, Guangdong, 14 earth-god shrines (tudimiao), 119, 281, Pl. 7; and fengshui forests, 203, 207 economic reforms. See land tenure and economic reforms ecosystem restoration, 259 –260, 313n. 7; and habitat corridors in Southeast Uplands, 276–279 elephants, 55, 293n. 8 ethnolinguistic (cultural) diversity: Meihuashan, 94–95; Southeast Uplands, 37–41 exploding bait (traps), 228 extinction, 293n. 8 famine (the Three Bad Years, 1959–1961), 112–113 fengshui (“wind-water,” geomancy), 99, 119, 281; and ancestral temples, 203, 308n. 9; compass, 199, 206; as dili (earth principles), 196; and environmental management, 200–201, 210–211; as ethnoscience, 201; in

everyday life, 206; and Hakka villages, 200; and intervillage conflict (feuds), 211–212, 309n. 13; as Kanyu, 196; masters, 197–199, 206; principles, 196–201; schools, 197; significance of term, 197; suppression of, 204–205; wenfeng (scholar peaks), 43–44, 204; yin, yang, and qi, 196–197. See also fengshui forests fengshui forests ( fengshuilin), 21, 45, 46, 92, 93, 98, 135, Pl. 12, Pl. 13; biodiversity, 207–210; and broadleaf forest habitat, Pl. 13, 168; decline in Wuyishan, 46, 294n. 17, 308n. 8; destruction of, 204–205, 208–210, 308–309n. 12, Pl. 4; and giant trees, 308n. 10; management and enforcement of rules, 206–207; offerings to trees, 308n. 11; and protected subareas, 214; in reforestation efforts, 213–214; research on, 195–215; and sacred space, 196–204; trees in fengshui theory, 199 –200, 307n. 3; typology, 201–204; and watershed management, 200–201, 210–211, 307n. 6. See also fengshui Fengyangshan-Baishanzu Nature Reserve, Zhejiang, 81–82 fern flour ( juefen, shanfen), 147; production, 148 filariasis, 245, 311n. 14 fire: and bracken fern cultivation, 147–150; effects on Meihuashan vegetation, 151–153; and rice production, 142, 145; and southern landscape, 145–146; state prohibition of, 149 –150; and swidden cultivation, 146; threats of forest arson, 240; wildfire, 150 fire walking, 151, 243 flooding, 60, 210–211, 307n. 6 frogs, 138, 305n. 1 fruit orchards (as wildlife habitat), 163–167

333

334

INDEX

Fujian Provincial Forestry Bureau, 127, 281 Fuzhou, Fujian, 20, 31, 89 Fuzhou-Eastern Min dialect, 38, 39 game species and other prey, 231–239 gazetteer records, 54–70; gaps in twentieth century, 297n. 16; limitations of, 296n. 8 golden cat, 89 Gonghe village, Meihuashan 91, 98–99 grain first policy (yiliang weigang), 49, 113; high production (gao shengchan), 141 grazing (livestock), 258–259, 260 Great Leap Forward (dayuejin), 24, 49, 112–113; destruction of fengshui forests, 204–205 ground-set crossbow trap, 54, 66, 78, Pl. 14, Pl. 15, 219 –221; nu (crossbow), 317 Guadun village, Wuyishan, 21, 46; as site of biological discoveries, 299n. 31 Guizhuping village, Meihuashan, 91, 100, Pl. 11 guoyun (fate of nation), 1 Hakka, 2, 29, 37–47; cultural ecology, 42–44; cultural values, 44, 294n. 14; and fengshui, 45–46, 200–201; gender roles, 44; in Longxishan, 273–274; relations with She, 41, 59 –61; settlement of Meihuashan, 90; settlement and vegetation change, 157–158; women and marriage, 44, 294n. 14; in Wuyishan, 270; Yuanlou (round buildings), 293n. 11 Hakka-related dialect, 39, 45 Hmong culture group, 40 Houhan Shu (Book of the Later Han Dynasty), 53

