The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China

Tiger

The and the

Pangolin Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China

CHRIS COGGINS

The Tiger and the Pangolin

The

Tandiger the Pangolin Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China

Chris Coggins

U niversity of H awai‘i P ress H onolulu

© 2003 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chris Coggins The tiger and the pangolin : nature, culture, and conservation in China / Chris Coggins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8248–2506–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Nature conservation— China —History. 2. Wildlife conservation— China —History. 3. Ecology— China —History. 4. China —Civilization. I. Title QH77.C6 C64 2002 333.95'16'0951—dc21 2002004373

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Josie Herr Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

To the people of Meihuashan, for their kindness and patience, and to the landscapes and wildlife of the Southeast Uplands

Contents

Acknowledgments

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1 Introduction: A Short History of Nature Conservation

in China

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PART I The Southeast Uplands: People, Landscapes, and Wildlife 2 A Mountain Mosaic: Biological and Cultural Diversity

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3 Lord of the Hundred Beasts: A History of Tigers and

People in Southeast China

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PART II The Tiger and the Pangolin: An Environmental History of the Plumflower Mountains 4 The Wealth of Mountains: Settlement, Subsistence,

and Population Change in Meihuashan before 1949

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5 Three Rises, Two Falls: Political Ecology and

Socioeconomic Development in Meihuashan after 1949

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6 Burning the Mountains: A Historical Landscape Ecology

of the Meihuashan Ecosystem

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PART III Contemporary Village Resource Management and Nature Conservation Strategies 7 Habitat Conservation in the Post-Reform Landscape

161

8 White Tigers and Azure Dragons: Fengshui Forests,

Sacred Space, and the Preservation of Biodiversity in Village Landscapes

195

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CONTENTS

9 Eating from the Mountain: Hunting Traditions,

the Wildlife Trade, and Wildlife Management

216

10 Vital Connections: Linking Nature Conservation and

Cultural Ecology in Southeast China and Beyond

249

Appendix

285

Notes

291

Glossary

317

References

319

Index

331

Color plates follow page 148

Acknowledgments

This work has benefited from the support and inspiration of many individuals and organizations. First, I would like to thank Stan Stevens for his early advocacy of this research project when it was still in its infancy, and for his continuing moral support. Stan’s friendship and guidance have given me the confidence to pursue my dreams and to set high standards for field research, archival research, and writing. In his own life and work, Stan provides an example of scholarly excellence that I will always admire and strive to emulate. I would also like to give special thanks to Zhu Hejian, my academic advisor in China (under the grant regulations of the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China), and He Lian, a zoogeographer who assisted with field research. As the key player in my affiliation with Fujian Normal University, professor Zhu provided friendship and support while I worked in Fujian. In the field, He Lian was an invaluable friend and resource. His expertise on the wildlife and hunting customs of Fujian is unsurpassed, and I cannot thank him enough for being “in the right place at the right time,” even if he prefers to attribute it all to “yuanfen” (destiny). I thank Ruan Yunqiu, of the Fujian Forestry Bureau, and Li Shuqing, of the Fujian Provincial Museum, for their interest in the project. Ruan also helped me get official permission to conduct research in Fujian’s nature reserves. Professor Kam-biu Liu was helpful in the process of establishing contact with researchers in Fuzhou and Beijing. Qiu Honglie, his father, Qiu Shuangjun, and their family were also instrumental in my first trip to the interior of Fujian. Zhang Yongzu, of Academia Sinica, provided early encouragement for this research, and it has been a pleasure working with him on a related project. In the Meihuashan village of Gonghe, I was lucky to befriend Ma Shengxue and Ma Shulin, whose home I stayed in frequently and with whom I consulted—over tea, through dinner, and on many a mountain path. Ma Shengxue’s knowledge of wildlife and hunting in Meihua-

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shan, in tandem with his boundless energy and enthusiasm, are the very essence of community-based nature conservation. I thank Ma Shuwen for his friendship and wisdom, and for the generosity with which he shared his tremendous knowledge of local history and fengshui. This book could cover only a portion of the culture history that Ma Shuwen discussed with me in interviews, but I hope that these bits provide readers with some of the same pleasures of discovery that I found in the Ma household on many a cool mountain evening. In the other study villages, Guan Yanzeng, Luo Zhiming, Luo Changxiu, and Luo Ruiqing were also generous hosts, tireless guides, and special friends. I thank them and their families for the many hours they sacrificed in interviews and on trips through the mountains. Though I cannot list the names of all the Meihuashan residents who provided tea, food, lodging, friendship, and information, I thank them all. Luo Zhijian, Luo Bing, Luo Shunchang, Luo Shisun, Zhang Shisheng, and Luo Zhongkun will be remembered for their additional gifts of time and energy. The Meihuashan Nature Reserve directors and staff deserve special thanks for the hospitality and friendships that enriched my family’s life in the reserve. I would especially like to thank Luo Mingxi, Huang Chuguang, Fu Yongcheng, Wang Honggao, the Zhou family, Wu Jinping, Li Kaiming, and Chen Daoqing. Huang Zhaofeng, Lan Meiying, and Lan Xiaodan deserve special mention for their help and friendship over the years. I thank the Wuyishan Nature Reserve staff, especially Wu Haohan, and the Longxishan Nature Reserve directors and staff members, especially Xie Qiaosheng and Wang Guoliang, for their hospitality and generosity. Many people in the Southeast Uplands rendered aid and provided friendship, but special thanks go to Fu Qisheng, Fu Zhirong, Lai Chenghua, Liao Chunxiang, Lai Xiaobo, and Chen Xiangyi. Li Dengfa, Fang Pinguang, Lu Hongrong, and Han Liangfa were of great assistance in the libraries, archives, and special collections. Fang Pinguang provided a tremendous service in collecting gazetteer data for the study of humanwildlife encounters. I would also like to thank the U.S. institutions, staff, and faculty members that have made this journey possible. The Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University provided a grant through the Robert C. West Fund that allowed me to conduct

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

preliminary research in Fujian and Beijing. The Committee for Scholarly Communication with China provided generous funding and institutional support for one year of research. CSCC officers Joan Carey and Keith Clemenger were especially helpful and supportive. I thank L.S.U. professor Kent Mathewson for his enthusiastic backing of the project in its early phases, and William Davidson, the chairman of the Department of Geography and Anthropology, who offered timely support for cartographic revisions. I am especially indebted to cartographer Mary Lee Eggart, who saved the day by revising most of the maps and diagrams. Li Quan, the head of Save China’s Tigers, and Ron Tilson, of the Minnesota Zoo, have embarked on the most ambitious effort yet to help the Chinese government save the South China tiger, and I thank them for the information and support they have provided for this book. I thank the Caldwell family, especially Gail Harris and Muriel Caldwell Tillie, who invited me into their home in Tennessee and shared their fascinating family history. Here in the Berkshires, Miss Hall’s School and Simon’s Rock College have provided our family with two warm and caring academic communities during the writing period. I thank Pat Sharpe, the Dean of Academic Affairs, and Bernard Rodgers, VicePresident and Dean of Simon’s Rock, for providing me with fascinating work and bright students who make teaching a joyful challenge. I am especially grateful to Kathy Schmidt, who provided the spectacular rendering of the tiger and the pangolin in the frontispiece. My editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press, Keith Leber, provided high-spirited support and guidance throughout the process of manuscript preparation and publication; it was a pleasure to work with him, with managing editor Ann Ludeman, and with copyeditor Jane Taylor. I also thank the geographers, Paul Starrs and Ron Knapp, conscientious reviewers who took the time to provide detailed and instructive suggestions for revision. Finally, I thank my parents, who have provided emotional support for my endeavors over the long haul, and I thank my in-laws for all their kindness. Above all, I thank my wife, Tanya Kalischer, and my sons, Aaron and Noah Kalischer-Coggins, for sharing the hard times and the high points with love, affection, and patience.

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Introduction Chapter Title A Short History of Nature Conservation in China

Before Liberation there were lots of tigers around the villages. They often roared at night and stole people’s livestock. There were few hunters and everyone was afraid. They had to use drums and gongs to scare the tigers off. Why were there so few tigers by the 1950s? It has to do with national fate [ guoyun]; the tigers knew that the luck of the country was changing. When the country was in chaos [luan], stealing and killing were common in the mountains, so tigers were everywhere. People say that after Liberation, the tigers went away because the government got better, the country settled down. . . . I believe this too. —A thirty-six-year-old Hakka man in Gonghe village, Meihuashan Nature Reserve, 1995

* * * * * Ni lianli Wo lilian Ni kai shan Wo zhong tian Ni gei wo chile Wo geng hui zhuan qian.

You’re a lianli [pangolin] I’m a lilian [reciprocally inverted nonsense word] You work the mountain I work the fields You let me eat you And I’ll make more money.

—Longgui village (Meihuashan) pangolin hunter’s incantation spoken before the kill, to guard against bad luck The Tiger and the Pangolin

The South China tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis) and the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), a scaly anteater, occupy ancient and important niches in the biologically diverse ecosystems of Chinese folk cosmology. Both animals are believed to have mysterious magical power and high

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medicinal value, and both are now under state protection. The two species have also been anthropomorphized, to varying degrees, representing two types of intelligent free agents with very different roles on earth. Until well into the twentieth century, the tiger was seen as a representative of heaven that could bring justice to the aggrieved, aid the righteous in times of need, or impose a reign of terror on wrong-doers. Good relations between people and tigers thus depended on how well the country was being governed—on the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) and on the degree of harmony in the terrestrial realm. The tiger appeared to come and go of its own accord, or by the will of heaven. Rampant tiger attacks during historical periods of social dislocation, interior migration, and massive deforestation reinforced this cosmological linkage; folktales and local histories portrayed the tiger as, among other things, a protector of the forest. Ironically, the virtual disappearance of the tiger in South China since the 1950s, a result of massive ideological changes, widespread habitat loss, and systematic persecution, is still attributed by some to the good government and relative societal harmony (or greater degree of social control) associated with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The magic of the pangolin, on the other hand, comes from its strange closeness to the earth. Its subterranean haunts have earned it the name “earth dragon” (dilong). Its peculiar fishlike scales have earned it the name “wears mountain armor” (chuanshanjia), or “carp” (linli or lianli).1 Like many upland villagers, it depends on the mountains for a living, and like the village shaman, it protects itself with secret powers, so humans who hunt it for the medicine of its delectable meat and potent scales must first speak to the pangolin and coerce it to submit to its “fate.” Tigers also eat pangolins, and when tigers were more numerous, their dens were a good place to find pangolin scales. Though the tiger has often represented celestial or divine imperial power, and the pangolin chthonic, terrestrial, and local power, these two levels of agency exist in a state of continuous interaction. In the interior frontier of the Southeast Uplands, imperial administrators (or in modern times, state officials) and mountain peoples (like the She, Hakka, and so-called Pengmin) have relied on their own, often separate varieties of power, and in the course of their inevitable struggles, both have been important in shaping the landscapes of southeast China in distinctive ways. As nature conservation has become increasingly important in the

INTRODUCTION

Southeast Uplands and in China as a whole, both tigers and pangolins are now protected by national law. The South China tiger is believed to be the rarest of five remaining subspecies of tigers, the one closest to extinction, with probably fewer than twenty individuals left in the wild, and the only subspecies endemic to China.2 For the Chinese people, no animal has greater value as a symbol for the country’s natural heritage, and saving the tiger is becoming a matter of national pride. To protect tigers and to safeguard other rare fauna and flora in one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, the Chinese government established hundreds of nature reserves and implemented a series of wildlife conservation measures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the scientific and legal aspects of wildlife conservation in China are still in their incipient stages of development, with many obstacles to overcome. Many of the nature reserves in China encompass settlements, farmlands, and locally managed forest lands. It remains to be seen whether the needs and aspirations of local people and the goals of nature reserves and other state-run conservation schemes can find lasting harmony. This book examines land use traditions, landscape ecology, environmental history, and indigenous conceptions of the environment and natural resources in three nature reserves of the Southeast Uplands region. It explores the relationship between cultural landscapes and wildlife habitats, and between local resource management systems and government control over natural resources. Focusing both on environmental history and contemporary nature conservation issues in a subtropical mountain region of the southeast, my goal is to initiate a more engaging and inclusive dialogue on the conditions of wildland resource management throughout China. Conceptions of Nature and Wildlife Conservation in China

New students of Han Chinese cultural tradition are apt to be drawn to many distinctive intellectual and aesthetic pathways that traverse the realm of “nature.” Those who journey on find views of the nonhuman world quite different from the ones typically associated with “the Western tradition.” We see human affairs diminished by mountains, streams, and sky. One may, for a time, experience humanity as part of nature, adrift in a seamless continuum, and one may ask if it is possible that this holism survives in Chinese culture, perhaps still sensible in rural landscapes and daily life. While such ancient Chinese philosophers, poets, and painters as Laozi, Zhuangzi, Li Bo, and Guo Xi beckon the reader

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farther along this sinuous track, we need only to examine the landscapes within a Chinese nature reserve at the close of the twentieth century to find ourselves far from any envisioned destination, still at the beginning of our quest, where “among thousands of crags and ravines the road meanders.” 3 Just as this line by Li Bo describes a fantastic and unreal landscape discovered in a marvelous dream, it is all too easy for an outsider to romanticize mountain village landscapes and, thereby, to essentialize their inhabitants. On the other hand, those familiar with pollution problems in urban China and with the severity of environmental degradation in much of the countryside may wonder where any “wild nature” survives in China. Experiencing the pall that enshrouds nearly every metropolitan area, you easily grasp the alarming fact that the country has five of the ten cities with the worst air pollution in the world. Seeing the fetid, stagnant condition of most any stream that passes through a lowland settlement will quickly make the statistics on water problems tangible: serious pollution affects 30 percent of the rivers and 90 percent of the urban water sources, and three hundred cities face water shortages. Desertification and deforestation rates are equally alarming. Human pressure on natural resources in China is without historical precedent, with more than one-fifth of the world’s population on roughly 6 percent of the earth’s total land area. The forest area per capita is one-sixth the world average, and strict forest conservation policy is, by necessity, becoming an integral part of the CCP’s long-range economic planning. 4 Still, much of interior China lies beyond the densely populated and heavily industrialized urban cores, and 90 percent of the population occupies less than a third of the total land area. The rugged mountain ranges and high plateaus, covering about 70 percent of the land, remain less densely populated, and few foreigners have been permitted to visit the nature reserves in remote areas until recent years. Protected areas, like the Meihuashan Nature Reserve in Fujian Province, where small villages have been part of the landscape for more than five hundred years, where tigers have survived at least into the 1990s, and where leopards and clouded leopards can still be found, challenge us to question conventional assumptions about where humanized landscapes end and natural landscapes begin. The people who live in and manage resources in these reserves also challenge us to consider alternatives to traditional Western, and especially American, traditions of nature conservation based on the “Yellowstone Model,” which dictates that large areas of “pristine wilder-

INTRODUCTION

ness” be kept free of human inhabitants so nature can remain “unblemished by man.” While the scale of ecological devastation in China calls for large-scale, strict nature conservation wherever feasible, this book demonstrates that the preservation both of vast wild areas and of smaller conservation lands requires ongoing negotiation between official conservation agencies, local people, and, in the near future, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Issues of ownership, stewardship, and even the meaning and significance of natural resources in rural China have long been contested and negotiated by state authorities and common people, and this will go on as nature reserves continue to spread and expand through China’s rural and peri-urban areas. In more general terms, you need not visit a Chinese nature reserve to find troubling differences between Eastern and Western conceptions of nature and its purposes. The subject has loomed large in heated international debates in which Western environmentalists castigate China and Taiwan for their involvement in the international market for endangered species, such as elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, leopards, and bears. Attempts to meet consumer demands for tiger bone, rhino horn, and myriad other products in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the mainland alone have catastrophically influenced wildlife populations throughout Asia and Africa, and have notably affected certain wildlife populations on other continents. In April 1994, the Clinton administration imposed trade sanctions on wildlife products from Taiwan after the Lee Teng-hui administration failed to curtail trade in rhinoceros and tiger parts despite warnings from the United States aimed at China and Taiwan. This was the first time in history that international trade sanctions have been used to protect wildlife. 5 It may come as a surprise to some that China has not yet exhausted its own wildlife populations, and the country still has 500 species of mammals and 1,200 species of birds, both groups representing 13 percent of their global totals. Four subspecies of tigers, the Indian elephant, and two species of bears are among several highly endangered large fauna in China that have extremely high (Chinese) medicinal value. In fact, the richness of China’s natural fauna and the cultural values that have developed around wild animals through the millennia of Chinese history largely explain the demands that Chinese consumers now place on wildlife populations throughout Asia and Africa. Increasing material prosperity in China is fueling the demand for domestic and foreign wildlife products. Families for whom meat was largely proscribed by poverty in decades

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past are now able to consume it on a daily basis. Added to this is a kind of culinary renaissance; wild game is in vogue both for the urban business elite and for the rural farmer, and wild game prices are five to ten times higher than for the same farm-raised species. Trade in illegal wildlife and medicinal parts appears to be on the increase, and in many provinces captive-bred animals receive no legal protection at all, despite recent legislative efforts by the central government. In the late 1990s, game parks and zoos in many tourist areas provided bloody entertainment and illegal tonics; after watching “ferocious” tigers kill live ducks, chickens, pigs, or cows, visitors could retire to a dining room to feast on tiger meat and drink tiger-bone and bear gall-bladder wine harvested from aged inmates. At the Xiongsheng Bear and Tiger Mountain Village, a privately run park in Guilin, this was done with official approval, under the guise of raising tigers for reintroduction to the wild. 6 The Chinese government is keenly aware of the international condemnation evoked by these cultural patterns. As with all other “internal matters” that become subjects for dissection in the international press (e.g., human rights issues and family-planning policy), wildlife conservation has become a political and diplomatic problem. In the 1990s, Chinese policymakers recognized it as an “image problem” that could affect foreign relations, jeopardize Permanent Normal Trade Status with the United States, and hinder other opportunities for international commerce. The political tensions resulting from such profound cultural conflicts, coupled with military incidents and allegations of high-level espionage through the 1990s and into the new millennium, have exacerbated antiforeign—and especially anti–United States—sentiment in China. In essence, Chinese cultural practices that have reemerged or intensified as a result of economic development and increased trade with the West have also become a source of conflict with the West. Some would argue that an emerging international community, which strives for consistent legal and ethical rules, and even a global ethos, cannot tolerate rampant environmental degradation in any constituent country. While a global environmental ethic may be justifiable on scientific, moral, and aesthetic grounds, however, it will not succeed if developed solely according to historical and cultural conditions peculiar to the United States, Western Europe, or any other individual country or region. The primary challenges facing nature conservation at the dawn of the twenty-first century are to integrate national and international legal policies for the protection of biodiversity, to recognize and

INTRODUCTION

nurture the multiplicity of cultural practices and perceptions of nature and conservation held by peoples and national states around the world, and to understand and alter destructive consumption and trade patterns that have accelerated the loss of species and habitats worldwide. There is growing recognition among conservationists that such terms and concepts as “nature,” “environment,” “resources,” and “spatial boundaries” are socially and culturally constructed and signify different things to different people. Furthermore, the meanings of such terms and their application to particular places are being negotiated continuously by individuals and groups according to their cultural traditions and political agendas. 7 Since the beginning of Communist China’s détente with the West, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, wildlife conservation has been an important, if troublesome, aspect of bilateral relations. The World Wildlife Fund ( Worldwide Fund for Nature) panda conservation project, with field research directed by George Schaller, began in 1979 amid a series of misunderstandings and missteps on the part of Chinese and American participants. 8 In the mid-1980s, the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Man and the Biosphere Program (UNMAB) accepted ten of China’s nature reserves into the International Biosphere Reserve Network. Membership in the UNMAB helped bring China’s incipient conservation movement into the sphere of transnational conservation NGOs and funding agencies, from The Nature Conservancy to the World Bank, and there are many indications that foreign involvement in nature conservation and sustainable development schemes in China will continue to grow. Western involvement in nature conservation in China during the past decade has been substantial, but it has come at a much later historical phase than in other parts of Asia and Africa. The political geography of Western colonialism in China differed from that of India, British Malaya, East Africa, and other regions where colonial nature conservation schemes gained prominence, primarily because foreign power in China was concentrated in coastal enclaves, with commerce conducted under the policy of “extra-territoriality” (exemption of foreigners from the Chinese legal code). Under this regime, Westerners saw the establishment of nature reserves and other land management programs outside of the treaty ports as an unnecessary undertaking of little benefit to colonial interests. Big-game hunting by foreigners in China was not as prevalent as in India and Africa, and wildlife conservation was not as

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essential for maintaining foreign economic dominance or sense of place.9 Nevertheless, colonial contact with the West ushered in a new view of wild plants and animals as demythologized commodities, which could be harvested or even systematically exterminated with impunity in the name of God, science, sport, profit, or progress. 10 As political and economic conditions in China have changed over the past two centuries, so too have forest and wildlife management practices. In broad terms, there have been four historical periods in the development of wildlife resource exploitation and environmental perception since the late imperial era (1368–1911). They may be defined as (1) the period before significant Western influence, when local and national indigenous views of wildlife and resource management developed and prevailed; (2) the period of contact and exchange with Western missionaries and naturalists; (3) the period when Communist China closed its doors to the outside world, and the exploitation of nature in all forms became a heroic and patriotic quest; and (4) the current period of reopening to foreign contact and influence, which coincides with a deepening concern for nature conservation in the political and civil realms and an emerging grassroots involvement in environmental issues at the local level. Despite the fact that systematic nature conservation in China is in its infancy, many Westerners expect China to conform to Western cultural standards of wildlife conservation. This is not reasonable and may not be desirable. Even if the same legal and institutional management apparatus existed in China as in many Western countries (which is not possible in the near term), and even given the growth of an urban middle class— with rapidly changing values—different beliefs and knowledge systems concerning wild plants and animals can and will persist, especially in rural areas. Nature conservation in China, to be most successful, will have to develop a set of structural and cultural features suited to local and regional conditions. In today’s nature reserves, we see the emergence of such distinctive features, and it is important that we understand their historical origins as they continue to develop. While China’s government has begun to follow the lead of Western powers in establishing nature reserves and promoting an infrastructure of environmental beliefs and goals, some of these ideologies may be viewed as products of the world’s industrialized societies, with little resonance in the diverse belief systems of rural China. The practice of nature reserve establishment and management in China is based largely on Western

INTRODUCTION

archetypes, concepts, and values, and there were no national nature reserves or comparable protected areas in China before 1949. Though imperial hunting reserves and indigenous protected areas existed, they differed from modern nature reserves in fundamental ways. Recognizing the complexities of China’s environmental history and cultural geography is thus a critical foundation for developing regional conservation plans; this should be evident in a country with fifty-five officially recognized “national minorities” and numerous less-well-known ethnolinguistic subgroups. Though it would be a serious mistake to essentialize or caricature China’s emerging protected-areas system as inevitably bound to a set of structural features that are fundamentally different from Western conservation systems—and Taiwan’s protected-area system may provide a useful example for conservation efforts in sparsely inhabited areas of the mainland—prudent conservation planning must be based on existing socioeconomic and cultural conditions. 11 In most instances, especially in the mountain regions of southern China, reserves have been established in places occupied by peoples who have, over many generations, developed long-term natural resource management techniques and schemes. These include communal and familial cropland, forest, and pasture management; wildlife management; methods of gathering and processing medicinal and edible wild plants; and codes for protecting and maintaining commonly held sacred forests. Many land use and hunting practices reached an ecologically destructive level of intensity long ago, especially in the valleys and low mountains, where human population densities were high even in early historic times. But people in the mountains of western Fujian, who are the focus of this book, have long occupied and shaped biologically diverse upland habitats. In the process, they have developed a rich body of environmental knowledge and folklore through generations of hunting and trapping, through the eating of wild game and the preparation of animal-based medicinal products, and through the frequent contact with wild animals that comes with living in a remote mountain region. This study describes enduring cultural patterns pertaining to wild animals in the many guises that they have assumed in rural Chinese culture: food, quarry, medicine, bestial terrors, destroyers of crops, bearers of magic, and, most recently, protected natural resources. It reconstructs the history of wildlife depletion through habitat destruction, market hunting, government-sponsored “anti-pest campaigns,” “sport,” and “meat hunting.” Though environmental perception may be changing rapidly among

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peoples throughout China, traditional values, beliefs, and practices still affect land and wildlife management at local, regional, and even national levels. These have both negative and positive effects on the operation of nature reserves and the viability of bureaucratically administered wildlife management programs. For instance, local knowledge of animals does not always lead to a strong conservation ethic, and some people continue to poach to earn money in the black market for wildlife products. Others have worked with conservation officials to study and protect wildlife. China’s nature reserves are thus grounds of overlapping ideologies, patchworks of collective and familial lands inscribed with distinctive land use and resource conservation practices. Many such practices are rooted in the distant past but have recently been circumscribed by nature protection policies promulgated by distant regional and national authorities. Given enough time and concordance, these intersecting schemes may evolve into workable conservation arrangements. But in the Southeast Uplands, the questions remain—how much time is available to save habitat for such species as the leopard, the clouded leopard, and the Asiatic black bear? And can the South China tiger ever be rescued through habitat conservation and the reintroduction of captives to the wild? These are daunting challenges. Development of Wildlife Conservation Laws in China

The central government gained greater control over forest resources in China after the CCP came to power in 1949, but attempts to curb deforestation achieved mixed results, and there was little effort to protect wildlife or to develop a practical system of wildlife conservation. Not until 1988 did the first national wildlife protection law pass the National People’s Congress. The law, which went into effect in 1989, established that all wildlife was the property of the nation and must be carefully protected, actively propagated, researched, and exploited in a rational manner. The Ministry of Forestry and the Ministry of Fisheries were charged with directing the national management of terrestrial and aquatic species. The governments of each province, autonomous region, and provinciallevel city were ordered to coordinate wildlife management within their jurisdictions and at the lower administrative levels of the county and municipality. All unauthorized hunting and disruption of nationally protected wildlife was banned, and a system of punishments was imposed to deal with offenders. A rating system was initiated in which each species was given category 1 or category 2 national protection, based on rarity,

INTRODUCTION

economic value, or scientific value. Permits to hunt or otherwise utilize species designated category 1 were to be issued only by the national authorities; provincial and autonomous regional governments would be in charge of permits for hunting category 2 species.12 The apparent tardiness of this type of legislation does not mean that game laws have been nonexistent or that hunting has not been important in the lives of the ruling elite and rural peasants. Literary records and archaeological data indicate that the royalty of ancient China not only practiced hunting, viewing it as a means of demonstrating bravery and nobility, but also established protected hunting enclosures and wildlife parks. Rather than relying on unenforceable edicts restricting hunting throughout a particular administrative region, imperial rulers preferred to set aside large tracts of wild land, where wildlife and habitat were protected by remoteness from human activity, as well as by walls and guards. The Book of Songs (Shijing) describes a wildlife reserve established by King Wen, the legendary model ruler of the Zhou dynasty, in about 1150 b.c. One such enclosure during the reign of Emperor Han Wudi (236–290 c.e.) measured 50 kilometers (31 mi.) from east to west, and 25 kilometers (15 mi.) from north to south. In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Manchu royal family established an agency called the “Bureau of Imperial Gardens and Hunting Parks,” which managed 105 reserves in three categories. They were Imperial Hunting Enclosures ( Yuwei), Enclosures Designed to Provide for the Needs of the Imperial Household ( Wangduoluosuwei), and Enclosures for Military Training (Xianwei). As these categories imply, the reserves were designed to meet the cultural and political needs of the Manchu ruling minority. 13 Though there were imperial nature reserves, some exceptional administrative regions, and even historical periods in which certain types of hunting or the killing of certain species was restricted, most wildlife management in China was based on local custom. In the Southeast Uplands, local wildlife management systems were diverse and geared toward local conditions and preferences. A gazetteer account from Longyan, in Fujian Province, states: Folk customs relating to [wildlife] resource allocation were fairly complex, and regulations and restrictions, which varied in each locale, were diverse. Common regulations included rotating hunts from one village to the next and [a series of rules for dividing the quarry]. (Longyan Prefecture 1992, 1425)

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Hunting was often conducted by groups of men from different villages who assembled for game drives in specific places. Game was divided according to certain criteria, including who was hosting the hunt, who bagged the game, and who saw the quarry first. Those who heard the dogs and joined the hunt, and even those who heard the guns and rushed to the kill site, were often entitled to a share of the meat, bones, hide, organs, or blood. While social status could determine one’s share, the drawing of lots was frequently used to divide game as well. In rural areas, wildlife was a common property resource, and hunting was often limited to selected locales and particular times of year. Even when hunting was unregulated, the limitations of traditional technologies helped prevent the degree of wildlife decimation that occurred with the advent of modern guns and traps. 14 Magico-religious traditions also prohibited the hunting and/or consumption of certain animal species in certain areas, in certain seasons, or under certain conditions; in the eastern Min region of Fuqing County (south of Fuzhou), local hunters were forbidden by the god Hieng Tieng Siong-da from hunting on particular hills, believed to be inhabited by “fox spirits.” These spirits communicated through a female medium and, as one Western missionary and hunter wrote, “enjoy[ed] an immunity due to a superstition stronger than law.”15 After Mao’s ascent to power, CCP policies on wildlife were utilitarian at best but more often overtly hostile and aggressive. Government leaders at all levels organized extermination campaigns against animals that attacked livestock, ate grain crops, spread disease, or were generally perceived as a nuisance. Large livestock predators, such as tigers (which have a colorful history of dining on people in southern China) and wolves, were attacked systematically. Animals that posed a threat to grain crops were trapped, shot, and poisoned by the thousands. During the “Great Leap Forward,” the entire nation was mobilized to destroy “the four pests”: mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. In Beijing, for days at a time, in city streets and rural fields, people banged pots and lit firecrackers in a reputedly successful (if temporary) effort to drive away sparrows by wearing them out and giving them no place to land. Nature was viewed as an obstacle to progress. Traditional cosmologies, which prohibited the destruction of certain components of the landscape (sacred forests and spirit animals), were officially banned as “feudal superstition” ( fengjian mixin), and complex land use traditions practiced by rural people all over China were changed, perhaps irrevocably. An ancient parable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the

INTRODUCTION

Mountains” (“Yugong yi shan”) was used by the CCP to exhort all ablebodied people to attack and transform a resistant natural world, the final impediment to China’s modernization. The story tells of an old man who, possessed only of hand tools and help from family and friends, sets out to move a mountain blocking the way to his house. In Communist China, wild animals were part of that mountain, and they would be removed with no remorse, whenever and wherever it was necessary, but not without first serving the people. In the first three decades of communist rule, the utilitarian approach to nature gave peasants the ideological and legal carte blanche to decimate wildlife resources without fear of supernatural reprisal or punishment by the state. This trend, together with undying traditional Chinese beliefs in the medicinal value of wildlife and an international demand for fur, gave rise to one of the largest wildlife processing systems in Asia, if not the entire world. It is ironic that in its effort to “ban the old and embrace the new” (chu jiu bu xin), the Chinese government never attempted to alter the age-old popular perception that wildlife was endowed with healing properties greater than the biochemical sum of its parts. The harvest and consumption of wildlife was not completely exempt from centralized control, but because wild animals are mobile rather than rooted in the landscape, there were no clearly defined access rights and tenure arrangements of the sort that were central to the revolutionary redistribution of inanimate resources like arable soil, forest land, and water. A degree of government control was achieved by simply co-opting the retail function of local wildlife markets. Communes had “foreign export departments” (waimaozhan), which bought forest products, including wild plants and animals and their products (especially skins—it appears that in many instances, peasants used the meat, organs, and bones for themselves or sold them to others). Many of these products were stockpiled in coastal cities and then exported to international buyers. From a historical perspective, the comprehensive legal protection of wildlife implemented in 1989 is a highly significant event. In the late 1990s, important legislative commitments to the environment were made, most notably a ban on logging in the upper Changjiang (Yangzi River) and upper and middle Huanghe ( Yellow River) basin (the National Natural Forest Protection Project, 1998), and a clearly stated commitment to sustainable development initiatives in the Tenth FiveYear Plan (2001–2005).16 The real difficulty of enforcing game laws, however, has yet to be resolved, and in many areas, including nature

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reserves, unmonitored hunting, fishing, and plant gathering continue. In fact, with the development of free enterprise in China, the increased availability of guns, and the ever-increasing access to markets abroad, it appears that poaching for personal use and commercial markets has intensified. Development of a National Nature Reserve System in China

Unmanaged hunting, fishing, and plant gathering remain a serious problem throughout much of the country, but the development of protected natural areas in China has accelerated rapidly in the past twenty years. This trend is especially promising considering the difficulties that plagued the nature reserve system after its inception nearly half a century ago; these included constant administrative setbacks and even a period of complete disintegration. The country’s first nature reserve, Dinghushan in Guangdong Province, was established in 1956. Ten years later, there were nineteen reserves in the country. But during the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), many of these were dysfunctional, and no new reserves were created. During this ten-year hiatus, nature conservation was not a political priority, and even if it had been, local and regional political conflicts would have made protectedarea management difficult at best. 17 The late 1970s and 1980s marked the beginning of a renaissance for nature reserves in China. With the opening to the West, China’s environmental crisis became the focus of international attention. To stave off criticism and attract international funding, a tremendous effort was made to designate sensitive areas as nature reserves (ziran baohuqu, “nature protection areas”). The nineteen original reserves were restored, and by 1990, 289 Chinese reserves were listed on the United Nations List of National Parks and Protected Areas, with 285 type IV (partially protected) reserves and four type I–III (fully protected) reserves. The movement accelerated in the 1990s, and by 1995, 477 new reserves had been established at county, provincial, and national levels. In 1996, there were more than 766 nature reserves, including ninety state- (national-) level reserves, covering 6–7 percent of the total national territory. By 2001, the State Forestry Administration reported that there were more than 1,270 reserves covering 123 million hectares (474,900 sq. mi.), or roughly 1 2 percent of China’s total territory. These range in size from the more than 247,000-square-kilometer ( 95,367-sq.-mi.) Changtang Nature

INTRODUCTION

Reserve in Tibet, the second largest reserve in the world, to township reserves of a few hectares or less. 18 Though the establishment of hundreds of reserves within a twentyyear period represents a “great leap forward” for nature conservation in China, a survey of 159 nature reserves in 1993 showed that 44 percent had either no administrative bodies or no management staff. The same survey showed that nearly ten thousand people were living in each reserve, on average, and many more people were living outside reserve boundaries who depended on the natural resources within reserves for subsistence. With an estimated 7.6 million rural people in 769 reserves by 1995, it became imperative for county, provincial, and national administrative bodies to try to integrate nature protection with local economic development. Because there were only ninety national-level reserves by 1995, accounting for less than 12 percent of the total, coordinating management nationwide has been a difficult challenge. By 2001, most of China’s nature reserves were being run by county governments, and with decentralized economic and political power, it is nearly impossible for counties to raise the revenue needed to deal with such recurrent expenditures as salaries, and the basic infrastructural development to ensure that reserves are properly managed. In addition, local police, tourism, and other county and prefectural government organs frequently override reserve directors on land management issues inside protected areas.19 The 1994 Nature Reserve Law addressed many of the difficulties facing China’s nature reserve system by enacting laws for the solution of a series of complex and interrelated issues. These include local economic development, land use conflicts and reserve zonation, reserve establishment, administrative and bureaucratic ambiguities, reserve oversight, the development of tourism, environmental damage and mitigation procedures, and penalties for wrong-doers. The reserve system envisioned by China’s national assembly differs markedly from the U.S. national park system and resembles, in many ways, the United Nations Biosphere Reserve model. Acknowledging the difficulty of conserving nature in a country where high population densities require close cooperation between protected-area managers and local people, the Chinese Ministry of Forestry adopted a biosphere reserve model as the most appropriate approach to nature conservation. This means that nearly all reserves contain a strictly protected core area; most have buffer zones or transitional areas, where local residents are allowed to conduct carefully controlled

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commercial and subsistence land use; and some have research areas, where new types of land use and habitat management can be carried out on an experimental basis. The Nature Reserve Law has extremely important implications for the future of protected areas in China, calling as it does for the consolidation of nature reserve management schemes and local, regional, and national development planning. The success or failure of this undertaking will both shape and be shaped by the integration of nature conservation into the national identity (or identities) of a country with many peoples. With integrated conservation and development in mind, the government placed ten nature reserves in the UN International Biosphere Reserve Network, and this number had risen to nineteen by the year 2000. China also established a national system in 1993, the China Biosphere Reserve Network (CBRN), which included forty-five member reserves: ten international biosphere reserves and thirty-five at the national level. Membership had grown to eighty-one by 2000, with sixty-six national reserves and fifteen international biosphere reserves. 20 The main difference between current conservation practice in China and the UNMAB biosphere reserve model is in the degree of integration of local people into protected-area management and decision making. While “local participation” is the foremost of three strategies in the Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network Action Plan, the kind of local empowerment implied is subject to varying interpretation. Such provisions may be perceived by the government as a threat to state authority, especially in “sensitive” areas, where minority nationalities reside. The problem of political autonomy among local, especially non-Han, peoples may preclude such amendments from national legislation and regional application. On the Ground: The Political Ecology of Land Tenure in China’s Nature Reserves

The web of land tenure and settlement issues facing nature reserve managers, reserve inhabitants, and those living adjacent to reserves, complex in any particular instance, is further complicated by regional variation in land tenure conditions, traditional land use patterns, and environmental perception. This is evident in the mostly Han-dominated areas of eastern China, and probably will prove to be a chronic problem in non-Han areas of the west. 21 In southern China, conservation and development issues are com-

INTRODUCTION

plicated by land tenure regulations that limit the power of authorities to control land use within reserves. These regulations reflect differences in ancient land tenure patterns and communist-era administrative objectives for North and South China. In North China and the northeast, approximately 80 percent of the forested land is nationally owned in “forest areas” (linqu), and with the exception of former governmentsponsored forest laborers and their descendants, most nature reserves are devoid of long-term human settlements. In southern China, however, ancient settlements were merged to form larger village and township collectives ( jiti), which now hold land use rights over roughly 80 percent of the land, and nature reserve managers are partially responsible for the economic development of the communities within their domains.22 In addition, reserve managers must raise money for operating costs, and this typically involves “sustainable development” projects, in which reserve resources are harvested by residents and marketed under the direction of reserve administrators, who collect fees or taxes on resource use to ensure a steady supply of income for reserve budgets. 23 Under intense economic pressure, protected areas can suffer habitat degradation at rates exceeding those of adjacent areas under different management regimes. Research on habitat loss over a thirty-two-year period (1965–1997) in Sichuan’s world-famous Wolong Nature Reserve, which was established in 1975 to protect the giant panda, shows reserve residents causing an acceleration in high-altitude deforestation and a corresponding increase in rates of panda habitat degradation in the period after the reserve was established. The wild panda population has plummeted from 145 in 1974 to just 72 in 1986, at least partially as a result of upland forest loss. The increase in forest exploitation is the result of a 70 percent increase in population (75 percent of the local residents belong to the Qiang minority and other non-Han nationalities, and are not subject to the one-child policy), increased fuel-wood consumption, house construction, farming, and the timber demands of a burgeoning tourism industry.24 In Fujian’s Meihuashan Nature Reserve, the government has full jurisdiction over only 23.5 percent of the reserve. The rest of the land is under the control of the collectives, even though it is owned by the government. The collectives have rights to use the agricultural land (tuquan) and rights to use the forest land (linquan). Although forest use must conform to reserve guidelines, in the mid-1990s any family, collective, or government agency that practiced reforestation on wasteland could gain

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usufruct rights (shiyongquan) to the forests (while paying taxes to the government in the form of harvested timber). The unique land tenure rights and historical land use conditions affecting nature reserves in the Southeast Uplands merit close study. Not only do these factors largely determine the scope of sustainable nature conservation in the region, but they also provide a useful model for the study and implementation of community-oriented conservation in a variety of contexts, especially in developing countries, where local people make a living directly from the farms and forests of their home villages. The Research and the Study Area

This book describes historical and current relationships between people, ecosystems, and wildlife in the Southeast Uplands region, a rugged series of ranges running roughly north–south, mostly within Fujian Province. Centuries of anthropogenic environmental change throughout China’s subtropical south have left a legacy of distinctive landscapes and ecological conditions. Although I focus principally on forest resource use, economic development, and changing habitat conditions in the Meihuashan ecosystem of southwest Fujian, I have placed conservation efforts in this and other subregions (especially Longxishan and Wuyishan, which lie farther north) within the context of the environmental history and cultural ecology of the Southeast Uplands as a whole. Using this regional approach to examine nature conservation issues provides a preliminary means for discussing the human dimensions of habitat protection all over China. I have pursued as many sources of information on the subject as possible, delving into historical records; conducting wildlife habitat research; and holding in-depth, often outdoor interviews in the forests and fields with villagers and managers in three nature reserves. In the course of research, it was often necessary to take stock of what had been learned, what was missing from the puzzle, and what steps were necessary to fill in the gaps. For example, results from a survey of wildlife habitats in Meihuashan yielded important information about the negative effects of certain local land use practices. Surveys on village and household land use then focused on distal causes of environmental degradation, originating in the socioeconomic and socioecological conditions at the level of the household and village. These conditions were then related to larger-scale economic factors at the level of the township, county, and region. This research process, well known in the fields of cultural ecology and protected-area studies, applies a flexible perspective

INTRODUCTION

on ecosystem scales and boundaries to account for the multiple exogenous and endogenous factors involved in environmental change. The project has involved several years of archival research in China and the United States, combined with extended field research in southeast China. I conducted fieldwork in three phases. The first was a threeweek reconnaissance trip to Fujian Province in 1992–1993, during which I visited the Daiyunshan and Meihuashan Nature Reserves, in the interior mountain ranges of Fujian Province (fig. 1). The second phase was a year-long period of intensive research in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve in 1994–1995, during which I also conducted rapid comparative surveys in the Longxishan and Wuyishan Reserves, which lie farther north. The third was a follow-up trip to Meihuashan and Wuyishan with a small group of students from Simon’s Rock College for several weeks in the summer of 1999. The Meihuashan Reserve covers 221 square kilometers (85 sq. mi.) at the boundaries of Liancheng and Shanghang counties and the Longyan municipality, in Longyan Prefecture, southwest Fujian. While conducting preliminary research on tiger conservation efforts and protected-area management, I found the Meihuashan area among the most promising for wildlife conservation and for conducting research on the relationship between humans, forests, and wildlife in the region. Preliminary research on tigers, conducted by the World Wildlife Fund in 1991–1992, showed that tigers still inhabited Meihuashan (though the population was undetermined) and that the reserve and surrounding mountains were among the best remaining habitats for tigers in southern China. During initial field trips in the mountains, I observed ground scratches made by tigers and abundant signs of wild ungulates. A high percentage of broadleaf, bamboo, and pine forest coverage, interspersed with extensive montane grasslands and wetlands, provided good habitat for many species in the reserve and surrounding mountains. At the nature reserve headquarters, I saw a clouded leopard that had died in captivity after being confiscated from local hunters. The cultural landscapes of Meihuashan were no less remarkable. During visits to several mountain villages, I learned that the small, single-surname communities had a long history of collective and household-based resource management centered on bamboo cultivation, forestry, periodic burning, wet-rice cultivation, plant gathering, and hunting. In each village, I observed sacred fengshui forests, common property resources that had been protected by local custom for many centuries.

