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The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China
This landmark account of China’s environmental history, written by an internationally pre-eminent China specialist, "should stand for decades to come as a unique statement on motives, processes, perceptions and consequences of environmental change in China.” (Jennifer L. Mnookin, American Scientist ) This is the first environmental history of China during the three thousand years for which there are written records. It is also a treasure trove of literary, political, aesthetic, scientific, and religious sources, which allow the reader direct access to the views and feelings of the Chinese people toward their environment and their landscape.
Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time.
Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China’s present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.
Elvin chronicles the spread of the Chinese style of farming that eliminated the habitat of the elephants that populated the country alongside much of its original wildlife; the destruction of most of the forests; the impact of war on the environmental transformation of the landscape; and the re-engineering of the countryside through water-control systems, some of gigantic size. He documents the histories of three contrasting localities within China to show how ecological dynamics defined the lives of the inhabitants. And he shows that China in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the modern era, was probably more environmentally degraded than northwestern Europe around this time.
Indispensable for its new perspective on long-term Chinese history and its explanation of the roots of China’s present-day environmental crisis, this book opens a door into the Chinese past.
564 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2001
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November 6, 2019Picked up in a bookshop near the campus of the University of Chicago on a blustery fall day, wanted to buy, couldn't afford to buy. That was nearly 15 years ago, and now I finally have the chance to read it.
The first time you see China, you look down at the landscape and come to the conclusion that this is a place eaten at by time (at least I did). If you look at the Wikipedia page showing the worst disasters of all time, sorted by type, you'll notice half of them occurred in China, and you probably haven't heard of most of them. Maybe not any of them.
And Retreat of the Elephants is a hell of a guide to the cavalcade of cruelties that forms Chinese history, the struggles against the environment, and the many instances in which the environment pushed back. Elvin largely based his analyses on classical poetry, and he admits that this isn't an ideal tactic, but it's probably the best available to modern scholars. So take that grain of salt, fellow empiricists, but it's enjoyable all the same.
The first time you see China, you look down at the landscape and come to the conclusion that this is a place eaten at by time (at least I did). If you look at the Wikipedia page showing the worst disasters of all time, sorted by type, you'll notice half of them occurred in China, and you probably haven't heard of most of them. Maybe not any of them.
And Retreat of the Elephants is a hell of a guide to the cavalcade of cruelties that forms Chinese history, the struggles against the environment, and the many instances in which the environment pushed back. Elvin largely based his analyses on classical poetry, and he admits that this isn't an ideal tactic, but it's probably the best available to modern scholars. So take that grain of salt, fellow empiricists, but it's enjoyable all the same.
January 25, 2013
Elephants and rhinoceroses once roamed the plains of what is now Beijing. The Yellow River was not always yellow. And the modern Chinese landscape was not always the barren, treeless expanse that much of it is today. Accounting for how these things came to be is the aim of Elvin's pioneering synthesis. It is a story that builds in the costs of progress, not from a late moment in the history of industrialization, but from the very beginning of one of our oldest civilizations, and by implication, all civilization.
Similar stories of human society expanding at the expense of megafauna (such as elephants, rhinos and tigers) and environmental degradation could be told for virtually any area or period of organized human activity. What makes Elvin's study interesting is its treatment of so great a span of history within one region, and the relative richness of resources available to us for its investigation. What makes his perspective urgent is the widespread contemporary sense that we are entering upon an era of heightened environmental unpredictability, in which the dynamic interaction between human and natural systems is shifting radically.
As it was 4,000 years ago, China is at the center of this story today, though readers should not take up this book expecting a review of China's current environmental challenges. Elvin's aim is broader than any possible catalog or indictment of contemporary ecological woes. In fact, the Chinese exposure to environmental catastrophe was much greater only several hundred years ago, when floods of epic proportions and famines affecting millions of people followed closely one upon the other. What Elvin narrates is the struggle to bring stability to naturally fluctuating environments - especially its great rivers, wetlands, and estuaries - and the trade-offs that inescapably accompanied them. Our present predicament, as pressing as it is, is the latest episode in a very long drama.
There is no better example of this than the efforts at hydrological engineering that in some sense made Chinese civilization possible to begin with, and have been seen by some as leaving an indelible imprint on it in the form of 'hydrological despotism.' So great has been the need to control water for the sake of agriculture, the argument goes, and so extensive has been the mobilization of resources required to do so, that an authoritarian and highly bureacratized Chinese state has been almost a geographical necessity from the beginning.
Elvin doesn't go this far, but in telling his tale, through an impressive, moving, and often delightful assemblage of historical sources, he makes clear the Faustian bargains that were made to establish the earliest lineaments of the state and society in China. The implications carry far beyond the twin valleys of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Urban, agricultural settlement in China was a response to the practical needs of continual warfare. The needs of warfare drove an agricultural expansion that targeted the temperate forests of East Asia and the species it supported. The archaic states of China were conscious of their antagonism to elements of the natural world; Elvin cites several pangyrics to the Shang and Zhou Dynasties that equate the destruction of forests with the consolidation of power, the establishment of cities, and the spread of civilization. Elvin highlights this sentiment as it reappears in various texts in later centuries.
The wealth generated by this new form of human settlement enabled more sophisticated states to arise, which in turn acquired the capacity to implement enormous irrigation works to better serve their agricultural needs. Human population swells, and the buffers of ecological protection - mainly forests inland, and marshland along the coasts - from extreme events become dangerously thin as a result. The idea of extreme events caused by anthropomorphic activity thus long precedes carbon-induced climate change. The leading example of this feedback loop, which is the leitmotif of the book, is deforestation. It was clearance of forests along the middle reaches of the Yellow River in the ancient Qin Dynasty that led to the erosion of loess soils from cultivated fields which gave the 'River' its 'Yellow' character. Agriculture sent soil down the rivers, soil which settled as farmland elsewhere, at the price of more frequent flooding. From this point on, as Elvin documents, the increasing rate of floods and dike failures along the Yellow River corresponded to deforestation all along the river's course, and ever greater efforts to control its power.