Huanghe (Yellow River), 13, 36 Huangshan Pine (Pinus taiwanensis). See pine forest Huhui (Tiger Compendium), 67–68 hunters: attitudes toward conservation, 239 –242; non-specialists, 230; specialists, 230–239, 310n. 8. See also hunting and trapping; indigenous wildlife management hunting and trapping, 216–248; customs, 11–12; and meat consumption, 138; monkeys, 310n. 10; poaching, 241, 272, 305n. 1; regulation and enforcement, 229 –230, 242; rituals, 245–247; wild boar, 227–228. See also arrowshooting trap; game species and other prey; muzzle loader; pitfall trap; shotguns and rifles; snare traps; steel leghold trap; tiger trap hunting dogs (tugou), 224, 226–227 Hupingshan Nature Reserve, Hunan, 80, 82 illegal logging, 129; control of, 260–261; in Wuyishan, 272, 313n. 8 Indian muntjac (Common muntjac, chiji, Muntiacus muntjak, shanzhang), 317; appearance (morphology), 289; distribution, 288–289; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 288–289; population, 289 indigenous wildlife management, 11–12, 216–230; decline of 12–13, 75; definition, 217; and religion, 73, tigers, 65–67 Indomalayan Realm, 34 IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature, World Conservation Union), 16, 29, 34 Jinggangshan Nature Reserve, Jiangxi, 81–82

INDEX

Jiulianshan Nature Reserve, Jiangxi, 81–82 Jungar Basin, 36 Kangpusa (Carry the Buddha) ritual, 212–213 Kill the Tiger Movement (Dahuyundong), 76–78 Koehler, Gary, 21, 79 –80, 121 Kunlun Range, 36 labor outmigration, 129 landlords (dizhu), 109, 110, 111, 303n. 3 land reform, 109 –111 land tenure, 25; bamboo and, 177–180, 254–256; collectives and, 17; economic reforms and, 175, 177–178; land reform (1950s) and, 109 –111, 306n. 5; nature reserves and, 16–18, 250 Leopards (bao), 32, 52, 89; evidence in Meihuashan region, 175; and Reeves’s muntjac population, 287. See also clouded leopard Liancheng County, 97 lianli ( linli). See pangolin Loess Plateau, 36, 47 Longgui Village, Meihuashan, 91, 101–102; boundary dispute, 211; economic primacy, 131–132; timber management, 128, 304n. 7 Longxishan Nature Reserve, Fujian, 20–23, 39, 273–276; bamboo management and trade, 274–275; economic diversification, 275; Hakkas in, 273–274; household economy in, 275–276 Longyan Municipality, 20, 48; average income, 131 Longyan Prefecture, 20, 31 Majiaping village, Meihuashan, 91, 100–101, Pl. 5; poverty, 131

Man culture group, 40, 53 Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), 2, 65, 87; and tigers, 298n. 24 Mangshan Nature Reserve, Hunan, 81–82 Mao Zedong, 282; and Dazhai, 314n. 20; and feudal superstition, 214 Marco Polo, 70; and tigers, 297n. 23, 299n. 29 Marks, Robert B., 103, 146, 303n. 11 masked palm civet (guozili, Paguma larvata); 229, 231, 234, 237, 311n. 12 Masson pine (maweisong, Pinus massoniana), 49, 152, 156, 169, 265 mega-reserves, 24 Meihua deer (meihualu, Sika, Cervus nippon), 81, 265 Meihuashan Forestry Department Office, 127 Meihuashan Nature Reserve, 19 –29, 39, 45, 52, 81, 89 –95; co-management prospects, 252–253, 312n. 3; tiger breeding and reintroduction, 264–267 Miao minority nationality, 40, 53, 54; as tiger hunters, 219 Ministry of Forestry, 10, 79. See also State Forestry Administration minority nationalities, 9, 17. See also Dai; Miao; She; Yao Min River, 20, 89, 94 Minxi Region (Southwest Fujian), 301n. 2 mixed forests (broadleaf and needleleaf ), 165, 169 mongoose (crab-eating mongoose, Herpestes urva), 62, 188, 231, 235, 299n. 30 monkeys (macaques), 52, 55; bamboo shoot depredation, 170; crop predation, 144, 151; hunting, 310n. 10 montane shrub and grassland, 156,

335

336

INDEX

157–158, 168–169; restoration, 259 –260 montane wetland: in Meihuashan lore, 304 (note on the epigraph); protection and restoration of, 259 –260; as wildlife habitat, 163–165 Mountain Spirit (Shanshen), 245 muntjacs. See crested (tufted) deer; Indian muntjac; Reeve’s muntjac mushrooms, Pl. 11; commercial production and export, 130, 192–194, 262–263 muzzle loader, 77, Pl. 18, 225, 310n. 6; in gun trap, 223, 225 mythical animals, 51, 295n. 1. See also weretigers Nanlingshan Range, 36, 79 Nanman culture group, 40 Nanping Prefecture, 20, 31, 48 Nationalist Party (Guomindang), 105–106 National Natural Forest Protection Project, 13 natural village (zirancun), 95 Nature Conservancy, The, 7 Nature Reserve Law (1994), 15 nature reserves: history in China, 11, 14–16; and other protected areas in Taiwan, 291n. 11; of Southeast Uplands, 276–279. See also Daiyunshan Nature Reserve; Longxishan Nature Reserve; Meihuashan Nature Reserve; Wuyishan Nature Reserve NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 5, 7 North China Plain, 36, 47 Northern Min dialect, 39, 45 opium addiction, 105 Palearctic Realm, 34 pandas, 7, 17