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Figure 1. Nature Reserves of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range. The Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan Nature Reserves lie in the heart of the Southeast Uplands region. These reserves, and the Daiyunshan Nature Reserve (northeast of Longyan), belong to the eighty-one–member Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network.

INTRODUCTION

The combination of good wildlife habitat and active, long-term human use and stewardship of natural resources convinced me that the Meihuashan region was a good field study area, an intriguing place worthy of extended field study in its own right, and a useful benchmark from which to measure processes of environmental change across the rugged terrain of the Southeast Uplands. With a grant from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, I moved to Meihuashan with my wife and young son in the fall of 1994, and began conducting field research. We lived in an apartment in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve headquarters, in the valley town of Gutian, the seat of Gutian township. I made frequent trips into the mountains, hiking from village to village along the extensive network of mountain trails, living in tents, village homes, a reserve management station, and a mountain observation post. In some villages, residents stated that I was the first foreign visitor ever to pass beneath the enormous Cryptomeria (Chinese cedar) trees in the fengshui groves that protect the village entranceways. If others had visited these villages before 1949, memories of them had long since vanished. In several other villages, there were photographs and fresh memories of an American wildlife biologist named Gary Koehler and his wife, Mona. Gary is a field biologist who conducted surveys on the South China tiger in four provinces for the World Wildlife Fund China Program in the early 1990s. Though more foreigners have visited Longxishan, and many more have been to Wuyishan (an International Biosphere Reserve in the U.N. Man and the Biosphere Program), I was surprised to hear that few had visited the villages in recent years. This seemed especially odd in Wuyishan, where elderly villagers spoke of the numerous European and American missionaries, naturalists, and specimen collectors who had frequented the area before 1949. Today, a church still stands in the village of Sangang, and crucifixes adorn the walls of Catholic homes in Guadun and Qiliqiao, where Masses have been held every Sunday—in secret during much of the Communist era —since at least the late eighteenth century. While vestiges of Western influence endure in the mountain villages of Wuyishan, much older, indigenous traditions have been maintained in the communities of Meihuashan and Longxishan. In both contexts, however, there is an overwhelming sense that many local customs will endure, whether indigenous or adapted from the outside, and that foreign culture and Western concepts of nature conservation are of little import in the everyday course of life.

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During most of my time in Fujian, I was permitted to work alone or with assistants whom I selected for specific tasks. In the fall of 1994, after conducting wildlife habitat surveys in Meihuashan with a friend and colleague from the Fujian Provincial Museum in Fuzhou, I was provided with a guide and assistant, an employee of the reserve who was to accompany me wherever I went. This young man was very capable, but since he was a reserve employee and not a local resident (he was from Baisha, two townships to the east), villagers were not always comfortable discussing sensitive matters in his presence. Because my assistant did not speak the local Hakka subdialects, and because many elderly villagers in Meihuashan can speak Mandarin, a language I can converse comfortably in, I decided to conduct all interviews and daily transactions on my own. My assistant was allowed to return to his regular duties, and I was permitted to travel wherever I needed to, inside or outside the reserve. Freedom of mobility allowed me to spend more time in village households, developing friendships with local people and relying on their expertise and local knowledge. I continued to work with reserve staff on certain projects, most notably broadleaf forest surveys, wildlife observation efforts, and interviews on reserve management and planning. My relationship with administrators and staff remained cordial throughout the research period, although the reserve directors were much more interested in learning more about the South China tiger than about land use patterns, environmental history, and other key features of my research. While they understood that I was not a wildlife biologist, they frequently urged me to “find the tiger” and photograph or video a living specimen. This is still one of the main missions of the reserve administrators, since the reserve was established to protect a species whose very survival in the wild becomes more questionable with each passing year. Most of my ethnographic research was conducted within five study villages, but I made an effort to learn as much as possible about land use and environmental history in all twenty-five villages in the reserve and several outside the reserve. To this end, I conducted interviews in thirteen additional villages within the reserve, and seven villages outside the reserve. In some instances, there were residents with expertise in certain subjects with whom I was advised to consult; in others, research was initiated for comparative purposes. During the summer of 1995, I traveled north to the Wuyishan and Longxishan reserves to conduct comparative research consisting of rapid assessments of wildlife habitat conditions and

INTRODUCTION

interviews on reserve management, village land use, and environmental history. The interviews were held with reserve administrators and with individuals and groups of local residents in eight villages (three in Longxishan and five in Wuyishan). My most recent work, in Fujian during the summer of 1999, included follow-up visits to Meihuashan and Wuyishan, where I collected additional information on changes in reserve conservation policies, village land use patterns, and the most recent trends in economic development. In the spring of 2001, I accepted a request from a resident of Gonghe village, in the Meihuashan Reserve, to help establish a community-based conservation plan. Throughout this time, I have maintained correspondence with Provincial Forestry Bureau and reserve administrators, staff, and residents. In a separate project in 2001, I worked with Zhang Yongzu, a zoogeographer in the Institute of Geography in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other Chinese conservation experts, to map the distributions and assess the current conservation status of the twenty-one species of primates in China. This work is preparatory to a primate conservation action plan for 2002–2006. A Final Foreword

Village settlement patterns, land use, hunting, and other forms of natural resource management in the Southeast Uplands have shaped montane landscapes and ecosystems for centuries. These cultural patterns and associated landscape features have also had a profound influence on environmental perception, indigenous conceptions of nature, and the development of a regional discourse on nature conservation. This theme has been explored in other regions of the world, and by the late 1990s, it was clear to many researchers that cross-cultural studies of nature conservation issues are essential not only for maintaining life on earth but also for examining and refining the definition of “nature” and reevaluating its relationship to what is “human.” 25 While much of my effort has been focused on documenting distinctive indigenous land use and hunting practices of the past and present, this investigation encompasses a wider spectrum of interrelated topics, principally political ecology, local knowledge, and the prospects for developing community-based conservation. I argue that villagers in the uplands region have continually adapted not only to local environmental variables but also to regional socioeconomic and ideological changes, political and military campaigns, and a plethora of government direc-

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tives. From an environmental-historical perspective, and one that takes local viewpoints into account, regulations on resource utilization imposed by nature reserve authorities are simply a new set of obstacles around which the stream of daily life must flow. Villagers recognize the power of reserve authority, but they will support reserves as institutions only to the extent that such bodies appear to serve local socioeconomic needs and to support indigenous cultural traditions. This pragmatic approach to state authority is rooted in painful memories of the brutal suppression of local customs from the 1950s through the 1970s and of the disastrous results of central planning, which held villagers in penury during the same period and brought mass starvation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, following the Great Leap Forward. The underlying ideology of such formal, authoritarian resource management schemes has been described by James C. Scott as a “hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.” 26 By exploiting or overriding indigenous, informal, flexible practices of adaptation and adjustment to local conditions, patterns that central governments cannot create or sustain, early CCP policies often failed their intended beneficiaries. After the economic reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which gave rise to a wave of entrepreneurial activity and market triumphalism that shows few signs of ebbing in the near future, the central government’s role in regulating rural resource utilization patterns has become less absolutist, but also less effective at mitigating environmental degradation. Rural expectations for ever-increasing prosperity require that government conservation schemes have at least the appearance of providing material benefits to local people over the long haul. In southern China’s vast subtropical zone, where hundreds of nature reserves contain ancient human settlements within their boundaries, conservation programs will increasingly depend on intensive, longterm land use planning and coordinated resource management. And though most reserves in China are less than twenty years old, many are already developing unique systems of integrated resource management based, in varying degrees, on older indigenous land use practices and land tenure patterns. As conservation biologists and advocates of “community-based conservation” debate the relative merits of large, uninhabited protected areas (known as “mega-reserves”), reserves that integrate subsistence and commercial land use and a greater share of management by local people, and conservation schemes adopting ever more fluid approaches to

INTRODUCTION

human resource tenure and management, there is a growing need for long-term studies of human-environment relations in biologically diverse regions. Greater recognition of both the variety and similarity of cultural variables and land use patterns contributing to habitat degradation and biodiversity may provide the foundations for more successful nature conservation. To this end, my study focuses on a region where land tenure conditions are relatively secure and stable. There are no large-scale migration streams of landless peasants entering the uplands in search of land (this took place long ago), and forest clear-cutting is no longer the main vector of environmental degradation. Unlike many areas in tropical and subtropical Southeast Asia and Latin America, where landless rural immigrants clear millions of hectares of forest each year, much of China’s subtropical highlands are an intricate weave of diverse vegetation types in different phases of succession and under different tenurial and managerial regimes. Groups and individuals have defined and evaluated these habitats, struggling and negotiating for particular territories and resources, altering and laying claim to the landscape for ideological and subsistence purposes, and these processes have led to complex cumulative ecological changes in the regional vegetation mosaic and the microgeographic land cover patterns that it comprises. China’s mountain regions are the final refugia for myriad species of plants and animals. Holistic interpretations of the environmental, cultural, and natural histories of these peripheral realms may give rise to appropriate guidelines for conservation, and I hope this and other studies employing integrative methods of geographic research will promote greater appreciation and respect for the tremendous biological and cultural diversity that remains.

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Part I The Southeast Uplands

People, Landscapes, and Wildlife

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A Mountain Mosaic Biodiversity, Cultural Diversity, and Land Degradation in the Southeast Uplands

Dark wind blows in the forest, crows and magpies mourn: People sense a ferocious tiger’s coming before it appears. Eyes burning bright, it crouches in the middle of the road; Once espied by the general, arrows fly off the bow. Homes plant thorny stakes as high as their door; Hogs and suckling pigs are corralled before sundown. How fierce indeed a tiger, yet all still rejoice If only it keeps to its swaggering far off in the mountains’ depths. — Gao Qi (1339–1374), “Ballad of a Ferocious Tiger”

China has been designated by the IUCN as one of the world’s ten most biologically diverse countries, ranking fifth in species richness for mammals, and the subtropical Southeast Uplands is an area of high value for mammal conservation. High biodiversity in the region is largely a function of the relatively sparse human population in the highlands, a feature that sets the region in sharp contrast with surrounding, densely settled coastal plains and river basins, where native species of wild fauna and flora have been greatly depleted. The Southeast Uplands region also encompasses tremendous ethnolinguistic diversity, with 104 local Han dialects in Fujian Province alone, comprising the greatest cultural variation of Han subgroups of any province. Centuries of forest resource management and tenurial control by villages, clans, and individuals have made the landscapes of southeast China a heterogeneous mix of successional forest and scrub interspersed with bamboo, tea, fruit orchards, and rice paddies. The assemblage of wild and domesticated fauna and flora found in this embroidery, and the landscape structure resulting from human modification of the mountain environment by such culture groups as the She, Hakka, and diverse dialect

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groups (e.g., the Minnan, Minbei, and Mindong), contribute to making the region geographically unique. A deeper understanding of the complex migration history and environmental consequences of upland settlement provides a foundation for a more critical perspective on the prospects for sustainable nature conservation in the region. Mountains, Forests, Plains, and People

Traditionally known as the Southeast Mountain Kingdom (Dongnan Shanguo), the Southeast Uplands consists of five ranges of the WuyiDaiyun Mountains of Fujian Province (see fig. 1).1 The mountain region, 150–200 kilometers (95–125 mi.) wide, runs parallel to the coastline (south-southwest to north-northeast) between 24° and 28° N, a distance of about 450 kilometers (280 mi.). The mountainous zone is extremely rugged; 95 percent of Fujian’s land area is mountainous or hilly land, and only 5 percent consists of alluvial plains. Though the ranges of the uplands region continue southward into northwest Guangdong Province, to the north they taper off just across the Zhejiang border. To the west, they form a distinctive barrier between Fujian and the interior plains of the neighboring province, Jiangxi. In the east, the region is bounded by the hills and the narrow coastal plain, where the mainland meets the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. The westernmost of these ranges is the Wuyishan (Military Safety Mountains). This long, linear range includes the highest mountains in the region; the highest, Huanggangshan, at 2,158 meters (7,078 ft.), lies on the Jiangxi border in northwest Fujian. The Wuyishan Range continues southward along the entire border between Fujian and Jiangxi. Farther east, forming the central axis of Fujian Province, are the Daimaoshan (Hawksbill Turtle Mountains) in the south and Jiufengshan (Vulture Peak Mountains) extending northeast. These ranges contain numerous mountains higher than 1,500 m (4,920 ft.), with the tallest peaks higher than 1,800 m (5,900 ft.). Along the southeastern edge of the upland region are the Bopingling (BeatenFlat Mountains) and Daiyunshan (Wearing Clouds Mountains), of comparable elevation with the two central ranges. East of these, and outside the Southeast Upland region, lie the foothills, which gradually descend to the narrow coastal plain and the bays, headlands, and rocky islands of the rugged ria coastline. These mountains were formed during episodes of volcanism and faulting, and the orientation of the ranges and valleys is the result of three fault systems. One controls the orientation of the ridgelines and valleys

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of the Wuyi-Daiyun mountain system, the other two intersect the mountain system perpendicularly (east-southeast to west-northwest), and the second at a more oblique angle (east to west). The intersecting faults form gaps and river valleys, which have facilitated immigration and settlement. The network of rivers is dense (.1 km/km 2 ), forming a trellis-shaped drainage pattern in alignment with the geological structure of mountain ridges and valley faults. The longest river is the Min (539 km, or 335 mi.), which though only about one-tenth as long as the Yellow River produces an annual discharge 16 percent greater, a result both of higher rainfall and steeper stream gradients within its drainage basin. Other major rivers include the Tingjiang (a tributary of the Hanjiang in Guangdong), the Jiulongjiang, the Pujiang, the Mulanxi, and tributaries of the Minjiang. Most of the 9.9 million (1993) inhabitants of the Southeast Uplands are concentrated along arable alluvial plains within these intermontane valleys and their tributaries. Large riverside settlements in or near present-day Longyan, Sanming, and Nanping had become administrative and trade centers between the second and eighth centuries, and today these cities are the capitals of prefectures bearing the same names. The Southeast Uplands region corresponds roughly to these three prefectures and several counties to the southeast.2 Rice, tea, bamboo, indigo, and timber (especially Chinese fir, Cunninghamia lanceolata), cultivated in the hinterlands, have long been the economic mainstays of the region. If you follow the short, swift rivers eastward to where they flow out upon the alluvial and marine terraces of protected bays and estuaries, you find a narrow coastal plain. Two-thirds of Fujian’s 30.9 million residents inhabit these bounded plains, where arable land, marine resources, and good harbors gave rise to the ancient urban trade centers of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Fuzhou, and Xiamen; today, Xiamen is a rapidly developing “special economic zone,” where the state has permitted free trade and foreign investment for more than twenty years. Economic disparities, sociocultural differences, and environmental contrasts have kept the coastal region and the mountainous interior distinctly different since historical times. The average population density in the Southeast Uplands in 1993 was 131 people per square kilometer (247 acres), while in the coastal region it was 452 people per square kilometer. Income disparities are marked as well; even in the agricultural sector, coastal families in Xiamen average twice the income per capita of farm families in Longyan Prefecture.3

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Compared with other land areas at similar latitudes, southeast China is unusually humid. The vast majority of the earth’s terrestrial surface between 20 and 30 degrees latitude is desert or semiarid steppe, and all the world’s great tropical and subtropical deserts lie at this latitude, but maritime tropical and subtropical air masses from the South China Sea make southeast China one of the largest humid subtropical zones on earth. High annual rainfall and the absence of soil-water deficit in any season allow two—and in some places three —rice crops to be grown on the alluvial soils of the valley lowlands throughout the region. Even on the poor, granitic yellow soils of the mountain slopes, abundant precipitation, warm temperatures, and intensive husbandry have allowed for the production of a wide range of forest and agricultural products over the centuries. Land use patterns depend, too, on location within the region, because the ranges form a barrier to monsoonal air flow from the northwest in winter, and from the southeast in summer. The southeastern slopes of the Daiyun Mountains are exposed to warm maritime air masses and are sheltered from continental polar air masses, and there is a marked north-south temperature gradient in Fujian, with mean annual temperatures varying from 14°C (57°F) in northern Fujian to 21°C (70°F) in the south. The mountains also give rise to a zonal precipitation pattern resulting from the orographic effect, with high western mountain areas receiving up to 1,200 millimeters (46 in.) more than the low coastal plains at the same latitude. The average annual precipitation in Fujian varies from 1,000 millimeters (40 in.) along the coast to 2,200 millimeters (86 in.) in the Wuyi Mountains. The highest mountain in Fujian, Huanggangshan (2,158 m, or 7,080 ft.), in the Wuyishan region, receives an average of 2,871 millimeters (113 in.) of precipitation in the form of rain and snow. Because of the distinct differences between the climates on opposite sides of the Daiyun Mountains, geographers place the area to the north and west in the central subtropical climate zone, and the area to south and east in the southern subtropical climate zone. The latter zone comprises about one-third of the province. This boundary is actually a transitional zone, or ecotone, between the two biophysical regions, and areas lying within this ecotone have ecological characteristics of both. Throughout the Southeast Uplands region, the rainy season lasts from March to June ( January to June in Meihuashan), with 50–60 percent of the annual precipitation, so that there is seldom a problem with the spring drought that affects other regions in China before the arrival of the summer monsoon. Typhoons in late summer and early fall bring

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some rain to the interior mountain regions, but September marks the return of cool, dry air from the Mongolian High and the beginning of a nearly rainless period lasting from October to February, with about 15–20 percent of the annual precipitation. 4 The predominant potential natural vegetation of the Southeast Uplands, though now highly disturbed and surviving only in remnants, is subtropical broadleaf evergreen forest. This can be further subdivided into southern subtropical monsoon rainforest and central subtropical broadleaf evergreen forest. The subtropical broadleaf evergreen forest was probably the most widespread forest type in southern China before extensive deforestation. These forests are composed chiefly of members of the oak-beech family, especially chinkapins (Castanopsis), Cyclobalanopsis, tanoaks (Lithocarpus), and Fagus; members of the laurel family (Lauraceae), such as camphor and other members of its genus; magnolias; camellias (especially Schima and Eurya); Altingia (a member of the witch hazel family—which includes sweetgums—Hamamelidaceae), and members of the Rosaceae. Many of these taxa have similar leaf types, characterized as cup shaped, ovate to lanceolate, leathery, and entire margined or slightly serrate. The forests are characterized by a relatively small number of genera, but each genus has many species and varieties. Coniferous genera are also well represented, especially Chinese cedar (referred to in this text by its taxonomic name, Cryptomeria), Chinese fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata), Fujian cypress, Keteleeria, two species of pines (Masson and Huangshan), golden larch, two species of hemlocks, podocarps, yews, and plum yews. 5 Because of the rugged terrain and long-term human effects on vegetation in the uplands, they exhibit marked zonation of vegetation types along an altitudinal gradient. Near the summits and on the ridges of the highest mountains (above about 1,400 m, or 4,600 ft.), subtropical mountain meadow is the predominant vegetation type. Downslope, there is a transitional zone of mountain bush and scrub or needleleaf forests predominated by pine, which may extend down to as low as 1,200 m (3,900 ft.). At lower elevations lie the subtropical broadleaf evergreen forests, mixed needleleaf-broadleaf forests, and mixed deciduous-evergreen broadleaf forests. Another distinctive vegetation type in the region is associated with montane wetlands, or dambos. These assemblages of grasses and forbs grow in and around bogs and ponds in alpine headwater zones and alluvial terraces.6 The Meihuashan ecosystem, which lies in the central Daimao Mountains, is in a transitional area between

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the central subtropical and southern subtropical climate zones. The southern subtropical zone resembles South China’s narrow east–west belt of tropical monsoonal rainforest, which stretches from southeast Tibet through southern Yunnan. Broadleaf forests in Meihuashan contain lianas and epiphytes, a characteristic of tropical rainforests, but the canopy is less complex, and such dendrologic features as plank buttressing and cauliflory are rare. Cultural and Biological Diversity

China is one of seventeen national states that the IUCN has called “megadiversity countries,” which together account for an estimated 60–70 percent of the world’s terrestrial species. Most of these countries are within the earth’s humid tropical centers of high biodiversity, but biodiversity in China, the third largest country in the world, stems from three primary factors: the multitude of biomes encompassed within the country’s borders; the heterogeneity of geomorphology and habitats within those biomes; and China’s paleo-historical role as an important center of mammalian evolution and dispersal. Preliminary surveys show that there are roughly 2,300 species of terrestrial vertebrates in China, or nearly 10 percent of all species of terrestrial vertebrates on earth. The mammalian flora of China is especially diverse, with five hundred species, and China ranks fifth in the world in diversity of mammals. Large mammals are especially diverse; for example, there are twenty living species of deer, or 41.7 percent of the world’s deer species. China provides habitat for about 10 percent of the world’s primate species, too. The foremost Western authority on mammals in China, George Schaller, writes that China “supports a diversity of wildlife unequaled by any country.” 7 High species richness for terrestrial vertebrates in China is partly the result of the country’s position as a transition zone between the tropical and subtropical fauna of the Indomalayan realm and the temperate fauna of the Palearctic realm. In other words, China has long been a mixing ground for fauna of the biologically rich, low-latitude Southeast Asian humid tropical rainforests and the less-rich, high-latitude temperate forests and grasslands of Eurasia. China is the only country in the world that encompasses an unbroken series of climate zones, with an extraordinary variety of biomes and ecosystems, from the desert basins of Xinjiang to tropical rainforests in southern Yunnan, and from montane tundra in the Himalayas to coral islands in the Nansha archipelago. Added to this regional diversity is the extremely rugged terrain in most of China.

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Mountains and hills more than 500 m (1,640 ft.) high cover 74.8 percent of the country. This topographic variety has resulted in altitudinal zonation of ecosystems, enhancing species richness at microregional scales. It has also been important in preventing biotic extinctions, by muting the destructive capacity of humans within natural ecosystems that is characteristic of China’s lowland plains and basins. The inherent difficulty of placing mountain lands under widespread, permanent cultivation, though not insurmountable, has prolonged the viability of wildlife populations in many regions that otherwise would have perished centuries ago. This is especially true in southern and eastern China, and in Sichuan Province, areas where population pressure has been greatest. Most terrestrial vertebrate species, especially mammals, have been wiped out by human inhabitants in the coastal plains and arable river basins of northern and central China, but mountain refugia continue to provide vital habitat, patchy though it usually is (fig. 2). 8 Within the biogeographic context of China as a whole, the biodiversity of the Southeast China Uplands is remarkable, especially given the high population densities of southern and eastern China. Fujian Province alone, which accounts for only 1.26 percent of the land area of China, has an estimated 110 species of mammals, accounting for 25 percent of the national total; more than 540 species of birds, 45 percent of the national total; 115 species of reptiles, 35 percent of the national total; and more than 5,000 species of insects, 20 percent of the national total. Regional patterns of biodiversity in the Southeast Uplands, as in China as a whole, exhibit an intriguing relationship to a complex of climatic, geomorphic, demographic, and cultural factors, with important implications for nature conservation. Predictably, indices of biodiversity rise with temperature and humidity, for tropical and subtropical broadleaf evergreen forests produce the most biomass and are the most ecologically complex terrestrial biomes on earth. In China, however, human population density is an important intervening variable, and mammalian species density values are highest not only in the tropical and subtropical humid climates of the south but also in mountain regions of relatively low population density in nearly every physical region of the country. The warm temperate humid to subhumid climates of northern China and the subtropical humid climates of central China (including parts of the Changjiang basin) no longer hold the vast deciduous, mixed, and evergreen broadleaf forests of historic and prehistoric times. The loss of forests and wildlife resulting from centuries of intensive land use in these regions, in conjunction with industrialization and serious pollution

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Figure 2. Natural features (top) and administrative regions (bottom) of China.

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problems, have reduced mammalian diversity to levels lower than those of the colder but less densely populated and less environmentally degraded mountain regions of the northeast and the northwest. In China as a whole, mammal species density values are highest outside the eastern coastal and river plains (China proper); that is, in non-Han areas (Tibet, Tianshan, Altaishan), border zones (western Sichuan, Yunnan, and southeast Tibet, the Daxinganling, and Changbaishan), and interior mountain frontier regions (e.g., the Southeast Uplands and the Qinling Mountains). 9 These regions also encompass the greatest cultural diversity in China. One form of cultural diversity can be gauged by the number of Han ethnolinguistic subgroups in an area, by far the greatest in montane regions of high biodiversity in the south and southeast (104 local dialects in Fujian Province alone). Non-Han peoples, China’s fifty-five non-Han nationalities, also represent great cultural diversity, comprising only 8 percent of the population but occupying approximately 60 percent of the land area. The tropical rainforest region of southern and western Yunnan exhibits the highest land mammal species density (one hundred) and the greatest cultural diversity in China. Geographers have commented on the correlation, or overlap, between high cultural diversity and high biological diversity in regions throughout the world.10 It may be argued that this pattern is merely a result of the territorial marginalization of minority peoples within remote mountainous or lowland rainforest regions, areas where obstacles to transportation and settlement have precluded cultural homogenization by dominant national groups until modern times. In many instances, however, indigenous conservation systems are also an important factor. In southern Yunnan and the Southeast Uplands (and probably many areas in between), evidence exists for traditional land use and resource stewardship that have allowed for the perpetuation of biodiversity through the conservation of forest and crop resources. The diversity of mammals in these areas is, in part, a legacy of this tradition of stewardship. Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Hakka Identity in the Southeast Uplands

In southeast China as a whole, language is the most important single variable in the establishment and differentiation of local and regional ethnic identity. The Southeast Uplands is no exception, and no place in China has such a diversity of Han subgroups. In the mid-nineteenth century,

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Westerners with a knowledge of Chinese began to recognize the intricacy of this cultural weave. After a trip from Fuzhou to Shaowu County, in northwest Fujian, in 1878, J. E. Walker wrote, “What a babel of brogues and dialects there is among those wild mountains! A native can hardly pass the limits of his own village but his speech will betray him” (Moser 1985, 165) Of this ethnolinguistic richness, Sowerby (1929) declared, “A traveler up the Min [River] will soon realize there are many types of people in this area, types as distinct as, let us say, the different races in Europe.” Later observers and researchers realized that ethnolinguistic diversity in Fujian (and Guangdong) was evident at microscales and macroscales, and that within each of Fujian’s roughly seven major dialects were numerous subdialects (fig. 3). The Fuzhou dialect, for example, though grouped with the Minbei (north of the Min River) dialects, was not understood more than 40 miles from the capital. Until the past fifty years, it was common to find people in adjacent valleys who spoke mutually unintelligible languages; in some instances, this was true of neighboring villages. Today, although putonghua (the common language, Mandarin), also known as guanhua (the official language), is the lingua franca of China and a unifying element in Han Chinese culture, dialects remain the most important markers of subethnic identity throughout China proper. In constructing regional, subethnic identities within a broader national context, peoples of the Southeast Uplands have long used Mandarin to strengthen their political, economic, and cultural ties to the political and economic core areas, while maintaining their local or regional dialects in daily life and, when faced with threats from other culture groups, as an assertion of being ethnically distinct. Moser (1985, 165) posits that the formation of Fujian’s ethnographic complexity stems largely from “the fact that there was no single, easy route of access for Han culture and people to enter the province.” Sinitic culture and language entered the region slowly, from different source areas and from different directions; it followed overland routes traversing mountain passes to the north and west, and it came by maritime trade routes to the coastal trade centers and up the large rivers that drained their hinterlands. Instead of mixing within a cultural and linguistic melting pot, many local cultural traditions and dialects persisted through the centuries. Indeed, certain areas exhibit notable examples of local adaptation to intra-ethnic strife that bespeak an acceptance of such

Figure 3. Dialect regions of the Southeast Uplands and coastal Fujian, by county. Meihuashan Nature Reserve is in the western Min Hakka region, Longxishan in the Hakka-related region, and Wuyishan in the northern Min region.

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conflict.11 The apparent stability of ethnolinguistic diversity is not therefore merely the result of physical isolation among constituent culture groups but also a product of the formation and alignment of social groups that encouraged the maintenance of lineage and ethnic differentiation.12 One of the strongest cultural characteristics of the rural peoples of the Southeast Uplands today is the persistence of lineage groups, which often define village social structure and relations between villages. In many mountain villages throughout the region, especially in areas occupied by Hakkas, single surname patrilineage villages are still common, and traditional delineations of kinship and ethnic identity are reinforced through ancestral records and oral histories, frequent rites and rituals, and patterns of daily social and economic interaction. Cultural identity is also inseparable from the strong sense of place developed within village landscapes through time; houses, temples, fields, sacred forests, and hinterlands bear the distinctive, collective imprimatur of people who have long claimed the land by shaping it to meet their social, economic, and cultural needs. The earliest Han settlers of Fujian did not enter an empty land and simply transfer their modes of living into a new environment. From the Pacific littoral through the interior of southeastern China, there were aboriginal people known by such names as Yue, Man, Wulingman, and Nanman who, by early in the first millennium a.d., had occupied the region for centuries, if not millennia. In prehistoric times, the Yue are believed to have inhabited the coastal zone, from Zhejiang (and possibly farther north) through Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, and into Vietnam. An Austro-Asiatic people, they are believed to have been linguistically related to the modern Vietnamese. In interior southern China, there were other non-Han tribal groups of hunter-gatherers and swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists (including the Man, or “Barbarians,” Wulingman, and Nanman), who were probably the ancestors of today’s minority nationalities known as Miao (or Hmong in Southeast Asia), Yao, and She (pronounced shuh). These nationalities share a complex of cultural traits; after migrating to different regions of southern China, probably escaping persecution by the Han, they developed distinct cultural identities.13 The ancestors of the She had migrated to the mountains at the borders of Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong by the Sui dynasty (581–618) or shortly thereafter. In the Southeast Uplands, they came into contact with Han settlers, including ancestors of the people who would later become known as Hakka, who arrived in substantial numbers by

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the late Song (thirteenth century). The Han referred to the indigenous people as She, meaning “swidden cultivation,” or She Man (“the Man who practice swidden”). The She and the Hakka have had a complex relationship of mutualistic cultural exchange, periodic open conflict, and a degree of intermingling that has given rise to long-standing debates concerning the origins of the Hakka as a distinctive ethnolinguistic group. Even with a history of “spasmodic inter-ethnic confrontation,” including a series of She revolts from the 1480s to the 1650s, relations between the She and the Hakka have long been close; She and Hakka communities were geographically interspersed; there may have been mixed communities, and intermarriage was probably not uncommon (this remains a subject of debate). Gradually, the She language became, by general consensus, a dialect of Hakka. Nearly all the 330,000 She who inhabit Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang (mostly along the coastline) speak Hakka dialects, even though many now live far from the linguistic source areas of these dialects. In the western Min region (Longyan Prefecture) are two She townships (Guanzhuang and Lufeng), both in Shanghang County. Other Fujian She communities in Fujian are found along the hilly northeast coastal counties of Fu’an, Xiapu, Fuding, and Ningde. In general terms, the She and their settlements are said to be indistinguishable from the Han, for the minority nationality has been thoroughly assimilated into Han culture. Ethnic discrimination against the She by the Han has lasted since the Yuan dynasty (1264–1368), and with most She preferring not to display their ethnic identity. This changed in the 1980s, with the announcement that national minorities would receive preferential treatment in family-planning policy, and each family would be allowed to have more than one child. One of the only distinguishing characteristics of the She today is that all, or nearly all, possess one of three surnames: Lan, Lei, or Zhong. Another common trait is that many She still follow the dietary proscription against eating dogmeat (in marked contrast to most Hakka, for whom it is a delicacy). Superficial appearances notwithstanding, She culture and ethnic identity are without doubt more substantial and more nuanced than they may seem. Though the Hakka arrived in Fujian somewhat later than the She, they entered the province by a similar route. Scholars of the Hakka diaspora from the North China Plain divide the southward migration into a series of three to five stages, or waves. Though the estimated dates of each stage often vary considerably, since they are based on family gene-

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alogies and other historical records, there is general agreement on the arrival of large numbers of Hakka in southeast Jiangxi and southwest Fujian sometime between the late ninth and late thirteenth centuries. The Hakka of the Southeast Uplands are distinctive because most belong to the so-called third-migration wave (having never made the fourthstage journey into Guangdong). In fact, it was the thousands of immigrant families that migrated farther south in the sixteenth century who were first labeled “guest people,” or Hakka, by the Cantonese-speaking natives (the so-called Punti, or native Yue-speaking Han) in southern Guangdong. Leong (1997, 43) argues that a macroregional economic depression in southern China from 1300 to 1500 prevented major Hakka out-migration from the mountain regions of southwest Fujian and northern and eastern Guangdong, and that a more significant expansion, which brought Hakkas into the low foothills surrounding major commercial centers in Lingnan and the southeast coast, did not occur until regional economic upturns began in the sixteenth century. While the origins and migrations of the Hakkas are a subject of ongoing scholarly debate, the assumption of ancient connections to the North China culture hearth is a fundamental part of Hakka cultural pride and an essential component of what could be called the “Hakka mystique.” Reviewing the historiography of the Hakkas, Leong (1997, 28–36) states that the “first and last scholarly investigation of the Hakkas” was Luo Xianglin’s study, entitled Kejia Yanjiu Daolun (Introduction to the study of the Hakkas) (published in 1933). According to Leong (1997, 28), the work became a “Bible for the Hakkas,” containing a comprehensive and definitive statement of their most cherished beliefs about their own cultural identity. Among these was a treatise on the Hakkas’ northern origins and a series of five successive southward migrations. Leong states that Luo’s work is “part scholarship and part ethnic rhetoric” and that it is based on a small sample from Hakka genealogies, which “pose serious problems of elite bias and reliability.” He adds that although numerous variations on the theme of the southward diaspora have been developed from Luo’s work, they provide few new insights on early Hakka origins and migrations. Moser (1985, 242) points out that the Hakka who never left the Southeast Uplands share most of the cultural traits of the Guangdong Hakkas, [but] “having remained in the land where their ancestors were long established, and not having suffered from treatment as outsiders, they understandably lack the sense of group identity that characterizes

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the [latter group].” Still, several traits commonly associated with Hakka culture and character derive from the difficulties of the diaspora. Most Hakka immigrants found that the best land had already been settled, and thus were forced to settle in the highlands and in mountain valleys. The long-term historical struggle to eke out a living on often marginal lands has given the Hakka a reputation for being hardworking, persevering exemplars of pioneer virtues. Moser (1985, 240) notes the following: The Hakka remained adept at the agricultural skills needed to glean a living from land that was considered insufficiently productive by other Sinitic peoples. Generally this meant hillside land and the Hakka were alert to new crops such as sweet potatoes and peanuts that could be grown on land previously unworked.