Elvin argues that the efforts to control the Yellow River, especially under the 'river tamer' Pan Jixun in the 1570s, and the centuries-long battle against the East China sea in the Bay of Hangzhou, represent respectively the greatest single human impact and program for action upon the environment in premodern times anywhere in the world. Debunked, in consequence, is the notion that only the West sought to comprehensively control nature.
The book suffers from a few flaws, chief among them the absence of maps, which is galling in a book that pays such close attention to geography. It is long, and in places burdened with taxonomic cataloging of flora and fauna. Some readers may feel that Elvin dumps long excerpts of historical text whole cloth into the narrative, when a shorter gloss would do just as well.
For my part, I appreciated Elvin's method of textual citation. It accounts for one of the book's greatest successes: providing the reader an opportunity to envision, and almost in some places to hear and smell, now vanished worlds of the senses. We see how Elvin extracts the picture of a landscape, its economy and technological landmarks and color and flora and fauna, from a grab bag of classical poems. The same is as true, if not more so, of the human experience of all of these: what it is like to be stalked by a tiger, or a python; how one might possibly have sold off one's wife or children in time of famine, or gnawed on the bark of an elm tree out of hunger; a world populated by dragons and goblins and non-Han peoples who viewed their wooded environments more charitably than their Han neighbors.
Elvin does not romanticize the efforts of millions over the centuries to survive in the face of countless threats. But he does, at each point at which the evidence allows, account for the trade-offs and costs for each gain in security, and for the epic loss resulting from the trade of ecological richness for human riches.
Similar stories of human society expanding at the expense of megafauna (such as elephants, rhinos and tigers) and environmental degradation could be told for virtually any area or period of organized human activity. What makes Elvin's study interesting is its treatment of so great a span of history within one region, and the relative richness of resources available to us for its investigation. What makes his perspective urgent is the widespread contemporary sense that we are entering upon an era of heightened environmental unpredictability, in which the dynamic interaction between human and natural systems is shifting radically.
As it was 4,000 years ago, China is at the center of this story today, though readers should not take up this book expecting a review of China's current environmental challenges. Elvin's aim is broader than any possible catalog or indictment of contemporary ecological woes. In fact, the Chinese exposure to environmental catastrophe was much greater only several hundred years ago, when floods of epic proportions and famines affecting millions of people followed closely one upon the other. What Elvin narrates is the struggle to bring stability to naturally fluctuating environments - especially its great rivers, wetlands, and estuaries - and the trade-offs that inescapably accompanied them. Our present predicament, as pressing as it is, is the latest episode in a very long drama.
There is no better example of this than the efforts at hydrological engineering that in some sense made Chinese civilization possible to begin with, and have been seen by some as leaving an indelible imprint on it in the form of 'hydrological despotism.' So great has been the need to control water for the sake of agriculture, the argument goes, and so extensive has been the mobilization of resources required to do so, that an authoritarian and highly bureacratized Chinese state has been almost a geographical necessity from the beginning.
Elvin doesn't go this far, but in telling his tale, through an impressive, moving, and often delightful assemblage of historical sources, he makes clear the Faustian bargains that were made to establish the earliest lineaments of the state and society in China. The implications carry far beyond the twin valleys of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Urban, agricultural settlement in China was a response to the practical needs of continual warfare. The needs of warfare drove an agricultural expansion that targeted the temperate forests of East Asia and the species it supported. The archaic states of China were conscious of their antagonism to elements of the natural world; Elvin cites several pangyrics to the Shang and Zhou Dynasties that equate the destruction of forests with the consolidation of power, the establishment of cities, and the spread of civilization. Elvin highlights this sentiment as it reappears in various texts in later centuries.
The wealth generated by this new form of human settlement enabled more sophisticated states to arise, which in turn acquired the capacity to implement enormous irrigation works to better serve their agricultural needs. Human population swells, and the buffers of ecological protection - mainly forests inland, and marshland along the coasts - from extreme events become dangerously thin as a result. The idea of extreme events caused by anthropomorphic activity thus long precedes carbon-induced climate change. The leading example of this feedback loop, which is the leitmotif of the book, is deforestation. It was clearance of forests along the middle reaches of the Yellow River in the ancient Qin Dynasty that led to the erosion of loess soils from cultivated fields which gave the 'River' its 'Yellow' character. Agriculture sent soil down the rivers, soil which settled as farmland elsewhere, at the price of more frequent flooding. From this point on, as Elvin documents, the increasing rate of floods and dike failures along the Yellow River corresponded to deforestation all along the river's course, and ever greater efforts to control its power.
Elvin argues that the efforts to control the Yellow River, especially under the 'river tamer' Pan Jixun in the 1570s, and the centuries-long battle against the East China sea in the Bay of Hangzhou, represent respectively the greatest single human impact and program for action upon the environment in premodern times anywhere in the world. Debunked, in consequence, is the notion that only the West sought to comprehensively control nature.
The book suffers from a few flaws, chief among them the absence of maps, which is galling in a book that pays such close attention to geography. It is long, and in places burdened with taxonomic cataloging of flora and fauna. Some readers may feel that Elvin dumps long excerpts of historical text whole cloth into the narrative, when a shorter gloss would do just as well.
