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¹³ Brian Lander has already demonstrated this correcting role of archaeological discoveries in a case study of the Central Yangzi region. See “State Management of River Dikes in Early China: New Sources on the Environmental History of the Central Yangzi Region,” T'oung Pao 100 no. 4–5 (2014), 325–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ For the ancient Chinese perception of animals, see Sterckx, Roel, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002)Google Scholar. An exception may be the classical work Huainanzi, which has been convincingly analysed by John Major. As he concludes, the authors of this text turned to the world of animal behavior to make important metaphorical points about the world of human society, especially the nature of a sage government: Major, John S., “Animals and Animal Metaphors in Huainanzi,” Asia Major 21, no. 1 (2008), 133–51Google Scholar, here 149.

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¹⁸ See Zong, Yongqiang et al. , “Holocene Environmental Change and Neolithic Rice Agriculture in the Lower Yangtze Region of China: A Review,” The Holocene 22, no. 6 (2011), 623–635CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The growing role of human modification is emphasized by Zhang, Yijie and Kidder, Tristram R., “Archeology of the Anthropocene in the Yellow River region, China, 8000–2000, cal. BP,” The Holocene 24, no. 11 (2014), 1602–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²¹ Wen Huanren, Zhongguo lishi shiqi, 185–219.

²² While Chinese mammalogy was only institutionalized in the early 1950s, the first comprehensive guidebook was published only half a century later, in 2008. See Smith, Andrew T. and Xie, Yan, eds., A Guide to the Mammals of China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. It is based on the unpublished work of Wang Sung. While Brian Lander concentrates on North China, R.S. Hoffmann offers an overview of the distribution of mammals in the southern boundary of the Palaearctic realm: Hoffmann, R.S., “The Southern Boundary of the Palaearctic Realm in China and adjacent countries,” Acta Zoologica Sinica 47 (2001), 121–31Google Scholar. Xie Yan published a statistical analysis to identify aggregations of biogeographic units based on mammal distributions. See Yan, Xie, MacKinnon, John, and Li, Dianmo, “Study on Biogeographical Divisions of China,” Biodiversity and Conservation 13 (2004), 1391–1417Google Scholar.

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³⁰ See Goldschmidt, Asaf, “Commercializing Medicine or Benefiting the People—the First Public Pharmacy in China,” Science in Context 21 no. 3 (2008), 311–50CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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³⁵ However, Han Chinese farmers did not enter barren wasteland. Even today, there are conflicting attitudes toward space and the natural environment between Han Chinese farmers and Mongolian nomads. See Williams, Dee Mack, Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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³⁹ Their emotionality (though different in kind) recalls the emotional rhetoric of dismay described by Edgerton-Tarpley, Kathryn Jean, “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 2 (2014), 447–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 452.

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⁴³ Cao Mu also describes the slow progression from the old practices of feces disposal to a modern westernized sanitary system using the example of the introduction of public lavatories in Tianjin. See Mu, Cao, “The Public Lavatory of Tianjin: A Change of Urban Faeces Disposal in the Process of Modernization,” Global Environment 9 (2016), 196–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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