The Retreat of the Elephants

THE RETREAT OF THE ELEPHANTS: An Environmental History of China. By Mark Elvin. Yale Univ. Press.

564 pp. $39.95

Some 4,000 years ago, wild elephants roamed woodlands across much of China. Tame ones worked as war elephants in

Chinese armies until 1662. Today, China’s elephants exist only in zoos and in tiny protected areas in the southwest. Mark Elvin, one of the foremost historians of China, uses this vanishing act as a symbol of environmental transformations over the course of Chinese history. Elvin made his mark more than 30 years ago with an insightful if controversial interpretation of the economic history of premodern China, Patterns of the Chinese Past (1973). Retreat of the Elephants is a worthy successor, one that will long serve as the standard work on the subject.

The centerpiece of the story is the relentless deforestation of China, which has resulted from the extension of farming mainly to keep up with population growth. But Elvin takes pains to show that Chinese environmental history is not a simple Malthusian process; politics and the state played crucial roles. Regions that manipulated nature for short-term advantage, he contends, enjoyed a competitive edge over those that did not—more a matter of Darwinian politics than Malthusian pressures. This idea seems plausible for the periods when various regions struggled against one another in China, but less so for eras of centralized control.

The book opens with masterly and engaging accounts of deforestation, species loss, agricultural expansion, and the establishment of irrigation. Next come tightly focused tales of three localities: Jiaxing, just south of the Yangzi delta; Guizhou Province in the south, originally home to the Miao people; and Zunhua in the northeast. These chapters place the themes of the book in specific contexts. The story of Guizhou, in which the Miao were gradually dispossessed and replaced by Han Chinese, is especially illuminating. Like the history of Amerindians and Euro-Americans in North America, this clash of cultures involved environmental transformation as a means of political control: To defeat the Miao, the Chinese replaced Guizhou’s forests with cultivation. The final part of the book deals with Chinese perceptions of nature. Here Elvin concludes, as others have before him, that the reverence for aspects of nature expressed in countless Chinese texts did next to nothing to restrain the actual behavior of Chinese toward nature.

Chinese history is a broad canvas, and Elvin doesn’t cover it all. He leaves aside the borderlands and the regions inhabited chiefly by non-Chinese. He also avoids the 20th century, in which environmental changes were overwhelming, as well as the invisible but important world of microbes. Still, his book is essential for those who want to understand the long sweep of Chinese history, and it will enhance the perspective of those who think they already understand it. A scholarly tour de force, it’s not for beginners; Elvin doesn’t always wear his immense learning lightly. But readers can skip the occasional algebraic formula or table of raw data on rice yields. Few books repay patience as generously as this one.

—J. R. McNeill