For my part, I appreciated Elvin's method of textual citation. It accounts for one of the book's greatest successes: providing the reader an opportunity to envision, and almost in some places to hear and smell, now vanished worlds of the senses. We see how Elvin extracts the picture of a landscape, its economy and technological landmarks and color and flora and fauna, from a grab bag of classical poems. The same is as true, if not more so, of the human experience of all of these: what it is like to be stalked by a tiger, or a python; how one might possibly have sold off one's wife or children in time of famine, or gnawed on the bark of an elm tree out of hunger; a world populated by dragons and goblins and non-Han peoples who viewed their wooded environments more charitably than their Han neighbors.
Elvin does not romanticize the efforts of millions over the centuries to survive in the face of countless threats. But he does, at each point at which the evidence allows, account for the trade-offs and costs for each gain in security, and for the epic loss resulting from the trade of ecological richness for human riches.
January 24, 2014
Elephants in China? Yes, and Forests Too
Every once in a while you come across a book so original and thought-provoking that you make you gasp in admiration. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin is such a book.
It turned up when I was doing a search about the difficult relation between humans and forests over history as part of the research for my next non-fiction project, Road through Time. A little time trolling library catalogues and data bases and I came up with a fascinating reading list that I'm currently working my through. (Another good one is Deforesting the Earth, From Prehistory to Global Crisis: An Abridgement by Michael Williams, whose title has got to be an inside joke since it has 561 pages.)
Elvin is from New Zealand, and perhaps that South Pacific vantage point has allowed him to write a history of the rise of intensive agriculture in China and the accompanying destruction of forests, water courses and grasslands. He takes as his starting image the herds of elephants which five thousand years ago roamed woods around Beijing--apparently there are many caches of the beasts' bones in that part of China. The huge herbivores were hunted by the elite, but that was not what did them in. Rather, they were the type of pachyderms which could not survive outside forests, and as the Chinese vigorously deforested the land, they retreated until now there are only a few left on the border with Myanmar.
What happened next, Elvin recounts with the same striking storyteller's skills. What is more he quotes extensively from Chinese poetry to bring the rest of his history to life. While it appears that he greatly regrets what the Chinese have done to their land over the last five thousand years, he also shows much sympathy for the reasons that lie behind their desire to make every inch productive.
I'm no Asian scholar so I can not critique either his sources or his analysis, but the 50 pages or so of notes and bibliography at the end of the book attest to Elvin's seriousness and his academic credentials.
If you are interested in China, the environment or Chinese literature, this book is a must-read.
Every once in a while you come across a book so original and thought-provoking that you make you gasp in admiration. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin is such a book.
It turned up when I was doing a search about the difficult relation between humans and forests over history as part of the research for my next non-fiction project, Road through Time. A little time trolling library catalogues and data bases and I came up with a fascinating reading list that I'm currently working my through. (Another good one is Deforesting the Earth, From Prehistory to Global Crisis: An Abridgement by Michael Williams, whose title has got to be an inside joke since it has 561 pages.)
Elvin is from New Zealand, and perhaps that South Pacific vantage point has allowed him to write a history of the rise of intensive agriculture in China and the accompanying destruction of forests, water courses and grasslands. He takes as his starting image the herds of elephants which five thousand years ago roamed woods around Beijing--apparently there are many caches of the beasts' bones in that part of China. The huge herbivores were hunted by the elite, but that was not what did them in. Rather, they were the type of pachyderms which could not survive outside forests, and as the Chinese vigorously deforested the land, they retreated until now there are only a few left on the border with Myanmar.
What happened next, Elvin recounts with the same striking storyteller's skills. What is more he quotes extensively from Chinese poetry to bring the rest of his history to life. While it appears that he greatly regrets what the Chinese have done to their land over the last five thousand years, he also shows much sympathy for the reasons that lie behind their desire to make every inch productive.
I'm no Asian scholar so I can not critique either his sources or his analysis, but the 50 pages or so of notes and bibliography at the end of the book attest to Elvin's seriousness and his academic credentials.
If you are interested in China, the environment or Chinese literature, this book is a must-read.
April 6, 2014
I finished reading this just as Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" opened in theaters. Quite appropriate, given the book's focus on hydrological disasters!
If you don't mind a spoiler (can there be spoilers for history books?) Mark Elvin arrives at a somewhat pessimistic conclusion, casting doubt on the "hope that we can escape from our present environmental difficulties by means of a transformation of consciousness".
Using the vast expanse of Chinese history as a source of examples, he finds that the pursuit of profit and military advantage tends to trump any enlightened view about the environment a culture might have. A heightened appreciation of Nature may come about as a reaction to its very destruction, but not prevent such destruction in the long run.
The book contains a surprising insight about technological and economic development: even if they allow greater control over nature and huge increases in population, they may in fact worsen the average quality of life in some cases. I was reminded of Derek Parfit's thorny dilemma of population ethics, the "repugnant conclusion". How can we adjudicate ethically between a small population and a much larger population with worse quality of life?
Jared Diamond argues in his essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" that agriculturalists lived shorter lives and were less healthy than hunter-gatherers. Elvin sees to agree. He recounts that ancient rulers often had to force their subjects to take on agriculture. And see this quote from the book. Are Diamond and Elvin perhaps over-romanticizing pre-agricultural times?
There's a lot more to this book, for example how Elvin corrects Max Weber's misconceptions about Chinese culture. It can get a bit heavy-going at times, but I recommend it.
If you don't mind a spoiler (can there be spoilers for history books?) Mark Elvin arrives at a somewhat pessimistic conclusion, casting doubt on the "hope that we can escape from our present environmental difficulties by means of a transformation of consciousness".
Using the vast expanse of Chinese history as a source of examples, he finds that the pursuit of profit and military advantage tends to trump any enlightened view about the environment a culture might have. A heightened appreciation of Nature may come about as a reaction to its very destruction, but not prevent such destruction in the long run.