Leong has contributed new perspectives on the historical cultural ecology of the Hakka by asserting that as lowland Han immigrants to the Southeast Uplands, they had to learn to adapt to the unfamiliar constraints and opportunities of a tropical, upland environment—“an environment atypical for Han Chinese.” This, he says, was accomplished through long contact with the She, during the “Hakka incubation period” in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, when economic decline in surrounding lowland cores impeded out-migration, and the Han settlers, who would later become Hakkas, learned the special skills that allowed them to adapt to, and later to thrive in, what Leong calls a “peripheral ecology.” In agriculture, this would include a period of “borrowing from the preexisting practice of slash-and-burn agriculture of the She people before mastering irrigation using mountain streams and terracing,” and learning to manage a wide variety of crops suited to the marginal soil, climatic, and hydrological conditions of a rugged upland environment. Leong also suggests that the Hakkas may have developed their specialized skills in mining and stone cutting during this time, and that even the Hakkas’ gender division of labor—distinctive among the Han in that both sexes undertake an equal share of field labor —may have been adopted from the She (Leong 1997). A hardscrabble life did not detract from the value that Hakkas placed on education and a love of the great traditions of Chinese culture and learning. Even in remote mountain villages, where only footpaths linked villagers to the outside world, I have observed sacred “scholar peaks” (wenfeng), the summits of which were once made sharper with rocks and dirt to ensure that the village produced scholars. Concern with scholar-

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ship stemmed from a belief that the Hakka were true Chinese, superior to the Yue and Min southerners around them. Moser calls this “the northern mystique,” an important part of the Hakka self-image, which has served to downgrade ties with other local cultures and to connect the individual with the high culture of the nation. As the wenfeng example illustrates, however, veneration of national culture has not made the Hakkas any less attuned to the village environment and the substantial canon of local tradition. On the contrary, the “little traditions” have proved essential for maintaining the superstructure of clan organization and village cosmology. These might include the preservation of family genealogies, the worship of village ancestors and local gods, and the maintenance of good fengshui, all of which continue to be important in shaping the landscape ecology of Hakka villages in the Southeast Uplands today. Another facet of Hakka culture unique among Han subgroups relates to the status of women and the definition of gender roles. Hakka women have been characterized as more self-reliant and even more “liberated” than women of other Sinitic subgroups. These statements are debatable, but certain historical examples do distinguish Hakka women from their other Han counterparts. Hakka women were not subjected to the cruel tradition of foot binding. But the apparent freedom to retain natural feet (or “big feet,” in traditional Chinese parlance) probably resulted largely from the fact that no laborers could be sacrificed. Women have often had to do the work typically reserved for men. Indeed, in the household division of labor in Meihuashan today, many women work in the vegetable garden, the rice paddy, the collective forest, the bamboo forest, and the home. In the bamboo and collective forests, women cut and haul heavy poles and logs for hours up and down steep slopes. On reaching home, their work does not end but shifts to cooking and cleaning. Child care may be a daylong occupation, depending on the age of offspring, and women commonly are seen engaging in all kinds of manual labor with children strapped to their backs. 14 The Hakka emphasis on hard work, social insularity, genealogy, ancestor worship, and the importance of fengshui has led to the formation of distinctive village landscapes. In the long struggle to establish a sense of place, Hakkas in the Southeast Uplands have developed patterns of landscape signification and environmental perception with important implications for nature conservation. Villages within the three nature reserves in this study, for example, exhibit strikingly different land use

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and village structural patterns. While some of these may be viewed as largely a function of subsistence opportunities and adaptation to particular environmental conditions, many are more closely linked to cultural identity and environmental perception. The Meihuashan Nature Reserve lies at the edge of the Southwest Fujian Hakka region, where the Hakka-speaking counties of Shanghang and Liancheng meet the Longyan municipality, home to people who speak a southern Min dialect. The Longxishan Nature Reserve is in Jiangle, a county lying in the second ethnolinguistic area (Hakka-related people of Jiangle). The Wuyishan Nature Reserve lies outside the Hakka culture area (though it overlaps with Shaowu County), in the zone of northern Min speakers. Besides linguistic similarities, the Hakka villages of Meihuashan and Longxishan share certain cultural traits that are manifested in local landscape ecology. These traits are largely absent from the northern Min villages of Wuyishan. The first is long-established local patrilineages. Villages in Meihuashan are single-surname, patrilineal communities with a settlement history of between twenty and thirty generations of in situ habitation. The villages surveyed in Longxishan contain six to nine family surnames, each with lineages of three to eight generations. In Wuyishan, lineage histories were less clearly defined, but most villages have comparable numbers of surnames and generations with those of Longxishan.15 There are striking differences between the cultural landscapes of Hakka villages in the first two reserves, and those of the northern Min villages of Wuyishan. First, there are no rice paddies in the five Wuyishan villages, since all valley land has been allocated to tea cultivation, and slopes are devoted to tea and bamboo groves. Second, many houses in Wuyishan are composed of Chinese fir timbers with bamboo shingle roofs, materials not used in the other regions for decades. Third, and most significant, the Wuyishan villages lack ancestral temples, active earth-god shrines, and substantial sacred forests. Within these three reserves, which are the most important in the Southeast Uplands, the largest and most biologically diverse sacred fengshui forests are found in the villages of Meihuashan, where long-term landscape management by single lineages has ensured the preservation of some of the only patches of primeval broadleaf evergreen forest in the region. In Longxishan, despite the relatively recent arrival and higher degree of transience of family lineages, there are ancestral temples, local earth-god shrines, and fengshui forests of substantial age and areal dimension (though few can compare with those of Meihuashan). In Wuyishan,

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with a high degree of transience and less lineage stability, there are no ancestral temples in five villages surveyed, earth-god shrines have been abandoned, and fengshui forests survive only in vestigial remnants, if at all.16 As a reserve manager in Wuyishan explained, “There are no ancestral temples [citang] here because there are no Hakkas; the Hakkas preserve records and traditions.” While ethnicity may account for some of the cultural distinctiveness of Wuyishan landscapes, Christian missionary influence has led to the abandonment of many traditional cultural features among the villages. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Catholic and Protestant missionary efforts in the region were very active, and the old stone church in Sangang, built by American Dominicans, still holds a prominent place in the village landscape. Several villages in Wuyishan retained their Christian identity after 1949, holding secret Masses and prayer meetings even during the Cultural Revolution, and residents still consider themselves Christian. In some homes, crucifixes and other Catholic icons can be seen within ancestral shrines, having replaced Daoist and Buddhist deities. As one resident in the village of Guadun explained, “We have no village ancestral temple, no earth-god shrines, and no fengshui forests because we are Catholics.” Indeed, in 1995, a shady bamboo grove opposite the few scattered houses contained not the usual isolated stone or cement tumuli that each take advantage of a favorable location in the landscape but rather a cluster of wooden crosses forming a rustic cemetery. There is a correlation between Hakka ancestor worship, the building of ancestral and earth-god shrines, and the cultivation and maintenance of fengshui forests, but the connection between fengshui forest management and subethnic identity is less clear. Fengshui forests can be found in many areas throughout the Southeast Uplands, and their distribution in relation to particular subethnic culture areas is a question that remains unexplored. What is less obscure is that long-term settlement and lineage traditions among the Hakka correspond with intensive village landscape management based on fengshui. Fengshui forests are a persistent feature in upland Hakka villages. This is true not only in western Fujian but also among Hakka villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong. These settlements lie in rugged mountains, where fengshui forests are functional components of the soil and water conservation systems critical for sustainable wet-rice agriculture.17

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Historical Patterns of Land Degradation in the Southeast Uplands

In the early Holocene, an estimated 70 percent of the land in China was covered with forests, in contrast to 8 percent today.18 The accuracy of this estimate is debatable, but deforestation undeniably has occurred on a massive scale. When, where, and how fast it has occurred are important research topics for detailed regional analysis. Today, significant stands of old-growth forest are found only in the Da Xingan, Xiao Xingan, and Changbai Mountain ranges of the northeast, in remote areas of Guangdong, Fujian, Yunnan, and Sichuan, and in river valleys of southern Tibet. The most severely deforested regions are found in North China, especially the North China Plain and the eastern part of the Loess Plateau, areas once covered by deciduous forests. Seven thousand years of agriculture have left large parts of this area nearly devoid of natural vegetation. Another region almost completely deforested is the Sichuan basin. Once covered by subtropical evergreen broadleaf forest, this rich agricultural land has been under cultivation for at least two thousand years.19 The Southeast Uplands region is noted for its relatively high percentage of forest coverage. Fujian is purported to be the province with the highest percentage of forest coverage in China, estimated at 50,034 square kilometers (19,318 sq. mi.), or 41.18 percent. This figure may be attributed largely to the constraints of rugged terrain on traditional land use patterns. Mountains and hills make up 87.5 percent of the land area of the province, and in traditional times, approximately 85 percent of the rural labor force was concentrated on only 10 percent of the land, specifically the arable land in narrow valleys, basins, and plains where wet rice was cultivated.20 Twentieth-century Western observers have described Fujian’s landscapes as degraded, luxuriant, or, more accurately, as varying according to terrain and proximity to dense human populations. John Caldwell, son of the well-known missionary–tiger hunter Harry Caldwell, described this relationship in the first half of the twentieth century: “Americans think of China as a crowded land, with people packed like sardines. The human population is large, but it is concentrated in villages and cities. In Fukien, wilderness is always close at hand” (1953, 35). The persistence of primeval and secondary forest cover in the most mountainous parts of the province, even into the twentieth century, prompted renowned naturalist Arthur Sowerby to comment, “In spite

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of its comparatively dense population, Fukien is wild, inexpressibly wild, and over the greater part of the province the people live very close to the jungle” (Sowerby 1925 in Moser 1985, 163). Sowerby’s depiction of vegetation conditions is highly misleading, however, and there is evidence that widespread deforestation has been common throughout Fujian, even in parts of the more mountainous areas, for more than a thousand years. The severely deforested coastal hills of Xiamen’s hinterlands prompted tiger hunter William Lord Smith to make the broad generalization that “in southeastern China the forests passed ages ago, and there remains today a bare, low-lying country studded with bowlder-covered [sic] hills. Often these scattered rocks reach enormous size — twenty feet or more in height—and in the caves formed among these huge and tumbled blocks, the tigers live” (Smith 1928, 430). The degradation of mountain land in southern China is aptly described by Walter Parham: For a thousand years, soil erosion, landslides, unreliable water supplies, waterlogged soils, and sandstorms have led to the loss of wildlife habitat and extinction of certain animal and plant species. Loss of vegetation sets in motion a variety of interrelated changes that drive the degradation process: increased soil temperatures, reduction of soil organic matter, soil compaction, and erosion. (1995, 16)

These problems are compounded by the prevalence of granite bedrock and associated nutrient-poor soils throughout much of the Southeast Uplands. In the most severely degraded areas, a grassland-scrub vegetation complex characteristic of more arid regions becomes dominant and persistent. Caldwell (1953) provides a more geographically specific description of vegetation conditions in the province in the early 1900s: “Among the barren seacoast hills there are valleys and pockets of tall sword grass. As one advances inland the cover thickens until there are vast tracks of virgin hardwood-and-bamboo forests.” The uneven distribution of forests in Fujian is still evident, and 60 percent of the total forest area lies in the three prefectures of the mountainous interior, Longyan, Sanming, and Nanping. These are the prefectures that comprise the Southeast Uplands region. High forest cover in the interior mountains and some areas in the coastal hills results partly from a history of locally managed sustainable forestry. Indigenous for-

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estry systems based on Chinese fir (known in the region as “shanmu”) and pine (especially Pinus massoniana) account for substantial forest coverage in the Southeast Uplands, comprising approximately 22,876 square kilometers (8,832 sq. mi.), or 18.65 percent of Fujian’s land area and roughly 45.7 percent of the total forest area in 1988. 21 What simple statistics on forest coverage do not reveal, however, is the severity of forest degradation and loss of floristic biodiversity in the decades since 1949. Official records show rapid rates of deforestation in past decades. Forest destruction accelerated during a series of disastrous government movements and policies beginning with the “backyard iron-smelting movement” (daliangangtie) of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1959), which resulted in the famine of 1959–1961. During the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when Mao initiated the “grain first” policy, forest clearance for agriculture reached an all-time high. From the later years of the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of the reform period, deforestation in Fujian reached disastrous levels, and total forest coverage declined from 49.3 percent in 1973 to 39.5 percent in 1978. In the 1980s, market values for Chinese fir increased exponentially, and remote primeval forests in the Southeast Uplands, which previously had been too inaccessible to harvest, were devastated. In many areas of the Southeast Uplands, governmentdirected reforestation campaigns, beginning in the 1950s, helped stabilize deforestation rates through the aerial broadcast of pine seeds in tandem with the abolishment of an ancient tradition of clearing mountain lands with fire. Despite these measures, the quality of forest stands throughout the province has steadily degenerated since 1949. Broadleaf forest coverage, which amounted to 10,930 square kilometers (4,220 sq. mi.) (21.8 percent of the total forest area) in 1988, has continuously decreased, and reforestation schemes throughout the province have been limited to coniferous forest monocultures of pine and Chinese fir. The extensive fire-controlled montane scrub and grassland ecosystem, which covered vast areas of the upland region before 1949, has been succeeded in many areas by Masson and Huangshan pine forests, mixed needleleaf-broadleaf forests, and, to a much lesser extent, by stands of broadleaf evergreen forest. Conifer monoculture is widespread throughout eastern China, which has raised concerns about the ecological consequences, including podzolization of soils, loss of water storage capacity, and loss of plant and animal biodiversity. 22 Villages in the higher elevations of the Southeast Uplands have a dis-

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tinctive history of forest management that differs significantly from lower-elevation Chinese fir agroforestry systems. Lower populations and centuries of integrated agriculture and forestry in the high-altitude zones have given rise to a more intricate mélange of land use and vegetation patterns. The people of Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan have long relied on bamboo (and in Wuyishan, tea) for their economic survival, developing forest management strategies that maintained more diverse forest cover than what predominates at low elevations in the Southeast Uplands and other parts of southern China. A long-term historical view of highland-lowland differences in land and wildlife management makes it clear why state-sponsored nature conservation in southeastern China has taken hold first in the rugged mountainous interior, the realm of highest habitat heterogeneity.

3

Lord of the Hundred Beasts A History of Tigers and People in Southeast China

Chinese literature from the earliest times is full of tiger stories— man-eating tigers, weretigers, symbolic tigers, anti-tiger spells, tiger hunts—tigers in China are like mice in a cheese factory. — Edward Schafer, The Vermilion Bird

Han Chinese settlement of the mountains, hills, and basins south of the Changjiang occurred in a series of wavelike migrations, first from North China and then from the southeast coast. Escaping drought, famine, poverty, political persecution, or invasions by nomadic tribal peoples, individuals and groups left the North China culture hearth, seeking refuge along the coastal plains and interior valleys of the southern subtropics. The plethora of strange vertebrate species and indigenous peoples encountered by early civilian and military settlers as they opened the wild frontier contributed to the Chinese literary record on wild animals and “wild barbarians.” Literary research on wild animals and non-Han peoples in classical literature shows that there was a fine line between the observed and the imaginary, between wildlife, wild people, and wild chimeras. 1 Gradually, the South became the richest grain-producing region in the empire, and urban centers of political and economic power developed on the coast and along the large rivers of the interior. Some of the more remote interior highlands, however, remained unsettled until the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The pacification of wild nature and the removal of threats associated with fierce and deadly animals, such as tigers, were not complete until the 1950s. Even in the 1990s, villagers in the relatively wild mountain areas like Meihuashan viewed such species

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as wild boar, monkeys, and rats as a serious menace to their crops and to fruit, bamboo shoots, and other forest products. Through long contact with wild animals, upland peoples have developed a unique set of cultural values and techniques for wildlife management. These values, beliefs, and practices have developed from both Han and non-Han aboriginal traditions. The human influence on wildlife throughout China has been severe, and the influence of animals on Chinese culture has been vast. This chapter examines four aspects of this ongoing relationship: (1) conflicts that have arisen between humans and wildlife in southeastern China and their relationships to patterns of human migration, settlement, and resource exploitation; (2) methods of management and mitigation of attacks by tigers, Asiatic black bears, leopards, Asiatic dholes (red dogs), and wolves, and how these changed as a result of Western influences in the early twentieth century; (3) depiction of tigers in Chinese myth and folklore, and how this relates to perceptions of wildlife and management strategies past and present; and (4) historical and current significance of wild animals of the Southeast Uplands in Chinese medicine and in nature conservation. Nature conservation efforts include a scheme to save the South China tiger by a reintroduction program based at the Meihuashan Nature Reserve. In Western classical thinking, animals were part of a designed universe, of which humans were a natural, though superior, part. The teleological view of nature first espoused by Aristotle later was taken up within Christian theology, which modified it to assert that animals were placed on the earth to serve humanity. In this latter view, the taming of wildlands and animals, along with the conversion of pagans, were acts of godliness, services that returned Christians to a state of dominion over nature, to a paradise lost in the Fall. 2 This world view was resurrected by missionaries in the mountain landscapes of Fujian. Before this, wild animals were integral to Chinese systems of correlative thinking, and people of southern China have, from the period of earliest Han frontier settlement, used these belief systems, along with more physical and practical approaches, to deal with their fiercest and most colorful nonhuman neighbor, the South China tiger. With this historical background in place, we may begin to view post-1949 developments in environmental perception and nature conservation in a new light. Current efforts to establish nature reserves and protect key species will then be placed within the distinctive cultural context of the Southeast Uplands region.

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Human-Tiger Encounters in Southeastern China

Before the 1950s, the South China tiger ( huananhu) (Panthera tigris amoyensis) inhabited a vast area south of the Changjiang, with outlying populations farther north. The geographic center of its distribution lay in the provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan, and the greatest population concentrations were probably in the mountain regions, where wild ungulate prey was most abundant. Distribution boundaries proposed by Chinese biologists suggest that P. t. amoyensis was limited to subtropical humid central and South China, which extends from the Qinling-Huai River ecotone in the north to the humid tropical fringe of southernmost Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Yunnan. 3 In historical times, this range met or overlapped with those of the Siberian tiger (P. t. altaica) in northeastern China, the Indochinese tiger (P. t. corbetti) in the Southwest, and the Indian tiger (P. t. tigris) in southeast Tibet, but recent research shows that genetic differences between tiger populations are insufficient for classification by subspecies, and morphological differences between the socalled subspecies are now believed to be clinal; that is, phenotypic traits attributed to the South China tiger, such as pelage patterns marked by hollow stripes (in which the reddish yellow background is framed within stripes on the flanks), relatively small body size (second smallest after the Sumatran tiger), and distinctive cranial features may have varied gradually across the tiger’s range in southern China, with gradation into features like those of other tigers once classified as other subspecies. Before human disruption of the ecosystems adjoining their ranges, there were no major physical barriers between these regions (with the possible exception of the Hengduan Mountains between southeast Tibet and China proper), and some degree of genetic exchange occurred over a large part of East, Southeast, and South Asia. 4 Historical interactions between humans and tigers in southern China developed from prehistoric, pre-Han cultural foundations. Long before the first written records of tigers were penned by Han scholars in the early dynasties, tribal peoples living in the hills, mountains, and river valleys south of the Changjiang developed myths and tools to maintain peace, both spiritual and physical, with the great and formidable cats. Linguistic evidence and studies of folklore show that the so-called Man aborigines (ancestors of the Miao-Yao-She peoples), felt a deep cosmological affinity with tigers. According to the Houhan Shu (Book of the later Han dynasty), the Man of eastern Sichuan believed their primary

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ancestor turned into a white tiger after his death, and human sacrifices subsequently were offered to this tiger-ancestor. Archaeological finds from the Ba region show a preponderance of tiger motifs, believed to be associated with a tiger cult. Present-day Miao and Yao folklore contains stories of the transmigration of human souls into the bodies of bloodsucking were-tigers, and of the transformation of living people into tigers, a theme common in later Han folklore. Philologists also believe that the Mandarin word for “tiger” (hu, see glossary) may have derived from Austro-Asiatic and/or Miao-Yao-She roots.5 The most important technological innovation for managing tigers was another aboriginal invention, which appears to have diffused from the Miao and Yao (who are related to the She of Fujian) during the Warring States period (403–221 b.c.), when they began to be assimilated into the Chinese empire in the kingdom of Chu. The word “crossbow” in Mandarin (nu, see glossary) is the same or similar in Austro-Asiatic and Tai-Kadai languages, and probably diffused northward, along with the crossbow itself, into the Han Chinese sphere. The invention of the crossbow as a military weapon is attributed to the people of the kingdom of Chu, and it was first used by non-Han peoples there as a bow trap to kill game.6 In a remarkable example of cultural persistence, She and Han tiger hunters in the Southeast Uplands relied on crossbow traps as recently as the 1980s, when more modern technologies had long since become ineffective as a result of the rarity and reclusiveness of surviving tigers. As Han settlers gradually filled the southern frontier, aboriginal peoples in many areas were assimilated into Han culture, and settlements sprang up across mountain regions that previously had been wild and remote from lowland towns and cities. With this increased settlement came greater exploitation of mountain resources and a plethora of environmental disturbances that put humans in greater conflict with tigers. This can be documented through such historical records as local gazetteers (difangzhi), especially county gazetteers (xianzhi), to analyze changes in the distribution of the South China tiger and the nature of humantiger encounters through time. The compilation of gazetteer records first became systematized on a national level at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, in 1368, when local governments were required by imperial law to maintain records of important historical events, as well as economic, political, and demographic data. Since then, records of wildlife in the Southeast China Uplands have been fairly numerous. Though gazetteer records have been used for the study of Chinese environmental history

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and historical geography, this is one of the first attempts to analyze patterns of human-wildlife encounters in relation to anthropogenic environmental disturbance. 7 Gazetteer records of tiger problems in four southeastern provinces (Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Guangdong) provide what may be the longest written chronological account of humanwildlife interactions of any region of comparable size in the world. For this study, 511 records were gleaned from gazetteers in the Ancient Books Collection at Fujian Normal University. Many more gazetteer records on tigers probably exist in other collections in China and abroad. I focus on the tiger in part because it appears more frequently than any other species of wild animal in gazetteer records on the Southeast China Uplands. There are also records on Asiatic black bears (Selenarctos thibetanus), wolves (Canis lupus), red dogs (Cuon alpinus), macaques ( Macaca mulatta and Macaca thibetana), wild boar (Sus scrofa), and rats (among eight species of Rattus), as well as one mention of wild elephants (Elephas maximus). These species are mentioned only sporadically, and with the exception of perennial crop damage caused by wild boar and rats, they do not appear to have constituted a serious hazard to human welfare. Most of the wildlife records in the gazetteers tell of the appearance of tigers in human settlements, or of casualties to humans and wildlife caused by tigers. Casualties caused by bears, wolves, and red dogs, and crop damage caused by rats, boar, and monkeys, are mentioned as well, but with much less frequency. Though tiger attacks were sporadic, they often involved many human and livestock deaths and injuries. Along with sightings and other encounters, they were recorded in sections of the gazetteers called “shouzai,” or bestial disasters, which rarely lasted more than a few months to a year. This may indicate that a few problem tigers could cause a lot of damage, and as is well documented, certain individuals could become prone to preying on humans and livestock. 8 During the roughly 1,900-year period under examination, the data show that more than ten thousand people were killed or injured by tigers in the four provinces in question. This figure would be much higher, but 395 records did not specify the numbers of casualties. 9 Encounters occurred in 146 of 362 present-day counties and administrative cities (40 percent) from across the four-province region, and span the years 48 c.e. to 1953 (figs. 4 and 5). The records indicate that incidents involving tigers were taken very seriously by the government, and even the sighting of a tiger in or near a county seat was sufficient to warrant recording. Tiger attacks on humans and livestock were dutifully recorded, though with

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varying degrees of specificity and detail as to the number of tigers involved, the number of people involved, and the nature of the incident. All the records include the year(s) and location(s) in which incidents occurred. The very earliest record discovered, penned in Jiujiang County, Jiangxi Province, in the twenty-fourth year of the Han emperor Guangdi (a.d. 48), says simply, “[A] tiger[s] injured [a] person [people]” ( hu shang ren). Of the eight tiger records from the four provinces before a.d. 1000, seven describe sightings of white tigers. White tigers always have been extremely rare (only two recorded sightings after a.d. 1000), and their physical beauty secured them a central place in Chinese cosmology from early times. Records of white tiger sightings may well have had political or cosmological significance, representing a contemporary or imminent state of humane government and social tranquility. 10 The lack of evidence of tiger attacks or problems with tigers in general during the first millennium suggests that attacks on humans were much less frequent than in the following millennium, or that tiger attacks were not recorded as frequently. Tiger attacks possibly were not deemed worthy of inclusion in gazetteers because they were so common; also, before about the fourteenth century, the gazetteer record is simply too sparse to be reliable. Despite these and other limitations of the gazetteer record, cultural and environmental variables should not be ruled out as factors in the increase in recorded tiger attacks in the second millennium. Indeed, such attacks almost certainly derived from demographic and social factors that resulted in unprecedented degradation of wildlife habitat and that routinely placed people in closer proximity to tigers. While analyzing broad historical patterns of environmental change, however, we must bear in mind that individual records are themselves historical artifacts. As such, they are signs that can reveal as much about culturally constructed conceptions of nature as they do about the natural phenomena being described. Beginning in the mid-1500s, Han migrations to areas south of the Changjiang, along with natural population growth, caused an overflow of people from the original walled cities and other valley settlements into unsettled or sparsely settled uplands. Under conditions of burgeoning human population and the disruption of upland ecosystems, conflicts with tigers were inevitable. In fact, the records indicate that the highest incidence of human-tiger conflicts in all four provinces coincides pre-

Figure 4. A temporal profile of human-tiger encounters in Southeast China. Recorded incidents increased dramatically in the mid-1500s and peaked in the last quarter of the 1600s, with a smaller peak in the late 1800s. The first rise corresponds to a period of increased anthropogenic disturbance throughout the greater Southeast Uplands. Records of tiger depredation may have held political significance, peaking in periods of political instability in the late Ming, the early Qing, and, once again, the late Qing.

Figure 5. Distribution of human-tiger encounters in Southeast China. Records of tiger attacks and sightings form a widespread pattern across the greater Southeast Uplands. Interactions from the Wuyi-Daiyun core area are particularly numerous. The large number of encounters in Fujian Province reflects the location of the archives where data were collected.

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cisely with a period of unprecedented environmental disturbance from the mid-1500s to the 1800s, when montane forests were being cleared and settled by a massive wave of migrants and settlers. Of 511 incidents involving tigers, 363 (71 percent) occurred during the period between 1550 and 1850. The late Ming–early Qing immigrants were known as “guest people” ( kemin), or “shed people” (pengmin),11 because they constructed simple huts in the forests and scrub, and settled into the difficult job of transforming the rugged wilds into economic bases for the production of subsistence and commercial crops and forest products. While the macrohistorical conditions that led to this wave of internal migration are still under investigation, several scholars contend that the most important factors were the commercialization of agriculture along the coasts of Guangdong and Fujian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Commercial crops replaced food crops, and changing land tenure relations led to a concentration of land ownership, with the result that many previously land-owning peasants became tenants. Many of the migrants were compelled to leave their homes in the heavily overpopulated Fujian and Guangdong coastal plains because of shortages of arable land. Overpopulated areas in the interior basins and mountain regions provided another source area for impoverished migrants. The shed people were drawn to the abundant lands in sparsely populated highlands of the same or neighboring provinces. An entry in a Nanjing County (Fujian) gazetteer (n.d., Morita in Averill 1983, 90) describes this population of wanderers: [Those who] depend on the mountains and ravines, cut grass, bind it into dwellings and live [in the grass huts] are called shed people. . . . They are mostly from Ting, Chuan, Zhang, and Yong [areas of southern Fujian; that is, present-day Changting, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Yongding]. After three or four years the land’s fertility declines and they often move elsewhere.

Besides commercialization and the divestment of peasants from their lands, Averill (1983, 87) lists other “push factors” for migrants from the large population centers: “large population[s] pressing on limited food supplies, unsettled political and social conditions, and government resettlement policies.” The political and social unrest that swept the southeast coast during the Ming-Qing transitional period was largely the result of the activities of anti-Manchu rebels, such as Zheng Chenggong and Wu Sangui, who fought off Manchu domination until the 1680s. Political

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chaos and social dislocation were intensified by rampant piracy and a reactionary government policy of forcing people out of the most fertile and populated coastal areas, which might invite the depredation of pirates and rebels. Displaced peoples had little recourse but to cross the South China Sea to Taiwan or Southeast Asia, or to journey to the interior, where wild, unsettled, or sparsely populated mountain land was abundant. 12 Leong (1997, 98) gives an alternative explanation for the diaspora, hypothesizing that “pull factors” may have been more important than “push factors.” According to this theory, three converging forces were behind the interior migration: (1) a regional economic boom created surplus capital in the southeast (especially in the Zhangzhou and Tingzhou regions) for investment in cash crop farming; (2) surplus labor became available in southwest Fujian and northeast Guangdong, where Hakkas, who had long been accustomed to using She swidden techniques for clearing land, sought economic opportunities beyond their increasingly crowded homelands; and (3) depopulation of certain interior zones as a result of harsh treatment by local power holders made peripheral mountain zones available for productive commercial enterprises. In addition, many remote areas of the interior highlands south of the Changjiang were designated “government lands” (guantian), and this was true of most of the Southeast Uplands region of Fujian. These areas were largely ungovernable and ungoverned, and as Menzies (1988a, 89) notes: Neither the Ming nor the Qing governments seem to have had an explicit policy with regard to [southern] wildlands. Agriculture, the economic foundation of the Chinese state, was seen as the highest and best use for land. Wildlands were of interest in so far as they posed a threat to orderly government as a refuge for unruly elements such as the Shed People or rebels, or when flooding and siltation, presumed to be the result of upland forest clearance, threatened the irrigated agriculture of the lowlands.

Ironically, some coastal emigrants found free land in areas that had been designated “closed mountains” ( jinshan) during the Ming, where cultivation and settlement were forbidden because of the prevalence of bands of outlaws. Many highland areas were as politically and economically unstable as the coast, and some were overpopulated as well, contributing to a continuing stream of vagrants in need of land. Consequently, the shed people were not defined by a single ethnicity or dialect

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group, but comprised Han peoples (including the Hakkas, Minbei, and Minnan peoples) and non-Han peoples (including the She, Yao, and Miao). Many shed people practiced short-cycle pioneer swidden, especially in the early stages of mountain clearance, cutting and burning the montane vegetation, planting crops, and moving on after the soil was exhausted. Hakka migrants often moved in tandem with She swidden cultivators, who excelled at clearing wild forest land and planting the first crops. As the migrant population increased, large tracts of montane forests, scrub lands, and meadows were heavily degraded. Erosion and siltation of streams that fed irrigation systems in the long-established valley settlements often led to violent conflicts with local inhabitants, who regarded the itinerant shed people as intruders. In other instances, mountain lands were rented to the shed people under long-term lease agreements that gave the tenant usufruct rights to the surface, or “skin” (pi) of the land, while the owner kept the “bones.” This was common in Fujian, where it was known as the “One field, two landlords” (yitian liangzhu) system. Typically a “mountain lord” (shanzhu) controlled the land, while shed people had usufruct rights to all the resources that grew on the land. Gradually, many shed people were integrated into the various societies and economies of the mountain regions where they had first settled, and they came to be seen by many locals as important agents of landscape reclamation. A passage from an eighteenth-century Funing prefectural gazetteer shows that local officials had discerned an important connection between land tenure conditions and the degree of destructiveness of land use practices: Most of the land in Fujian is crown land, with no prohibition on cutting timber. Any branches or twigs that grow are burned or taken away, and they even dig up the roots to use as cooking fuel so that nothing can grow again and the mountains become barren. However, where the mountain is owned, industrious owners plant pine, Cunninghamia [Chinese fir], tung oil, and tea oil, earning themselves considerable profits. (Menzies 1988a, 89)

As shed people began to settle into more permanent forms of sedentary agriculture, pioneer swidden became less common, and farmers had to occupy themselves with controlling crop and livestock predators. Records from a Nanjing County (Fujian) gazetteer show that subsistence

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and commercial crops of both New and Old World origin were important components of the new economy, and that removing wildlife from the immediate vicinity was one of the first steps in the cultivation process: [The shed people] bring the seeds of maize, sweet potatoes, tong [tung] trees, tea, cedar, lacquer, indigo, yams and potatoes; cut the thorns and brambles; drive out the foxes [denoting species of the dog family, small wild cats, weasels, mongooses, and civets], and plant. (Morita in Averill 1983, 90)

Averill (1983, 93) points out that the diversity of crops shows that there was “much more to the settlement of the Yangzi highlands than peasant realization of, as Ho (Ping-ti, 1959) phrases it, ‘the economic advantages of maize and sweet potatoes.’” In fact, as Averill shows, the earliest shed people, arriving in the mid-1500s, served as a catalyst for regionwide (and, I would add, national and international) interest in mountain resources of all types. Examples from the relatively remote areas where the nature reserves in this study are found today provide a case in point. In Meihuashan and Longxishan, this was the period when bamboo paper production reached its zenith; in Wuyishan, tea production for foreign markets expanded rapidly; and in Daiyunshan (Dehua), porcelain china made from local kaolinite was produced at unprecedented volume (largely for European buyers). These products were important in domestic trade and in world markets from Southeast Asia to Europe and the Americas. Though each of these areas experienced dramatic increases in resource exploitation, there was variation in the immigration, settlement, and land tenure patterns of shed people. As a result, the kinds and severity of land degradation varied from place to place. 13 Dehua County, in Fujian Province, suffered some of the earliest effects of widespread destruction of montane wildlife habitat, and as a consequence, some of the earliest disastrous tiger problems occurred there. The following account, written in the early Ming dynasty, provides a glimpse of what would later occur in many other counties: In the 20th year of Hongwu [1387], in Dehua County there were tiger problems. There were black [melanic] tigers [heihu] all over.14 In broad daylight, they ate people in their own homes. At night, they pushed open doors and entered houses. When people were killed in one house, they fled to other peoples’ homes. Crops were abandoned and returned to the wild. (Dehua County 1940, 16)

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According to the records, by the fifteenth century, “tiger problems” ( huzai, huhuan, or hubao) were becoming increasingly common in all four provinces of the southeast. Widespread deforestation in the mountains is known to have caused increases in flooding and erosion, but it also appears to have brought about an increase in tiger attacks. In Fujian, tiger problems were widespread, especially in the Wuyi-Daiyun Range. The northeast coast, too, appears to have had a particularly high frequency of attacks, with Ningde (formerly Funing) County having the highest number of incidents in this survey (twenty-one). This may have been because of the terrain, since the region contains a mountain corridor extending out upon a broad coastal plain, where extensive agricultural land surrounds peninsulas of montane habitat. The disruptive human onslaught into the marginal uplands of interior southern China led to an increase in tiger attacks not only on village peoples and their livestock but also on walled towns and cities. In Jiangxi Province, for example, there were high frequencies in the relatively densely populated alluvial plain of Lake Poyang and the Gan River. Similarly, in Hunan, tiger encounters were widespread throughout the province, but a high number of incidents is reported in the Lake Dongting–Xiang River basin (Changsha, Liuyang, and Hengyang). By contrast, events in northwest Hunan, a rugged and sparsely populated region dominated by Miao and Tujia nationalities, may have been underreported and/or remained beyond the wave of massive Han frontier settlement. In Guangdong as well, the estuaries of the Pearl River’s deltaic plain, Guangzhou and Shunde, continued to record as many conflicts with tigers as did more remote mountain zones. As with Hunan, a dearth of data from the western and northwestern border areas of the province, where Yao and Zhuang minorities predominated, may reflect a gap in record keeping, less-intensive Han settlement, less environmental disturbance, or some combination of these factors. From these records, we can surmise that beyond the most densely populated urban areas and intensively cultivated plains, human interference had not yet caused a decrease in regional tiger populations in the seventeenth century. Instead, there was an increase in man-eating behavior and attacks on livestock, and tiger populations in rural areas did not diminish as long as there were nearby hill or mountain refugia. 15 The following passages illustrate the magnitude of the periodic crises that faced settlements throughout the region:

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In the third year of Ming Tianshun [1459], tigers attacked the villages near Beiyi Mountain in Xinghua County [Fujian]. Human and livestock casualties numbered in the hundreds. In the daytime, some people ventured abroad in groups, and even some of these were attacked. In the mountains, all travel ceased. (Fujian Gazetteer 1490, Juan 81, 24b) In the fourteenth year of Qing Shunzhi [1657], in winter, there were many tigers in Tiaohua township in northwestern Ningxiang County [Fujian]. Over 100 people were eaten. The fields were abandoned and returned to the wild. (Ningxiang County 1941, 14a)

In many areas throughout southeastern China, tiger attacks continued through the mid-twentieth century, though they were probably underreported during the tumultuous first half of this century, when ongoing warfare and social dislocation may have precluded careful record keeping. Westerners’ accounts of the Southeast Uplands region during this period show that tigers were still a serious threat throughout Fujian Province. John Caldwell, son of Methodist missionary and tiger hunter Harry Caldwell, describes the county seat of Fuqing (on the coast south of Fuzhou) in the early 1900s with a stark explanation of the need for security against the wilds: The walls were high and the gates were closed for another reason. Fuqing lies in the heart of the south China tiger country. Every home outside the city was locked at night, the cattle, pigs, and precious water buffalo brought into the inner court for safety. Even so there were years when the annual toll from tigers ran to over five hundred people in Father’s four districts. (Caldwell 1953, 28) 16

Even with high walls and sometimes with moats around towns and cities, tigers often found a way inside. In 22.5 percent of the gazetteer records, tigers entered large human settlements, many if not most of which were walled. Foreigners in Fujian at the turn of the century state that tigers entered villagers’ homes with some frequency. Another phenomenon frequently mentioned in the gazetteer records that contradicts “normal” tigrine behavior is the presence of “groups” (qun) of tigers. The Caldwells observed the same phenomenon, however, and on one occasion they saw five tigers together in Fuqing County, Fujian. The majority of human casualties was probably attributable to one or a few man-eaters hunting individually. A particularly ferocious man-eater was

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said to have killed 250 people in Gutian County (presumably within a period of a few years), and Caldwell’s description of the carnage, as well as the fear that spread among the people, is reminiscent of many gazetteer records of earlier centuries: “Men tending their herds or walking along the trails disappeared, or were found mangled and half eaten. Crops were going untended; paralysis began to settle on the hills. . . . People were afraid to stir from their houses” (Caldwell 1953, 38). Strategies for Tiger Management Documented in the Gazetteer Records

Through time, tiger management strategies were developed in response to crises that threatened the orderly functioning of villages, towns, and cities. Methods of mitigating disasters or preempting them at an early stage were often decided on by local government officials. Management tools included spontaneous efforts by groups of local people to drive away a marauding tiger; organized reconnaissance and counterattacks by local military forces or conscripted militias; enlisting hunter-specialists (or sorcerers) to trap or kill tigers; and offering prayers, usually by local officials, to local gods of the city, town, or mountains. As with other forms of natural disaster, local officials were held responsible for mediating with heaven to bring an end to tiger attacks. As a nexus between heaven and earth in the Chinese state religion and a representative of the emperor, the county or prefectural magistrate was expected to uphold the Mandate of Heaven. Good government meant a harmonious and prosperous peace between people and nature. A Confucian proverb stated that “an oppressive government is worse than a tiger.” 17 And Hammond (1991) notes, “Many Chinese, influenced by practices and beliefs that linked rulers and other authority figures to religious forces, supposed the statement to mean that a ruler’s subjects would be free of the depredations of tigers if the ruler were truly benevolent.” That the burden of responsibility rested at least partially on the shoulders of government officials is attested to by their involvement in about one of every ten recorded cases. The very act of keeping official records of tiger encounters was part of an effort to monitor and manage a natural (or supernatural) hazard. 18 If we consider the increased frequency of records on tiger depredation shown in figure 4 from the perspective of the record keepers, some interesting patterns emerge. The climax in tiger depredation in the late 1600s coincided not only with increased internal migrations (and envi-

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ronmental disruption) but also with the disintegration of state control under the Ming and a transition to foreign rule under the Qing. Problems of state legitimation may have impelled the local literati who made and transcribed the record to include more natural disasters, for these were signs of cosmological disharmony that had serious implications for the maintenance of political power. In fact, gazetteer research on the frequency of typhoons in Guangdong Province reveals a peak in the late 1600s, resembling the pattern of tiger attacks described above.19 Records hinting at a connection between seemingly causally unconnected physical events, such as typhoons and tiger attacks, may indicate an effort by local officials to promote the notion that the Mandate of Heaven did not favor the new Manchu rulers of China. The number of cases in which officials offered prayers in response to serious tiger problems (6.4 percent of all records), and the high rate of assumed efficacy (about 73 percent), reveal the extent to which tigers were viewed as part of an active and purposive cosmos, a cosmos that often responded, for better or worse, to the prayers and actions of human beings. Some records even state that tigers submitted to the entreaties of local authorities by “leaping” into bamboo or granite tiger traps (see pl. 4), or by walking into ground-set bow (pl. 1) or gun traps, to be killed in a kind of suicide (zibi). The following cases from Fujian show how official prayers, forceful action, and divine intervention were often combined to restore order: In spring of the seventh year of Ming Chongzhen [1634], in Pinghe county, there were tigers on the rampage in the mountain forests. . . . There were countless attacks on people and livestock. . . . The county magistrate pleaded with the city god and the mountain spirits for mercy. As a result, one tiger was killed, two tigers sacrificed themselves [zibi], and two tigers fled. The disaster was then quelled. The local person, Zhu Longxiang, had a tiger-destroying sign (miehuji). 20 (Pinghe County 1719, Juan 10, 1 2a) In the 39th year of Ming Wanli [1611], in Luoyuan county, a bunch of tigers attacked people. The county magistrate, Chen Liangke, prayed to the gods and enlisted a She [nationality] person to use poison arrows [a crossbow trap with poison arrows]. [The hunter] killed four tigers. The terror came to an end. (Luoyuan County 1722, Juan 29, 1b)

