ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cosmologies in the Field: Epistemological Conflicts over Opening the Earth in Late Qing Mining

• In Event: Minescapes 3: Religion as Knowledge Matrix between Earth Science and Resource Management

English Abstract

This paper examines how the late Qing mineral field became a site of contest over who possessed the authority to open the earth, drawing on late nineteenth-century mining survey reports from Central China along the Yangzi River, in the decades following the forced opening of China’s ports under Western imperialism. Produced by field managers (including officials and their assistants) and by Western engineers, these documents record disagreements over shaft placement and extraction methods. For local actors, fengshui operated as a grounded epistemology for reading landforms and “dragon veins,” determining whether disturbing the subsoil was safe, auspicious, or morally permissible. Western engineers, by contrast, claimed authority through geological mapping, mechanical drilling, and drainage. These encounters reveal an epistemological crisis of expertise and trust—not between “religion” and “science,” but between competing vocabularies and lived worlds offering incompatible criteria for deciding when and how the land could be opened.
Missionary translations further complicated this landscape. Western mining treatises introduced vocabularies for understanding the earth, yet their authority was refracted through existing cosmological and administrative logics when applied to China’s fields. A final perspective is offered by the updated Chinese Essentials of Mining Study (1902), a manual integrating local traditions, including fengshui, with the selective adoption of Western techniques. Taken together, these sources show how mining knowledge in late nineteenth-century China was reconfigured through on-the-ground epistemological contests over authority and trust, reshaping how local managers and outside actors negotiated the relationships among humans, technologies, and the earth.

Author

• Hailian Chen, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science