The book contains a surprising insight about technological and economic development: even if they allow greater control over nature and huge increases in population, they may in fact worsen the average quality of life in some cases. I was reminded of Derek Parfit's thorny dilemma of population ethics, the "repugnant conclusion". How can we adjudicate ethically between a small population and a much larger population with worse quality of life?
Jared Diamond argues in his essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" that agriculturalists lived shorter lives and were less healthy than hunter-gatherers. Elvin sees to agree. He recounts that ancient rulers often had to force their subjects to take on agriculture. And see this quote from the book. Are Diamond and Elvin perhaps over-romanticizing pre-agricultural times?
There's a lot more to this book, for example how Elvin corrects Max Weber's misconceptions about Chinese culture. It can get a bit heavy-going at times, but I recommend it.
December 22, 2025
a case study in how to do a general history of ridiculously large scope that makes a compelling overall argument. As well as how to combine as part of one history the material and economic history of x with a cultural/ideational history of x and map the causal relations (or lack of) between them across time.
Traces the expanding scope of a Chinese system of intensive pre-modern exploitation of the natural environment from the shadow of prehistoric north China to the strained economy of the Qing.
Traces the expanding scope of a Chinese system of intensive pre-modern exploitation of the natural environment from the shadow of prehistoric north China to the strained economy of the Qing.
October 30, 2020
Don't expect too many elephants.....
This is one of those, not up to my taste kind of books. The thing is, I can easily see the amount of information that is in here. The considerable amount of translated relevant Chinese sources stretching thousands of imperial historical years on it's own makes it worthwhile for anyone interested in Chinese history. The possibility to compare the Chinese exerting their reach and control into the Miao land with the Russian expansion in Siberia and the American western expansion from this angle of control and perception of the environments worth, would definitively be worthwhile with the sources available. One truly gets how the Chinese state viewed the Miao and how they as indiviuals and communities tried to adapt or resist to such expansion. That is all great but overall that does not save the book for me. The issue for me was that there is a dissonance with my personal tastes and style, the style used by Mark Elvin in this publication does not resonate with my own, I personally find it hard to gleam the information that is contained in these pages.
As I said before, Mark Elvin gives the reader a lot of translated Chinese sources, on several topics he gives us all of the available sources, that is quite a feat but to me that lessened readability. Every chapter is made up of snips and bits of translated Chinese sources intermixed with some commentary of his own, quite a few pages have but 10 or so lines from his own hand and this, this is a bit overkill in my opinion. I wasn't here for a literary analysis or compendium of Chinese sources, I came for an analysis of these sources. To be fair that is there, but it is overwhelmed and quite difficult to access.
What I did gleam from the text has left me with some impressions; like the true amount of work that went in the hydraulic system the Chinese imperial state founded its power on which in turn was built on a legacy of communal labor, mass systemic exploitation of natural resources and a believe that civilization came from transformation of the world to suit the Han Chinese societal model. For there is a lot in this book! It starts with a short chapter on elephants and other mega fauna, goes into the early semi mythical Shang dynasties efforts to mold the environment as part of their system of controlling people, the colonization of the Miao lands, how Jiaxing was a man made land as much as the Netherlands were in Europe and quite a bit more.
Which brings me to my second complaint; the book is all over the place. I found it particularly difficult to keep track of everything. I think this is linked to the first issue concerning the overuse of translated sources to fill the book; a lack of analysis on his own makes it difficult to built op to a point of his own. The concluding remarks delve into an entire new subject of whether pre modern China was less destructive of its natural environment then Europe. That is fine a subject of any and a worthy angle to make the study of Chinese environmental history accessible for those not as familiar with the Chinese context, but why is this only brought up in the conclusions?
Let's go back to the title, the retreat of the elephants. I was expecting that the presence of elephants would have been the red line throughout the book, but that would have required a book structured on time period, not on thematic chapters as is the case now. In my opinion it almost felt as if the book could and perhaps should be multiple books on its own. One on the hydraulic system or Chinese use and handling of water. A second on the use of human intervention in the environment to expand and cement the imperial system of control over both Ethnic Han Chinese and the indigenous people of southern China; finally a book that collects and bundles the source material and treats them to a more detailed literary analysis to form an intellectual history approach. To be fair the book is somewhat segmented along these lines, but not quite and as with anything, a half hazer approach to anything is worse then nothing at all.
In conclusion, I do believe there is a lot here to be found but for me that was overshadowed by the structure and in part of the content of the book. Not for me but perhaps for you?
ps
On a small sidenote; the comments on how the Shang state actively converted land, chopped down forests and killed or drove of wildlife; made me reconsider the great leap forward. I had always assumed that Mao's mad idea had been brought forth by a extreme version of the modernization ideology and that surly will have played a role, but now I do wonder to what extent mythologized norms of the supposed golden age of early China, with its communal lifestyle and total state control, did play in fermenting the idea that a defacto war on the environment was so paramount to Mao and the Chinese communist parties for redirecting Chinese society to their "better tomorrow." That may sound a bit farfetched but on the other hand quite a few communist movements in Asia did have this component of restoring a fabled golden era's of communal bliss that was supposed to exist before capitalism, feudalism and organised religion; the Khmer rouge certainly did, as do the Naxalites in India, while in north Korea the worship of the leader has distinct tones of god king culture to it. This is an angle I will keep in mind for the future.
