Entombed Woodlands: Vital Space for People and Trees in Qing Royal Internment

• In Event: Woodland and Wood Resources in Ming and Qing China

Abstract

My paper examines some environmental consequences of imperial state attempts to protect woodlands from agrarian incursion in order to maintain proper fengshui conditions in the Qing royal tomb complexes of Sanling and Xiling-Dongling. Woodlands were a prerequisite for complex establishment, forming the ecological basis of the ritual practice of royal internment. Fengshui cultural norms were conditioned by such ecological factors, which were then environmentally expressed as tomb complexes. This environmental relationship between non-human woodland ecology and human ritual culture was problematically mediated through “imperial arablism.” This set of practices maximized arable land’s cereal harvests while simultaneously constructing a Han agricultural identity through which the empire’s centralized stability was embodied. The reservation of complexes from full cultivation exploitation through woodland clearance created conflict between agrarian and fengshui interests, both of which are nevertheless manifestations of imperial arablist order. State tomb woodland policies promoted a particular form of local Han identity formation in response. This inculcation of a “Qing environmentality” was intended to alleviate contradictions inherent within imperial arablism over tomb woodlands in borderlands. Its effects were, however, inhibited by connections between people and woodlands that could not be contained by the state’s nested gradations of tomb complex space.

Author

• David A. Bello, Washington and Lee University