pangolin (Chinese pangolin, Manis pentadactyla, chuanshanjia, lianli, dilong), 1–3, 317; chants, 1, 246–247; chuanshanjia, 291n. 1; 311n. 15; as mountain fish, 245; trapping and poaching, 237–238 Panhu (She and Yao Dog-god), 293n. 13 Pengmin. See shed people pesticides and fungicides, 188–191, 306nn. 6, 7 pigs (domestic): and pork consumption, 137 pine forest: and ecosystem restoration, 259 –260; in reforestation, 152–153; and vegetation history, 152–153, 156–158; as wildlife habitat, 164–165, 169. See also Masson pine pitfall trap, 221–223 production brigades (shengchan dadui), 112 production teams (shengchandui), 112 protected area management strategies, 8–9; in Annapurna, 313n. 4; in China, 15–16, 249; co-management, 249, 281; consultation, 249; indigenous management, 11–12, 249; Manchu hunting enclosures, 11; in Meihuashan, 249 –254; unified administration (Longxishan), 273, 276; and village-level democracy, 250, 312n. 2. See also protected subareas protected subareas (baohuxiaoqu), 90, 257 Qinghai-Xizang (Tibetan) Plateau, 36 Qinling Range, 36 Quan, Li, 300n. 42 Reeve’s muntjac (Chinese muntjac, huangji, Muntiacus reevesi, shangzhang), 317; appearance (morphology), 286; bamboo forest habitat,

INDEX

170; broadleaf forest habitat, 170; damage to orchards, 167; fallow rice paddy habitat, 167, 168; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 286–287; montane wetland habitat, 164; population, 286–287; signs of predation on, 175 religious rituals. See fire walking; kangpusa rice, 31, 92–93; ash fertilizer, 142; consumption, 138–139; environmental impacts of, 141, 185–191; hybrid varieties, 142–143; paddy cultivation, 141; production in household economy, 129, 186–187; and rat poisons, 187–188; rice wine, 138; self-sufficiency, 186–187; sustainable production of, 262; terrace abandonment, 144–145, 190–191, Pl. 9; and village population, 103. See also pesticides and fungicides; rodenticides; wildlife habitat roads, 123–126; and bamboo production, 180–185; dirt roads, 123, 124; mountain footpaths, 123–124; paved roads, 123–125; reserve contributions to, 253; tractor roads, 123; village economy and, 132–133 rodenticides, 187–188 sacred geography (as centripetal force), 211–215 Sangang village, Wuyishan, 21, 46 Sanming Prefecture, 20, 31, 48 Save China’s Tigers (Organization), 300n. 42 Schaller, George, 7, 34 Scott, James C., 24 serow (Capricornis sumatraensis, shanyang, sumenling), 317; appearance (morphology), 288; broadleaf forest habitat, 288; grassland habitat, 168, 288; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 288; pine forest habitat, 169;

religious significance, 243–244, 311n. 13 shamanism, 73, 243 Shanghang county, 97 She (minority nationality), 2, 29, 40–41, 53, 54, 317; dog-god (Panhu) worship, 293n. 13, 309n. 4, 310n. 7; as swidden cultivators, 305n. 3; as tiger hunters, 66, 219 –220, 309n. 3. See also minority nationalities shed people (pengmin), 2, 59 –63; in Meihuashan, 296n. 13, 302n. 9; similarities with modern itinerants, 304n. 8 shotguns and rifles, 225–226 Sichuan Basin, 47 snakes, 146, 243, 244 snake wine, 271 snare traps: bamboo bow trap, Pl. 16; for bamboo rats, 223–225; stick snare trap, Pl. 17; types, 225 South China tiger (Huananhu, P. t. amoyensis), 51–86, 89; captive breeding and reintroduction program, 81–86, Pl. 3, 251, 264–267; conflicts with humans, 53–65; gene pool, 84–85; grassland habitat, 168; historical management of, 65–67; as original subspecies, 295n. 3; reserves for, 81–82; shot in Meihuashan, 121; signs discovered in Meihuashan, 172, 306n. 3; signs discovered in southern China, 80, 300n. 37; studies of conflicts with humans, 295n. 7 Southeast Uplands Region, 18, 29, 30–46, 292n. 1; biogeography, 34–37; climate, 32; cultural geography, 37–46; habitat fragmentation in, 276–278; land degradation in, 47–50, 61; soils, 32; vegetation, 33–34 Southern Min (Minnan) dialect, 39