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These accounts demonstrate that there was a perceived connection between the moral rectitude of officials, as shown in their pious petitions to heaven, and their ability to halt the depredation of nature’s fiercest beast. If the tiger answered to heaven (tian), then according to this belief system, we might reasonably ask why heaven from time to time was determined to destroy so many people. Was the tiger an agent of righteousness, carrying out the will of the gods; a henchman for “mountain devils” (shanxiao); or an animal that acted on its own volition but could be swayed by greater powers? Chinese tiger folklore shows that tigers played all of these roles and more. The Tiger in Chinese Cosmology

The tiger has left a deep and lasting impression on Chinese culture for many reasons, not least of which are its size, its beauty, and the relative frequency of its predation on humans and livestock under conditions of environmental stress. Somewhat like the lion in Western tradition, the tiger was known as “the king of a hundred beasts” (baishouzhiwang, see glossary). Dominion over other animals was not the only thing, though, or even the primary thing, that gave the tiger such preeminence in traditional cosmology and lore. In medieval Europe and post-Columbian North America, large predators until the late twentieth century have commonly been viewed as an evil scourge, to be wiped out without hesitation, apology, or reflection. As we have seen, in southeast China depredation by tigers (as well as leopards, wolves, and red dogs) was a serious problem. These animals, however, were not viewed simply as large, sinister menaces to humans and livestock, as were grizzly bears and wolves in European and Euro-American culture. Though near-extermination has been the final outcome in the last phases of the ancient and ongoing human-tiger relationship in China, the cultural significance, especially the high aesthetic, totemic, spiritual, and medicinal value of the tiger in China, has had no parallel in the belief systems of Christian Europe or Euro-America. 21 According to the Huhui, or “Tiger Compendium,” a sixteenth-century collection of centuries of tiger lore, tigers were both feared and revered. It was commonly held that tigers, like people, could think rationally, and tigers sometimes were held responsible for their crimes. Tiger calamities were seen either as a natural manifestation of poor government, an idea related to the Mandate of Heaven concept, or as the

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just dessert of the victims, who in many instances had offended local, regional, or universal deities through wanton acts of forest cutting or other transgressions.22 According to legends in the Huhui, less-righteous tigers were sometimes taken to court and tried for their crimes against humanity, and some stories hold that they were required by heaven to pray for divine permission to kill humans.23 One management strategy for problem tigers, an approach that shows Daoist sensibilities, was to leave them alone —they supposedly would go away of their own accord. 24 The legendary ferocity and righteousness of tigers has made them a popular talisman throughout China (and in many Asian cultures), and the power of tiger representations depends on the presence of the character for “king / lord /emperor,” the imprimatur of heaven, emblazoned in the stripes on the tiger’s forehead. Hats with tiger-face motifs were and still are, though less frequently today, worn by babies in China to ward off illness. A doting parent would bundle up an infant or toddler in layer upon layer to keep its body warm, and seal its head with a tiger cap to ward off evil spirits. The front of the cap bore the intricately stylized face of the beast, with fangs bared and eyes burning. On the tiger’s forehead was the character for “wang” (see “wang” character in “baishouzhiwang,” in glossary), denoting the animal’s royal supremacy in the animal world. Some caps picture another tiger, lilliputian, sitting on the forehead above the character for “lord,” and if one looks carefully at the forehead of this tiny tiger, there is another, even more minute version of the same character. This stylistic reiteration amplifies the power of the tiger icon. The three horizontal bars and one intersecting vertical line of the “wang” character represent not only one who rules but more precisely one who mediates between, and ultimately unites, heaven and earth by holding an axial position between heaven above and earth below. The importance and persistence of the tiger-as-king myth is exemplified by Harry Caldwell’s account of the evaluation of dead tigers by local literati, who were often on hand with other villagers to inspect tigers he killed in Fujian in the early twentieth century: The Chinese character meaning “lord” or “emperor” must also be found in the markings of the face of a tiger if it is to be a real tiger of whom devils and demons are afraid. I had shot one handsome male tiger with two horizontal and one vertical white lines in the forehead not exactly to the liking of the scholars, and this animal too was dis-

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credited. Such a one is said never to have been born of tiger parents, but to have emerged through some strange metamorphosis from some animal or fish living in the sea. (Caldwell 1924, 47) 25

The tiger guardian is an important motif in vernacular architecture in China, too, found in protective roof figurines and amulets hung on walls and above doors. 26 In the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, I observed a tiger talisman sculpted out of clay hanging on the wall of a rammedearth house in the village of Zhongping. Villagers told me it was there to scare away evil spirits (pl. 2). Two final additional locations where the tiger symbol appears in Chinese cosmology are in geomancy ( fengshui or dili) and in toponyms (place-names). In fengshui, the white tiger is associated with a hill or mountain west of an ideal site (with the green dragon to the east). Rural villagers still commonly refer to this symbol in locating propitious sites for graves, houses, and temples. Finally, place-names that include the word “tiger” can be found in virtually every county across southern China, especially in reference to mountains and other geomorphic features. In Dehua County, Fujian, there is even a village named “Fierce Tiger” (Menghu). The tiger’s presence in cosmology and everyday life, from fengshui to talismanic iconography, in religious symbolism, literature, fine art, and place-names, gives it a very different position in relation to Chinese culture from that of the gray wolf, grizzly bear, or any other wild animal in relation to traditional Judeo-Christian European and Euro-American cultures. For instance, after the rise of Christianity, no mere animal could serve the will of God by enforcing celestial laws, as did the tiger in numerous examples from Chinese folklore. 27 Another aspect of the traditional relationship between humans and wildlife in China, and one persisting to the present, is the importance of wild animals in Chinese medicine. Though medieval Europeans also believed that particular parts of certain wild plants and animals held medicinal value, this belief did not develop into the complex, systematic ethnoscience that Chinese medicine has become. This system of knowledge was collected in such classics as the Herbal (Bencao), and in recent times has been propagated and institutionalized through governmentsponsored scientific research and writing in such books as The Guide to Economically Important Animals of China (1962) and The Guide to Medicinal Animals of China (1983). 28 The tonic, curative, or empowering effects

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believed to come from ingesting the meat, bones, fur, or organs of wild animals represent natural power in its purest form. Tiger-penis soup, which now fetches more than $100 (here and throughout, dollar amounts are expressed in U.S. dollars) a bowl in Chinatowns around the world, is consumed by males to increase sexual virility. Tiger-bone wine is ingested to treat rheumatism, weakness, or paralysis. Whiskers are used for toothaches, eyeballs for epilepsy, brain for laziness and pimples, and the tail is thought to be good for various skin diseases. On a more fundamental and abstract level, ingestion of tiger has long been seen as a way to reconnect with the cosmos. Within the correlative thinking schemes and empirical processes through which Chinese medicine developed, this paradigm has become highly elaborate, and the human body has been viewed as a microcosm of the universe, each organ associated with one of the five elements (wuxing), a certain color, certain sounds, and in the wild pharmacopeia, with particular parts of certain animal species. Despite ongoing efforts to find more scientific rationale for the use of wild animals as medicine, correlative thinking and cosmological harmony remain seminal subtexts. This holistic approach to health and the body has considerable appeal to many people (including New Age Westerners), but the global commercialization of wild medicinals has had grave consequences for wildlife conservation worldwide. The Bible, the Gun, and the Butterfly Net

Given the kind of reverence for (or ambivalent obsession with) the tiger that is evident in Chinese art, literature, folklore, and medicine, we might ask, what caused the extermination of the “lord of one hundred beasts” throughout most of its range? Tiger parts were highly valued as medicine, and man-eating tigers were often killed, but would total destruction of the species have been a human prerogative, or even a conceivable event, according to traditional Chinese views of nature? The settlement of large numbers of Westerners in China, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a profound influence on indigenous views of nature and natural resources and, ultimately, on the treatment of wildlife. Perhaps the first written Western account of the Southeast Uplands and the South China tiger came from the legendary Marco Polo. In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Polo allegedly journeyed overland from what is today Zhejiang Province into the mountains of what is today northern Fujian. He followed the pass that leads to the

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Jianxi River and boated to the Min River at Nanping, which was the main trade route to Fuzhou. Of the Min Valley hinterlands of Fuzhou, he wrote: “Over hills and along valleys, you continually pass towns and villages, where the necessities of life are in abundance, and there is much field sport, particularly of birds. . . . In these parts there are lions of great size and strength” (Marsden 1961, 300–301, in Moser 1985). 29 Missionaries and specimen collectors in Fujian during the early twentieth century have left accounts of the natural history that far exceed mere descriptions of an exotic landscape and its inhabitants. Harry Caldwell, a Methodist missionary from Tennessee who was also a hunter and naturalist, wrote a detailed narrative of his experiences with the people and wildlife of western and central Fujian from around the turn of the century to the 1920s (figs. 6 and 7). His autobiographical book, Blue Tiger, provides useful information on the South China tiger and many other species of mammals and birds. It also describes local perceptions of

Figure 6. Methodist minister Harry Caldwell, with a tiger he killed in Fujian. He wrote of this specimen, “I shot the animal with a .22-caliber high-power Savage rifle at close range, after the animal had charged me from a long distance. This is a bit of real missionary work I have greatly enjoyed, and incidentally have found most helpful in the preaching of the gospel.”

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wildlife, including the “superstitions” that Caldwell vowed to destroy through preaching the gospel and hunting. The book provides a record of the encounter between Western and rural Fujianese concepts and practices of wildlife management. It also reveals how advances in weapons technology and the desacralization, or at least demystification, of wildlife could precipitate a major shift in ecological dynamics, changes that resulted in the virtual annihilation of large carnivores like the tiger. Until the 1950s, tigers were common from the Changjiang south to Guangdong Province, and hunting took place mostly in mountainous areas devoid of forest cover. Man-eating was common in many areas and provided a convenient excuse for Westerners to impress locals with their superior weaponry. Caldwell tied live goats to stakes, usually near densely vegetated ravines in an otherwise treeless landscape, to lure tigers within rifle range. He viewed tiger hunting as “a means for advancing the knowledge of the Christian God in the heart of Asia” (1924, 13). In the Fuzhou–eastern Min region, he sought to refute local beliefs about

Figure 7. Harry Caldwell and friends with quarry taken in Nanping (Fujian) in December 1921.

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so-called spirit cats, which were protected by local deities.30 These animals were thought to be imbued with spiritual powers, which made them impervious to bullets or dangerous for humans to harass, and were part of a shamanistic religious cult. Caldwell noted that the magico-religious prohibitions against killing the animals were stronger than game laws would have been, had they been part of the legal code. Blind to any possible conservation functions in these customs (despite being an ardent and gifted naturalist himself ), the minister sought to portray local mores as aberrant superstitions: These so-called cats include the civets, wild dogs, and foxes, all of which have worked great havoc among the small pigs and poultry of the peasant people. Porcupine, pangolin, and small deer are also here in abundance, all with marked medicinal values, so it is safe to say that at one time hunters frequented this region with bow and gun. But things suddenly changed one day; the gods changed them, and finally established the fact that these animals were not flesh and blood at all, but evil spirits incarnate in the denizens of the wilds! . . . Since that day in the long ago the superstition about spirit cats has grown as mold grows, until the very life of the ignorant people of this part of China has become blighted. The woman into whom has entered one of these spirit cats is as popular as the priest and must be consulted on every imaginable occasion. She is a diviner of spirits and interpreter of omens and dreams. Unto her is committed the fate of the living, and in her is the voice of the dead. As Saul consulted the witch in the days of his trouble, so do the people of China commit their all into the hands of her into whom has entered the spirit of a devil cat. This female conjurer and spirit medium decides the destinies of millions of people, while foxes and wild cats enjoy an immunity due to a superstition stronger than law. (Caldwell 1924, 26)

Caldwell ridiculed the local belief system that gave these animals “immunity,” and he set out to prove that his gun and his god provided immunity from superstition about devils, shamans, and the magic powers of animals. Accompanied by the naturalist Arthur Sowerby, he agreed to observe the “spirit cats” on a certain sacred mountain only under the condition that if he could successfully kill one (which local hunters said was impossible), the people would have to abandon their belief in the

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“fox devils,” and “were never again to consult the temples and shrines in order to ascertain the will of the gods regarding the hunt.” Needless to say, Caldwell prevailed in this mission. Caldwell was not alone. Another Westerner, William Lord Smith, in an article in Natural History magazine in 1928, tells of a tiger drive near Xiamen in which locals, armed only with tridents, encircled a tiger at its den in the boulder-strewn montane grasslands, where the author finished it off with a bullet (fig. 8). Other foreign naturalists were also active in the Southeast Uplands at this time, including the director of the Asiatic Expeditions for the American Museum of Natural History, Roy Chapman Andrews (for whom Sowerby worked). Many new species of birds had been discovered in Wuyishan by French naturalist Père Armand Davids, 31 and European naturalists of less renown continued to work with and employ local peo-

Figure 8. Trident-bearing Minnan hunters with quarry taken in Nanping [Fujian] in December 1921. The photo was made near the tiger’s lair, in a typical mountain landscape of granite boulders and caves. William Lord Smith, who organized the hunt and took this photograph for an article published in Natural History in 1928, finished off the tiger with a rifle shot.

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ple, collecting specimens there through the first half of the twentieth century. 32 In fact, all the naturalists mention that local people were employed as hunter-guides and specimen collectors. From about 1900 on, there was a transfer of values and technology, as well as the formation of a new market for wildlife parts and specimens. This period marked the beginning of a transformation in local perceptions of wild animals— from supernatural beings to natural objects for scientific investigation, and from a source of sacred medicine sold in local and regional markets to commercial commodities to be sold in a growing international market. The vast environmental changes to come as the Chinese Communist Party attained power were driven by new definitions of “natural resources” and a revolution in the speed and thoroughness with which natural resources could be exploited. Wildlife and other forest resources became commodities, the sole purpose of which was to serve the economic needs of “the people.” Before assessing the damage of the post1949 period, however, a reevaluation of habitat conditions in the region in the early part of this century will be helpful. One might easily conclude that most of the forested land in the Southeast Uplands was destroyed during the early decades of CCP rule, and that tigers were pushed to the brink of extinction as a result of habitat loss starting in the 1950s. While habitat destruction was, by all indications, a critical factor in the extinction process, one must consider how adaptable tigers had been to the extremely degraded habitats that for centuries had prevailed over much of the region. Virtually all the Western naturalists’ accounts from the early part of the past century comment on the fact that tigers were still abundant in the barren and anciently deforested hills and mountains. Even today, in western Fujian—with its relative abundance of forest cover—it is still commonly believed that tigers, in their regal vanity, prefer grasslands and avoid forests because once under the trees, their coats might become soiled by bird droppings. Tigers survived in degraded grasslands and scrub for hundreds of years, making dens in the dense foliage of ravines and preying on muntjacs, wild boar, serow, and crested deer. Most of the time there was little conflict with humans, even though the landscape had long since been shaped by fire, agriculture, small-scale hydroengineering, and commerce. In areas where the vegetation was a mosaic of forests, agricultural crops, and montane meadows, ungulates were probably at maximum density, and the same was likely true of tigers, as has been observed in India. 33

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Problems arose when wild ungulate (hoofed animal) populations were inadequate, or when tigers suffered from diseases or other conditions that altered normal predatory behavior patterns. Under these circumstances, tigers entered towns or villages and ate dogs, pigs, or people. An impoverished prey base could result from overhunting or the destruction of ungulate habitat from intensified land use at all elevations. Judging from current patterns of ungulate habitat preference, however, the most prolific ungulates, especially wild boar and Reeve’s muntjacs, can maintain viable (if not dense) populations in extremely degraded habitats, even in the hills and mountains outside large cities, where hunting pressure and habitat loss are often severe. In remote mountainous areas like Meihuashan, which had relatively sparse human populations, relatively high amounts of forest coverage, and a fairly abundant ungulate prey base, it appears that tigers were less prone to predation on humans and livestock. Few villagers in the reserve remember having had tiger problems, and tigers have not attacked livestock there since the 1930s and 1940s. In the lower valleys near Gutian, however, tigers attacked humans in the 1940s and, less frequently, in the 1950s. An estimated four thousand South China tigers existed in the 1950s. How and when did the population crash? If you ask a villager in Meihuashan, you may well receive the same answer I did from a man in Gonghe: “After liberation, the whole country was in order again, there was peace and stability, and the tigers went away. I don’t know where, they just left.” Perhaps the Mandate of Heaven is alive and well. The People’s War on Wildlife: Wiping Out the Four Pests

During the 1950s, predator control was carried out with revolutionary and patriotic zeal. Teams of peasants and soldiers encircled tigers in their mountain lairs, but by then the weapons of choice were grenades and machine guns. The extermination of tigers through systematic hunting was part of a national movement to conquer nature. Anti-predator campaigns, like the Kill the Tiger movement (Dahuyundong), with its slogan kill the tiger, banish evil (dahu chuhai), were part of the national policy of “bending nature to the will of the people,” a refrain that played almost daily in the national press. The decimation of the South China tiger was set in motion when Western naturalists and missionaries entered the Southeast Uplands and introduced modern weaponry, modern science, Christianity, and new modes for exploiting, processing, transporting, and marketing natural resources. The extirpation of tigers

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was not merely a matter of technological innovation but resulted also from the introduction of new conceptions of nature, ideological developments that culminated in the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist doctrines of using nature to serve the needs of the people. The hunting techniques of such early–twentieth-century Westerners as Harry Caldwell were a catalyst for more systematic extirpation campaigns against tigers. If the people of Fujian were awed by Caldwell’s impressive firepower in the 1920s, they proved that they could achieve the same results on their own after “liberation.” But in contrast to Caldwell’s intense fascination with the natural history of the tiger, a love he expressed in the peculiar idiom of scientific interest mated to religious fundamentalism and tempered by “sportsmanship,” the Chinese government was singularly committed to the permanent removal of the tiger from the stage of human progress. Wild animals became targets in a Maoist ideological war on nature. Peasants became crusaders in countless “battles” against the wild, the uncultivated, and the unsettled. Wildlife conservation, never a well-articulated agenda, was relegated to the realm of bourgeois capitalist ideology, a null concept, and the 1950s marked the beginning of the end for much of the faunal wealth of China. The Kill the Tiger movement rallied teams of farmers, hunters, and former soldiers who used traditional muzzle loaders, modern rifles, machine guns, grenades, and other weapons widely available during the war and its aftermath to extirpate the big cats. Guns provided for the local guard (minbing) battalions, in which all adult males were expected to receive training annually, were used more for hunting than for military action. One of many such stories comes from rural Dehua County in Fujian, where a child was killed and much livestock was lost. Local people complained to the new government that they could not go into the mountains, and they asked for official help. A former revolutionary guerrilla named Mao Piao, who is now known locally as “Mao the Tiger Team Captain” (Mao Laohuduizhang), recalls how in 1956 a squad of more than thirty local men was enlisted by the county government. Because of his military experience he was made the leader of what was officially designated “The Fujian Green Mountain Hazard-Elimination Hunting Team” (Fujian Qingshan Chuhai Daliedui), a group whose responsibility was to exterminate the tigers of Dehua and Yongchun counties. The team pursued tigers nonstop for three months, but to no avail. Under intense pressure and increasing criticism from the government, and under the scrutiny of the national news media, they finally succeeded in

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locating a tiger in Yongchun County.34 In hot pursuit among the granite boulders of the grasslands, they shot the tiger in the leg, and it retreated to a nearby mountaintop. Unable to see the tiger, the men hurled grenades into the grass and slowly closed in to find their prey. The tiger’s body was taken to the local township government office, dressed, and hung up for display for three days: a 220-pound female, pregnant with two cubs. In the aftermath of numerous local, state-sponsored anti-predator campaigns like this one, tigers were increasingly confined to isolated highlands, where only traditional crossbow specialists were capable of locating and killing them. To make the best use of wildlife, which was being killed off at unprecedented rates—partly because of a massive increase in military weaponry among the peasantry— the government set up a system of foreign trade stations (waimaozhan). By the 1970s and 1980s, these trade stations were scattered across the Southeast Uplands in virtually every commune, even in the remote mountain highlands. Every county had a foreign trade bureau (waimaoju) to collect products from stations in the hinterlands. There were no prohibitions against the sale of any kind of animal. Trade in furs and skins (as well as wild and cultivated plant products) was fueled by international demand. From the Meihuashan foreign trade station, in Buyun, and hundreds of other stations across the Southeast Uplands, furs were transported to cities like Xiamen, where many were shipped to other nations. Government data collected from eight provinces in central and southern China between 1951 and 1981 show how an estimated population of four thousand tigers was rapidly decimated. From 1951 to 1955, the official average annual production was four hundred tiger pelts. From 1961 to 1965, this figure decreased to 152 a year, leaving an estimated one thousand tigers in the wild. As tigers became scarce in the early 1970s, annual production dropped to one to two in most provinces, and to five in Henan and Hunan. 35 In the 1990s, the enforcement of wildlife laws was still spotty, and even in Beijing, Tibetan street vendors could be seen hawking musk deer glands, artificial forelegs of “tigers” (constructed from ox bones, claws carved from hooves, and fur of unknown origin), and several other animal parts. Pharmacies and restaurants throughout the country continued to sell illegal wildlife parts in the new millennium, and a backwoods game trade still prevails in mountain regions throughout the country, where the absence of fixed business venues makes it extremely difficult to control.

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Saving the Lord of a Hundred Beasts

Biologists in China in the 1980s began to call on the government and the people to take rapid action to protect the South China tiger. These specialists declared that the subspecies was on the verge of extinction, with thirty to fifty tigers inhabiting widely disjunct pockets of wild mountain habitat across the Chinese subtropics from Fujian to Guizhou and Guangxi. It seemed clear that the remaining tigers would not survive without immediate intervention by the government, lasting cooperation from local people, and technical aid and expertise from abroad. 36 By 1990, the Chinese Ministry of Forestry and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-International) were working together to ascertain the status of the South China tiger in the wild. In 1990–1991, the WWF and the Wildlife Protection Associations of the Forestry Departments of Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, and Hunan conducted a series of field surveys in mountainous areas of those provinces to locate tiger tracks and ground scrapes (characteristic territorial markers made by large felids), and to tabulate these and recent sightings. The primary goals were to determine the overall distribution of tigers and the approximate population and age composition in each survey area, and to determine if reproduction was still occurring. The researchers assessed the status of prey species and of other large felids, too, especially the leopard and the clouded leopard. Gary Koehler, the American wildlife biologist in charge of the surveys, relied heavily on the knowledge of local people who until the 1970s had hunted tigers: Hunters not only possess the skills for identifying tracks and marking scrapes but they knew areas that tigers had frequented and areas where tigers had scrape marked in past years, sites which were often still used by tigers. Tiger sign was frequently observed during the survey at sites where hunters had killed tigers 30 years ago. A technique employed by some hunters . . . was to construct tilled dirt pads about 30 cm in diameter in the center of a wild animal trail. This method was used successfully by the survey team in Fujian to collect impressions of tiger tracks. (Koehler 1991, 5–6)

The survey team discovered the most tiger signs in nature reserves and wildlands in two regions: first, the Southeast Uplands (especially Meihuashan and Longxishan) and second, at the borders of southwest Jiangxi, northern Guangdong, and southeast Hunan, where the Nanling

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and Luoxiaoshan mountain ranges converge. The data were insufficient for accurate population estimates, but recent sightings of cubs in certain areas (including Meihuashan) indicated that reproduction was still occurring. Koehler proposed several measures to protect the South China tiger: enforcing bans on trapping ungulates in areas where clouded leopards and tigers live; possible bans on guns in these areas; initiating ungulate habitat protection; protection of tiger habitat; establishing adequate-size nature reserves; developing public education and information programs; continuing research on tigers and their prey; developing, if necessary, programs for reintroduction of captive-bred tigers to the wild; and an international commitment of funding and expertise. No field studies have been conducted on how much habitat is sufficient for the survival of a viable population of the South China tiger, nor are there adequate data on the home range size of a single individual, but Koehler found that few reserves in the four provinces were greater than 400 square kilometers (154 sq. mi.), and that only Wuyishan (560 km 2, or 216 sq. mi.) and Hupingshan (Hunan) (400 km 2, or 154 sq. mi.) were possibly adequate for tiger conservation. For this reason, he recommended that existing reserves should be enlarged, combined, or connected by corridors where human disturbance is minimal. He also noted that local people could contribute to conservation practices and to wildlife research. He recommended that future studies include assessments of the habitat needs of prey and of the influence of human management practices on habitat; the effects of seasonal vegetation changes on ungulate habitat use; the use of fire in grassland maintenance; and the importance of grasslands for ungulate populations. Though the report was cause for some optimism, subsequent tiger sightings have been scant and widely isolated. Undaunted by long odds, the State Forestry Administration pressed ahead, and in the Forestry Action Plan for China’s Agenda 21, in 1995, saving the tiger was a priority action. In its latest incarnation, the tiger had become a “mysterious and beautiful animal,” and a matter of national pride. Though there was little promising evidence of viable populations surviving in the wild in the 1990s, and though no officials have seen a wild tiger in more than twenty years, reports of sightings continue to trickle in, and by May of 2000, the State Forestry Administration claimed to have compiled two thousand bits of information on sightings, roaring, tracks, scratches, and the remains of prey killed by tigers.37 Official reports no longer hazard an

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estimate of how many individuals might be left in the wild, but the Chinese government is promoting a large-scale plan to revive the South China tiger. By 2000, the State Forestry Administration had completed the “China Action Plan for Saving the South China Tiger,” which includes specific measures to expand and link existing nature reserves and restore habitats in four areas: eastern Jiangxi Province ( Yihuang N.R.); Zhejiang Province (Fengyangshan N.R. and Baishanzu N.R.); Fujian Province (Meihuashan N.R.); and the Luoxiao Mountains from northern Guangdong Province (including Chebaling N.R.) north to western Jiangxi ( Jiulianshan N.R. and Jinggangshan N.R.) and eastern Hunan (Taoyuandong N.R., Hupingshan N.R., and Guidong-Bamianshan N.R.) (fig. 9). All told, the plan calls for the “rehabilitation” of 170 square kilometers (65 sq. mi.) of agricultural lands for wildlife habitat, the relocation of 3,900 families (roughly 19,500 people), and the protection of 12,800 square kilometers (4,942 sq. mi.) of mountain land where tigers can range freely— enough territory to support 90 to 130 tigers. 38 The most ambitious tiger recovery work is under way at Meihuashan. In September 1998, the nature reserve received support from the Longyan prefectural government and provincial and national forestry officials to begin a captive breeding program. Three tigers, two males and one female, were transported by airplane and truck from the Suzhou Zoo in Jiangsu Province to a new facility at the Meihuashan Nature Reserve headquarters. The young tigers, all aged two to two-and-a-half, were part of the first generation in a long-term program designed to reintroduce the species to the wild. The three were to remain in captivity in pens, with regular access to a 20-hectare ( 50-acre) outdoor activity area, where they were learning how to hunt (pl. 3). By 1999, they had learned to kill live chickens. By 2001, three more tigers were brought to Meihuashan, and all six were moved to a new captive breeding and retraining facility built on land purchased from the villages of Liling and Mafang. The 332-hectare (820-acre) enclosure encompasses a representative array of habitat types near the southern boundary of the reserve, and the tigers have regular access to outdoor zones, where they are learning to kill mammals, including captive prey. A deer farm was established to raise sika deer (or “plumflower” deer in Mandarin, the same meihua as in Meihuashan) as prey during the training period and to attract tourists. The hope is that the tigers will produce at least ten cubs by 2007, and that this second generation will learn to hunt by following the example of their parents. By 2010, when managers hope the tigers will be capable of

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Figure 9. Protected areas designated as tiger reserves for tiger habitat rehabilitation and reintroduction.

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bringing down large prey and surviving in the wild without direct human intervention, the doors of the enclosure will be opened. The tigers will be released into a special tiger reserve, projected to be 600 square kilometers (231 sq. mi.) in area, or nearly three times larger than the present nature reserve, and they will have continuous access to the security, and food, of their enclosure. If the first reintroductions succeed, additional tigers will be trained and released in Meihuashan and perhaps other reserves. 39 In July 2001, a female gave birth to three healthy cubs, and project manager Huang Zhaofeng reported happily that the adult tigers had learned to kill live goats and wild boar piglets. Unfortunately, the population may already be dangerously inbred; in 1995, the forty-eight captive tigers in China were descended from only six wild-caught tigers, with 62 percent of the genetic material in the population originating from just two of the founders. For genetic viability, 120 tigers descended from thirty wild-caught individuals would be closer to the ideal. Of eleven tigers whose semen was analyzed by a team of American experts, only four fell within the average range for sperm concentration, and the concentration of normal, highly motile sperm was low for eight of these males. In the same year, Chinese researchers found that 65 percent of all sperm samples had morphological abnormalities, and perhaps most disturbing of all, 90 percent of all cubs born in captivity died soon after birth. Though the sample population from which the genetic material has come may be too small to be definitive, these problems taken as a whole suggest serious inbreeding depression in the captive population. 40 Compounding the difficulties is an official confidence in technological fixes to revive nature, and a corresponding disregard for sociocultural variables; a new and in many ways admirable agenda is cloaked in an old, familiar technocratic hubris that has caused disasters in China before, and may yet again. In 1999, when asked if Meihuashan villagers had been notified about the plan to reintroduce tigers and whether there would be educational programs to explain the reintroduction process, a reserve administrator responded that there was no need to do so: “If there is enough wild prey in the reserve, there will be no conflicts between people and tigers. There is really no need for special programs like this.” In what will be a 600-square-kilometer (231-sq.-mi.) reserve with about ten thousand residents, this may not be the most prudent approach, but the “China Action Plan for Saving the South China Tiger”

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shows that the government may have an additional surprise for the people of Meihuashan in the near future, as it calls for the relocation of three hundred families from the larger tiger reserve area to rehabilitate tiger habitat. Western conservationists’ responses to the Meihuashan reintroduction plan range from cynical skepticism to guarded optimism. In the spring of 2001, an American official from the World Wildlife Fund China office, who doubted that the tigers were being raised for anything more than show, stated, “Having a bunch of inbred, hungry, chicken-eating tigers on the prowl is not in anyone’s best interest.” But others find hope in the Chinese government’s stubborn commitment to saving the tiger, and the latest turn in the human conception of the tiger may prove to be what allows the cat once again to reign as king in the mountains of southern China. While the most common apposition for the South China tiger in the past twenty years has been “the most endangered of five remaining subspecies of tigers,” geneticists and zoologists who specialize in tigrine diversity now argue that little molecular genetic evidence exists to support the idea that so-called tiger subspecies are significant evolutionary units. Morphological and genetic diversity in tigers is low, and differences between regional populations is thought to be clinal (as stated), meaning that there are gradual changes in genotype and phenotype across the species’ geographic range, rather than abrupt, genetically significant boundaries. These differences reflect adaptation to different climates and habitats over the past ten thousand to twenty thousand years rather than longer-term subspeciation. 41 This reconceptualization of tiger diversity has tremendous potential to revitalize tiger conservation efforts. As Andrew Kitchener suggests, “Critically endangered South China tigers could readily be genetically reinforced by animals from northern Southeast Asia and possibly the Indian subcontinent. The most important conservation outcome is that tigers continue to survive in China, where they continue to perform their vital role as top predator.” With this idea in mind, Ron Tilson, who specializes in the genetic and demographic management of captive populations of tigers and has years of field research experience in Southeast Asia with the Sumatran tiger, has become the first non-Chinese tiger specialist who is firmly committed to helping the Chinese government save tigers in southern China from almost certain extinction.42 Several years after completing research on captive tigers in China, which led to the publication of a South China

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Tiger Studbook Analysis and Masterplan in 1995, Tilson was asked to help with a census of wild tigers in southern China. Finding very little evidence of tigers in the wild, he has concluded that the genetic stock of China’s tigers must be reinvigorated, and he believes that the best source areas will be Laos and Cambodia, which share more ecological similarities with southern China than any other region in the tiger’s current range.43 In the summer of 2001, Tilson expected this proposal to meet with strong resistance from Chinese authorities. As he put it, “The tiger is not a biological unit, it is a biopolitical unit. The people of India do not want a Sumatran tiger, the Chinese do not want a Southeast Asian tiger.” Whether this is the end or a new beginning for the tiger in southern China may hinge on a struggle between nationalistic concerns about the purity of China’s nature, on the one hand, and a pragmatic grasp of scientific evidence suggesting (in broad terms) that “a tiger is a tiger,” on the other. Will tigers reintroduced in Meihuashan survive and reproduce in the wild? Will their offspring disperse along mountain corridors to habitats outside the reserve? Will dispersing tigers reestablish a viable population along the length and breadth of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range and across the mountains of southern China? The answers lie decades ahead, but there is strong political will and a growing ideological momentum for tiger restoration. An essay written by the eleven-year-old daughter of the captive tiger management program director in Meihuashan and published in the Minxi Daily on April 3, 1999, describes the return of tigers in language that seems to answer back across the decades with a soft but unwavering response to the fierce rhetoric of the tiger-killing campaigns of the 1950s: I’ve lived in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve Headquarters [almost] twelve years, and I’m familiar with everything around here, but the day they brought three South China tigers from Suzhou was the most exciting day of all. It was a bright and beautiful day. I got out of school and headed home, and before I was through the garden gate, my mom told me that the tigers had been brought in. I couldn’t suppress a gleeful shout; my heart was already flying to the tiger enclosure and I couldn’t stand to wait around, so off I dashed. When I got to the enclosure, I saw three tigers locked in separate cages. Seeing so many strangers, they looked really vexed; they kept circling round

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and round, two had scuffed their hindquarters and were soaked with blood. It was truly pitiful.

The essay goes on to describe two subsequent visits, relating how the tigers adapted to their new surroundings and learned to kill live chickens dropped into their cages by the keepers. The keeper (tiger-raising uncle) explains how his charges gradually will regain their “wild nature” as they are subsequently released into larger and larger enclosures and learn to kill larger animals. Once they learn to fend for themselves, he says, they will be returned to the wild. The essay closes with a gentle but stirring call to action: “The tiger-raising uncle also told me that the South China tiger is extremely rare in China. If we do not save it as quickly as possible, it could become extinct. As I left the tiger enclosure, the tiger-raising uncle’s words were still echoing in my ears.” 44

Part II The Tiger and the Pangolin

An Environmental History of the Plumflower Mountains

4

The Wealth of Mountains Settlement, Subsistence, and Population Change in Meihuashan before 1949

The Ting, the Nine Dragons, and the Min River, The headwaters of the three rivers lie here. Tingzhou, Zhangzhou, and Fuzhou Prefecture, The wealth of the three prefectures arises here. — Qing dynasty verse describing Meihuashan

The Meihuashan Nature Reserve, where tigers soon may be reintroduced to the wild, is also home to more than three thousand people in more than two dozen villages, and most of these communities are between four hundred and seven hundred years old. Villagers’ attitudes toward nature conservation in Meihuashan have developed, in part, from the region’s distinctive historical patterns of resource utilization, socioeconomic change, and landscape transformation. These phenomena are best reconstructed at the village level, and a composite view of the historical human ecology of Meihuashan, fascinating in its own right for what it reveals about local cultural identity, can also provide a broader and deeper perspective on the nature conservation issues that have recently come to define the area. If the Plumflower Mountains are to regain their “wild nature,” it will not be without the long-term cooperation, or at least compliance, of the Hakka villagers who have long called the area home. The Meihuashan Reserve was established in 1985, with a mandate to protect the South China tiger, a subspecies then believed to have fewer than forty individuals surviving in the wild, and today believed to number fewer than ten. The region also supports populations of leopards, clouded leopards, golden cats, Asiatic black bears, and Asiatic dholes (or red dogs). These animals require large areas of relatively undisturbed habitat and, with the exception of the black bear, an adequate prey base of ungulates and smaller mammals. But human pressure on these species

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exists even inside the nature reserve. The 221.75-square-kilometer (85.6sq.-mi.) Meihuashan Reserve provides natural resources for more than thirty-five hundred people, more than three thousand of whom live in twenty-five villages situated entirely inside the reserve’s boundaries.1 The government has complete jurisdiction over roughly 23 percent of the reserve, mostly in the 59.6-square-kilometer (23-sq.-mi.) core area, where economic activities are forbidden (fig. 10). The buffer zone (known as the “experimental zone,” shiyanqu), which comprises 162 square kilometers (62 sq. mi.), or 73.1 percent of the total reserve area, has been formally divided into land use zones, including protected subareas (baohu xiaoqu, 86.5 km 2, or 33 sq. mi.), scientific experimental subareas (keyanqu, 6.6 km 2, or 2.5 sq. mi.) (not yet demarcated), and (economic) land use areas (liyongqu, 68.9 km 2, or 26.6 sq. mi.). Hakkas arrived in Meihuashan between five hundred and seven hundred years ago, settling in the flats and hollows of narrow valleys at elevations between 700 and 1,300 meters (2,300 and 4,265 ft.), building terraces for rice cultivation, and exploiting the abundant forest resources. All the extant reserve villages have had single-surname, patrilocal lineages through the twenty to thirty generations since their establishment (though many villages have been settled by different lineages at different times). The insularity of these settlements within the rugged Daimao Mountains has maintained local dialects and traditions, and the people of Meihuashan are culturally distinct from non-Hakkas in villages and towns of the Longyan municipality, to the east. 2 The economic mainstay of Meihuashan has for centuries been the indigenous giant bamboo, known as mao (fur bamboo, also known as brush bamboo; Phyllostachys pubescens), and until the 1980s, the region was renowned for the quality of its bamboo paper, which was exported through Guangdong Province to markets in Southeast Asia as early as the mid-1700s. Since the 1980s, villages with access to mountain roads have sold unfinished poles for use as scaffolding in urban construction. Today, a typical Meihuashan village is surrounded by a patchwork of family-managed dooryard vegetable gardens and rice paddies, a series of sacred forests in and around the village proper, family-managed bamboo forests, remote rice paddies, and collectively owned forest lands (fig. 11). Nearly all the villages in Meihuashan, and many villages in the Southeast Uplands as a whole, developed at or near the heads of small, high valleys, where streams converge to provide a steady supply of water for

Figure 10. Meihuashan Nature Reserve. The twenty-five natural villages in the reserve are clustered mainly in the south and east, at elevations lower than the mountainous west and where suitable agricultural land is abundant. Most of the mountains higher than 1,300 meters (4,265 ft.) are in the central and western parts of the reserve, which have been designated as the core area.