This is one of those, not up to my taste kind of books. The thing is, I can easily see the amount of information that is in here. The considerable amount of translated relevant Chinese sources stretching thousands of imperial historical years on it's own makes it worthwhile for anyone interested in Chinese history. The possibility to compare the Chinese exerting their reach and control into the Miao land with the Russian expansion in Siberia and the American western expansion from this angle of control and perception of the environments worth, would definitively be worthwhile with the sources available. One truly gets how the Chinese state viewed the Miao and how they as indiviuals and communities tried to adapt or resist to such expansion. That is all great but overall that does not save the book for me. The issue for me was that there is a dissonance with my personal tastes and style, the style used by Mark Elvin in this publication does not resonate with my own, I personally find it hard to gleam the information that is contained in these pages.
As I said before, Mark Elvin gives the reader a lot of translated Chinese sources, on several topics he gives us all of the available sources, that is quite a feat but to me that lessened readability. Every chapter is made up of snips and bits of translated Chinese sources intermixed with some commentary of his own, quite a few pages have but 10 or so lines from his own hand and this, this is a bit overkill in my opinion. I wasn't here for a literary analysis or compendium of Chinese sources, I came for an analysis of these sources. To be fair that is there, but it is overwhelmed and quite difficult to access.
What I did gleam from the text has left me with some impressions; like the true amount of work that went in the hydraulic system the Chinese imperial state founded its power on which in turn was built on a legacy of communal labor, mass systemic exploitation of natural resources and a believe that civilization came from transformation of the world to suit the Han Chinese societal model. For there is a lot in this book! It starts with a short chapter on elephants and other mega fauna, goes into the early semi mythical Shang dynasties efforts to mold the environment as part of their system of controlling people, the colonization of the Miao lands, how Jiaxing was a man made land as much as the Netherlands were in Europe and quite a bit more.
Which brings me to my second complaint; the book is all over the place. I found it particularly difficult to keep track of everything. I think this is linked to the first issue concerning the overuse of translated sources to fill the book; a lack of analysis on his own makes it difficult to built op to a point of his own. The concluding remarks delve into an entire new subject of whether pre modern China was less destructive of its natural environment then Europe. That is fine a subject of any and a worthy angle to make the study of Chinese environmental history accessible for those not as familiar with the Chinese context, but why is this only brought up in the conclusions?
Let's go back to the title, the retreat of the elephants. I was expecting that the presence of elephants would have been the red line throughout the book, but that would have required a book structured on time period, not on thematic chapters as is the case now. In my opinion it almost felt as if the book could and perhaps should be multiple books on its own. One on the hydraulic system or Chinese use and handling of water. A second on the use of human intervention in the environment to expand and cement the imperial system of control over both Ethnic Han Chinese and the indigenous people of southern China; finally a book that collects and bundles the source material and treats them to a more detailed literary analysis to form an intellectual history approach. To be fair the book is somewhat segmented along these lines, but not quite and as with anything, a half hazer approach to anything is worse then nothing at all.
In conclusion, I do believe there is a lot here to be found but for me that was overshadowed by the structure and in part of the content of the book. Not for me but perhaps for you?
ps
On a small sidenote; the comments on how the Shang state actively converted land, chopped down forests and killed or drove of wildlife; made me reconsider the great leap forward. I had always assumed that Mao's mad idea had been brought forth by a extreme version of the modernization ideology and that surly will have played a role, but now I do wonder to what extent mythologized norms of the supposed golden age of early China, with its communal lifestyle and total state control, did play in fermenting the idea that a defacto war on the environment was so paramount to Mao and the Chinese communist parties for redirecting Chinese society to their "better tomorrow." That may sound a bit farfetched but on the other hand quite a few communist movements in Asia did have this component of restoring a fabled golden era's of communal bliss that was supposed to exist before capitalism, feudalism and organised religion; the Khmer rouge certainly did, as do the Naxalites in India, while in north Korea the worship of the leader has distinct tones of god king culture to it. This is an angle I will keep in mind for the future.
September 29, 2012
To build a portrait of environmental history on a canvas spanning 4000 years, in a large country with an extraordinary geographic and demographic profile like China, is no easy task. Somehow, Mark Elvin, in this book, manages to pull it off, with engaging stories and compelling analysis of the historical record. There have been many reviews of this book already, by historians, and they have made a better assessment than I can, in all honesty, make here. But let me share straight off, as an ecologist who is no historian, some of the things I liked about this book and some of what I learnt.
The first aspect that I liked, which finds little mention in other reviews, is the author's extensive use of Chinese literature, especially period poetry, presented in translation (often at length) to build his narrative and arguments. Some of the poetry is telling in detail. Poets who recount the plight of farmers in an era of agricultural and demographic expansion, the harsh conditions of coal-miners, the scarcity of fuelwood and food. They write of floods and famine, of forests and rain, of nature as resource and as a force. Not only do these evoke descriptions of the period, they also bring insights into people's perceptions of the environment. This is particularly used by the author in the latter parts of the book.
A second aspect, which was interesting is the comparison, of the history of landscapes and peoples in three different regions in China. The author makes a convincing case for the strong influences that landscapes cast on history, and conversely, on how the historical changes in people, land-use, and resource exploitation cast their sometimes indelible mark on the landscapes.
Finally, it is good to see the comprehensive sweep of the analysis of Chinese environmental history, especially in the opening chapters. The retreat of the elephants, mentioned in the title, is used as a defining marker of the decline in forests and wildlife with the expansion of farming and pre-industrial development in China. Deforestation is linked to erosion and rising river basins, and consequently to catastrophic floods. In addition, the response in terms of hydraulic measures, of dykes and dams and canals, is clearly pinned down for the additional implications that these engineering measures have: costly and constant repair and maintenance. The importance of environmental buffers runs as a thread through the historical narrative.