337

338

INDEX

Sowerby, Arthur de C., 38, 47, 48, 73, 74 spirit cats, 299n. 30 State Forestry Administration (former Chinese Ministry of Forestry), 14, 16, 81; and South China tiger recovery, 264–267. See also Chinese Ministry of Forestry steel leghold traps, 228; and clouded leopards, 172, 173; and tigers, 172 Stevens, Stan, ix, 249, 313n. 4 sweet potatoes: in boar traps, 223; for subsistence, 139, 305n. 2 Taipingliao village, Meihuashan, 91, 101, Pl. 13; population peak, 103–104; population decline, 104–105 Taklimakan Desert, 36 Taoyuandong Nature Reserve, Hunan, 81–82 Tarim Basin, 36 Tea, 31, 62, 294n. 15 Tianshan Range, 36, 37, 47 Tigers, 1–3, 51–86; baishouzhiwang (king of a hundred beasts), 317; blue tigers (melanic tigers), 62, 71, 297n. 14; cosmology and, 56, 65, 66, 67–70; deference to officials, 297n. 23, 298n. 24; and good luck, 298n. 26; habitat mosaic in India, 299n. 33; hu (tiger), 317; used for hunting, 299n. 29; Indian tiger (P. t. tigris), 53; Indochinese tiger (P. t. corbetti), 53, 85; linguistic vagueness, 311n. 11; man-eating, 63, 64, 72, 297n. 15; Siberian tiger (P. t. altaica), 53; Sumatran tiger (P. t. sumatraensis), 85; talismans, 68–69; Pl. 2; tiger cult, 59; tiger suicide (zibi), 66; virtue of, 298n. 25; white tigers, 56, 198, 215, 296n. 10. See also South China tiger tiger trap (tiger closet—huchu), 66, Pl. 1, 218–219; decline of, 220

Tilson, Ron, 84– 85, 300n. 42 timber management: quotas, 127, 128. See also illegal logging tourism: Meihuashan, 267–268; Wuyishan, 268, 271 traps and weapons, 76, 216–230. See also exploding bait; ground-set crossbow; muzzle loaders; pitfall trap; snare traps; steel leghold trap; tiger trap typhoons, 66 UNMAB (United Nations Man and the Biosphere Program), 7, 16, 21; Wuyishan, 270 vegetables: commercial production, 192–194; household production of, 140; subsistence and diet, 139 –140. See also sweet potatoes vegetation: forest coverage in Fujian and Taiwan, 294n. 20; patterns in Meihuashan, 171; patterns in Southeast Uplands, 277; synoptic view of anthropogenic change, 156–158, 161–162 village economic development (since 1949), 117–126; and changing house types, 117–119; Pl. 5; comparison with other regions, 130; and hydropower, 119 –123; and income, 131–133, 304n. 10; and roads, 123–126; and telecommunications, 126 village histories: abandonment, 301n. 3; Meihuashan, 90, 95–102 village land use, 92–93, 135–137 village population change (Meihuashan): current, 114–117, 303n. 5; and family planning policy, 116, 304n. 6; Qing dynasty peak, 102–104; 302n. 8; twentieth-century decline, 104–106, 115–116 village trade patterns, 97

INDEX

weretigers, 51 Western Min Hakka dialect, 39 wild boar (shanzhu, Sus scrofa, yezhu), 52, 55, 317; appearance (morphology), 285; bamboo forest habitat, 170; broadleaf forest habitat, 170; crop predation, 144, 151, 286; fallow rice paddy habitat, 167, 168; grassland habitat, 168; hunting, 227–228; life history and habits, 285–286; pine forest habitat, 169 wildlife conservation: history, 3–10; recruiting local people, 263–264, 313n. 10; restoration and protection of corridors, 276–280. See also hunters, attitudes toward conservation; indigenous wildlife management wildlife conservation laws, 10; history, 10–14 wildlife habitat, assessment in Meihuashan, 163–172; bamboo forests, 170; broadleaf forests >1,000 m, 168; broadleaf forests