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paddy irrigation. Sacred fengshui forests are of two general types, broadleaf forests along the valley slopes and village center, and groves of ancient, towering Cryptomeria, purported to have been planted by the first ancestors, most commonly where streams flow into or out of the village. This prototype of village settlement exemplifies a regional pattern of ecological adaptation that follows the guidelines of fengshui and the hydrological demands of wet-rice agriculture. As a common pattern of village land use, this configuration is found within a highly complex matrix of montane forests, scrub, and grasslands, which led me to conduct field research addressing the following four questions: How have local people, as bearers of particular cultural traditions, perceived and shaped the structure and function of habitat configurations and patterns of biological diversity through time? How have subsistence and mercantile resource use, in tandem with ideological forces, shaped local land use patterns within the larger political economic trajectory of late-imperial, prerevolutionary, and Socialist China? Does the present configuration of vegetation patches help maintain mammalian biodiversity, and if so, how? And how does the present system of nature reserve management articulate with the contemporary suite of local land use conditions and environmental values? The relationship between population density, natural resource consumption, and infrastructural development is critically important in a nature reserve where local people depend on agriculture and forestry for a living. In Meihuashan, the populations of the twenty-five natural villages have fluctuated dramatically through the centuries in response to prevailing subsistence, socioeconomic, and political conditions. Each village has been shaped by internal (village and intervillage) social and ecological forces, and by external (national, regional, and microregional) political and economic forces. Though this may seem axiomatic, it is important; lineage relations within and between villages are often the “push and pull” factors leading to migration. With fengshui as a primary means of regulating land and lineage relations, endogenous forces can appear more idiosyncratic and are more difficult to predict than phenomena more tangibly linked to larger historical patterns. In short, villages have their own histories. 3 With this caveat in mind, it is safe to say that there also has been a high degree of correspondence between periods of immigration, economic prosperity, and peace (at least locally) on the one hand, and emigration, economic decline, and political and social

Figure 11. Village land use in Meihuashan. Typical land use and cover patterns (from the village center outward) consist of a dense cluster of houses, temples, and other buildings; rice paddies and vegetable gardens (the latter not shown); old-growth broadleaf and Chinese cedar fengshui forests; householdmanaged bamboo forests; and collectively managed forest, scrub, and grassland.

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turmoil on the other. Starvation, economic decline, attacks by marauding bandits and soldiers, and combinations of these factors have resulted in decreases in village populations at least twice in the twentieth century. Large population swings have led to dramatic variation in the amount of pressure on natural resources. By linking episodes of population fluctuation to specific historical events and processes, we can gain an understanding of some of the primary forces behind anthropogenic ecological changes in the nature reserve and throughout the Southeast Uplands. We can also gain insight into the relationship between external political forces and agencies represented in the title by the “tiger,” and internal adaptations made by local people whose collective capacity to adapt to the montane environment and to state directives may find its best metaphor in the oft-harried but ever-enduring pangolin. Ethnolinguistic Diversity in the Meihuashan Region

The Qing dynasty verse in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter alludes to the fact that Meihuashan encompasses the headwaters of the Nine Dragons River ( Jiulongjiang), and major tributaries of the Ting River (Tingjiang) and Min River (Minjiang). The high peaks of Meihuashan (Gouzinao, 1,811 m, Miaojinshan, 1,735 m, and Youpoji, 1,777 m) form a triple divide, with streams flowing north to the Shaxi (Sand River) and then into the Min River, east into the Nine Dragons River, and southwest into the Ting River drainage system, a part of the Han River (Han Jiang) drainage, which flows into the South China Sea near Shantou (in Guangdong). The mountains of the Daimaoshan Range also form an ethnolinguistic barrier within the western Min region. This region has two major dialects ( fangyan): the southern Min dialect (or interior-southern Min), spoken in the Longyan municipality and Zhangping County, and the western Min Hakka dialect, spoken throughout the other five counties in Longyan Prefecture. Because of diverse migration streams, long-term insular village settlement, and the difficulties of travel within the western Min Hakka dialect region, there are twenty mutually unintelligible subdialects (hua) of western Min Hakka, and these are divided into fortythree regional accent sections ( fangyinpian), with 1,792,000 local speakers as of 1985. Despite such a high degree of linguistic diversity, all western Min Hakka trace their ancestry back through the “gateway” of Ninghua County, just north of Changting, before later settlement in

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Tingzhou Prefecture (which included what are now the five counties of Changting, Liancheng, Yongding, Shanghang, and Wuping). Today, the Changting subdialect is held as the standard representative of the western Min Hakka dialect as a whole. 4 The Meihuashan Nature Reserve lies within the Hakka-speaking culture region, and residents of all the surrounding townships speak the western Min Hakka dialect (even those in the neighboring Longyan municipality to the east). The Meihuashan high mountain region (encompassing the nature reserve and surrounding townships) is a fracture zone between the Gujiao subdialect (Gutian accent) to the south, the Wenxiang subdialect (Luxi accent) to the northwest, the Wanan subdialect to the northeast, and the Shuangche subdialect to the southeast. Though categorizing the reserve villages by subdialect is difficult, and all residents of the reserve share mutually intelligible speech, speakers from different villages can be distinguished from one another according to accent, grammar, or lexicon. Linguistic relationships in Meihuashan are complicated by the fact that villages sharing common surnames, and migration histories are spread across the reserve and are interspersed with other villages of quite different origins. Resident family surnames from the five study villages of Gonghe, Guizhuping, Majiaping, Taipingliao, and Longgui (see fig. 10) are Ma, Guan, Luo, Luo, and Luo, respectively. The other natural villages depicted on figure 10, and their family surnames, are (1) Mawu, surname Ma; (2) Jiaotan, surname Lin; (3) Wulang, surname Wu; (4) Daxie (abandoned), surname Guan; (5) Dapingshan, surname Guan; (6) Zhongxing (Zhongcun), surname Guan; (7) Qiushan, surname Guan; (8) Guanfuban, surname Ma, and Luo (across river); (9) Chenyikeng (Chenerkeng), surname Chen; (10) Dagaoxie, surname Li; (11) Qingcaoyuan, surname Chi; (12) Xiebei, surname Chi; (13) Chijiashan, surname Chi; (14) Xiaogaoxie, surname Chen; (15) Beikeng, surname Wen; (16) Huameng, surname Yang; (17) Dutou, surname Huang; (18) Baijinshan, surname Luo; (19) Baishuizhai, surname Yi; (20) Daguan, surname Luo; and (21) Mengjue ( Wuku), surname Luo. Village Administrative Status and Settlement Histories

The regional administration system of China encompasses two types of villages (cun): natural villages (zirancun) and administrative villages (xingzhengcun). The five study villages in this research (Gonghe, Guizhuping,

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Majiaping, Taipingliao, and Longgui) are natural villages, meaning they are more or less discrete settlement units. For administrative purposes, they have been grouped with other villages within four administrative villages. An administrative village consists of two or more natural villages; for instance, the natural villages of Guizhuping and Gonghe together comprise one administrative village known as Guihe (a name derived from characters in the names of the two natural villages). Several administrative villages comprise a township (xiang or zhen). The administrative system in Meihuashan is complicated by the fact that the reserve straddles two counties (Shanghang and Liancheng) and one municipality (Longyan). Furthermore, the twenty-five natural villages of the reserve are grouped within nineteen administrative villages, in seven townships. Before 1936, Meihuashan was an administrative area (qu) called Changtiequ, which lay within Changting County (formerly Tingzhou Prefecture). The area was later divided into smaller administrative areas, and these became communes in 1957. In 1981, the communes were dissolved, largely replaced by townships, which, in Meihuashan, continued to manage the same areas. Given the complexities of the administrative system, it is more instructive for cultural historical research to focus on the natural village as a settlement unit rather than on the administrative village. This is because the natural villages have a much higher degree of historical homogeneity and structural integrity than the administrative villages (especially since the latter are often groups of natural villages with different lineages, settlement histories, and traditions). Meihuashan’s natural villages typically are composed of discrete clusters of houses and other buildings nestled in high, narrow valleys (Gonghe, Guizhuping, and Majiaping), clumped on high promontories (Longgui), or arrayed along sloping mountainsides following small streams (Taipingliao). Their structure could best be described as compact, though a few riverside settlements in the reserve are elongated or linear villages. Dispersed villages were observed only in Tongxian and Guanzhuang townships in Shanghang County and in the Wuyishan Nature Reserve. All the natural villages in Meihuashan and most of those in the surrounding highland areas are composed of single-surname lineages, which are further subdivided into descent groups with residences that exhibit some degree of within-village residential clustering. The structural features of the study villages— single lineage (with multiple descent groups), natural (as opposed to administrative), nucleated, compact, interspersed with vegetable and rice crops, and surrounded by rice

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paddies and managed forests— made them useful settlement units for analysis and comparison. The reserve area can be divided into four traditional hinterland tributaries to four or five different market towns, with which there has long been a reciprocal relationship of mountain-valley trade. Villages in Buyun township (Shanghang County), in the southern part of the reserve, trade in the periodic market in Gutian, which occurs on every day in the lunar calendar with a date containing the number 4 or 9 (4, 9, 14, 19, etc.). Villagers in Gonghe recall making the trip down to Gutian on foot (a distance of about 16–18 km, or 10–11 miles, by trail) loaded with trade goods in four to five hours, and returning late at night. In the northwest, villagers of Zhongping and Majiaping have traditionally traded in the town of Miaoqian (west of the reserve in Liancheng County), though Majiaping people now also buy and sell products in the coal-mining center of Jiangxie village, which is 7.5 kilometers (4.6 mi.) distant and on the way to Miaoqian. People from Longyan villages (Chenyikeng, Dagaoxie, Qingcaoyan, Xiaogaoxie, Beikeng, and Dutou), along with residents from Liancheng County villages (Chijiashan and Xiebei), trade in Wanan township (in Longyan municipality) or in Meicun village, northeast of the reserve. Those who live in villages in the northern part of the reserve (Taipingliao, Baijinshan, Daguan, and Wuku) use the market in Luxi, northwest of the reserve (in Liancheng County). All five of the study villages are between five hundred and seven hundred years old, with an average age of 610 years. Like most villages in the area, they were settled by Hakkas during the southern Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties, and most of the people of Meihuashan trace their lineages back to Ninghua County (in Sanming municipality, north of Longyan Prefecture), an important stepping-stone in the Hakka diaspora. Ma, Luo, and Guan are all common surnames in the area, and many villages whose members share surnames share ancestral origins, too, as shown in ancestral records. Some villages were settled by families or groups other than those present today, meaning that the number of generations of a lineage that have resided in a particular village today does not always reflect the age of the village. Several villages also probably belonged to the She before Hakka gained control of the area, as suggested by the history of Majiaping. Although many detailed records of village history were lost during periods of turmoil between 1911 and 1976, some ancestral records (zupu) were carefully protected and even secretly preserved through the Cultural Revolution (as in Gonghe). These records

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document the names, dates of arrival, and numbers of early settlers.5 Even in villages where ancestral records were destroyed, certain middleaged or elderly people know their village history well, having become familiar with the genealogies and village oral histories before the subject was forbidden in the 1960s. In some villages, these data can be corroborated with historical records at the county and township levels. The settlement history and present conditions within each of the five study villages are described below. The greatest historical detail is provided for Gonghe, where I had access to ancestral records. This written record provides a brief but fairly detailed glimpse of the historical migration patterns that lie behind Hakka village settlement in Meihuashan as a whole. 6 Gonghe

Gonghe (Common Peace, or Republic) village, is an enclave of the Ma family. The village has developed on a narrow alluvial terrace in the bottom of a high, narrow valley running north-northwest to southsoutheast. The plain is less than 500 meters (.3 mi.) wide and lies at an elevation of about 1,200 meters (4,265 ft.). Houses, temples, gardens, mushroom sheds (built since 1998 for commercial production), and some of the village rice paddies are clustered along both sides of a small stream, a tributary of the Malinxi River (itself a tributary of the Nine Dragon River, Jiulongjiang). On a low hill in the eastern part of the village is a forest that is crescent shaped when viewed from above. This is the fengshuilin ( fengshui forest), which protects the main ancestral temple. A high ridge to the southwest runs parallel with the valley; its steep flanks are covered with bamboo forests, and its saddles hold groves of towering Cryptomeria trees. These, too, are fengshui forests. Up the valley, about a kilometer away, is the village of Guizhuping. Down the valley a couple of kilometers is the village of Liling, which is outside the nature reserve. Although the Ma family ancestral record traces the forebears back to several prestigious military leaders in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, during the later Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms era (a.d. 25–280), the record of their southward journey is unclear until about four centuries later. Like many other Hakka, the Mas were in Fujian by the Tang dynasty (a.d. 618–907), when the brothers Ma Falong and Ma Fawang settled in Zhuangyuanfeng village, in Ninghua County. Ma Falong sired nine sons, some (or all) of whom moved to Majiawei village, in Liancheng County, before the end of the Tang. In the Song dynasty, some (or per-

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haps all) of Falong’s descendants moved to Sibaomawu (now known as Sibao), in the northwest corner of Liancheng County, where today there is an ancestral temple that descendants return to each year at Qingming (what Westerners call “Grave-Sweeping Day”) to offer prayers. One of Falong’s grandsons produced nine sons, one of whom, Ma Zhiyuan, moved from Sibao to Lingfang village during the last years of the Yuan dynasty (ca. 1368). Zhiyuan’s descendants occupied several villages in the Meihuashan area before settling in Gonghe. These were, in order: Luxi, Mawu, Tieshanluodi, Majiaping, Zhongmenqi (no longer extant), and Guizhuping. In the course of field research, I visited all these villages. Only Mawu is today inhabited by Mas, and from what is known of the history of other villages in Meihuashan, it appears that the Ma family may have coexisted with other families in at least some of these villages before moving on en masse or in segments. The first Ma ancestor to settle in Gonghe was Ma Wangfu, who arrived during the Ming dynasty, in about 1444. On arriving in Gonghe from neighboring Guizhuping, the Mas built an earth-walled house (tulou) or fortress (baoweizhai) on a hill called Longjianzhai (1,247 m), just southeast of the village. Like the tulou in Yongding, Nanjing, and other areas of Minxi that remain today, this was a defensive structure. Soon, however, they found that the wind was too strong on the hilltop. Because this was not good fengshui, the villagers moved down to Fufengtang, where the main ancestral temple is today. 7 The fengshui of that location was good, and soon there were many male offspring. As the main informant on village settlement history stated while interpreting the ancestral record, “Fengshui is serious; you can’t live long as a village if it’s bad. There are only certain places [in the landscape] where you can live” (for comparison, see notes on Majiaping below). The danger of attack by bandits or even marauding soldiers was another problem for villagers in Gonghe, as it was throughout Meihuashan and in other remote mountainous areas of the Southeast Uplands. At times, the villagers had to take dramatic precautionary measures to survive such depredation. In the late Ming dynasty, during the Hongxiu reign, troops under general Hai Kou launched attacks in the area (for unspecified reasons). Once again, the villagers retreated to fortified earth-walled houses built on hilltops around the village. After twentytwo generations, some 550 years since its founding, the population of Gonghe is about 232.

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Other Study Villages (Guizhuping, Majiaping, Taipingliao, and Longgui)

Guizhuping (Cassia Bamboo Flats) has been occupied by the Guan family for twenty-two generations. Though the village is at the head of the same valley as its neighbor, Gonghe, it is only 10 meters (33 ft.) higher in elevation (1,210 m, or 3,970 ft.), and it lies along a different tributary of the Malinxi. As a result of stream capture, both villages are now situated at the headwaters of southeast-flowing streams, and today only an irrigation ditch shunts water from the upper village to the lower. The village is similar to Gonghe in many respects, and given the close proximity and strong physical similarities between the two, locals are as likely to refer to “Guihe” (the administrative village encompassing both villages) as they are to “Gonghe” or “Guizhuping.” Guizhuping is nearly identical to Gonghe in areal size, occupying the highest alluvial plain in the valley large enough for a settlement. Its roughly forty-three families comprise a population of about 230. As in Gonghe, the twenty-five houses of the settlement are tucked into the narrow valley bottom and backed by steep mountains, which are covered in a green carpet of bamboo and sacred forests. Though Chinese cabbage crops, mushroom sheds, home gardens, and rice paddies surround the buildings in Guizhuping, the majority of Guihe’s rice paddies are on gentler slopes east of the valley, toward the villages of Mawu, Jiaotan, and Wulang. A couple of kilometers by cobblestone trail northwest of Guizhuping village, you pass through a pine-covered saddle at an elevation of roughly 1,600 meters (5,249 ft.). The spot marks a gap in the major drainage divide of Meihuashan, a place known locally as “fenshui ao” (divide water gap). Another kilometer through the dry, mountain pine forest brings you into Liancheng County, and after another couple of kilometers the trail descends along a rushing stream through dense broadleaf forests. About 10–12 kilometers (6–7.5 mi.) from the divide, along the old stone trail, lies the isolated village of Majiaping (Ma Family Flats). The village is at 770 meters (2,526 ft.), in a small alluvial basin where four swift streams converge and plunge through a steep gorge to the north to enter a tributary of the Tingjiang River. Mountains embrace the village on the south, east, and west, and only the north is open to a lower valley. These remote, rugged slopes contain the greatest expanse of broadleaf evergreen forest in the reserve, and when viewed from the high pass to the west, the village is a small clearing in a U-shaped valley, surrounded by billowing green mountains.

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Though the village received its name from the Ma lineage, who settled there for a time, probably six hundred to seven hundred years ago, it is now occupied by the Luo family, who settled in Majiaping eleven generations ago (they say roughly 260 years). The first people known to have lived in the village were She tribal people named Zhong. They lived by the stream in the western part of what is today’s settlement. After the Zhong family came Han families named Zai and Lou. The Ma family, ancestors of the Mas of Gonghe, came next, settling in the house that still marks the southeasternmost corner of the village. Majiaping is one of four natural villages with lands in the reserve that until the end of the 1990s still lacked access roads for transporting bamboo and other products to the outside. Two of the other three villages, Yanbei and Zhongping (which still lack roads), with Majiaping form the administrative village of Yanbei. Because the three natural villages are so remote and two lack even a “tractor road,” the Yanbei administrative village is the poorest of the twenty administrative villages in the reserve, with an official average annual income of 486 yuan ($58) in 1994. The village of Taipingliao is divided into an upper and a lower village, both inhabited by the Luo family. The village extends nearly a kilometer along the north bank of a mountain stream that descends west to east down a steep mountain slope from its source, at about 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.). Houses face down the valley to the east. The highest houses of the upper village, in the west, lie at an elevation of about 970 meters (3,200 ft.), and the lowest houses in the lower village, in the east, are at about 770 meters (2,500 ft.). The village is striking because of its conformity to the precipitous terrain, and to the large, primeval fengshui forest that separates the upper and lower residential areas (pl. 4). The main trail is a stone staircase, which winds up the steep slope, weaving in between the houses and drying platforms. The youngest of the roughly 220 inhabitants of Taipingliao represent the twentieth generation of Luos in situ. Though the village is more than seven hundred years old, having been established as Heyuan Lower Village during the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279, the Luo family settled there about 450 years ago. Who inhabited the village for the first two hundred years of its existence is unknown, but the word “liao” in the village name suggests they may have been She people. Longgui (Dragon Turtle) village is known in local dialect by its older name, Broken Caldron Hollow (in Mandarin, Podingkeng). The latter name is attributed to an accident of long ago, in which a person selling

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the three-legged cauldrons or sacrificial vessels known as ding slipped down a ravine in the village and broke some of his merchandise. The village is situated on a north-facing slope, with the highest row of houses on a platform at an elevation of 740 meters (2,400 ft.). A lower cluster of houses lies across a ravine at 700 meters (2,300 ft.). About five hundred years ago, the first Luos to settle the village were one couple with five children. Today, roughly one hundred people live in Longgui, making it one of the smallest natural villages in Meihuashan. Longgui is also the richest village as measured by annual per capita income, with an average of 1,761 yuan ($210) for the two natural villages of the Yunhui administrative village (Longgui and Qiushan) in 1994. This is 82.6 percent higher than the average income of all twenty administrative villages in Meihuashan (970 yuan, or $115), and 382 percent higher than that of the poorest villages, in the Yanbei administrative village. Longgui’s relative wealth is the result of its low population coupled with the large area of village lands devoted to legal timber harvesting through the mid-1990s, which was especially lucrative because of large quotas and logistical support from the nature reserve management. Qing Dynasty Socioeconomic Climax

From a historical perspective, the Meihuashan Nature Reserve’s current population is not high (2,718 in 1991). In 1994, the average population of the five study villages was 191, and aggregated with figures from seven other natural villages where this information was sought, the average village population was 180. In contrast, informants in ten of twelve villages stated that at one time in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), village populations were 50–1,000 percent greater than today. 8 By the late Ming, bamboo paper production and related industries were the economic mainstay of most villages in Meihuashan. When the paper trade reached its zenith, in the Qing, the population of Meihuashan was probably at or near its all-time high. Local economic growth probably attracted clan members and unrelated migrant laborers (such as the shed people) from other areas of Fujian, and villages grew by in-migration as well as by natural increase.9 Economic depression in the southeast coastal population cores would have provided a large pool of such itinerant laborers, while the simultaneous cycle of economic growth in the Lingnan region (southern Guangdong and Guangxi) provided a high demand for paper.10 Taking advantage of their location in the upper reaches of the Han River basin, the people of Meihuashan sold paper to

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traders based in the Guangdong Province entrepôt cities of Chaozhou (near Shantou), where the Han meets the South China Sea, and Guangzhou, the preeminent port in the region. Paper that was not used in China was exported to urban markets in Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of Southeast Asia. In this way, Meihuashan experienced a demographic inflorescence, while the densely populated urban areas in coastal Fujian experienced severe decline and out-migration. Popular examples of how Meihuashan communities burgeoned in the Qing are recounted by village elders and recorded in family genealogies. For example, in Taipingliao, more than one thousand inhabitants lived there during the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong periods (1661– 1722), and local legend holds that the village of Jiaotan, which had an official population of 111 in 1991, reached a peak of 999 people in the late nineteenth century. Not wanting to let the opportunity for demographic greatness slip away, the villagers of Jiaotan bought a person, who was kept in the village as the thousandth resident. A critical feature of the economic boom was that it did not signify the end of the subsistence economy; there is no indication that food demands were matched by food imports, and subsistence was still a major concern. Such conditions exemplify what Marks has called “commercialization without capitalism,” a characterization that would hold true for most mountain communities in many parts of the Southeast Uplands in the same period and even, to a certain extent, from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. 11 Assuming the population in the villages of today’s reserve area were five times greater during the mid-to-late Qing, overall population would have been roughly 13,600, and population density (12.2 people/km 2 in 1991) would have been 61 people per square kilometer. This would have caused much greater pressure on local subsistence systems, and ultimately on the natural environment. The lower yield per unit area of traditional breeds of rice could not sustain villagers through the year, even at population levels of the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, even without a precise figure for the population during the Qing, forestry-based commerce flourished and the demand for laborers drew a much larger population to Meihuashan than the local grain supply could sustain. The supply of rice was inadequate to feed such a large number of people, even though the area of rice paddy was much greater than it is today, and the roots of wild plants served to fill the gap in carbohydrate-rich staple foods. These subsistence challenges had dramatic and lasting effects on the landscape ecology of Meihuashan.

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Political, Military, and Economic Factors in the Population Decline of the Early Twentieth Century

Because village populations in Meihuashan, as “low” as they are today, have been increasing since 1949 (with one setback resulting from nationwide famine in the early 1960s), some intriguing historical questions come to mind. How could a flourishing society of mountain communities collapse in the late Qing or early Republican period and fail to fully recover within a century? When did demographic and socioeconomic conditions reach their nadir and at what level of population? What were the effects of such depopulation on the landscape? And, projecting into the future, is the peak population density described above likely to recur? As to the first two questions, it is clear that throughout the twentieth century, there has been a direct relationship between political, military, and economic disruption at national and regional scales, and demographic and socioeconomic conditions in Meihuashan villages. Village histories of Taipingliao and Longgui provide abundant evidence of this relationship and illustrate the catastrophic local ramifications of the political and social chaos that swept China in the first half of the twentieth century. In Taipingliao, population growth was spurred by the development of the village’s bamboo paper industry during the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1661–1722). Like many other villages in the region, Taipingliao capitalized on the growth of an extensive foreign trade network, which included the transport of paper from the Minxi region to other parts of China, especially Guangdong, and from that province to overseas markets in Southeast Asia. The village developed its own paper workshops (zhichang), porters carried the merchandise out to local market towns (Luxi and Meicun), and the local economy grew. With the development of a more vibrant cash economy came an increase in the division of labor and a diversification of commercial industries. Like the large villages and small towns in the low valleys outside the reserve today, Taipingliao was large enough to support several producers and vendors of locally consumed goods, such as tofu, rice wine, and peanuts. The population, which peaked at more than one thousand, crashed at the very end of the Qing dynasty and the beginning of the Republican period—from 1910 to 1915 (the exact population just before the decline was not determined). By 1920, the population was down to about one hundred people, and by 1949, it was just over seventy. Whether the decline began earlier and was actually less rapid is unknown, but villagers say the causes were manifold and included emigration, a higher death

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rate, and an increase in the selling of women and children to other villages, problems that were all connected to a rise in opium addiction, the protracted civil war of the twentieth century, and long-term social upheaval. In Taipingliao, as in Gonghe, Majiaping, and other villages where the subject was discussed, opium was widely used in the villages until about the 1920s, when it became unavailable because of government control. In Taipingliao, opium is said to have caused serious social problems associated with addiction, including the early death of addicts, the selling of wives and children to support the habit, and, it may be inferred, an increase in violence associated with the activities of opium dealers and other outlaws (tufei), the latter of which were numerous in Meihuashan during this period. 12 Though social dislocation may already have hindered economic sustainability in the villages of Meihuashan by the late Qing, the most serious threats to survival came when China’s civil war spread into the Minxi region. All the villages of Meihuashan were forced to align either with CCP insurgents or Nationalist Party (Guomindang) forces, and neither side could guarantee safety or security from attacks by the other, or from the depredations of local bandit gangs. During the first half of the century, the village of Pingshui (between Longgui and Chijiashan) was a bandits’ lair, and bandits (tufei) made frequent attacks on surrounding villages. In the 1920s, the village was wiped out by nationalist forces, and has never recovered; today, only the columns of a former official’s house remain. Taipingliao was under the control of the Guomindang but supported the communist guerrilla brigades (youjidui) led by the regionally famous martyr Luo Buyun and others, and was the scene of intense fighting until 1948, when the village was “liberated” by communist forces. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), stability returned, the population began to increase naturally, and Taipingliao was named a “key revolutionary village” (geming jidian cun). The civil war had dramatic effects on Longgui village as well, causing its near-annihilation and long-term evacuation. As a center for CCP guerrilla activity by the early 1930s, Longgui provided foot soldiers and spies for the communist cause. With the execution of Luo Buyun, in the mid-1930s, the guerrilla brigade disbanded until 1939, when a new leader was sent to Longgui. By then, ten Longgui residents (from a population of roughly sixty people) were guerrilla soldiers and others were spies, communication specialists, and propagandists. They served under two different leaders until 1944, when turncoats reported their activities to

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the Guomindang. About a hundred nationalist troops stationed in the nearby village of Shangche attacked Longgui, and all the residents fled. Faced with constant pursuit by the soldiers, the villagers were forced to set up temporary encampments above village paddy fields in the mountains between Longgui and Taipingliao. These “zhai” served as home (reminiscent of Gonghe during military attacks in the Ming), and villagers secretly tended their crops to survive. After the turncoats revealed the encampment to the Guomindang, soldiers attacked it, killing two people and capturing four (who later were tortured and killed). With no means of subsistence and under constant terror, the villagers dispersed to many separate villages in the region, and only one old couple remained, surviving as beggars. After the guerrilla brigade was routed, the village was virtually empty for three years, until 1947–1948, when the Red Army regained control of the region and villagers could safely return. By 1949, the population had rebounded to its previous level of more than sixty people. After the Communist victory in 1949, the villages of Meihuashan enjoyed a respite from war. Peace was gained, in part, through an unprecedented degree of government intervention in every aspect of daily life. It soon became evident that the absence of warfare did not ensure a lasting peace. For almost three decades, Meihuashan, and indeed all of China, were to endure a new variety and a new scale of authoritarian rule as villages both adopted and adapted to the tools and techniques of “permanent revolution” (yongyuan geming).

5

Three Rises, Two Falls Political Ecology and Socioeconomic Development in Meihuashan after 1949

In the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, the conditions of agricultural production are characterized by a lack of diversification. Aside from the commercial value of timber and bamboo exchanged each year in outside markets, production not only fails to meet commercial demands, but only partially meets the needs of daily life. Production is underdeveloped, production forces weak; to a large degree these are the characteristics of a self-sufficient, natural economy. — Comprehensive Research Editorial Team, 1991

The above description of conditions in Meihuashan in the early 1990s, though highly reductionist and narrowly focused on classical notions of development, encapsulates several salient features of the local economy and human ecology of the time, especially for people who lacked road access for transporting goods to and from outside markets. Several households were still without electricity, and only by the end of the decade had some villages begun to use electric power in the manufacture of bamboo finished products. There was, and still is, a high level of reliance on local natural resources to meet basic needs for food, shelter, medicine, and other subsistence requirements, with virtually all commercial activity centering on household bamboo production, limited village-based forestry, and small but growing systems of commercial agriculture. Though the low level of economic development places these among the poorest villages in Fujian, the past two decades have brought greater wealth to villagers than most ever expected, and local economic growth rates have been unprecedented. To understand the social and ecological significance of these changes, we can examine patterns of demographic and socioeconomic growth and decline over the past fifty years, guided as they have been by centrally inspired ideological move-

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ments, all of which have combined to shape village land use and local conceptions of “nature” and “economic development.” And though the population of Meihuashan may never again reach the levels of the Qing dynasty, rapid economic development in the past twenty years has changed village landscapes and livelihoods in dramatic, fundamental ways. With the new roads and new systems of energy production and use, not only are individual households and entire villages undergoing profound structural changes, but relationships between individuals, communities, and the natural environment are being redefined. Rapid economic development during the 1990s was facilitated by the construction of dirt roads and hydroelectric power stations, and by the end of the decade, increased access to telephones and television promised to bring ever greater social and cultural changes to the villages. Though road building and the construction of hydropower systems have helped integrate mountain communities with lowland market zones, without careful planning the ecological costs may outweigh the benefits. The unique cultural landscapes of Meihuashan may also suffer the effects of modernization. Architectural innovations reflect the local demand for the trappings and conveniences of modernity, and traditional house types and other distinctive features of the cultural landscape may soon become the exception rather than the rule. Despite these changes and their potential influences, the current era of capitalist development in China has taken place on socialist foundations, and the villages of Meihuashan exhibit resource utilization and land tenure patterns unique in the world and to this period of Chinese history. Socioeconomic conditions, cultural landscapes, and patterns of natural resource management have been profoundly influenced by a half-century of Chinese Communist Party rule, and the legacies of Mao and Deng are visible in the landscape ecology and nature conservation practices found in Meihuashan today. Demographic and Socioeconomic Change Since 1949: Effects of Communist Land Tenure and Resource Management Systems

Since 1949, Meihuashan villages have undergone alternating periods of socioeconomic development and decline. These cycles have closely paralleled the course of nationwide socioeconomic development and the political movements and programs that gave rise to them. Still, there have been important local exceptions within the Minxi region as a whole and within the villages of Meihuashan collectively and individually. The oscillating pattern of changes in living conditions in the reserve (and

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presumably those of China as a whole) have been described as “three rises, two falls” (san qi er luo). 1 The first period of resurgence after the long period of wartime poverty occurred from 1949 to 1958. This was far from a peaceful transition to “normalization,” however, even in the exceptional case of the Minxi region. In the PRC of the early 1950s, land reform and the creation of a classless society were viewed as fundamental for national development. In rural areas, these goals were expressed in the well-known slogan, “Overthrow local despots and redistribute the land” (Dadao tuhao fen tudi). In parts of the Minxi region, like Meihuashan, however, land reform (tudi gaige, or simply tugai) was first carried out without violent class-leveling (pingjieji) actions. This was because of the relative success of the reform movement in Minxi before 1949, and the powerful influence of the mastermind behind it, a man from Jiaoyang township (Shanghang County) named Fu Baicui. Fu, who was a lawyer and social reformer, initiated local and regional land reform in Jiaoyang and Gutian townships, in Shanghang County, during the 1920s–1930s. In September 1950, when the “land revolution movement” (tudi geming yundong) began in Shanghang County, Jiaoyang and Gutian (and part of Baisha) townships did not have to participate (having already achieved some degree of land reform under the leadership of Fu Baicui), and still other townships in the Minxi region were allowed to divide the land without undergoing “class leveling”— the redistribution of other forms of wealth, such as houses and personal possessions. 2 Land reform was not enacted in Meihuashan until 1952. A resident of Gonghe recalls county officials entering the village that year and determining that two families qualified as landlords (dizhu) and three qualified as rich peasants ( funong). In the villages of Meihuashan, as in many other small settlements of the uplands, class distinctions were not always evident from the amount of land owned. Nearly all privately owned land with some degree of economic value consisted of rice paddies and bamboo forests. These were held by families on the basis of land deeds (tudizheng). Other forest and grassland areas were communally held by the villagers, with open access for fuel-wood gathering, cattle grazing, the taking of wildlife, and the gathering of wild plants and other resources. Fengshui forests were communally owned and protected, and resource use within them was restricted to varying degrees. In some villages, like Gonghe, rice paddy and bamboo forest lands, while not evenly distributed, were not predominantly in the hands of the wealthier villagers.

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These villagers owned more land than many others, but only slightly more. Before 1949, each natural village had a committee of elders, composed of representatives of each household or extended family. These representatives were known as fangzhang (household elder or chief ). Some families had more than one fangzhang, depending on the relationships between different segments of the family and their land tenure status. In Gonghe, about eight fangzhang participated in land use conflict resolution ( jiufen tiaojie) and other important decisions. The representatives generally came from middle-income and rich families, which in Gonghe constituted most of the population, since there were nine paper workshops (many similar-size villages had just one or two workshops). In 1952, the rich peasants and landlords in Gonghe were distinguished from middle peasants (zhongnong) and poor peasants (pinnong) mostly by their material wealth and control of the work force. Landlords were defined as those who did not have to work. They hired year-round laborers to work in their fields and their households. The landlords were moneylenders, who, in many instances, owned or controlled a large portion of the village papermaking industry. Rich peasants, on the other hand, were defined as those who worked but who also hired laborers and loaned money to other villagers on a regular basis. Middle peasants owned land and were self-sufficient. They did not hire other laborers. Poor peasants had no land and worked for others, often under various sharecropping arrangements. In Meihuashan, class differentiation and land tenure systems varied markedly from village to village. In Gonghe, the two families classed as landlords and three families classed as rich peasants (in a village of twenty-seven families) earned about 40 percent of the village’s income. Guizhuping did not have any landlords, but it did have three families of rich peasants, whose landholdings were comparable to those of the other villagers. One landlord in Longgui owned 40–60 percent of the productive land. In Majiaping, one landlord owned all the productive village land and six of nine local paper workshops.3 Taipingliao had one landlord (the same person as in Longgui), but he did not own much land. In that village, many people rented and owned land, and a village rule stated that large amounts of land could not be amassed by one person or one family. During the land reform campaign, lands belonging to landlords and rich peasants were divided among the middle and poor peasants. Middle

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peasants were allowed to keep their old land deeds, and new deeds were drafted for the poor, rich, and landlord classes. The goal was to provide each family in the village with equal amounts of bamboo forest and paddy land or, given significant differences in soil fertility and site conditions, equivalent amounts in productivity. This was deemed more or less successful. Rich peasants and landlords still hired some extra labor but not as much as before, exploitation was significantly reduced, and the village environment was safer and more stable. The relatively peaceful nature of post-1949 reforms in Meihuashan had changed dramatically by 1955, when Minxi officials implemented the “Democratic Revolutionary Reeducation (or Remediation)” (Minzhu Geming Buke) movement. CCP officials decided that certain areas in Minxi (especially those that had been under the command of Fu Baicui) had not been thoroughly revolutionized according to class distinctions and political affiliations. The geming buke movement was intended to complete the work of identifying and reforming enemies of the people. Besides isolating landlords and rich peasants, officials also targeted “counter-revolutionaries, traders, and bad elements.” By 1953, the heads of the two families in Gonghe labeled “landlords” had been executed (one for his alleged association with bandits in Luodi, the other for reasons undetermined). The Remediation movement in the village focused mainly on the confiscation of houses, gold, cattle, and other possessions of rich peasant and landlord families, and the redistribution of them to other villagers or to the government. A landlord’s son in Gonghe recalls that landlords’ houses were little different from most of the others. After his father’s execution, however, the family was forced to move into a house that was filthy and dilapidated. The movement is seen by villagers in retrospect as having been unnecessarily harsh, especially since it involved the persecution of kin. With preliminary land reform efforts complete, and with firmer government control over the region, the mid-1950s was a period of relative stability. Government support for public health and education brought improved living conditions. Rice production and traditional commercial activities, such as papermaking, were resumed. Through the 1950s, the economy grew and the population increased. In 1957–1958, the collectivization ( jitihua) movement swept through China, and all the recently divided private paddy and bamboo forest lands in Meihuashan reverted to joint ownership by administrative villages, which were called collec-

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tives, or “production brigades” (shengchan dadui). A group of collectives formed a commune (gongshe), which was the equivalent of a present-day township. As members of these village collectives, villagers ceased to produce food and forest products for their own families, serving instead as laborers for the communes and collectives within smaller work units, called “production teams” (shengchandui), two to three of which absorbed the entire work force of one natural village. The first post-liberation disaster in the villages of Meihuashan resulted from the reckless policies of the Great Leap Forward (Dayuejin), in 1958. The nation was swept up in a political movement that aimed to make a rapid transition to industrialization and to a kind of communism in which the proletariat consisted of industrial workers. In Meihuashan, villagers were ordered to hand in their woks and other iron implements to local cadres for smelting in small blast furnaces in the valley towns. Luxi township (Liancheng County) had more than twenty such smelters. Agriculture was poorly managed, as villagers were put to work in the smelters, in lumberyards, on road-building teams, and on other large projects designed to spur rapid economic development through industrialization. This occurred throughout China, and from 1959 to 1961, several years of mismanaged collective agriculture and drought in northern China resulted in the well-known famine that has been deemed the worst in human history, resulting in untold suffering and thirty million deaths. 4 Each village responded to the crisis in its own fashion, adapting according to local ecological conditions and economic opportunities. Many people resorted to old subsistence practices, gathering wild plants, trapping, and hunting. Others, lacking access to forest resources, suffered more casualties. As a result, there was considerable variation among villages in the number of casualties during the famine and the several years afterward that it took to recover. In Longgui, Gonghe, and Majiaping, meager rations of watered-down rice gruel and rice bran or chaff (mikang) were supplemented with wild herbs and nuts, and wild game. People in Longgui ate chinkapin nuts (Castanopsis) gathered from the surrounding broadleaf evergreen forests, and herbaceous plants like “revolution spinach” (gemingcai). In Gonghe and many other villages, people returned to the ancient practice of digging up the rhizomes of bracken fern ( juecai; Pteridium aquilinum), which they pounded into a powder called shanfen (mountain starch, or mountain flour). This powder was made into balls