The flip side of the book is its length, the varying structure of narrative, and the lack of illustrative maps (additionally problematic while reading on the Kindle edition). It would have also helped if the author had presented a summary of key conclusions and concepts at the end of each section of the book. The concluding remarks does a good job of setting out an analytical context and mentioning some broad conclusions, while highlighting the further work, comparisons, and empirical research that is required in future.
The first aspect that I liked, which finds little mention in other reviews, is the author's extensive use of Chinese literature, especially period poetry, presented in translation (often at length) to build his narrative and arguments. Some of the poetry is telling in detail. Poets who recount the plight of farmers in an era of agricultural and demographic expansion, the harsh conditions of coal-miners, the scarcity of fuelwood and food. They write of floods and famine, of forests and rain, of nature as resource and as a force. Not only do these evoke descriptions of the period, they also bring insights into people's perceptions of the environment. This is particularly used by the author in the latter parts of the book.
A second aspect, which was interesting is the comparison, of the history of landscapes and peoples in three different regions in China. The author makes a convincing case for the strong influences that landscapes cast on history, and conversely, on how the historical changes in people, land-use, and resource exploitation cast their sometimes indelible mark on the landscapes.
Finally, it is good to see the comprehensive sweep of the analysis of Chinese environmental history, especially in the opening chapters. The retreat of the elephants, mentioned in the title, is used as a defining marker of the decline in forests and wildlife with the expansion of farming and pre-industrial development in China. Deforestation is linked to erosion and rising river basins, and consequently to catastrophic floods. In addition, the response in terms of hydraulic measures, of dykes and dams and canals, is clearly pinned down for the additional implications that these engineering measures have: costly and constant repair and maintenance. The importance of environmental buffers runs as a thread through the historical narrative.
The flip side of the book is its length, the varying structure of narrative, and the lack of illustrative maps (additionally problematic while reading on the Kindle edition). It would have also helped if the author had presented a summary of key conclusions and concepts at the end of each section of the book. The concluding remarks does a good job of setting out an analytical context and mentioning some broad conclusions, while highlighting the further work, comparisons, and empirical research that is required in future.
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March 26, 2019I have to admit defeat on this - it's more academic than I was looking for and it addresses the modern era less than I'd hoped. I suspect the writing is denser than it needs to be, but since I might not be the target audience I won't leave a negative rating.
July 7, 2016
Enormous, disjointed, and a dense read, The Retreat of the Elephants is nonetheless an extraordinary work of scholarship, even if its final form is not easily digested. Mark Elvin looks at four thousand years of Chinese history to show the gap between the Chinese people's love of nature and the simultaneous destruction of the environment for the sake of commerce and political power. By the 1800s, China had undertaken more environmentally intensive projects than the West. China's environmental degradation was also becoming severe; by the present day, that degradation has become catastrophic and unsustainable. The book wanders over much ground, covering religion, poetry, hydraulics and watershed management, imperial politics, superstition, legends, comparative studies of different provinces, warfare, the use of nature in war, longevity, and food. In many ways, this book reads like the summary of a pathbreaking conference – it lays out the parameters of a field and gives other historians topics to write about. However, I do disagree with Elvin's contention that environmental history only applies to the period for which we have written sources about the environment. I and quite a few biologists & geologists would contend that we can use natural evidence to tell us about the Earth's history and mankind's relationship with nature before writing was invented.
November 7, 2021
A tour de force exposition. Filled to the brim with interesting quotations from a great number of original sources and details of Chinese practical lives throughout centuries. Comparison of three ecologically disparate areas in the second part of the book is attractive and impressive. I agree with the author that poems from original sources are relevant for this particular topic, but the third part of the book overstays its welcome in this direction.
This cannot be your first or second book on Chinese history and geography. The author presumes a great deal of familiarity with both. Without knowledge of the context, you will be lost at many places. If you do have the necessary background, you know that Chinese history books can severely test your attention span. This one keeps the reader on his/her toes for most of the text.
I am aware that the book forms an integral part of Elvin's lifelong research program. Still, I feel like he wrote the whole book just to provide ammunition for the last two sentences. Powerful.
This cannot be your first or second book on Chinese history and geography. The author presumes a great deal of familiarity with both. Without knowledge of the context, you will be lost at many places. If you do have the necessary background, you know that Chinese history books can severely test your attention span. This one keeps the reader on his/her toes for most of the text.
I am aware that the book forms an integral part of Elvin's lifelong research program. Still, I feel like he wrote the whole book just to provide ammunition for the last two sentences. Powerful.
March 28, 2007
A great, if dry in points, environmental approach to the broad sweep of Chinese history, countering the common assumption that traditional Chinese philosophy (Daoism etc) leads to a way of life somehow more "in harmony with nature" than the dominant philosophies and religions of the West.
November 20, 2012
This is a long book dedicated to the environmental history of China. He includes a lot of work from contemporary writers to the point it is just way too much!
August 13, 2015
interesting stuff...
January 15, 2023
Mostly a good, long, in depth history of "China's"environment. I put the quote marks in because of course you can't cover all of China (using today's map). Elvin focuses on three areas: one in the coastal rice-growing area, Jiaxing; one in the southwest, rich in trees and mountain slopes and also an area of Chinese colonialism which only totally succeeded last century, Guizhou (home to the Miao): and finally the mountainous north near Manchuria, Zunhua. For these three areas he goes into great depth, using all kinds of written records. This part is very dense but worth it because it's the only book out there that covers this.
The story is one of unrelenting human pressure on the environment, from natural increase and human migration. The Chinese changed their environment more than the Europeans did, with the exception of the Dutch. Huge hydraulic works, dams, dikes, etc., deforestation, whether intentional or the result of overlogging, leaching the soil of all nutrients, these are common themes. Elvin stops his history at the start of the industrial age in China, which he puts at pre-WWI.