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and steamed, boiled, or fried like glutinous rice or bread. Villages outside the reserve in deforested areas, which lacked natural resources and wild foods, suffered the heaviest losses. In Beiyang administrative village, for example, which lies in a dry, deforested, piney area southeast of today’s reserve and had a population of a few thousand, people were forced to eat tree bark. In thousands of desolate villages, such as Beiyang, which lacked wild sources of food and economic opportunities, there were periods when a few people starved to death during the course of a day. In contrast, Majiaping village was not adversely affected by the famine at all; in fact, the villagers prospered and even benefited from the plight of others. During the Great Leap Forward, while other villages responded to official orders to grow rice collectively and provide laborers for industrial projects, the people of Majiaping were left alone or were unresponsive. Geographic remoteness from central authority, coupled with a tradition of independence, played a part in their choice to continue producing rice for their own families, a decision that allowed them to maintain normal levels of grain production during “the three bad years.” While other villages lost people to death and emigration, Majiaping thrived. As a result, children from other villages were sold to families in Majiaping, and young women were given in marriage to available men in the village in a last-resort effort to help them survive, or because they were viewed as a burden. The famine of 1960 –1961 decreased the population and slowed further population growth in Meihuashan for several years. In 1962, villages began to reinvigorate traditional agricultural and forest production, along with papermaking and other local industries. The population slowly began to increase, though many people died of malnutrition-related diseases contracted during the famine. But a second socioeconomic plunge came in 1966, with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The national movement to “take grain as the key link” (yiliang weigang) impelled county and regional officials to demand that peasants produce as much rice as possible. In tandem with national movements to “cut off the tail [or last vestiges] of capitalism” (pou zibenzhuyi weiba) and to cleanse China of all elements of the old society, widespread social chaos erupted. Red Guards and party leaders led a campaign of destruction focused on temples and religious icons. In the Southeast Uplands (and in most regions of rural China), centrally inspired attempts to reform Chinese society in toto spelled the end of all but the most basic economic activi-

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ties. In the villages of Meihuashan, which traditionally produced one crop of red rice a year, the movement forced a transition to two crops a year. With the colder water of high-elevation streams feeding the rice paddies, the increased expenditures of capital, and the relatively sparse labor force, commune leaders soon discovered that at elevations above about 750 meters (2,500 ft.), two crops a year was an unfeasible regimen, producing less grain than one well-managed crop. Only in the mid1970s were the villagers allowed to return to the more productive practice of growing one crop a year, and in early 1981, rice paddy and bamboo forest lands were once again distributed to families with incentives for better management. This was implemented under the national program known as the “household mutual production contract responsibility system” ( jiating lianchan chengbao zerenzhi). Since then the third “rise” has been marked by continuous economic and population growth. The first wave of economic growth in the post-reform period came with an explosive rise in timber values. Within one year, the price of a cubic meter of Chinese fir rose from 3–5 yuan ($.38–.63) to 45–50 yuan ($5.62–6.25). Suddenly, the rush was on to cut and sell Chinese fir as fast as possible. Meihuashan did not have any Chinese fir plantations, but very large Chinese fir trees grew there in family-managed bamboo forests, in remote parts of collectively owned old-growth broadleaf and mixed forests, and in a few fengshui groves planted long ago. With the exception of those few growing in fengshui forests, virtually all these large, ancient trees were removed and trucked out to Guangzhou and other coastal trade ports by the end of the decade. Several families grew relatively wealthy from the timber boom. A few in Gonghe and Longgui (among the only villages with roads) even bought trucks to haul bamboo to the coast, cutting out the middlemen altogether. New houses were built, and a new phase of capitalism was under way. As a result, very few large Chinese fir trees remain in Meihuashan, aside from those in the sacred forest in Lingbeixie village, where giants of the species have thrived under village protection for centuries. The 1980s and 1990s have seen a corresponding growth in population. Recent Population Trends

Population growth in Meihuashan after 1949 was slow at first, accelerating only after the Cultural Revolution. Not until the early 1970s did the population rise to the same levels as in the early 1950s. The relatively slow growth could not reverse an inexorable expansion, however. From

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1951 to 1994 (disaggregated data on natural villages’ populations in the 1960s–1970s are not available), the population of each of the five study villages had grown from between 47 percent (Longgui) and 250 percent (Majiaping), with an average growth of 144 percent. The population of all twenty-five natural villages in the reserve increased from about 1,400 in 1949 to 2,718 in 1986, an increase of 94 percent. This is in contrast to a 126 percent increase in population for the Longyan region as a whole. Though more recent population data for each of the natural villages were not available, village population figures were derived from the number of households in each village in 1994 (multiplied by an average of five people per household— the reserve’s official estimate in unpublished data collected from surveys). The estimated populations of 9,640 for the eighteen administrative villages and 3,120 for the twenty-five natural villages within the reserve should be viewed as rough approximations only. Derived from the 1994 estimates, the population densities were 25.6 people per square kilometer in the eighteen administrative villages, and 14.1 people per square kilometer in the reserve. By 2001, population in the reserve had not changed significantly, according to reserve records. 5 Because violations of the two-child policy were the norm in the 1990s rather than the exception,6 close scrutiny of village population figures by outsiders appears to be a source of uneasiness and an occasion for practiced dissemblance or genuine uncertainty. In the mid-1990s, many (if not most) married couples in Meihuashan appeared to have more children than the law permitted, and they were willing to pay fines for “extra” sons. In fact, it is not uncommon to encounter families with three boys or a total of four or five children. Unwanted newborn baby girls are left at the front gates of wealthier peasants’ houses or at the township government headquarters in the dark of night, giving the unwanted children at least a chance to survive in another family or in an orphanage. Though the ancient concept of “zhongnan qingnu” (to look highly on males and lightly on females) persists in the rural agrarian sector of society, girls may be regarded as good laborers (since women do all types of physical labor in the forests and in the home), and in the future, bride prices may be an increasing incentive for raising girls (in addition to less pecuniary motives, one hopes). In small patrilineal and patrilocal village societies as found in Meihuashan, however, the “zhongnan” syndrome is severe and may persist longer than in other parts of rural China. By 1995, the government of Longyan Prefecture, realizing that family planning had largely failed, stepped up its efforts to control the popu-

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lation. All women over age thirty who already had the legally sanctioned number of children were required by law to undergo tubal ligations. Violations of the law led to stricter punishment, including the destruction of family property, usually houses or furniture, carried out by the township or county family-planning committees. These punitive actions have led to increasing animosity among villagers toward government authorities. While I was conducting field research in Meihuashan in 1994–1995, a family-planning worker was murdered in retribution for his participation in smashing the roof of a violator’s house in Luodi village (a place with a history of outlaw violence). The severity of punitive measures and the bitterness of the conflicts between reproductive traditions and state authority do not presage an easy transition to a state of population stability in Meihuashan. Probably the only hope for stabilizing or decreasing population growth without continuing to resort to draconian measures lies in economic development, education, and the possibility of an approaching “demographic transition,” a process in which couples will choose to have fewer children, as the cost of raising children will outweigh the benefit of having more family laborers. Many young couples in Meihuashan are concerned about raising their annual incomes and are conscientious about providing for the needs of their children, and though there is a dearth of available data on village population structure, economic and educational development planning policies will be the most effective approach to population control. More critical than the absolute population density, however, is the population distribution across the land area of the reserve, and how residents use village lands to make a living. In fact, with a transition to a less land-dependent economy, the villages of Meihuashan may have a less severe effect on the landscape than today, even with moderate population increase. Still, population monitoring is no less critical for an understanding of the relationship between demography, land use, and environmental degradation. Equally important for the future of nature conservation in the reserve is the development of relations between its inhabitants and the outsiders who try to control their land use decisions and direct their political and economic conditions. Meihuashan villages have a long tradition of enlisting outside help when it is strategically important, while avoiding involvement with the outside when possible. This bimodal approach is part of a larger and more uniform strategy to maintain the de facto autonomy that

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mountain villages have long held. Land use patterns in Meihuashan have long reflected the fact that villagers must simultaneously produce subsistence crops in an environment where constraints on agriculture are significant, and extract forest products for commercial exchange. These ancient imperatives and their effects are still manifest and still developing in the Meihuashan landscape. Infrastructural Development and Changes in Income Since 1949

Since 1949 the villages of Meihuashan have been forced to adjust to waves of political and economic changes, events that have transformed all of China. But alterations in traditional political and trade relations within and among the mountain communities and between the villages and the “outside world” have also led to manifold changes in resource management practices, land use patterns, and local human influences on the environment. Beginning in the 1970s, a series of infrastructural modifications ushered in a new phase of development and brought a new visage to the mountain enclaves: the construction of winding dirt roads and narrow tractor paths; the advent of electricity via hydropower; innovation in architecture and the access to new building materials; the use of motorized vehicles, such as motorcycles and tractor-carts; and, in recent years, the arrival of television. These developments are occurring in an uneven fashion, but all the villages in Meihuashan are in the incipient phases of integration with outside markets and information systems. Today, the most vivid impression of village transformation during the past half-century comes from the mélange of house types. Village architecture in the Southeast Uplands reflects the economic and cultural changes that are transforming rural landscapes throughout China. In part because Meihuashan is located in a remote mountain area with poor access to construction supplies, it is a repository for traditional architecture; but many traditional architectural features, particularly those associated with timber frame construction, are being lost. This marks a significant change in the cultural landscape in villages throughout Meihuashan. Though the newcomer may perceive the cluster of houses and other buildings in a particular village as being ancient and apparently unchanged for centuries, three types of building materials represent three architectural periods. For the people of Meihuashan, these three house types represent three stages of economic progress and a rational response to the decreasing availability of once plentiful timber supplies.

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The oldest houses, built of broad, dark planks hand-hewn from huge Chinese fir trees that once were common in the mixed forests, represent the ancient past of the old society ( jiushehui). In Meihuashan, these simple, elegant structures are one-story, with rooms surrounding an open, sunken patio paved with granite stones at a depth of roughly 30 centimeters (1 ft.) below the plane of the floor. The open courtyard, known as the “skywell” (tianjing ), permits the entrance of natural light and fresh air into what would otherwise be a gloomy interior. Many houses may adjoin one another, creating a honeycomb of residences, with multiple families separated only by wooden walls and connected by hallways and patios, as in Majiaping (pl. 5). From the 1950s to the 1970s, a new type of house became popular— the earth-walled house. Rammed-earth (hangtu) houses in other parts of the Minxi region have become world famous, especially in Yongding and Nanjing counties, where many are round, multifamily fortresses (tulou), in some instances housing more than 150 occupants. In Meihuashan, the earth-walled houses are typically two-storied, rectangular, and house just one extended family. The walls are built by pounding a mixture of water, red clay, and sand into wooden wall frames about 40 centimeters (15 in.) wide. The frames are removed after the walls dry. The resulting earthen walls are thick enough to keep out winter cold and hold in cool air during the summer. For these reasons, and because of the extreme scarcity of large Chinese fir trees, villagers favor these houses to the older wooden ones, and have rapidly adopted them as replacements or additions to their original homes. In the mid-1980s, after the nationwide economic reforms, a third kind of house became popular— the brick house, or the further modified and flat-roofed brick, cement, iron, and tile house. During the past decade, this house type has become more common, but only the relatively affluent can afford the materials and specialized labor to build in the new style. Though many aspire to own such houses, earth-walled houses are still far more numerous. This may change in the coming decade, as more families find the means to purchase materials and pay for construction costs. As a rough indicator of village-level economic conditions and transportation constraints, examine the percentage of the various house types in particular Meihuashan communities. In Majiaping, which has no cement or brick houses, about three-quarters of the houses are earth-walled (or earth-walled and wood hybrids), and about onequarter are wooden. At the other end of the income spectrum is Long-

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gui, which by the mid-1990s had only one remaining wooden house, three mixed brick and earth-walled houses, and the rest (seventeen) earth walled. By 2002, several Longgui families even had built houses in the new style. Other structures in the villages include storage buildings; ancestral temples (citang); earth-god or Taoist-Buddhist temples (including temples built on bridges, qiaomiao) ( pl. 6); small shops selling basic necessities (sometimes these are located in a spare room inside a house); and schools (which may double as assembly halls). From a distance, stores, schools, and some temples may be difficult to distinguish from houses. Many are made of the same materials as surrounding houses. Ancestral temples and bridge temples, however, are the most striking components of the built environment, often distinguishable by elaborate woodwork, stone masonry, and stylistic features, which have, in many instances, survived the ban on religious activity that spanned from the early 1950s to the early 1980s. Some temples have been rebuilt, though it appears that few were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, when they were used for storage or for domiciles. Small, man-made ponds in front of the ancestral temples serve a fengshui purpose but also are used to cultivate duckweed and other aquatic plants for fodder, and sometimes fish as well. Large, wooden, covered bridges invariably house Buddhist and local Daoist icons and thus are “bridge-temples.” They are the loci of powerful fengshui, religious worship, transportation nodes, and shelter during severe weather. Earth-god shrines (tudimiao) are another important feature of the built environment. These small stone dolmens or simplified replicas of temples are rarely more that half a meter (20 in.) high, but they are commonly nested within a raised, circular or semicircular stone base of up to 5–6 meters (16–19 ft.) in diameter (pl. 7). The shrines are placed by trails at the entrances to the village, especially where a stream enters or leaves the village. They may also be found in the saddles of mountains above villages. The religious architecture and sacred forests associated with the shrines are an attractive and intriguing aspect of the Meihuashan village environment that deserves further study and careful conservation. Hydropower Because of the abundant rainfall and rugged terrain in Fujian, the province has been deemed one of the most promising areas in China for hydropower development. In Meihuashan and other parts of the Minxi

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region, the power of mountain streams has long been harnessed to propel waterwheels attached to streamside mills. The mills polish rice, pulverize bamboo for paper production, and powderize the wood, leaves, and roots of trees and herbs for making incense and other products. Meihuashan, with its abundant rainfall, favorable geomorphic conditions, and dense vegetation, has great potential for hydropower development. The reserve has an estimated 320,000 kilowatts (kW) of hydropower potential, which could be used to bolster village sideline industries, such as bamboo processing, and to decrease reliance on fuel wood, thereby decreasing deforestation. These possibilities must be carefully weighed against the potential ecological damage caused by small reservoirs, aqueducts, penstocks (cement channels and pipes that carry water down steep slopes to turbines), and the power stations themselves. Rapid development of energy resources has already taken place in Meihuashan, an area where villages began to install their own streamside hydropower generators only in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1991, there were nineteen such units, most of which produced only 5.5–10 kW, and the largest of which produced 40 kW. In the five study villages, Majiaping produced 5.5 kW, Longgui 5.5 kW, and Gonghe and Guizhuping 10 kW each (there are no 1991 data for Taipingliao, though today it receives power from outside stations). Of these five, the three natural villages of Buyun township (Gonghe, Guizhuping, and Longgui) soon went online with the newly constructed, 1,200 kW hydropower plant in Qiushan (Longgui’s partner village in the Yunhui administrative village). In the early 1990s, seven other small industrial hydropower stations were built in and around the Meihuashan Reserve, with funding from county and township governments and private sources. In 1995, Majiaping was the only village where I observed small-scale hydropower generators in use. In that year, there were three generators in the village, each producing about 2 kW, but only about two-thirds of the villagers in Majiaping had electricity in their homes. The generators cost about 2,000 yuan ($250) and were shared by a few families. Electricity was used almost exclusively for light bulbs; there were only three televisions in the village, with limited or no reception. Power generation in the village had changed little by 2001, even as three medium-size hydropower stations were built with reserve financial support in the villages of Jiaotan (1,200 kW), Fukeng (1,200 kW), and Daguan (10,000 kW). Two types of industrial hydroelectric production systems operate in

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Fujian: reservoirs with dams, and large penstocks. The latter are composed of cement channels that divert water to large pipes constructed on steep mountain slopes. Water rushes down the slope to turbines in a power station below. Four hydropower reservoirs are located near the Meihuashan Reserve; one of them was generating electricity in 1994, and the other three began operation in the late 1990s. At least two industrial penstock generating systems are located in the vicinity of the nature reserve, one in Shangfu (Buyun) and one in Qiushan. Though it appears little concern is expressed about the potential ecological damage caused by hydrogeneration, critical issues should be addressed, namely: how the water is used to produce energy, how the energy is used in the villages, and the implications of such usage for the protection of natural resources. The creation and maintenance of dams and reservoirs is usually the more destructive of the two methods of power generation. The construction of a reservoir at Dayang, within the southwest border of the reserve, is especially unfortunate from an ecological standpoint, because it was sited in wetlands along the middle reach of a mountain stream that descends from the heart of the core area of the reserve. The best montane wetland habitat is found in a large riparian headwater area a few kilometers upstream, at a place called Xiaoyang. The Xiaoyang wetland lies in a basin between the highest peaks (Gouzinao, Youpoji, and Miaojinshan) (pl. 8). The dam, which provides power for Gutian township, stands 45 meters (147 ft.) high and has flooded more than 20 hectares (49 acres) of wetland, pine, and broadleaf forests in the extreme southwestern part of the reserve’s core area (where the reserve boundary and the core area boundary coincide). In 1995, construction workers and managers at the dam site said that boar, muntjac, and other wildlife had been abundant in the area until 1992, when the project began. Forest clearance, dynamiting the land, and dam construction had scared the animals away. Reserve authorities contend that only the reservoir (and not the power station) lie within reserve boundaries, and that effects on wildlife are minimal. As recently as the mid-1980s, tigers were seen in the area and in nearby Dayuan village; some of the last tigers to be shot in Meihuashan were bagged in the early 1980s. In 1991, tree scratches made by a tiger were discovered near Dayuan as well, and Gary Koehler believed that the best tiger habitat in Meihuashan was in the southwest part of the reserve. For all these reasons, conservation goals for the area in question are incompatible with such a destructive dam project unless the quality of ungulate

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habitat can be restored. Reserve administrators and regional planners should explore ways to mitigate the damage, restoring and protecting watershed forests and grasslands as the project nears completion. Penstock systems for channeling water to fall pipes can be destructive too. In Qiushan, a waterfall has been created by overflow from a channel leading water to a power plant. The fall has caused serious slope erosion, and the reduced flow in the river below results in stagnation and eutrophication in the fall dry season. The massive pipes that descend the mountain slopes are a couple of meters in diameter and hundreds of meters long. Their visual effect, at least by current Western standards for “wilderness” areas, detracts from the beauty of the landscape. They may also be a barrier to the movement of wildlife. On the other side of the hydropower issue is the question of how energy is used in the villages today, and what benefits it is likely to bring in the future. In the mid-1990s, the majority of energy used in the villages of Meihuashan went to electric light bulbs (replacing kerosene lamps), with minor amounts used for the few fans, televisions, tape players, rice steamers, and other electric devices used in some village homes. By the end of the decade, at least one or two households in most villages had begun to use electricity for household manufacture of bamboo products. In the mid-1990s, industrial activities that added value to forest products, thereby increasing village income, were limited to a woodcarving factory in Gonghe, which provided few benefits to the majority of the villagers. Machine processing of bamboo, a prominent and prosperous activity in Wuyishan, had just begun in the Meihuashan Reserve in the late 1990s. The most energy-intensive household activity in Meihuashan is food preparation. Meat and vegetables are stir-fried in large woks, on rammedearth or brick ovens, which are heated with fuel wood collected from surrounding forests. Even more energy is required to cook rice — eaten at every meal— which is steamed in traditional bucket-shaped wooden steamers placed inside the woks. The large, wooden steamers are especially favored by large families, because much more rice can be cooked all at once in the traditional fashion. Though there was no shortage of bamboo and dead branches for fuelwood in the 1990s, much of the wood used for cooking came from trees illegally felled in the bamboo forests. The use of hydroelectric power in the reserve has been well-developed but has yet to reach its economic potential. Recent developments in bamboo processing constitute a major improvement in economic

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returns for energy use. Villagers still depend on fuel wood for their daily energy needs, though, and studies to assess the environmental effects of household fuel consumption are needed. Roads Paths and roads are a component of the cultural landscape in the Southeast Uplands that reflect ongoing cultural and historical change. Regardless of size, whether narrow mountain footpaths or paved highways, they are all called “roads” ( lu), which indicates the importance of the network of small trails that have served as transport routes throughout the South since ancient times. In general, the Southeast Uplands has four types of roads: (1) mountain footpaths (shanlu), which can be subdivided into trails paved with stones (stone roads, shilu) and unpaved mud paths (nilu); (2) narrow dirt “tractor roads” (tuolajilu), which support small, four-wheeled tractors, the most important vehicles for agricultural transport in China; (3) dirt roads wide enough for car or truck transport (simple roads, jianyi gonglu); and (4) paved or well-graded roads (gonglu). Since 1949 the road network in China has expanded at an unprecedented rate, and road construction has been so squarely equated with economic development that it has been impossible for reserve officials to prohibit the construction of access roads in an effort to protect natural habitat. Increased vehicular traffic could prove to be one of the most destructive aspects of human habitation in the reserve, and may become a more contentious issue in the future. Throughout South China, stone roads were for centuries the major routes for land transportation. Footpaths were painstakingly paved with stones across miles of remote terrain, to prevent the muddy mires and erosion common in areas with heavy precipitation and subtropical soils. Human beings were the draft animal of choice. The use of horses and donkeys was impractical under these conditions, and they were (and still are) virtually unknown in the Southeast Uplands. Many of the narrow stone paths were designated “official roads” (guanlu), connecting important centers of trade and political power. In Meihuashan, stone paths can be found in every part of the reserve, and at least one of these, from Gonghe to Majiaping, was an official road during the late imperial era, a section of the key transport route between the regional administrative centers of Longyan and Changting (formerly Tingzhou). The labor resources and organization required for the construction and maintenance of these roads through what are today wild, seldom-traveled

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mountainous areas demonstrate their past importance for commerce and communication. They represent both the extension of centralized political authority into the hinterlands and local desire to maintain connections with trading centers in the lowlands. A network of mountain trails is still the most important transport system between many villages inside the nature reserve, but links to market towns outside the reserve have developed rapidly in the late 1980s and 1990s, and some interior footpaths are falling into disrepair. The past decade has brought an increasing orientation toward radial connections to the lower-elevation market towns surrounding Meihuashan, and a decrease in travel and transport along certain interior routes between mountain villages. Road building has changed the lives of many villagers, making it possible for some to reach market towns—by tractor, truck, motorcycle, or bus—conduct their business, and return to the village all in one day. New roads have made it possible to transport larger quantities of goods than before, and much heavier items from the highlands to the lowland market towns and vice versa, with less expenditure of labor. This has made possible a virtual revolution in the quantity and type of consumer goods and building materials entering some villages and in the quantity and variety of natural products being exported. Road transport thus has been the first step in a new phase of economic growth and regional interconnection, and access to roads has become an important determinant of community prosperity. To understand how rapidly roads have changed daily life in these mountains, consider the fact that until 1978 not a single dirt road reached any of the reserve villages, and all transport depended on strong backs and legs. On market days in village townships, which long have been held every five days, villagers or hired porters set off hours before dawn with shoulder poles, bearing reams of bamboo paper to sell at market. At the end of the day, people routinely made the long return trek to their home villages. The return load often consisted of daily necessities and powderized limestone, the latter being the primary ingredient in soaking pits, where bamboo strips were softened before being pulverized and made into paper. By the year 2001, all the villagers had access to tractor roads or dirt roads that reached the villages or those nearby, but well-graded roads that qualified as “gonglu” were limited to about 12.2 kilometers (7.6 mi.) in the southeastern part of the reserve. These have made it possible for Longgui and Qiushan villagers to reach the market, the nearest hospital, and the nature reserve headquarters, all 30 kilometers (18.6 mi.)

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away in Gutian, in little more than one hour. Other roads in the reserve are steeper, rougher, and more prone to erosion, with stretches that become streams during rainstorms. Among the best of these is the road from Buyun to Gonghe, over which jeeps or cars can make the trip from Gonghe to Gutian in about one hour and ten minutes. Most of the villages in the reserve rely on tractor roads, which are too narrow for cars, trucks, or buses. The economic and ecological ramifications of new roads and motorized vehicles are vast, and villagers see a clear connection between road access and wealth. For these reasons, road construction has at times become a contentious political issue in the reserve. Longgui village is the richest natural village in the reserve, largely as a result of the road access it gained in 1978, and its establishment of a timber area before the reserve was established in 1985. In addition, its low population and the reserve’s slow action in curtailing the village’s timber quotas have helped some of the Longgui villagers become quite prosperous by local standards. Similarly, in Gonghe village, certain people were quick to take advantage of their new transport link, the construction of which coincided with national market reforms and exponential inflation in timber values; many new brick and cement houses were built with money made from the harvest of old-growth Chinese fir. The advent of truck and tractor transport led to even more profound land use and economic changes when the export of bamboo poles replaced paper production as the primary source of income for mountain villages. Until the early 1980s, the local economy was based on the export of paper made locally from bamboo culms. Motorized transport made it possible to export unprocessed poles for use as scaffolding in urban construction, a more lucrative and efficient use of the resource. The dwindling paper industry had come to an end by the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the nature reserve prohibited the activity because of water pollution associated with the flushing of lime and other substances from soaking pits. By the mid-1990s, no paper workshops were operating in the reserve, though the ruins of rammed-earth buildings used for this purpose can still be found even in remote sections of the core area. In stark contrast to the relatively wealthy villages with a history of road access are villages like Majiaping, which had no access road until 2000. Because of the steep terrain surrounding the basin where the village lies, the 7.5-kilometer (4.6-mi.) trail to the nearest road, in Jiangxie, took villagers nearly three hours to traverse on foot without heavy loads.

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Bamboo poles could not be carried out economically, even by paid porters, and bamboo was converted to chopsticks for transport. In the mid1990s, residents of Majiaping, one of the poorest villages in the reserve, were extremely frustrated by the geographic features and political forces that hindered their access to goods and services. Several villagers stated that they would not hesitate to set fire to reserve forests if they did not receive permission to build an access road. Reserve administrators, on the other hand, had privately vowed to relocate the village outside the reserve if such a measure became necessary to prevent the road, which would provide access to the largest remaining stands of broadleaf forest in Meihuashan. By 1999, however, a road was being constructed to Majiaping. There was insufficient legal precedent to support the reserve’s argument, and Liancheng County officials cited the village’s fundamental rights to road access, sanctioning the village’s decision to link up with a new road to Yanbei village, which lies outside the reserve to the north. Telecommunications In the mid-1990s, none of the villages in the reserve had telephones. Ironically, until the initiation of economic reforms in the early 1980s, one-way phone and /or loudspeaker communication did exist in each village. One-way systems were used by central authorities to issue commands and maintain contact with cadres. Phones were used in medical emergencies and (at least in some villages) by private individuals for personal calls. With the decline in government-funded infrastructure in the 1980s, the phone lines were not maintained. By 1995, villagers were growing impatient with the lack of what has become a basic amenity in most of eastern China, and they sought the aid of the reserve in restoring the phone system. By 1999, all the villages except Majiaping had regained phone access, and by mid-year at least ten households in most of the villages had their own phones. By continuing to help provide access to telephone services, and other benefits that have no direct adverse environmental consequences, the nature reserve can improve its relations with villagers. Effects of Forest Conservation Policies

Perhaps the greatest differences between village land use patterns in Meihuashan and those of outlying areas is that outside the reserve there are fewer restrictions on the harvesting of timber on collective lands. This simple difference has had vast consequences. When the reserve was

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in the earliest phases of establishment and planning, in the early 1980s, this problem was anticipated, but twenty years later it remains unsolved. The people who first worked to establish the nature reserve included researchers and bureaucrats from the Fujian Provincial Forestry Bureau, Xiamen University, Fujian Normal University, Academia Sinica, and the Longyan Regional Forestry Committee. When they began to delineate the boundaries of the reserve, they proposed that it cover an area more than five times that of the present, totaling more than 1,000 square kilometers ( 386 sq. mi.). When representatives from Shanghang and Liancheng Counties, Longyan municipality, and Laiyuan township (in Liancheng) convened to review the plan, they decided that only the least-populated central area would be included in the reserve. These officials feared that if timber cutting were restricted in the areas of high population density, like Gutian, Laiyuan, Wan An, and other townships, there would be too many people with no means of economic survival. The paradox of this decision is evident. The dilemma lay between limiting the size of the reserve to allow a greater range of land use in more densely populated areas, or expanding the protected zone to ensure that more people practiced good resource stewardship over a larger geographic area. Huang Zhaofeng, a reserve forester-administrator described the situation aptly: It’s hard to know whether it would have been better to include them [people in the greater area] within the reserve. On the one hand, nature protection is all of society’s business. On the other hand, people have to have an income. People understand the protection concept as a whole, but as individuals they have to protect themselves. It’s easy to do the “concept work” with the peasants [laobaixing]; the hard part is the policies— how do people survive? (Huang Zhaofeng, pers. comm.)

To make up for the low incomes and lack of timber revenue anticipated in the interior of reserves, the Provincial Forestry Bureau planned to offer a 120-yuan ($15) subsidy for each cubic meter of standing timber volume. The payment was never made, and inhabitants of the reserve have not forgotten it. Within the reserve, timber and bamboo cutting on village lands is now controlled by quotas set by the nature reserve, and all timber and bamboo sales must be made through the Meihuashan Forestry Development Office (Meihuashan Linye Kaifagongci), in the reserve headquar-

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ters. Outside the reserve, timber quotas are managed by the Longyan regional forestry committee (diqu linwei). Of the useful timber tree species, reserve villagers can sell only pine and Chinese fir, and quotas for these grow smaller each year as logging within the reserve boundaries is gradually phased out altogether. There is no legal cutting of broadleaf trees more than 30 centimeters (1 ft.) dbh (diameter at breast height) inside or outside the reserve, and the forestry bureau stopped issuing sales permits for hardwoods of any size in about 1990. Aside from camphor (zhang; Cinnamomum camphora, which is used to carve Buddhist and Daoist icons), Schima (mu he; Schima superba), and a few other species, broadleaf trees are not seen as having a great deal of economic value. Low demand for broadleaf no doubt has saved many remaining patches of montane forests in the Southeast Uplands from rapid conversion. In 1994–1995, only Longgui, Dapingshan, and five or six other reserve villages in Liancheng County were issued permits to cut pine. Except for Longgui, which has a special forest road (aside from the village access road) for cutting and hauling timber, only villages with newly established roads were given cutting permits. 7 Villages without roads cannot get permits because there is no truck access, and villagers who have had road access for several years have already exhausted the legal timber supply. In Longgui, pine was sold for 250 yuan ($31) a cubic meter in 1995. In coastal markets, logs more than 40 centimeters (15 in.) dbh could be sold for more than 900 yuan ($112). When pines are removed from mixed forests, it must be done without cutting down other trees. A recently logged broadleaf forest in Longgui appeared to be recovering quickly, and removal of pine may have accelerated its succession to a more mature broadleaf community. In 1994, logging was prohibited on slopes visible from roads or streams, a restriction designed to protect both scenic integrity and watershed quality. Outside the reserve, most villages still receive yearly permits to cut pine and Chinese fir, which they then replant from seedlings. This disparity has caused resentment among reserve villagers; it also has made bamboo management a high priority. Through superior bamboo management, reserve leaders hope to close the slight income gap between the interior and surrounding mountain villages. Because Chinese fir is the most important source of lumber in China, its market value is much greater than pine. At the village level, sales value was between 400 and 500 yuan ($50 and $62.50) a cubic meter (coastal sales values were not determined). There were no legal sales of Chinese fir in 1994–1995, however, and there may not be for many years. With

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almost all the naturally occurring Chinese fir removed, and most of the planted stands being less than twelve years old, there will be few permits for Chinese fir for another decade or so, if cutting is not phased out entirely. Though there were no legal sales of Chinese fir in the mid1990s, some villagers capitalized on the market rates by operating illegal logging and transport networks. In remote valleys, such as Qikouping, in the core area of the reserve, several large Chinese fir trees were scattered through the broadleaf and mixed forests. Villagers from Tieshan Luodi, a settlement just northwest of the reserve with lands in the reserve, set up a camp in Qikouping and built trails through extremely dense forests across difficult terrain, to haul logs out of the reserve on foot. All the roadside forestry checkpoints were easily bypassed. On several occasions, I encountered log porters while hiking with a forest manager in the northwestern part of the reserve. Once, on a trail above Luodi, the sight of us caused a group of about twenty porters, male and female, to disperse into the woods. In the early 1990s, several villagers, many from Luodi, were arrested for such activity, which has caused tremendous resentment toward the reserve. Illegal timber cutting in Meihuashan is a serious problem, and relations between reserve managers and local people, though outwardly stable, are strained to the degree that local cooperation is based mostly on passive acceptance of legal authority and the varying degrees of regulation and enforcement that it imposes. Present-Day Labor and Income Structure

Bamboo pole processing and export are the most important sources of income for nearly every family in every natural village in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve. In 1995, no families earned enough money running shops or other local enterprises to cease bamboo production, and still fewer had established businesses outside the reserve that freed them from primary sector activities in the home village. In each of the five study villages, informants responded that virtually 100 percent of the work force was engaged both in rice cultivation and bamboo management, with the few exceptional individuals (one to two in some villages) who had moved outside the reserve to engage in business or to work in another work unit (danwei). By 1999, commercial production and labor patterns had begun to undergo significant shifts. First, because of a dramatic increase in the number of young males who found employment outside the reserve — working in construction, industry, or the service sector; second, because several villages in the southern part of the reserve

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had begun large-scale production and marketing of mushrooms and vegetables. While villages in the eastern part of the reserve had sufficient levels of production to continue to rely solely on bamboo, and a growing number produced and marketed finished bamboo products, villages such as Guihe and Daxie had begun to produce shiitake mushrooms (xianggu) for export to Japan. Guihe, Jiaotan, and Luodi had begun to grow Chinese cabbage, too, transporting it to markets in metropolitan coastal areas, such as Xiamen and Shantou (in Guangdong Province). When viewed within the larger economic realm of the Southeast Uplands, the villages of Meihuashan appear to be on middle ground, geographically situated between the widespread poverty in Jiangxi Province to the west, and the rising wealth of Fujian’s coastal metropolises to the east. Despite the economic constraints associated with primary sector economic activities, a steady stream of immigrants, mostly from Jiangxi, enter certain villages each year to work as hired hands. These “outsiders” (waidiren) are men who work for local families. They cut bamboo on family-managed lands and haul it to roadheads, where the poles are loaded onto trucks or tractors and transported to the lowlands. The laborers may work for a particular family for a few days, weeks, or months before helping another family in the same or another village. On holidays, the men return to their families, taking their cash pay. 8 East of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range, however, in the coastal cities of Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou, economic growth rates rival those of southern Guangdong. As a result of more rapid growth along the coast and in certain montane hinterland areas, the Longyan administrative region is the poorest of the nine administrative regions and cities in Fujian Province. Government surveys of sample populations showed that the average per capita rural income in Fujian in 1993 was 1,211 yuan ($151). Official reports noted this was the first year that average income in Fujian had “broken through the 1,000 yuan [barrier]” (increasing 226 yuan [$28] from an average of 984 yuan [$123] in 1992, an increase of 23 percent). 9 For comparative purposes, I calculated average rural incomes for all the counties and municipalities of Fujian, based on total rural income (chunshouru) divided by total rural population. The average rural income in Fujian was 1,530 yuan ($191), and the Longyan administrative region had the lowest per capita income in Fujian, averaging 1,087 yuan ($136). Rural income in the hinterlands of the Xiamen Special Economic Zone ( Jingjitequ), a day’s drive from Meihuashan by car, was more than twice what it was in the Longyan region.

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In part because of its location at the boundaries between the Longyan municipality and the counties of Shanghang and Liancheng, Meihuashan lay somewhere toward the middle of the economic spectrum of the Longyan administrative region in the mid-1990s. Of the seven administrative regions and municipalities in the region, the Longyan municipality ranked first, with an average of 1,389 yuan ($174); Liancheng County ranked fourth, with an average of 1,080 yuan ($135); and Shanghang County ranked fifth, with an average of 969 yuan ($121). In 1995, per capita incomes in the villages of Meihuashan were beginning to surpass the 1,000-yuan ($125) mark, though there was substantial unevenness in economic development between administrative villages, and even between natural villages in the same administrative village. 10 A large disparity also existed between rich and poor households in each village. Income differences among the five study villages were substantial, especially since these included natural villages from the wealthiest and poorest administrative villages. Longgui, with a stated per capita income of 1,000 yuan ($125), is in the Yunhui administrative village (along with Dapingshan), which had an official per capita income of 1,761 yuan ($220). Majiaping, on the other hand, had a stated per capita income of 255 yuan ($32) in 1994, and the administrative village of Yanbei (which includes Majiaping and two villages outside the reserve) had an official per capita income of 486 yuan ($61). The stark contrast in income among these villages is largely the result of the one key geographical factor that affects the economies of all the natural villages in Meihuashan: access to roads. Road development is a catalyst, both for habitat destruction and for economic growth. In the Southeast Uplands, it is viewed as an absolute necessity to economic development, and even nature reserve administrators often allow villages to develop roads where footpaths have sufficed for centuries, as long as the roads connect a village to the larger road network. The economic primacy of Yunhui administrative village (Longgui and Qiushan) is a constant reminder to the people of Meihuashan that mechanized transportation can lead to wealth. Road access beginning in 1978 in Longgui and in the mid-1980s in Qiushan gave the Yunhui administrative village an early advantage as nationwide economic reforms opened new trade opportunities. Abundant natural resources, low population, and the opening of a timber area on village lands allowed for rapid economic development, and by 1986, annual per capita income in Yunhui (859 yuan, $107) far exceeded that of all other villages in the

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reserve. By the late 1980s, one villager had became well known in the region for his wealth, having made large profits from investment in cement plants in Gutian and other areas, as well as from starting his own plywood factory near Fukeng. He subsequently moved down to Shangfu village (outside the nature reserve), the administrative center of Buyun township, where he built a two-story, cement-and-tile house complete with a courtyard and fountain. In 1995, he was probably the only native of the reserve area who owned a car. While his example is exceptional, other villagers in Yunhui and other villages enjoyed considerable windfalls by trading Chinese fir (during the 1980s price hikes, before the large trees were completely removed from the reserve), by producing Cryptomeria carvings for sale to Japan, and through the simultaneous pursuit of numerous sideline activities, which in the late 1990s was becoming the norm in Meihuashan. Another village lacking direct road access is not as seriously impoverished as Majiaping. Chijiashan village, with an average annual per capita income of 623 yuan ($78) in 1994, has a low ratio of population-to-bamboo forest area; in fact, it is the most extensive area of well-managed bamboo forest in the reserve, belonging to a community of about 220 people. Labor requirements exceed the capacity of the work force, and Jiangxi migrant workers are a critical supplement. By 1994, villagers had anticipated the trend of the future by adding value to bamboo before exporting it. Poles were cut into chopsticks or flat, thin pieces (zhupian) used in the manufacture of car seat covers, couch covers, and other portable, partially finished products. Just as Yunhui provides an example of the benefits of modern transport, Chijiashan stands out as a model of the benefits of effective bamboo management. With a long history of careful bamboo management, the village has overcome its limited access to transportation in recent times. Ironically, bamboo was cultivated more assiduously in that village in earlier times because it had a comparative geographic advantage in the dried bamboo-shoot trade at a time when goods could be transported to the Malinxi River and by boat to Wanan. At present, the economic development of villages within the nature reserve is constrained by land use regulations, especially those limiting timber harvests and prohibiting the disturbance of broadleaf forests. This is perceived by villagers in the reserve as a handicap, inhibiting their economic competitiveness, and has been a source of serious conflict between the reserve administration and reserve residents. The future economic well-being of the villages of Meihuashan is largely contingent on at least

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five conditions: (1) that bamboo management be improved so villagers can increase the density of plants per unit area, thus increasing overall bamboo culm production without significantly increasing the area under cultivation; (2) that villages or townships develop the capacity to process bamboo, thus adding value by creating marketable finished products (as is done in Wuyishan); (3) that bamboo lands be redistributed equitably among families at periodic village meetings as household populations change (some villages do this and others do not); (4) that village and regional economies become more diversified; and (5) that villagers become the main operators of an emerging service and technical economy associated with reserve management, research, and strictly managed tourism in and around the nature reserve. The two-edged sword of tourism and commercialism will require conscientious management if environmental destruction, landscape degradation, and economic inequity are to be avoided. With the development of a capitalist economy, there is also the danger of an ever-weakening centralized welfare system. Villagers complain that education, health care, and (until 1998) telecommunication services have declined. With the reserve divvied up among seven townships in two counties and one municipality, there is a serious lack of coordination between government bureaus in the provision of social services, law enforcement, and general planning. This is a source of acrimonious controversy, as villagers accuse the reserve of backing out on pledges to provide funding for poverty relief and capital investments for the production, processing, and marketing of bamboo, livestock, and other primary sector commodities. Enforcement of game and forestry laws thus has become extremely contentious. Over the centuries, the dual imperatives of subsistence and economic survival in a mountain society with trade connections extending beyond the borders of China have caused fluctuations in village populations and in the intensity of pressure on local natural resources. Social and environmental instability resulting from famine, banditry, military invasions, and national political movements often culminated in periods of depopulation through death and out-migration. Still, the villages in the nature reserve today are inhabited by direct descendants of the early settlers. The history of their land and resource use is critical to their identity and to understanding the ecological conditions in which indigenous wild plants and animals exist today.