The 'mostly' part is the last section where the author looks at human (elite male) interpretations of the environment and ecology. This would be very interesting to someone who is interested in the subject, but it's not really environmental history. I skimmed it.
Overall , worthwhile if you are interested in the topic and are willing to wade through all the details. This book is aimed at specialists in the are, graduate on up. 3 stars.
The story is one of unrelenting human pressure on the environment, from natural increase and human migration. The Chinese changed their environment more than the Europeans did, with the exception of the Dutch. Huge hydraulic works, dams, dikes, etc., deforestation, whether intentional or the result of overlogging, leaching the soil of all nutrients, these are common themes. Elvin stops his history at the start of the industrial age in China, which he puts at pre-WWI.
The 'mostly' part is the last section where the author looks at human (elite male) interpretations of the environment and ecology. This would be very interesting to someone who is interested in the subject, but it's not really environmental history. I skimmed it.
Overall , worthwhile if you are interested in the topic and are willing to wade through all the details. This book is aimed at specialists in the are, graduate on up. 3 stars.
August 27, 2021
Academic and thoroughly footnoted environmental history of China by a professor emeritus of Chinese history at Australian National University, who translated the many excerpts here himself. It's an unusual history in quoting so many poems, letters and literary works, but this approach is productive and reveals the growing environmental toll, over four millennia, of the expanding human population on one of the world's countries that had been richest in wildlife, minerals, and plants.
In the latter part of the book, he contrasts several different areas of China and shows that in the regions with more natural resources, people had a better life. This also implies that in ancient times, when much of what is now China was forested and full of animals and plants, ordinary people may have lived better than they did by the end of the 1800s, when the central China plain was largely deforested and few animals larger than a raccoon-dog could survive in the wild.
The biggest defect of the book is that it nowhere includes the Chinese for the many Chinese personal names, words, places and titles. Aside from this, which was probably done for economy, the book is a fascinating overview of the Chinese environment over almost 4000 years.
In the latter part of the book, he contrasts several different areas of China and shows that in the regions with more natural resources, people had a better life. This also implies that in ancient times, when much of what is now China was forested and full of animals and plants, ordinary people may have lived better than they did by the end of the 1800s, when the central China plain was largely deforested and few animals larger than a raccoon-dog could survive in the wild.
The biggest defect of the book is that it nowhere includes the Chinese for the many Chinese personal names, words, places and titles. Aside from this, which was probably done for economy, the book is a fascinating overview of the Chinese environment over almost 4000 years.
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May 18, 2025Needs more elephants.
Hopelessly academic in treatment, this book isn't accessible to an interested amateur in history. The beginning has a nice synopsis of the central thesis of the book: the expansion of rice-cultivating Chinese culture was the concomitant retreat of elephants and other wilderness across a millennia of Chinese modification of the environment. In retrospect I wish I had stopped there.
The description of the intricacies of hydological manipulation and tehcnological lock-in were initially quite interesting, but the depth of intricacies drilled into were too much for me. Elvin was exhaustive in citing poems and primary resources, often multiple paragraphs where only a few lines were relevant. The descriptions of case studies of particular locales with their own geographic and ecological intricacies were likewise lost in excessive detail. It seems that Elvin is mortally afraid of being caught generalizing on any given point, and so constantly provides caveats to any broader conclusions he might even tangentially approach. As an interested non-specialist, I would love to have a 74 page essay distilling the ideas here, with a greater focus on the broader themes and less translational, poetic, and historiographical minutiae.
Hopelessly academic in treatment, this book isn't accessible to an interested amateur in history. The beginning has a nice synopsis of the central thesis of the book: the expansion of rice-cultivating Chinese culture was the concomitant retreat of elephants and other wilderness across a millennia of Chinese modification of the environment. In retrospect I wish I had stopped there.
The description of the intricacies of hydological manipulation and tehcnological lock-in were initially quite interesting, but the depth of intricacies drilled into were too much for me. Elvin was exhaustive in citing poems and primary resources, often multiple paragraphs where only a few lines were relevant. The descriptions of case studies of particular locales with their own geographic and ecological intricacies were likewise lost in excessive detail. It seems that Elvin is mortally afraid of being caught generalizing on any given point, and so constantly provides caveats to any broader conclusions he might even tangentially approach. As an interested non-specialist, I would love to have a 74 page essay distilling the ideas here, with a greater focus on the broader themes and less translational, poetic, and historiographical minutiae.
June 16, 2021
Perhaps unfairly, I kept comparing this with McNeill's Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, the only other book I've read about the environment.
Why such a low rating?
1. very poorly organized; I don't think I could ever use it as a reference
2. excessive quotations. On top of p. 457 he writes "This was cited in the preceding chapter, but is worth repeating in briefer form as the context is quite different." The so-called briefer quotation takes up the rest of the page.
3. overreliance on poetry as evidence; as he tells us repeatedly, its hard to come by evidence related to environmental issues for much of Chinese history; fine, then maybe the text shouldn't be 471 pages long.
4. its hard to learn too many technical details about the environment, as I did from McNeill's book
MAKE NO MISTAKE, Elvin seems very knowledgeable Chinese history and even environmental issues when he does address them, and I would consider reading any of his other books. It just seems to me that this one misses the mark.
Why such a low rating?
1. very poorly organized; I don't think I could ever use it as a reference
2. excessive quotations. On top of p. 457 he writes "This was cited in the preceding chapter, but is worth repeating in briefer form as the context is quite different." The so-called briefer quotation takes up the rest of the page.
3. overreliance on poetry as evidence; as he tells us repeatedly, its hard to come by evidence related to environmental issues for much of Chinese history; fine, then maybe the text shouldn't be 471 pages long.