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As China begins its first experiments with democracy, by allowing villagers to elect their own leaders, the long-term human inhabitants of places such as Meihuashan should be considered stewards of the land. Striking a balance between the national (and international) values, goals, and regulations of nature conservation, on the one hand, and local traditions and economic interests, on the other, is the main challenge confronting both the inhabitants and the management of Meihuashan and other nature reserves in China. Understanding the effects of current land use practices on landscapes and ecosystems requires a clearer view of the cumulative effects of village land use over the course of centuries.

6

Burning the Mountains A Historical Landscape Ecology of the Meihuashan Ecosystem

In Meihuashan lie eighteen basins, in each basin lie eighteen marshes, in each marsh lie eighteen coves, in each cove lie eighteen crannies, in each cranny lie eighteen golden armchairs. — Ancient ode to Meihuashan

Vegetation patterns in Meihuashan today are the result of centuries of landscape modification by Hakka villagers and probably by earlier aboriginal inhabitants as well. As the Hakka came to dominate the region, they continued to transform the once ubiquitous, subtropical broadleaf forests into a patchwork of cultivated, semicultivated, and wild habitats. With more than five hundred years of Han settlement, rice terraces crept up the valley sides, fire scoured montane meadows to the highest peaks, bamboo forests covered the slopes, and sacred broadleaf forests or cultivated groves of Cryptomeria trees rose above the villages, blocking fierce winds in the water gaps and covering low knolls among the houses and temples. China’s transition to socialism led to a series of changes in local resource management patterns and accelerated the rate of landscape transformation, and though government directives often have called for uniform approaches to resource management, environmental change in Meihuashan since 1949 has been highly complex. In the past fifty years, a Western-influenced, scientific-utilitarian view of “nature” and “natural resources” has been propagated, and new conservation techniques have been introduced, along with the beginnings of industrialized agriculture and forestry. With the establishment of the Meihuashan Nature Reserve in the late 1980s, still other goals and values were instituted, most notably those related to wildlife conservation. Through all the changes of the past half-century, however, some of the oldest local land

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use traditions continue, and certain ideologies and social structures developed in conjunction with the primary goals of settlement and subsistence have persisted and even found renewed vigor in recent years. Even government-led reforestation schemes, deemed largely unsuccessful in most of China by foreign critics, have had dramatic, if not always ecologically favorable, results. The simplistic notion that deforestation and land degradation have been the predominant trend in rural China since the 1950s is challenged by the evidence gathered from this field investigation. Though there have been numerous negative effects on wildlife and habitat during the past half-century, there have also been changes in land use patterns that have led to greater forest coverage, especially in conifers on the high mountains. The Meihuashan landscape is a mosaic of vegetation types, in different phases of succession, each associated with particular elevation zones and particular sets of land use practices and indigenous perceptions. Traditional views of these vegetation and land use zones, based on local knowledge, are reflected in the history of their anthropogenic formation. As perceptions have changed, the landscape has changed, and vice versa. Investigating both the ecological and ethnohistorical dimensions of landscape change will lead to an understanding of the causes and consequences of this panoply of human influences on the environment through time. Contemporary Land Use Patterns in and around Village Nuclei

With the population of Meihuashan being clustered in twenty-five natural villages, the land use patterns surrounding these settlements is the critical link between human influence and habitat conservation. Current land use patterns concentrate most human disturbance on the valleys and slopes closest to the villages. Beyond the village nucleus and its rice paddies, vegetable gardens, and sacred forests are extensive stands of bamboo, as well as broadleaf, pine, and mixed forests. There are also lessextensive grasslands, which can be divided into two types: first, low-elevation grasslands (so-called montane wastelands, huangshan), where rice terraces have been abandoned or where grazing pressure has prevented reforestation; and second, high-elevation grasslands on the ridges and summits above 1,700 meters (1,860 ft.), where conditions are unsuitable for pine forest succession. On these more peripheral village lands, residents extract forest resources for subsistence and commercial purposes. Bamboo forests are divided into plots, with usufruct rights granted to

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individual families under the “household responsibility system,” in a fashion similar to the allotment of rice paddy lands. Most of the pine, broadleaf, and mixed forests are jointly owned by the collective ( jiti), which in Meihuashan consists of all members of a particular administrative village. Substantial areas of forest have reverted to complete government jurisdiction (totaling 23 percent of the reserve area), typically as the result of unresolved intervillage land tenure conflicts. Traditional Food Ways and Subsistence Patterns in Meihuashan

Since the early 1950s, dietary regimes in the villages of Meihuashan have changed dramatically. The transformation in local food ways has occurred in tandem with developments in agriculture, animal husbandry, and transportation, all of which have increased local food production. The Chinese “green revolution” has increased the availability and affordability of new varieties of grain, vegetables, and livestock. This has profoundly affected land use patterns and has led to an apparently irrevocable dependence on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Local people — especially hunters— have noticed the devastation to wildlife populations caused by chemical contaminants, but the problem remains largely unexamined by the scientific community. On the other hand, the advent of hybrid rice has led to much higher productivity per unit area, and therefore much less land is now devoted to agriculture; forest succession is occurring in many relict rice paddies throughout the reserve. Higher grain production per unit area has further obviated the traditional need to burn large land areas to produce starch-rich wild plants, thereby eliminating a major source of vegetation disturbance. From these trends, we can see that the development of more “modern” subsistence practices, which correspond to a change in diet and consumption patterns, has had both positive and negative effects on wildlife and habitat. Before 1949, Meihuashan villagers subsisted primarily on rice, vegetables, starch from the rhizomous roots of bracken ferns, and other wild edible plants and animals. Because villagers did not have cooking oil, they steamed or boiled these foods. And though they raised pigs, pork was eaten only about twice a month, when a pig was slaughtered, and then only in small quantities because one family’s pig was divided and sold to the rest of the village. Most people ate more fat than lean meat, which often appears to be the custom today as well. Chickens and ducks were raised by individual households, providing eggs, but their meat was eaten only during celebrations and holidays. Bean curd (doufu) was another

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source of protein. It was produced in the market towns and sometimes in the villages themselves. The meat of wild animals provided an important supplement to the local dietary regime. Many families trapped bamboo rats (zhushu; Rhizomys pruinosus), forest rodents resembling large guinea pigs (with long tails) that feed on bamboo. Dried bamboo-rat meat is a famous local specialty, and the trapping and consumption of the rats is still commonplace. Frogs (shiren, or shidong) captured in mountain streams are another traditional delicacy, as are, to a lesser degree, certain species of turtles in riparian habitats.1 The hunting of large mammals, though typically practiced by only a few males in each village, provided the meat of muntjacs, wild boar, and other animals. Some additional animals and birds that have long been captured for food and medicine include pangolins, porcupines, badgers, civets, mustelids, wild cats, bears, red dogs, pheasants, and other gallinaceous birds. Even in the 1990s, when people in Meihuashan are no longer under dietary stress, they will eat virtually any animal, even those killed serendipitously, including owls and other nongame birds. In the mid-1990s, hunting, trapping, and the consumption of wildlife, though not critical for subsistence, remained an important part of upland culture. Though wild plants and animals have for years been consumed on a frequent basis for medicinal and food purposes, village dietary regimes have been based predominantly on agricultural products, especially rice and vegetables. Three types of rice have figured prominently in the diets and cultivation systems of Meihuashan: glutinous rice (nuomi), white rice (baimi), and red rice (hongmi; also known as heimi, black rice). Glutinous rice traditionally comprises between one-quarter and one-third of each family’s total annual rice crop. As the primary ingredient in rice wine and ceremonial foods, it has great cultural significance. Most families use their glutinous rice stocks to make rice wine (mijiu), which is ritually consumed at meals. Though the frequency and volume of consumption varies among families, males typically drink one or more servings from their rice bowls before rice is served at a meal. This is done mostly at lunch and dinner, but sometimes at breakfast as well. Some people prefer to drink rice wine instead of eating rice, even in times of grain scarcity, such as the early 1960s. Within the past fifteen to twenty years, the average person’s daily rice consumption is reported to have decreased by nearly one-half. Though this statement is difficult to verify and still more difficult to prove in a quantitative fashion, there are compelling reasons for a decline in starch

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consumption. Villagers attribute the change to three factors: first, a decrease in the metabolic energy requirements of laborers since the advent of roads and vehicular transport of goods to and from the montane villages; second, a shift toward more sedentary work modes— more business dealing, less hard labor, and the hiring of waidiren (outsiders) as laborers; and third, the availability of a much greater variety of locally and regionally produced food items, which have partially replaced rice and other starches in the diet. The transition from a diet predominated by starchy staples, cereals, and root crops, which are the cheapest available plant foods, to a diet more balanced with other, more expensive animal and plant foods has been observed in developing countries and regions around the globe. Because of a shorter growing season, more extreme cold events, and cooler year-round temperatures, as well as soil and hydrological limitations, Meihuashan does not produce the array or quantity of vegetables common in lowland and southeastern hill areas of Fujian. Most of the vegetables consumed by Meihuashan villagers are grown in household gardens interspersed with houses and other buildings throughout the village. Before the 1950s, these consisted mostly of taro (Colocasia esculenta —many varieties of wet- and dryland types), five to six varieties of peas and beans (including Phaseolus vulgaris, Pisum sativum, and Vigna sinensis), four types of squash (including Cucurbita moschata, Cucumis sativus, Momordica charantia, and Benincasa hipida), Chinese cabbage (qingcai and xiaobaicai; Brassica spp.), canna ( jiaoyu; Canna edulis) and sweet potatoes (Ipomea betides). Taro has been grown in small plots within the villages of Meihuashan for many centuries. Along with rice and bracken root, it was an important source of starch in the local diet. The most favored varieties are those that produce drier roots. These types include both dry and aquatic types. Though there was no mention of upland taro cultivation in historical times, and there is no evidence of this practice today, it is possible that taro was cultivated in mountain plots during periods when high populations created a greater demand for starch. Sweet potatoes, introduced in Fujian by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, do not appear to have revolutionized subsistence practices in Meihuashan as they did in many other montane areas of southeast China. In Meihuashan, villagers had no success with germination from tubers. 2 Bamboo shoots are another traditional food of high nutritional value, and these are gathered between March and May in the managed forests of mao bamboo, as well as in stands of wild bamboo, especially nude-

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sheath bamboo (stone bamboo, shizhu; Phyllostachys nuda) and “water bamboo” (shuizhu; P. heteroclada). Bamboo shoots have long been considered both a delicacy in times of plenty and an important local staple during food shortages. By the 1970s, many cultivars were introduced to the vegetable plots of Meihuashan, including hot peppers, bell peppers, potatoes, new types of squash and cabbage, and fruit crops, such as peaches and pears. An improved hybrid variety of sweet potato led to the introduction of a variety with a shorter, fatter tuber, which was hardier at high elevations and could be germinated successfully. For the first time, villagers could produce their own seedlings for new sweet potato crops each year. Today, more than thirty types of vegetables are grown in Meihuashan; they fall in three broad categories: Cruciferae (cabbages and other green, leafy vegetables), roughly ten kinds (including species and varieties); beans, roughly ten kinds; and tubers, about eight kinds. The general pattern of household vegetable cultivation today is very similar to what it was before 1949. The soil is prepared in March and seeds are sown in early May. Fertilizers are made from cow and pig manure (and to a lesser extent, human nightsoil) composted with the ashes of grass and ferns. When the plants are in the seedling stage, a mixture of water and human urine (at a ratio of 2:1) is applied weekly, and as the plants grow, a higher concentration of urine is applied. Vegetables are harvested through the summer, fall, and— squash and cabbages— into the winter months. Traditional Rice Cultivation and Its Environmental Consequences

The villages of Meihuashan are distinctive in having relied on rice cultivation for subsistence through most of their history. This is not typical for all high-elevation areas of the Southeast Uplands. Few Wuyishan villages produce any rice, because the scarce alluvial cropland in the mountain villages has been devoted to producing tea and bamboo products, and cash from these exports has been used for the purchase of grain (and many other necessities) from surrounding settlements in lower valleys. Though yearly grain production in Meihuashan consistently failed to meet annual needs until the 1980s, rice cultivation has for centuries been the most fundamental part of local subsistence strategies. Terraced rice paddies, some perhaps as old as the villages themselves, are a defining element of the cultural landscape, with dramatic long-term effects on montane hydrology and ecosystems. Even after terraces are abandoned, the restoration of geomorphic patterns and vegetation assemblages can

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require several decades. At least two historical episodes of extensive terrace abandonment, one around the turn of the past century and one during the past fifteen years, have led to old field succession to broadleaf (and mixed) forest and to low-elevation grassland, respectively. Present-day agricultural conditions in Meihuashan provide a reference point for viewing the past. In 1986, the total area of cultivated land (including vegetable plots and rice paddies belonging to settlements outside the reserve) in the reserve was about 7.4 square kilometers (2.8 sq. mi.), comprising about 3.3 percent of the total land area. More than 95 percent of the cultivated land in the reserve consists of rice paddy. Most rice paddies are on montane terraces, and most terraces are narrow (some hold only two rows of plants). Paddy lands are typically small and scattered through the rugged terrain at elevations up to 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.). Most are found at around 800 meters (2,500 ft.), though in the Guihe-Jiaotan area, paddies average about 1,000 meters (3,300 ft.) in elevation, and Mawu village has paddies at 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.). Even large terraced areas are rarely more than 7–10 hectares (17–24.7 acres) in area (with exceptions, especially between Guihe, Jiaotan, and Mawu). Many are isolated patches surrounded by mature broadleaf, pine, bamboo, or mixed forests. Some are up to 10–12 kilometers (6–7 mi.) from the nearest village. Isolated paddies a long distance from villages are especially susceptible to depredation by wild boar, monkeys, and rats. Natural conditions in Meihuashan are not ideal for rice production, and most paddy land is considered low in productive capacity. The area receives an abundance of precipitation—200 centimeters (79 in.) of rain a year on average, with up to 220 centimeters (87 in.) in wet years. Because most of the paddies are fed by the natural flow of groundwater and runoff, or by small bamboo-pipe aqueducts, large-scale irrigation ditch systems are unnecessary. Despite the favorable precipitation, there is a relatively long frost season, extending from mid- to late November to March or early April, a period of 140–150 days. Early frosts are a threat to late-season rice crops, and given the short frost-free season, double cropping of rice is not feasible. Double cropping was attempted in Meihuashan only during the “high production” (gaoshengchan) campaigns of the Cultural Revolution, and in some years, annual production fell below single-crop levels. Other impediments to rice cultivation include thin soils (because of steep slopes) and lower than optimal water temperatures. Cool paddy water temperatures result from cool air temperatures, short daily insolation periods, steep slopes, and poor circulation.

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The current scale of agriculture in Meihuashan also prevents its mechanization. Rice paddies are small and remote, many are far from roads, and economic returns are so small that mechanization would not be cost effective. Even water buffaloes, common in the region at elevations below about 750 meters (2,500 ft.), are not found in the reserve. Their absence is the result of several possible factors; the mountain rice terraces are too steep and narrow to support their weight, and the animals are too large to negotiate the mountain trails or to turn around within the small, terraced paddies. One local man stated that the lack of standing water and slow-moving rivers (water buffaloes’ favored habitats) in the high-elevation villages is another important limiting factor. For these reasons, locals have long relied on the much smaller yellow cattle for draft animals, and each natural village has between five and thirty head. A distinguishing characteristic of traditional agricultural in the Meihuashan region is the burning of straw, ferns (chiefly Dicranopteris dichotoma), and other herbage for fertilizer. This is done in the fields or in concavities on mountain slopes, from which ashes are collected and spread over the paddies. A field fertilized in this manner was known as a she tian (local pronunciation “xie”; see glossary), meaning “burnt field.” Because of this cultivation method, many mountain villages in the region contain this character as an element of their names, including the reserve villages of Daxie (Big Burnt Field), Dagaoxie (Big High Burnt Field), and Xiaogaoxie (Little High Burnt Field). A historical and etymological connection may exist between this practice and early swidden cultivation by the She people, whose name is represented by the same character (see glossary). In fact, the practice of burning field stubble or wild vegetation and using the ash as fertilizer probably developed from long-cycle swidden practices of the She people. 3 The influx of Hakka settlers to southwest Fujian no doubt altered indigenous mountain land tenure patterns, and swidden systems eventually gave way to sedentary rice cultivation. Before the introduction of hybrid rice (zajiao shuidao), a product of the Chinese green revolution, Meihuashan villagers (and millions of other peasants throughout southern China) cultivated varieties of rice much taller than those used today— meter-high plants were common. Hybrid varieties of high-yielding rice developed by the International Rice Research Institute and designated “IR-8 dwarf indica,” were propagated throughout southern China by the mid-1970s. Traditional varieties of red rice, white rice, and glutinous rice yielded much less grain per unit area than the modern hybrids. Traditional rice yields in Guihe

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are believed to have reached 3,000 kg /ha (3 tons/2.5 acres) (before drying) at maximum, whereas hybrid rice production in the village can reach a maximum of up to 5,250 kg/ ha (6 tons/2.5 acres) on the best paddies today. 4 Today’s higher yields per unit area are attributed to closer spacing of the seedlings in each row, and to closer spacing of rows. Although dwarf hybrid rice plants are only about half the height of traditional varieties, they have the same number of grains per plant (about 180– 200). Smaller plants of equal productivity are planted closer together, producing more grain per unit area. Hybrid rice first reached Meihuashan in the mid-1970s but not all villages had adopted it until the early 1990s. Some villages, like Majiaping, resisted the adoption of hybrid rice for more than a decade. Among the reasons cited for this decision were the prohibitive expenses of purchasing and transporting seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides to the village, and unwillingness to make a potentially risky transition into an unknown system of agriculture. Although villagers have now made a full transition to hybrid rice, several serious drawbacks to its production persist. First, the required additions of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have negative effects on local ecosystems; second, farmers are dependent on outside sources of fertilizer, pesticide, and seeds, expenses that are making grain agriculture uneconomical; and third, hybrids are causing the disappearance of traditional varieties of rice, which were better adapted to local soil, climatic, and ecological conditions (including the depredation of insects and other pathogens). Traditional agriculture in Meihuashan was completely organic and sustainable as long as it was limited to a relatively small areal scale. It is axiomatic that deforestation was a prerequisite of wet-rice agriculture in tropical and subtropical forest ecosystems, and that the cultivation cycle, including the construction and maintenance of terraces, perpetuated agricultural disturbance patches indefinitely. Under traditional cultivation schemes, however, disruptions to the hydrological, pedological, and ecological systems of the area were limited mostly to the agricultural plots themselves. Anthropogenic soils were developed through careful stewardship, and seasonal inputs of ashes, composted plant materials, human and livestock wastes, and other organic fertilizers were required to maintain fertile paddy lands. Because water is abundant, hydrological alterations were comparatively minor, except in areas of extensive terracing, where three to four villages shared abutting terrace lands (as in the Guihe-Jiaotan area). In many paddy lands, ecological conditions may actually have been enhanced in certain ways.

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For example, mature rice crops have extremely high forage value for ungulates, especially wild boar and Reeve’s muntjacs, and for rats; even during the fallow season, small, remote paddies provide prime open grazing land and edge habitat for ungulates and other large and small herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores. Rice Terrace Abandonment

Before exploring the combined effects of rice cultivation and other land use activities, it is helpful to try to ascertain the historical areal maximum of terrace land and to have some sense of its configuration. There are no reliable estimates of the rate of rice terrace abandonment since the Qing, but abundant visible evidence of abandoned terraces, now in many different stages of succession, corresponds with oral histories indicating that the phenomenon has a long history and many causes. The population of Meihuashan was much greater (possibly as much as five times greater) during the mid- to late Qing, while grain production per unit area was much lower—perhaps half the present level at best. Therefore, the paddy area required to feed the local populace (assuming contemporary levels of demand) would have to have been roughly ten times greater than at present. Though traditional rice production was insufficient to feed the population through the course of a whole year, the presence of abandoned rice (and perhaps taro) terraces in many broadleaf, mixed, and bamboo forests all over the reserve (and outside the reserve) reveals that significant attempts were made to match the demand. Observations in the study villages and in other parts of the reserve reveal that while paddy lands may never have reached ten times their present extent, they probably spread over an area several times greater than the present. According to villagers, terraces were abandoned for one or more of the following reasons: a decrease in population in one or more of the adjacent villages, which meant a decrease in subsistence demands; population decreases, which diminished the agricultural work force necessary for maintaining paddies, aqueducts, and other components of the irrigation system; terrace expansion into less-suitable lands (those at higher elevations, farther from villages, with thinner soils, colder water, and an insufficient water supply), which reached a point of diminishing returns, with repeated years of low productivity; and finally, depredation by wild boar, monkeys, and rats, which greatly decreased productivity in remote paddies. Today, abandoned terraces sit on forested slopes around all the study

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villages and in all other natural villages where such features were investigated or inquired about. Abandoned terraces are found, too, in some areas far from any existing villages. Similarities in the chronology of terrace development and abandonment in all five study villages suggest a regional rise and decline in population and socioeconomic conditions during the Qing dynasty, when a population surge created increased food demands. Rice croplands expanded again in the 1960s, when government policies fostered higher grain production rates through collective agricultural development. Since the reforms of the early 1980s, terrace abandonment has continued even as the population has grown (pl. 9). This is because of the following factors: first, inputs of chemical fertilizers (and pesticides) and the cultivation of modern hybrid rice varieties allows for more grain production within less paddy space; second, rice is used for family subsistence only (in nearly all instances), and is no longer economically sound for market or to meet government quotas (taxes are paid in cash, rather than a grain tax); and third, the depredation of rats, boar, and monkeys make rice cultivation in remote paddies especially problematic. While cropland probably reached its maximum area in the Qing, accounting for between 6 and 10 percent of the present reserve area, paddies were mostly small and dispersed. This amount of agricultural clearance might not have significantly affected local ecosystems, at least while nonagricultural lands on high mountain slopes and summits, and in remote valleys and wetlands, retained sufficient forest cover. Rice cultivation fell far short of meeting human subsistence demands, though, and the production of other starchy staples affected a much larger proportion of Meihuashan than did rice cultivation. Just as the shetian rice cultivation system made use of fire to create ash for fertilizer, which was then spread over the rice paddy, another starch-production practice involved the widespread firing of slopes, ridges, and summits to enrich otherwise uncultivated mountain soils. The burning of the mountains for the production of starch-bearing wild plants (among other motives) effectively kept most of Meihuashan cleared of forests, and this clearance was maintained for centuries. A Supplementary Source of Starch: The Bracken Root–Fire Complex

The use of fire as a tool for landscape management in South China is well documented in local gazetteers and by environmental historians and ecologists. While Averill (1983), Chandler (1994), and Menzies (1988b)

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have focused on the use of fire as part of indigenous agricultural and forestry systems, especially the cultivation of Chinese fir and associated intercrops, Marks (1996), in writing about the Lingnan region (Guangdong and Guangxi), comments on the historical Han and Yao custom of burning noncultivated upland areas on an annual or biennial basis. The history and raison d’être of cyclical shrub and grassland burning have been sparsely investigated. Coupled with the dearth of historical analysis of this problem is a lack of recent ethnographic fieldwork on the local oral history of fire use in grass and scrub management in South China. Marks (1996) implies that the origins of mountain burning in the Lingnan region lie in swidden cultivation patterns developed by Yao tribesmen (who often replanted trees) and were altered by the Han into a nonagricultural land use practice. By the twentieth century, and possibly much earlier, this practice was ubiquitous: In Lingnan, at least in the twentieth century, peasants habitually burned off the hills every year or two, not only rendering the hills unfit for replanting, but also preventing trees from growing. In Guangxi, Albert B. Steward observed that the peasant farmers “habitually fire most of the burnable slopes in the vicinity of the homes during the dry season each year. The continuation of this practice tends to destroy the majority of the species of woody plants and change the aspect of a once richly forested country to that of a hilly or mountainous grassland.” In Guangdong, according to Fenzel, Chinese farmers “annually burn down the grass covering the mountains.” (Marks 1996, 71)

In the course of field investigations, Fenzel (1929) and Pendleton (1933) asked farmers why they burned off the hills on a regular basis. Pendleton was told that ashes from the burned slopes washed down and fertilized agricultural land in the valleys, a phenomenon in some ways comparable to the shetian system in Meihuashan (and observed in other parts of the world), but one that Pendleton found unlikely because contour ditches ran along the slopes to carry water and eroded materials away from the paddies and to prevent flooding of the rice crop. Fenzel (1929) received a different response to the question of why montane grasslands were burned: “To deprive the robbers, tigers, and snakes of their dens.” The annual burning of the mountains in the Southeast Uplands before the 1950s is partially explained this same way by farmers there today as well, but animal control is only one of four common explanations given.

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In interviews conducted in thirteen study villages, in three nature reserves, spanning roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) along the axis of the Wuyi-Daiyun Mountains, I found that all the villages had a history of annually burning extensive tracts of surrounding uplands. In Meihuashan, Longxishan, Wuyishan, and areas between the reserves, I sought reasons for grassland burning. In all but three of the thirteen study villages, one of the primary reasons for burning was to enhance the growth of bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum var. latiusculum), or juecai, the rhizomes (or underground water and carbohydrate storage organs) of which were used to produce edible starch powder, called shanfen (mountain flour) or, less commonly, juefen (fern flour; see glossary for terms in Chinese). 5 In these high mountain areas, which lie mostly between 650 and 1,800 meters (2,100 and 6,000 ft.), rice production was low or nonexistent, and sweet potatoes were less common than in lower mountains and hill areas farther east. Villages in Meihuashan and Longxishan did not produce enough rice each year to meet subsistence needs, and Wuyishan did not have any rice cultivation. In all three areas, the production of starchy staples was insufficient to sustain the population, and bracken fern roots provided a much-needed supplementary source of starch. In Fujian, bracken fern grows mainly on barren hills and mountains or along the edges of forest or scrub. Only by burning the mountains during the dry season (in late fall or winter) did bracken fern grow in sufficient abundance, and with roots large and starchy enough to warrant the arduous efforts of root collecting and processing. Fire kept dense grasses (maocao) cleared to promote the growth of the heliophytic ferns, and laid down a yearly layer of ash for fertilizer. As one Jiangdun ( Wuyishan) villager stated, “Without burning, there was no shanfen.” The effects of fire on fern growth were visible on steep slopes outside the Meihuashan Reserve near Gutian, where a Chinese fir plantation had been clear-cut and burned in preparation for replanting tree seedlings. Bracken ferns were among the first pioneers on the slopes in spring, with the shorter and more leathery Dicranopteris fern (Dicranopteris dichotoma), or mangqi, becoming ubiquitous only in later stages of succession, when it forms dense green mats in the pine forest understory. In Meihuashan, burning was extremely common and, apparently, not managed with much rigor. No groups or individuals were designated fire managers, and burning apparently was restricted by very few regulations. Timing was important, however, and the shrub-grasslands customarily were burned

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after the “first day of winter” (lidong yihou, after the first day of the first winter period, one of twenty-four seasonal periods in a year), which normally falls on November 7 or 8. By then, the vegetation was still dry enough to burn but not dry enough to allow the fire to spread into bamboo forests, sacred forests, or village settlements, areas that were off limits to burning. Within the vast area of montane shrub and grasslands, one villager said, “Anyone could burn anywhere. As long as you did not burn a village’s bamboo forest nothing mattered, no one cared.” Fires spread easily across the montane meadows. Because burning was frequent, fuel did not build up enough to give rise to a catastrophic fire, which could threaten bamboo groves or sacred forests. Remnants of broadleaf forests were fairly fire resistant in this regime, since they held moisture much more effectively than did other types of vegetation. Though such forests could be cleared and burned with some effort, as under a swidden cultivation system, fires set in the grasslands did not easily invade broadleaf forests or riparian broadleaf shrub thickets within the grasslands. A burned area would provide plenty of bracken fern for about two years. The ferns, which grow to more than a meter high, could be harvested in the fall and winter, between August and December. In Meihuashan, people from many villages could harvest in the highest mountains (Gouzinao, Youpoji, and Miaojinshan) without triggering land use conflicts. Blatantly harvesting within another village’s lands, however, was generally prohibited. Wuyishan, too, had no known land use conflicts related to shanfen collection, since the population density was relatively low, especially in high grasslands where the ferns were gathered. One person could gather about 25 kilograms (55 lbs.) of fern roots in a day. The roots were washed and then beaten with a wooden mallet on a stone slab until they were soft. This stage was often completed in the mountains, on granite boulders near where the ferns were picked. In the village, the roots were washed in a bucket and beaten again repeatedly until the water in the bucket turned white. The water was then dumped into a bamboo basket, which was suspended over a wooden tub. The watery paste drained into the tub, and water was added to the basket until all the paste had sifted through. The dregs from the basket were disposed of. After sitting in the tub for a day and a night, excess water was dumped out, and the paste at the bottom of the tub was placed in the sun to dry. The resulting flour could be stored for a long time. To be cooked, it needed only to be put into a wok with water and stirred, or kneaded into a hoecake and fried. A day’s collection of 25 kilograms of roots could be

Plate 1. A granite “tiger closet” tiger trap. This trap is near a recently reconstructed ninthcentury Buddhist temple on Jiuxian Mountain in the Daiyunshan Nature Reserve. Measuring roughly 5 m long by 1 m wide (16.5 x 3.3 ft.), 2 m (6.5 ft.) high in front and 1 m (3.2 ft.) high in the rear, the trap is reputed to be as old as the original temple. Plate 2. A tiger talisman in Zhongping village, Meihuashan, north of Majiaping. This clay tiger face and similar icons are attached to house roofs and walls to ward off evil spirits.

Plate 3. A tiger in the captive breeding facility at Meihuashan. Plate 4. (Right) A Cryptomeria stump in a Guizhuping windgap fengshui forest. This tree was cut by local entrepreneurs, who used it to produce decorative carvings for sale in Japan.

Plate 5. (Below) Majiaping village (viewed from the west). This highly compact village consists of traditional timber-frame houses, many of them connected.

Plate 6. (Top) A cantilevered bridge-temple in Jiaotan village. Because they are critically important for transportation, these traditional folk structures have survived decades of political chaos. Restoration of religious relics inside the bridge-temples has occurred in the past decade. Plate 7. (Lower) An earth-god shrine in Guizhuping village. Each village in Meihuashan has several earth-god shrines. Most are located in or near fengshui forests.

Plate 8. The Xiaoyang wetland, in the core area of the Meihuashan reserve.

Plate 9. Abandoned rice terraces in Meihuashan. Thick grass covers old paddy in the foreground. Two active terrace systems are separated by a series of abandoned terraces, in the background.

Plate 10. (Top) A bamboo grove on Guizhuping village lands. The carefully cleared understory provides little browse or cover for wildlife. Characters on the culm at lower right mark the boundary between two households’ bamboo lands. Plate 11. ( Lower) Bamboo-walled mushroom sheds in Guizhuping village. In the late 1990s, these structures sprouted like mushrooms, covering former paddy lands in Guihe, Dapingshan, and Gonghe. Reserve managers predicted the mushroom industry would soon die, as the required supply of sawdust from hardwood trees harvested outside the reserve began to dwindle. By 2001, villagers had begun producing common “store” mushrooms, which can be raised in rice straw.

Plate 12. Cryptomeria trees in the Mawu village watergate fengshui forest.

Plate 13. (Below) A broadleaf fengshui forest in Taipingliao village. Situated between the upper and lower villages, it is a watergate forest for the upper village and a headwater forest for the lower one.

Plate 14. The traditional crossbow and tripline method used by tiger hunters. The bolts are placed on the cocked crossbow, and the tripline is set across a game trail. The bow’s spring action comes from flexible multi-ply strips of mao bamboo.

Plate 15. A crossbow bolt. Huang Zaiqiu ( pictured), one of the last crossbow tiger hunters in the region, does not reveal the ingredients of the poison that was applied to the iron heads.

Plate 16. A bamboo bow trap in Meihuashan. These traps are used for small animals, such as bamboo rats, bandicoot rats, partridges, pheasants, and small Indian civets.

Plate 17. A stick snare trap on a trail near Guadun village, in Wuyishan. The trap is powered by a bent sapling.

Plate 18. Short-barreled and standard long-barreled muzzle-loaders in Meihuashan. Found in nearly every village household in the 1990s, they are used primarily to kill wild boar.

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made into about 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of starch powder, a ratio of about twelve-to-one. Bracken fern is distributed in temperate and tropical regions worldwide. It was one of the most important (if not the most important) subsistence food items among the Maori in New Zealand until well into the nineteenth century, even in areas where sweet potatoes and taro were cultivated. It was consumed as a staple by aborigines in Tasmania, too, and by Native Americans in California. Like the peoples of the Southeast Uplands, the Maori burned large areas in the hills every one to three years to ensure that starchy rhizomes were produced. These were pounded into a flour, shaped into bread, and cooked. 6 Bracken fern grows all over China, but most abundantly south of the Changjiang. Although bracken root consumption in the Southeast Uplands is well known, there appears to be little information on the geographical distribution of this practice in other parts of China in historical times. The fact that it was common throughout the Southeast Uplands has important implications for understanding the use of fire throughout China, especially south of the Changjiang. Based on interviews in the three nature reserves, there was remarkable similarity between mountain communities in different subregions in the use of shanfen as a supplementary source of starch. Probably all the villages in both Wuyishan and Meihuashan were self-sufficient in the production of shanfen. In Aotou village (in Wuyishan) before the 1950s, villagers ate more shanfen than rice, and some villages in Wuyishan and Meihuashan produced enough of the starch to sell it or trade it for rice to outsiders in nearby market towns. Though this subsistence complex was widespread before 1949, central authorities of the communist regime moved rapidly to prohibit the burning of the mountains. One Wuyishan resident stated that even local representatives of the nationalist government had attempted to ban mountain burning by the late 1940s. The relationship between forest coverage and water conservation was well understood by central authorities, and the first significant forest conservation efforts in Longyan Prefecture revolved around fire prevention and reforestation. By the early 1950s, prefectural forestry authorities were drawing up yearly reforestation plans, establishing reforestation zones, “mobilizing the masses” in reforestation efforts, administering an aerial broadcast program to grow pines in rugged mountain zones, and prosecuting those who continued the ancient practice of firing the uplands. But the use of fire was deeply

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ingrained, and there were many conflagrations as villagers, for various reasons, continued burning the mountains. Gazetteer records show that seven of the nine largest forest fires in Longyan Prefecture since 1949 occurred before 1965 and were set intentionally for subsistence purposes, including: clearing land for growing taro, burning fields to clear weeds, burning to promote the growth of bracken ferns, and burning to make fertilizer. The largest forest fire on record, which occurred over a twoday period beginning on December 31, 1960, burned 84,000 mu (56 km 2, or 22 sq. mi.) of mountain land at the border of Shanghang and Liancheng Counties (near the present reserve boundaries). The fire was set by a man named Fu Guiyang, who was burning to promote the growth of bracken ferns, so he could “dig for fern flour” (wajuefen). The event says more about local and national history than first meets the eye. Though mountain burning for this purpose had subsided in the late 1950s throughout the province, 1960–1961 saw a resurgence in bracken starch consumption as villagers struggled to survive the famine. Many villagers recount the events of this period when they discuss the bracken subsistence system, for it was then that many younger people gained experience collecting roots and processing the flour. During the famine, bracken was regarded as key to survival in many villages. 7 Though large forest fires were much less common in the Longyan region after the mid-1960s, smaller fires were frequent. Many were set in or near rice paddies to clear weeds or to make fertilizer, and later spread out of control. Some, however, were illegally set in the mountain grasslands and pine forests. Of 2,409 forest fires recorded between 1977 and 1984, the purported (official) reasons for starting the fires were as follows: 16.2 percent were set for making fertilizer (in mountain concavities); 16 percent were set to clear weeds from rice paddies (and went out of control); 11 percent were set to clear mountain land (kaihuang); and 5.7 percent were set to “burn the mountain” (lianshan). Other alleged reasons for setting the fires included burning rice stubble, burning debris, burning pastureland, making charcoal, making saltpeter (shaojian), worshipping (burning sacrificial paper money and incense), and burning to drive off wildlife. 8 In Meihuashan, these traditional uses of fire have shaped the landscape and daily life in innumerable ways. The annual or biennial burning of large tracts of mountain land before the 1950s served many physical functions beyond the bracken root subsistence scheme. The most important purposes related to wildlife management, clearing high-eleva-

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tion cattle grazing areas, and facilitating off-trail overland travel (mostly for collecting juecai, hunting, and herding cattle). For wildlife management, the rationale for burning the grasslands each year was to keep the vegetation as sparse as possible, thereby destroying habitat and removing cover for many species of mammals. Wild boar, monkeys, rats, and other animals often caused serious crop depredation, which continues today. In some villages, fire was used as a retaliatory measure immediately after boar or monkey depredation. Villages also faced the threat of attacks on humans and livestock by tigers, leopards, and red dogs, which provided another reason to use fire liberally. Even the frequency of snake bites and bandit attacks was thought to decrease after foliage was removed and not allowed to regenerate. Even with all these reasons for yearly or biennial burning, the practice possibly served multiple psychological, cultural, and physical functions in perpetuating a desired montane grassland landscape. The smooth, grassy aspect of the hills may have had a certain aesthetic appeal for local people, or at least signified that theirs was a domesticated landscape: well-managed, accessible, productive of food, and relatively free of marauding tigers, bandits, and other dangerous enemies. Given the ancient ritual importance of fire as an agent of symbolic purification, burning the mountains may have had great significance on deeper perceptual, psychological, and cultural levels as well. Daily ritual in many villages still requires that three rockets, or other pyrotechnic devices, and wads of fake money be ignited early each morning. Ceremonial “firepit crossings” (guohuokeng) take place irregularly, too, on the recommendation of local gods who speak through shamans during village seances. I participated in one of these ceremonies in Longgui, in April 1994. Whatever the motives held by people of different regions, ethnicities, clans, or villages, the annual burning of the grasslands was encouraged as a multipurpose management strategy all over southern China. In bamboo paper producing or bamboo shoot producing areas, which included most of the Wuyi-Daiyun Range, mountain fires had only to be kept out of bamboo forests, sacred forests, and buildings in the village settlements. In Meihuashan, annually burned grasslands once extended over the entire area that today is covered in high grassland, shrub, and pine. It also included parts of what today are bamboo, mixed, and broadleaf forests. At present, pine forests cover an estimated 30–45 percent of the reserve area, and judging from oral historical accounts, the vast majority of this area was put to the torch regularly. In the aggregate, informants

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from the five study villages stated that annual or biennial burning was carried out in virtually all areas (excluding bamboo forests, cropland, broadleaf forest, and settled areas) of the high mountains. Most of the former montane grasslands have become dense, nearly impenetrable forests of short Huangshan pines above 1,250 meters (4,000 ft.), and Masson pines and mixed forests at lower elevations. This is largely the result of aerial pine seed broadcasting in 1957, a program implemented by central authorities to reforest the denuded uplands. The natural regeneration of broadleaf taxa in the montane grasslands is occurring only along streamside ravines, where broadleaf shrubs and trees form dense, linear thickets in the pine-grass-shrublands above about 1,400 meters (4,600 ft.). In the high mountains, where the soil layer is thin, the wind is strong, and winter frosts are frequent, reestablishing mixed coniferousbroadleaf forest (the representative natural vegetation of the region) may take many, many decades. Cartographic data provide further evidence of the areal extent of vegetation clearance from annual burning in the Meihuashan and Longxishan landscapes before 1949. In 1942, the Fujian Provincial Land Survey Bureau prepared 1:50,000 topographic maps of the province. In 1955, the U.S. Army Map Service revised these maps using aerial photographs of certain sections. The maps, available in the U.S. Library of Congress, provide the best possible synoptic view of land use, village sizes, and vegetation cover in the 1940s and 1950s. They are a useful guide to placenames, too, many of which have changed in subsequent decades. The maps may not accurately delineate small agricultural plots, but they do show larger patterns of montane land use and vegetation coverage, especially the ratio of montane forest to scrub and grassland. The maps were used during interviews with local people, especially those old enough to discuss land use and vegetation changes since liberation. The maps provide dramatic evidence of the degree of forest fragmentation that annual burning in the Meihuashan landscape caused through time. Forest patches shown on the map correspond closely to the distribution pattern of broadleaf forests of the present (fig. 12). This is probably because the remaining broadleaf forests were the only forests left. Other forests, if they existed, were probably sparse or small in area, and so were not mapped. Broadleaf forests did not burn as easily, and it makes sense that they withstood the traditional firing regimen. The largest patches shown on the forest fragmentation map are those surrounding Majiaping, those south and east of Taipingliao, scattered patches from north of

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Guizhuping to southwest of Longgui, and patches along the north-central border of the reserve. According to Longgui natives, there was more broadleaf forest near that village than is shown on the map. From this evidence, the map likely does not show all the forest stands that existed at the time. There was little evidence, however, that the forest area was much more extensive than the map indicates. Data on forest stand ages also indicate a significant degree of correspondence with the cartogographic data. The Provincial Forestry Bureau has determined the approx-

Figure 12. Forest fragmentation in Meihuashan. U.S. Army topographic maps show that in 1949, only fragmented patches remained from what once were extensive broadleaf forests in Meihuashan.