4. its hard to learn too many technical details about the environment, as I did from McNeill's book
MAKE NO MISTAKE, Elvin seems very knowledgeable Chinese history and even environmental issues when he does address them, and I would consider reading any of his other books. It just seems to me that this one misses the mark.
April 29, 2022
Wanna give it a 5-star but it was such a pain to finish it so 4 stars it is.
Some VERY interesting topics, some VERY VERY excessive quotations.
Some VERY interesting topics, some VERY VERY excessive quotations.
March 30, 2025
Great, if voluminous book. I will need to return to it again at some point.
January 6, 2020
“Retreat of the Elephants” was kind of an odd book. Mark Elvin provides a massive review of thousands of years of Chinese environmental history, and was apparently the first westerner to attempt this task. Most of the general takeaways of the book are covered in the first several chapters, which are about a third of the overall length. The rest of the book chiefly deals with seemingly cherry-picked in-depth examples that are supposed to exemplify some aspect of Chinese attitudes towards and interactions with their natural environment at various points in the country’s long history. These middle and later chapters deal with things such as the history of three specific localities, a massive water management project, and explications of works by certain poets and philosophers. Elvin translated a huge amount of archaic and historical writings into English, and he rightfully considers providing this primary source material to an English-speaking audience to be one of the most significant contributions of this project. Unfortunately, he also chose to include vast passages of these documents in his main text rather than appendices or end notes, and these translations account for a large portion of the length of this 500+ page book even though most of them only contain a line or two that directly support the point he is using them to illustrate. There is a lot of interesting information in here for sure, but also much less synthesis than I was expecting, and a lot of the useful nuggets are buried in page after page of poems and (not always well contextualized) mystical texts that make getting through this book an unnecessarily tedious chore. Elvin also seemed to at times be a bit too credulous of some of the things in these writings for his own good. Probably the most egregious comes in Chapter 3 when he uncritically passes along the report of a Qing Dynasty writer that “peacocks poison the environment” by becoming so abundant in undisturbed forest that they fouled miles of rivers with their droppings, and that somehow this is an example of extensive forest cover being bad for the environment. Needless to say I think most modern ecologists would be as skeptical of this anecdote as I am (personally, I suspect the writer had observed something like a red tide event and in grappling for an explanation linked them to his unrelated observation that these conspicuous birds were common in the area). Again, there is also some really interesting stuff in the book, especially the early chapters’ descriptions of the alteration of historical ecological communities by the ancient expansion of intensive agriculture out of the ethnic Han heartland (including the titular “retreat of the elephants”), and the later discussion of the long-term costs of “technological lock-in” of large-scale water management systems. However, I think most of the really useful synthesis he presents probably could have been covered in a much shorter book or a couple monographs. This is no doubt an important work in the specific field of Chinese environmental history, but it really is geared towards a technical specialist doing research work in this area rather than ecologists, natural historians, or more general readers.
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May 5, 2010Isabel Hilton, editor of the website China Dialogue has chosen to discuss
T
he Retreat of the Elephants
by Mark Elvin
on FiveBooks as one of the top five on her subject -China’s Environmental Crisis, saying that:
“…The most comprehensive and scholarly history of the Han people’s relationship to their environment…The environmental history of China is a very interesting one, and there is this mythology that Chinese peasants are somehow in tune with nature. But if you read Elvin you realise that in China there has actually been 2,000 years of unsustainable development and environmental degradation...”
The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/isabe...
“…The most comprehensive and scholarly history of the Han people’s relationship to their environment…The environmental history of China is a very interesting one, and there is this mythology that Chinese peasants are somehow in tune with nature. But if you read Elvin you realise that in China there has actually been 2,000 years of unsustainable development and environmental degradation...”
The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/isabe...
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October 17, 2013As a Chinese I am amazed by the quality and quantity of quoted poems&chorographies. It is interesting to read the poems and think which one they were in Chinese. Actually many poems are new to me, I often find my self surprised to find "Ah I did not expect that poet ever wrote something like that!" and "Never heard those poems in that dynasty before!".
As the environmental part, I do not have the position to judge since it is not my major. But the detailed descriptions, convincing facts are unquestionably authoritative and intriguing.
As the environmental part, I do not have the position to judge since it is not my major. But the detailed descriptions, convincing facts are unquestionably authoritative and intriguing.
December 23, 2011
Indispensable, and the only one of its kind.
The murder of the last elephants gets me terribly upset. I'd shoot the culprits. That's how civilized I am.
The theme is Civilization - in this case China, but so us - against the wild, and the Chinese were no better with a wild animal than the persecutors of the wolf in North America, for example.
And find out the truth about cities. Run like great jails, these were. Examine what 'civilized' means to you.
The murder of the last elephants gets me terribly upset. I'd shoot the culprits. That's how civilized I am.
The theme is Civilization - in this case China, but so us - against the wild, and the Chinese were no better with a wild animal than the persecutors of the wolf in North America, for example.
And find out the truth about cities. Run like great jails, these were. Examine what 'civilized' means to you.
December 16, 2010
A top-notch environmental history of early and medieval China. Many dislike the author's creative writing style, but I actually really enjoy it -- the claims are up-front and the evidence is presented quite directly. A pinnacle of Environmental History, once people get past the innovative writing style (which I personally think should be done more often anyways).
December 2, 2013
Very erudite book that incorporates many disciplines, linguistics anthropology environmental history
One of the most provocative and influential books I have read. Dr. Elvin translates "Oracle bones" The Chinese long view of history
One of the most provocative and influential books I have read. Dr. Elvin translates "Oracle bones" The Chinese long view of history
November 9, 2009
Way too many large block quotes and poems. The worst book so far in environmental history
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