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imate ages of all the vegetation stands in the reserve, based on average ages of selected trees and shrub. According to this system, most of the broadleaf forest stands corresponding to the forested areas shown in the 1955 maps are today between about forty-five and sixty-five years old. These are the oldest vegetation stands in the reserve (many individual trees within these stands are much older). Traditional Commercial Forestry: Bamboo Cultivation, the Paper Industry, and Sideline Cottage Industries

Widely used over the millennia by diverse peoples throughout the Asian tropics and subtropics, bamboo has been critically important in the culture history of China. Its rapid growth, high productivity, and physical properties—strength, lightness, and flexibility—make it one of the most useful plants on earth for the construction of buildings, boats, fences, and a wide variety of weapons, tools, utensils, and other products. Its edible shoots have long been used both as a subsistence food source and as a much sought-after delicacy. The long-term interdependence between people and bamboo has contributed to the spread of certain bamboo species. Of about one thousand species worldwide, more than three hundred are found in China. Roughly 80 percent of the total area of bamboo forest in China, however, is dominated by mao bamboo. In Meihuashan and throughout the Wuyishan Range, mao bamboo has been the most important forest product for centuries. From an economic standpoint, it is the most important bamboo species in China. Mao bamboo is cultivated most widely in subtropical China, south of the Changjiang. It grows at elevations between 100 and 1,500 meters (328 and 5,000 ft.) but is most productive when grown in hollows or on lower slopes, between 300 and 800 meters (984 and 2,600 ft.). These lower-elevation sites are protected from wind and have relatively thick, soft soils, with more humus and higher water content. In Fujian, with more land area in mao bamboo forests than any other province, the most extensive bamboo forests are found in the central and western mountains, from Daiyunshan west to the Wuyi Range, along the entire northeast-southwest axis of the province. Because natural conditions in the Wuyi-Daiyun Range are superior to those in other parts of the province (and because the terrain allows for few economic alternatives), the mountain prefectures of Longyan, Sanming, and Nanping produce most of the province’s bamboo. In 1994, these three (of nine) prefectures produced 63.3 percent of Fujian’s bamboo.9

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Mao bamboo can spread from roots without sexually reproducing. In fact, in favorable soil, water, and climatic conditions, the plant can go without flowering for up to a hundred years. So long as the culms do not flower, new shoots break through the soil surface each year or two, rising from a complex, rapidly growing underground root system. Once the plant flowers it dies, causing large areas of bamboo forest to wither away all at once. To encourage the spread of bamboo, the grower needs only to ensure that existing culms are surrounded by enough open space to spread roots and enough good soil for sprouting shoots. When these requirements are met, mao bamboo spreads rapidly. With several climatic, soil, and anthropogenic factors affecting the nutrient storage and physiology of mao bamboo, shoot growth is often most prolific in alternating years. In spring, a particular stand or forest of bamboo will produce many shoots, to be followed the next spring by little or no shoot growth. The productive year is called a “big year” (danian), the unproductive year a “little year” (xiaonian). As with flowering, a fairly extensive area is affected by the same conditions, and typically the cycle is synchronized over large areas. Mao bamboo is a heliophyte, growing best in areas where there is little or no underbrush over the shoots, and no canopy cover above the mature culms. Through the centuries, humans have fostered the spread of bamboo by clearing adjacent trees and understory plants, which could inhibit the growth of new shoots and eventually overtake the bamboo forest. Under these conditions, it has formed pure stands, in some places covering many square kilometers of mountain land. Following the decollectivization of bamboo forest lands in the early 1980s, the practice of manual defoliation (or “cutting,” pi ) has intensified, as families strive to increase the density and area of their newly acquired bamboo stands (pl. 10). How many centuries ago people began to promote the spread of bamboo forests in Meihuashan is unknown. Probably aborigines and early Han settlers favored bamboo as a source for building material, tools, and shoots. Certainly by a.d. 1000, bamboo was an important part of the local and regional economy. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), bamboo paper production was the most important industry in southwest Fujian. By the Ming (1368–1644), locally produced Minxi paper (Minxituzhi) was being exported to countries throughout Southeast Asia. During the reign of the first Qing emperor, Shunzhi (1644–1661), paper from Liancheng County was presented as tribute to the emperor in Beijing. By

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Figure 13. Altitudinal land use zones and historical change in vegetation in Meihuashan.

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the end of the Qing, so-called jade-button paper (yukou), produced in Changting (which included Meihuashan), was being exported to India, Japan, and other countries. 10 Before 1949, each village relied on bamboo to different degrees; some specialized in the production of certain types of paper, others in the production of pulp, which they traded with villages more skilled in paper production; still others may have had no processing capability, choosing instead to sell bamboo shoots, poles, and other forest products. Even in villages where paper was manufactured, some households supplemented their income with other types of forest resource extraction and trade, including the production of saltpeter (made from water mixed with the ashes of green bamboo), mushrooms, and products woven from mat sedge (Lepironia), especially beds, bags, and sandals. Synopsis of Long-Term Anthropogenic Vegetation Change

Changes in the Meihuashan landscape have been dramatic, and the trajectory of change has been directly related to resource management practices in specific elevation and vegetation zones (fig. 13). The period before numerous permanent Han or She settlements were established was probably preceded by a time when the vegetation was less disturbed by human activity. The date of the earliest anthropogenic vegetation change is unknown, but palynological data from Daiyunshan shows that the first massive forest clearance occurred about one thousand years ago. The onset of intensive disturbance was perhaps similar for the Meihuashan region, for it is likely that before Han settlers established villages in the mountains, aboriginal inhabitants were driven into mountain refuges in sufficient numbers to affect the forest cover through repeated firing. Before burning was carried out on a sustained and widespread basis, the mountains supported extensive stands of primeval broadleaf evergreen, deciduous evergreen, and mixed broadleaf-needleleaf forests. From the earliest period of Hakka settlement, late in the southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), to the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the landscape of Meihuashan was transformed to meet the subsistence and commercial needs of village communities. Extreme population growth in the Qing dynasty placed an unprecedented demand on the land to produce food for basic subsistence. The primeval forests were transformed by Hakka settlers into agricultural, forestry, and grassland extraction zones. Lands in the 400–1,250 meter elevation range were

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converted to rice paddies, bamboo forests, and needleleaf forests of pine and Chinese fir, although certain patches of broadleaf forests in this zone were preserved as village fengshui forests. Above about 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.) (and much lower in remote western parts of the reserve), ridges, slopes, and wetlands were burned annually or biennially, and a montane grassland-shrub meadow was maintained. In these meadows, fern rhizomes were gathered for subsistence purposes, and small herds of yellow cattle shared grazing land with wild ungulates. Burning was probably also intended to keep predators away from villages and mountain footpaths, to drive out tigers, leopards, dholes, monkeys, rats, and wild boar, and to remove the high grass and shrub vegetation where these species could find cover. Ironically, where a mosaic of different vegetation types persisted, the burning of montane grasslands helped provide good grazing land for ungulates, the primary prey for tigers, leopards, and other large cats. In the 1950s, afforestation schemes, including the prohibition of burning, led to the growth of Huangshan pine forests in the former highland meadow zone, and the regeneration of mixed forests in many areas. Masson pine spread into many lower-elevation grasslands. The period from 1949 to the 1990s saw extensive rice paddy abandonment. After the economic reforms of the early 1980s, there was a rapid clearance of mature Chinese fir trees from different stand types throughout the region and an areal expansion of family-managed bamboo forests. Most of Meihuashan’s ancient sacred forests remained intact.

Part III Contemporary Village Resource Management and Nature Conservation Strategies

7

Habitat Conservation in the Post-Reform Landscape

When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster. —Laozi, the Daodejing

During the first thirty years of communist rule, an unprecedented degree of government intervention in village land tenure relationships, subsistence patterns, and cottage industries brought massive change to the traditional social and economic order of village life. As Chinese Communist Party leaders carried out land reform, collectivization, and communization, family-based commercial paper production was transformed to a communal enterprise geared toward meeting quotas set by local and regional cadres. State control over rice and bamboo production transformed villagers into government laborers on their own lands. Except for the period of the Great Leap Forward, most of the local labor force was intensively concentrated on the relatively small area of preexisting rice paddies and bamboo groves. Though new paddy land had to be developed (sometimes on long-abandoned terraces), bamboo groves were sufficiently large to meet the needs of the command economy, and not much additional forest clearance was necessary. Patterns of ecological change in Meihuashan during this period were different from those in surrounding mountain and valley areas at lower elevations. While rampant deforestation during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution left devastation across vast tracts of the Southeast Uplands region, Meihuashan lacked the requisite network of serviceable roads (and many villages lacked the large streams) to support such enterprises until the late 1970s and early 1980s. For these reasons, the most dramatic change in the vegetation patterns of Meihuashan was the disappearance of widespread montane grasslands under a virtual sea

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of Huangshan and Masson pines. Pine seeds were aerially broadcast in anthropogenic grassland zones throughout the Southeast Uplands, and human-influenced succession occurred in highland areas across the region. Meihuashan is exceptional in that the logging of mature forest stands was not as severe or systematic during this period as it was elsewhere. The government prohibited the use of fire to clear the grasslands, and with some relatively minor exceptions, village customs prohibiting the cutting of trees in the fengshui forests were strictly upheld. The existence of these forests is testimony to the power of village forestry traditions, especially since there were periodic efforts to cut them down. After the Cultural Revolution, and especially after the economic reforms of the early 1980s, land use changes were largely in response to new opportunities, market forces, and technological change. The Individual Responsibility System brought a series of economic and political freedoms that had mutually amplifying effects on land use and resource extraction. For the first time since the early 1950s, families had virtual ownership of rice and bamboo plots, and could make their own decisions regarding production and marketing. Newly adopted hybrid rice varieties led to self-sufficiency in rice production for the first time in history. New roads put an end to paper production, as the demand for poles for scaffolding in urban coastal construction projects increased. Collectives gained rights to sell timber under a quota system, and the value of Chinese fir (also for construction) rose exponentially in the early 1980s. The advent of more powerful and destructive technologies has put tremendous pressure on wildlife habitat throughout the Southeast Uplands. The speed with which humans can transform the environment has increased, and only proactive conservation has the potential to hold environmental degradation in check. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution some of the most devastating local and regional examples of degradation include rapid expansion of the road network; increased cutting of primeval stands of Chinese fir, Cryptomeria, Chinese hemlock, and other tree species (even within sacred forests); increased use of agricultural chemicals and rat poisons (which have risen through the food chain); increased use of firearms and headlamps in hunting; and increased use of electric shock devices for fishing. The growth of a capitalist economy has both increased market demand for a wide variety of natural resources and created an expanding web of economic pressures and opportunities for mountain people. Hakkas and other upland peoples have long specialized in converting

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montane resources, such as bamboo, into cash income, and new patterns of resource extraction have given rise to new and ever-changing patterns of landscape and resource delineation. In Meihuashan, where village resource management on collective lands is now circumscribed by a growing array of harvesting restrictions, land use conflicts with reserve managers and land tenure conflicts between neighboring families and neighboring villages are becoming common. At the village level, household land tenure in bamboo groves provides fertile ground for bitter disputes and inequity, on the one hand, or for equitable resource tenure and periodic redistribution of land resources, on the other. Many remote mountain regions in China face similar problems, and nature reserve managers are charged with protecting wildlife and habitat in areas that are still being shaped by human activity. Local residents, though, must cope with restrictive land use policies that often threaten the viability of their communities. In the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995, I conducted research on the frequency of bird and mammal activity in ten vegetation types, in a preliminary effort to determine the value of each type as wildlife habitat. This basic delineation of the landscape ecology of the Meihuashan Reserve provides insights on the ways wildlife has adapted to anthropogenic ecological change, and the ecological implications of current land use patterns. Although the villages of the Wuyi-Daiyun Mountains rely on bamboo as the primary source of household income, this study shows that managed bamboo forests are the least valuable vegetation type for wildlife. Surveys of land use and resource tenure patterns in five Meihuashan villages also indicate that bamboo management practices in the past twenty years have accelerated the conversion of valuable broadleaf forests into bamboo, and have intensified competition for forest resources. The assessment that follows will address the habitat quality of ten major vegetation types in the Southeast Uplands region, discuss the status of large carnivores and omnivores in the region, and conclude with an examination of the linkages between present household and collective land use patterns and habitat conservation. Wildlife Habitat Surveys

Analysis of wildlife habitat preference was based on track and sign surveys in ten representative vegetation types (table 1). The objectives of this research were (in order of importance) first, to measure habitat use by five species of ungulates (hoofed animals); second, to measure habitat use

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by other mammal species for which data could be collected; and third, to measure habitat use by birds. With a zoogeographer from the Fujian Provincial Museum and the assistance of local villagers, I conducted thirty-seven stratified random trail sample surveys of wildlife signs in ten vegetation types, to determine the relative density of wildlife signs in each. Walking a total trail distance of 35 kilometers (22 mi.), we recorded the tracks, scats, feeding signs, and nesting (or bedding) signs of five species of ungulates as indices of the density and frequency of each species across the vegetation mosaic. We also recorded signs of other mammals and birds (classifying the latter simply as pheasants or nonpheasants and field-dwelling or forest-dwelling).1 The five ungulates surveyed were the wild boar (Sus scrofa), the common or Indian muntjac (also known as the barking deer, Muntiacus muntjak), the Chinese muntjac (or Reeve’s muntjac, Muntiacus reevesii ), the serow (a type of mountain goat, Capricornis sumatraensis), and the crested deer (or tufted deer, Elaphodus cephalophus). (The physical characteristics, life histories, and conservation status of each species, in Meihuashan and in China as a whole, are provided in the appendix.) These species were selected because they are abundant enough to provide an adequate data base, their signs are plentiful and discernible for research purposes, and they comprise the prey base for such important large carnivores as tigers, leopards, and clouded leopards. Table 1 shows how each vegetation type has been ranked according to the average number of tracks, signs, and sightings recorded per kilometer of trail distance. Landscapes of High Habitat Value: Montane Wetlands; Small Clearings of Young Tree Plantations, Orchards, and Rice Paddies; and Broadleaf Forests

The montane wetlands are grassy bogs in the high-elevation Huangshan pine (Pinus taiwanensis) and scrub zone (1,300–1,800 m, or 4,250–5,900 ft.). Most are small (1–5 ha, or 2.5–1 2.5 acres), 2 elongated, peat-filled depressions in subalpine headwater zones surrounded by high mountains. They are far from the highest villages, and contain seasonal or permanent pools and plenty of tender grasses and forbs for foraging herbivores. At dawn, dusk, and dark, muntjacs and other ungulates graze along the edges, where adjacent pine or broadleaf forests provide protective cover. Most of the surveys were conducted in the fall, and these data may reflect habitat preferences during the dry season more than in other seasons. Montane wetlands may be critical dry-season watering areas, as is

Table 1. Meihuashan Habitat Survey: Vegetation Types by Ungulate Sign Density

Vegetation Type

Estimated Area (ha)

Montane wetland < 220 Cunninghamia plantation 220 Fruit orchard <220 Rice paddy 600 –1,000 † Broadleaf forest >1,000 Unknown Total broadleaf forest 5,320 Montane grassland 890 –2,200 Pine forest 6,650–9,980 ‡ Mixed forest 2,220 Broadleaf forest <1,000 Unknown Bamboo forest 5,540

Trail Approx. Survey Ungulate Area* Distance Signs /km (%) (km) (Rank)

All Mammal and Bird Signs /km (Rank)

<1.0

1.50

109.0 (1)

182.1 (1)

1.0 <1.0 2.7–4.5

1.00 1.00 2.10

64.0 (2) 51.0 (3) 44.8 (4)

77.0 (5) 119.0 (2) 79.0 (4)

—

3.40

41.2 ( 5)

106.4 ( 3)

24.0

6.80

4.0–10.0 30.0 –45.0 10.0

5.00 10.30 2.95

26.4 (6) 19.4 (7) 18.6 (8)

37.8 (8) 33.8 ( 9) 44.7 (7)

— 25.0

3.40 4.70

17.9 ( 9) 9.1 (10)

68.2 (6) 21.5 (10)

Sources: Fujian Meihuashan 1991; Comprehensive Research 1991. Modified by Huang Zhaofeng, pers. comm. 1998. * Of the total area in the reserve of about 22,170 ha, .5–1.5 % is occupied by settlements, roads, and water (mostly streams). † This figure represents the total area of all rice paddy in the reserve. Figures for remote paddies are not available. ‡ The smaller of these two figures, based on a 1998 estimate by the reserve’s chief forester, may err on the low side. Estimates of total pine coverage in the early 1990s ranged as high as 65%. Vegetation maps indicate that pine forests constitute at least half the vegetation coverage, but reserve managers warn that these maps are inaccurate. Succession from pine to mixed forests is occurring throughout the Masson and Huangshan pine zones.

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true in other regions with distinctive wet and dry seasons. In Meihuashan, few montane wetlands have been carefully mapped. Though overgrazing by yellow cattle (which replace water buffalo as the draft animal above 700 m, or 2,300 ft.) may be causing compaction of peaty wetland soils and loss of wetland flora, most of the wetlands lie in the core area of the reserve, and specific protective measures can be taken if necessary. Given the unique geomorphology of these small montane basins, and their importance for wildlife, they should be targeted for special protection. Because the wetlands of Meihuashan are far from the nearest villages and are not presently used for agriculture, forestry, or intensive gathering, protection measures may prove effective. The main threat to the ecology of the wetlands today is cattle grazing. If herds of yellow cattle become too large, they may degrade wetland ecosystems. Most villages have between ten and twenty head, which are allowed to range freely in the mountains for most of the year, being brought down to the villages at plowing time in the spring. Though few herds are large enough to have caused noticeable environmental degradation, when they congregate in wetlands they may cause soil compaction, overgraze fragile plants, and displace other ungulates. Some villages have planned to seek permission to increase their herd sizes and raise cattle and goats commercially, and one Longgui family had begun raising a herd of sixty goats in the mid-1990s. Further such ventures should not be allowed without a careful analysis of probable environmental consequences. Anthropogenic clearings of high value include young tree plantations (in this instance, Chinese fir), orchards, and small rice paddies. Chinese fir, a member of the redwood family (Taxodiaceae), has been the most important timber tree in southern China for centuries. Though it grows at elevations of up to 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.), inadequate means of timber transport precluded its cultivation in Meihuashan until recent years, and since the removal of individual old-growth Chinese fir trees in the 1980s, it has not been a major component of the reserve’s vegetation mosaic. Most of the forty-one cultivated stands contain seedlings or small trees less than twelve years old, with an average area of only 5.8 hectares (14.3 acres). The small size of most young stands of Chinese fir in Meihuashan may account for their relatively high value for ungulates. There is no indication that ungulates are attracted to the young trees themselves; instead, they enter these open areas at night to browse on tender grasses in an area with clear views of predators and an easy retreat to tree

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cover at the periphery. Where Chinese fir and pines form vast needleleaf forests in the hills and low to mid-size mountains, ungulates are scarcer, and overall plant and animal species diversity is greatly diminished. Reserve directors were aware of this problem by the mid-1990s, and no more permits were granted for Chinese fir plantations on collective lands not under household contracts. Like cultivated stands of Chinese fir, fruit orchards are small, discrete, anthropogenic disturbance patches of high habitat value. Favored cultivars include pears, peaches, plums, loquats, and shancangzi (Litsea cubeba, which has medicinal roots). Before the late 1980s, there was little precedent for cultivating these species in Meihuashan, and even today the largest stands do not exceed a few hectares. Researchers from Fujian Normal University have recommended that Meihuashan villages could also produce tea, tung (Aleurites fordii), duzhong (Eucommia ulmoides), houpu ( Magnolia officinalis), and cinnamon (Cinnamomum cassia) for medicinal and industrial use (Comprehensive Research Editorial Team 1991). Little precedent exists for cultivating these species on a large scale in Meihuashan, though in recent years it has been attempted in a few small plots. Besides the problems associated with transporting perishable fruits to market, orchards often suffer depredation by herbivores. Aside from one small field of tea (most households grow a couple of bushes for their own use), shancangzi, and a few young orchards (some of which have been abandoned), there are few “economic forests” in the reserve. One of the only villagers I met who had an orchard complained that Reeve’s muntjacs, rabbits, and other animals had damaged many of his trees. For orchards to succeed, they must be managed vigilantly, and this could lead to an increase in conflicts with wildlife. Rice paddies, too, are favored feeding grounds for herbivores, and are available for foraging ungulates through much of the year, particularly during the fallow period in late fall, winter, and spring. At fall harvesttime, wild boar often feast on the grain, and guards armed with muzzleloaders maintain nightly vigils in nearby shacks. After the harvest, fallow fields abound with tender grasses and forbs, attracting herbivores and their predators until spring plowing time. Of the ungulates, wild boar and Reeve’s muntjacs appear to be the most common denizens of the fallow-season paddies. The paddies surveyed were all relatively small (up to several hectares), more than three-quarters of a kilometer (.4 mi.) from the nearest villages, and surrounded by forests, making them optimum

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for grazing. Most households in Meihuashan grow rice for subsistence purposes only, and large areas of paddy are being abandoned. Villagers cite low yields from mountain paddies and depredation by wild boar and rats as the most important reasons for the decline of rice agriculture, and it is uneconomical to invest time and labor in producing more rice than is required for family subsistence needs. Boar and rats have long been a threat to the rice harvest, and muntjacs are common in paddies after the harvest, but because there is no legal protection for these species, villagers will continue to exterminate them, using a variety of methods. Of the more extensive vegetation types, broadleaf forest at elevations higher than 1,000 meters (3,280 ft.) has the highest density of ungulate signs. Like the montane wetlands, the high-altitude broadleaf forests are used relatively equally by all four of the ungulate species (except the common muntjac) common at these elevations. These patches are successional remnants of the vast subtropical broadleaf evergreen forests that once covered the region. Most common on steep slopes far from villages, they are a source area for ungulates, providing cover, water, and forage in the form of leaves, fruit, and chinkapin acorns. Many village fengshui forests are broadleaf evergreen stands of considerable age and stature. Although most such forests do not exceed several hectares in size, they often intergrade with other forest stands of greater size and may become instrumental in reforestation efforts as sources of pollen, seed, and shade for the production of seedlings. The most severe threat to these forests is deforestation as a result of the expansion of managed bamboo forests. Landscapes of Intermediate and Low Habitat Value: Montane Grasslands, Pine Forests, Mixed Forests, Low-Elevation Broadleaf Forests, and Bamboo Forests

High mountain grasslands are among the best habitats for the high-altitude dwellers—serow and crested deer. Wild boar also make use of these remote meadows. The high mountain grasslands differ from those of lower elevations in taxonomic assemblage, and in their greater persistence after fire (because of drier soils and colder temperatures). These grasslands are found at elevations between 1,500 and 1,800 meters (5,000 and 5,900 ft.), on ridges and around the summits of the highest mountains in the Meihuashan region. Dominated by grasses, scattered shrubs (especially wild azaleas and members of the tea family), and the seedlings of Huangshan pines, the grasslands traditionally are regarded as the domain of the South China tiger. But with the government reforestation

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efforts that began in the 1950s, including the aerial broadcast of Huangshan pine seeds and a prohibition of mountain burning, these onceextensive meadows have been engulfed by impenetrable forests of stunted pines. This ecological transformation has been carried out with good intentions, but it amounts to the loss of highland meadows that are, at the very least, many centuries old. The pine forests of Meihuashan consist of two types, one dominated by Masson pine, known as “maweisong” (Pinus massoniana), and those dominated by Huangshan pine (Pinus taiwanensis). Forests of Masson pines are common throughout the Southeast Uplands. In Meihuashan, they occur from about 400 meters (1,300 ft.) in elevation to 1,300 meters (4,265 ft.). Huangshan pine forests grow on the high-elevation slopes from 1,300 to 1,800 meters (4,265–5,900 ft.) in elevation, surviving in the dry soils, high winds, and cold winter temperatures of the high mountains. At elevations higher than about 1,500 meters (5,000 ft.), they have not grown taller than about 2–3 meters (6.5–10 ft.) (though their average age is fifteen to twenty years), which makes the forest dense and virtually impenetrable for humans. Ungulate species do not favor this type of community, for it provides little forage, open grazing, or water, and despite being far removed from the frequent human disturbance around low-elevation villages, these pine forests do not constitute particularly good ungulate habitat. In winter, wild boar root for pine-root bark and sometimes make nests in the pine forests. Crested deer and serow appear to use the Huangshan pine forests adjacent to high grasslands for cover, but these forests are not as important for shelter as are broadleaf forest and riparian scrub thickets. Mixed pine-broadleaf forest, comprising pine, broadleaf, and bamboo taxa, are widespread and on the increase; estimates of its total area are provisional at best. The four forest areas sampled in these surveys ranged from elevations of about 900–1,200 meters (3,000–4,000 ft.). They may not represent the full range of geographic and ecological conditions of this important forest type. The relative ecological value of these forests is much greater for birds (ranking fifth). A large percentage of the pine forest is gradually being succeeded by broadleaf forests, and we can infer that the area of transitional mixed forest is steadily increasing. Broadleaf forests below 1,000 meters (3,280 ft.) contain less than half the density of signs of the same vegetation type at higher elevations, suggesting that proximity to human disturbance in the form of day-to-day activity and the alteration of adjacent vegetation patches is a critical fac-

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tor in ungulate density. All ungulates were represented in surveys of this habitat, but Reeve’s muntjacs and wild boars clearly dominate, given their adaptability to anthropogenic environmental disturbance. In density of bird activity, however, these forests were second only to the higher-elevation broadleaf forests, and like the mixed forests, the ecological value of these forests can be understood better by including indices of other mammals and birds. The habitat type with the lowest density of ungulate activity is the cultivated mao bamboo forest. This habitat also scores lowest in sign density for carnivores, all mammals, and mammals and birds combined. Bamboo forests are frequented by villagers, who keep the underbrush cleared to promote the growth of new shoots, and who set up traps, dummies, and explosive devices to repel wild boar during shoot eruption in spring. Though ungulates browse there at night, especially along forest edges, there is little cover. Bamboo forests with dense understories —that is, those managed in a very lax fashion—are said to be good wildlife habitat, but practically all the understory has been neatly trimmed in Meihuashan during the past ten years to promote shoot production. As a result, wildlife feeding activity is intense only during the spring period of shoot growth, when wild boar and monkeys can cause serious depredation. At other times of year, Reeve’s muntjacs sometimes browse the bamboo stands at night, eating the tender herbaceous plants that sprout after villagers clear underbrush. Forests dominated by mao bamboo currently cover about 25 percent of the reserve, and the area of pure bamboo stands is increasing each year, as villagers clear out the undergrowth and remove canopy trees (fig. 14). That this essential economic activity be as limited in areal extent as possible is critically important; otherwise, the reserve could become what has been called a “bamboo desert.” Mao bamboo, a native species that grows throughout southern China, is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world; after shoots erupt from underground rhizomes in early spring, culms can grow 10 centimeters (4 in.) a day, reaching a full height of more than 10 meters (33 ft.) in about two months. Rhizomes grow rapidly (meters per year), too, and bamboo can invade adjacent forest stands at average rates of up to 3–4 meters (10–13 ft.) a year when underbrush is removed before the shoots emerge. Shoots growing in the moist forest understory often succumb to mold and other diseases, so villagers cut the underbrush down to ground level to induce the areal spread of their

Figure 14. Distribution of broadleaf forest and bamboo forest in Meihuashan. Bamboo covers large parts of the more densely settled eastern buffer zone. Many of the remaining broadleaf forest patches are now in protected subareas (baohu xiaoqu).

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groves and the density of culms within their groves. Deprived of browse and protective cover, wild herbivores tend to avoid managed bamboo forests, with feeding activity becoming intense only during the spring and only for certain species. Evidence of Carnivores and Omnivores in Meihuashan

As with ungulates, evidence of carnivores was far more abundant in the montane wetlands than in any other habitat type (24.8 /km). This included the scats and tracks of the golden cat, Asiatic red dog, leopard cat, large Indian civet, small Indian civet, and crab-eating mongoose. Other species detected in other habitats included the tiger or leopard,3 clouded leopard (two sets of tracks found in two rice paddies), masked palm civet (omnivorous), Eurasian badger, weasels, and pangolin (insectivorous). The order of habitat preference is different from that of ungulates, most significantly in the greater importance of broadleaf forests. As with ungulate habitat preference, bamboo is the least valuable habitat. Much of the information collected on wildlife was not part of the wildlife surveys. This was especially true of signs and other information concerning large carnivores and omnivores. The following observations provide evidence of the persistence of certain large carnivores and omnivores in the Southeast Uplands. This information is important because relatively little systematic wildlife research has been conducted in Fujian since 1949. Thus, there is little reliable data on wildlife —most information on mammals is anecdotal or based on fur collection records. Evidence of large carnivores included kills, tracks, and scratches made by large cats. One of the most dramatic documented cases occurred while Gary Koehler was conducting tiger surveys in Meihuashan in 1990–1991. Near the village of Dayuan, just west of the reserve boundary, he was led high into the broadleaf forest on steep slopes several hours’ walk above the settlement. The objective of the jaunt was a small nanmu tree (Phoebe bournei) growing at the edge of a steep ravine far from the nearest trail, at an elevation of about 1,225 meters (4,000 ft.). The Dayuan villager who led the researchers to the tree explained that in November 1989, he had “discovered” scratches on the tree and a steel leghold trap attached to its trunk (an unlikely discovery for anyone unfamiliar with the remote trap site). In the jaws of the trap was a tiger’s toe. The team also found a tiger’s canine tooth embedded in the trunk of the tree, and surmised that in its

Figure 15. A clouded leopard injured by steel leghold traps set by poachers. The cat was confiscated in a local market by reserve officials in 1992, and died in captivity just before this photo was taken.

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Figure 16. The feeding nest of an Asiatic black bear. This vegetative mass in a Myrica rubra (yangmei) tree near Majiaping village was made by a bear pulling together a “nest” of fruit-laden branches. The platform then becomes both a perch and a plate.

agony, the large cat had bitten and scratched the bark repeatedly, up to a height of several meters, until it managed to free itself. The scratches were still visible when I visited the site in 1995. On my first visit to Meihuashan, in early January 1993, reserve staff showed me a clouded leopard that had been caught in leghold traps (fig. 15) and was confiscated while still alive by the Meihuashan Reserve staff. It died in captivity several days later, having received no veterinary care for serious leg wounds. Clouded leopards are probably the most common of the large cats in southeast China, but the species is under firstlevel state protection in China and is listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List (meaning they are likely to become endangered in the near future if factors that have led to their population decline continue). Other signs of large carnivores, including cats, were found in the

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mid-1990s. In the fall of 1994, a villager and I found the remains of two Reeve’s muntjacs believed to have been killed by Asiatic red dogs. The two separate kill sites were located in two montane wetlands, and what was believed to be red dog scats were found near one of them, though it is possible that the kills were made by a big cat. In May 1995, two sets of large cat tracks were discovered in a peanut field near a village some miles south of the Meihuashan Reserve. Separate investigations by myself and a former tiger hunter, who was accompanied by reserve staff, revealed that the tracks probably were made by two leopards that had wandered into the cultivated valley from a densely forested ridge nearby, and it appeared that they soon returned to the forested slope. Finally, figure 16 shows an Asiatic black bear feeding spot in a red bayberry tree (Myrica rubra). This photo was taken in a very remote broadleaf forest of Meihuashan, where a pine resin collector led me to a series of trees with fresh scratches in the bark, where bears had climbed up to get fruit. Once in the tree, the bears break branches and pull them into a kind of nest, where they can sit and dine on the luscious, tangy fruits. I found the same feeding signs of bears in high-elevation broadleaf forests in Wuyishan Nature Reserve as well. Bamboo Management, Household Economy, and the Threat of Bamboo Desertification

The most critical forestry management problem facing Meihuashan over the past decade is one that affects mountain regions across all of southern and central China: the conversion of broadleaf and mixed forests into bamboo forests. The rapid growth rates of bamboo rhizomes, shoots, and culms make it an ideal commercial forest crop, and most rural highmountain communities in western Fujian depend on bamboo for their economic well-being. Within a decade of the promulgation of economic reforms in 1979, the market for bamboo products increased exponentially, and village households and cooperatives throughout western Fujian began producing a growing supply of durable goods, especially poles for scaffolding in urban construction, but also an array of finished products, such as chopsticks, kitchen utensils, and household furnishings. Many households have promoted rapid lateral incursion of bamboo into adjoining forests by clearing the underbrush within and adjacent to the bamboo down to ground level. In quadrat studies, we (myself and village assistants) found that bamboo forests can invade forest stands at an average rate of roughly 4 meters (13 ft.) a year when underbrush is removed

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before the shoots emerge. The threat of forest conversion is very real and has occurred in many areas outside the reserve. The demise of the indigenous paper industry and the rise of raw pole exports coincided with a reserve prohibition on paper production, the rise of the individual responsibility system, and a growing road network in the reserve. Though figures on vegetation coverage in Meihuashan during the 1970s are not available, bamboo forests in Guizhuping increased from about 267 hectares (660 acres) in 1977 to about 467 hectares (1,154 acres) in 1994, an increase of 75 percent. In 1991, bamboo forests covered 20.3 percent (4,500 ha, or 17 sq. mi.) of the total land area of the reserve, and by 1998 this figure had grown to 25 percent. In 1994, noting the vast stands of biologically impoverished bamboo monocultures across the Wuyi-Daiyun Range and the rapid spread of bamboo in Meihuashan, one reserve forester lamented that the reserve was undergoing “bamboo desertification.” While there is a clear relationship between the expansion of bamboo cultivation and wildlife habitat degradation, the dynamics of bamboo management at the village and household level are highly complex. To gain an understanding of the factors that promote the conversion of other vegetation types to bamboo, I conducted exploratory research on household economy and bamboo management practices in the five study villages in the summer of 1995. At the end of the summer, brief, formal interviews were conducted in eight villages in the eastern half of the Meihuashan Reserve for comparative purposes. I also traveled to the Wuyishan and Longxishan Nature Reserves to conduct interviews with reserve managers and village leaders (five in Wuyishan and three in Longxishan) on past and present forest management practices and economic development in those reserves. If bamboo were not critical to household economies, it would cease to be propagated, and the stands, if undisturbed, would revert to broadleaf forest. One objective of this research was to determine whether villagers were in fact economically dependent on bamboo, and to ascertain whether other economic activities provided village households with substantial income. Activities that provide enough money to substitute for, or substantially augment, bamboo income could be important in more sustainable patterns of economic development. Survey results indicate that bamboo is indeed the source of most of the household income in Meihuashan, and in the five study villages, bamboo-derived income ranges from an average of 43 percent of total house-

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hold income in Majiaping to 97 percent of total household income in Taipingliao, with an average of 72 percent in all five villages (table 2). 4 Intervillage and interhousehold variation in total income and the percentage of bamboo-derived income are related to several political and economic factors. Three of the most apparent factors are access to roads and transportation, economic diversification, and the degree of equity of land tenure conditions. Post-reform village land tenure systems are a critical component of bamboo forest management, which may be important in the resolution of forest conversion problems. As part of the economic reforms of 1979–1981, all the natural villages in the Southeast Uplands (and other parts of China) held meetings to divide up certain parts of what had been collectively owned lands. In Meihuashan, the chiefs (duizhang) of the natural villages led the meetings, and each collective’s rice paddies, vegetable plots, and bamboo groves were distributed to households under various types of contractual agreements. All other lands (forest and grasslands) remained the property of the collective. Each village had to decide what criteria to use in allocating productive lands to each household.

Table 2. Village Population and Household Income

Village

Average Household Population Bamboo (1994) Income *

Average Total Household Income

Bamboo as Percentage of Total Income

Total Income / Person †

Gonghe Guizhuping Majiaping Taipingliao Longgui

232 230 175 220 100

6,090 2,850 1,900 12,600 2,767

9,480 3,974 4,446 13,072 5,592

64 72 43 97 50

1,634 (1,126) 568 (971) 529 (423) 2,108 (1,237) 1,290 (1,350)

Average

191

5,241

7,313

65

1,226 (1,021)

* Income in yuan; 8 yuan = 1 U.S. dollar in 1995. †

The first figures are based on household surveys; figures in parentheses are an average of estimates provided by village leaders, 1994 census figures for administrative villages, and data from household surveys. In 1994, the average per capita income for all eighteen administrative villages (including sixty-three natural villages in and adjacent to the reserve) was 927 yuan ($116).

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Some villages carried out redistribution on the basis of land deeds (tudizheng), which had been issued during the land reform campaigns of the early 1950s. In this system, families were given rice and bamboo plots that had belonged to them for the brief period after land reform (1952) and before collectivization (1957) (and in some instances before 1949). Other villages gave households the same lands they had owned, but with adjustments based on present household population. Still other villages chose to distribute the collective land solely on the basis of present household populations, regardless of former land deeds. 5 To allot plots fairly, some villages also made rough assessments of such variables as productivity and distance from the village center. Each village could decide whether to continue holding regular redistribution meetings at fixed intervals of between five and twenty years to reallocate land on a regular basis. Some villages used this as a way to maintain equitable land tenure as household populations changed with births and deaths, and as patterns of land productivity became more evident. Other villages did not plan to meet again, effectively deciding then and there that lands allotted to each household might never have to be redistributed; as household contracts expired they might be renegotiated willy-nilly, regardless of changes in household size. The ramifications of these decisions can be great, and potential scenarios for land tenure and power relations in the villages span the political economic spectrum. On the one hand, monopolies could develop resembling the landlord–landless laborer systems of old; those with more bamboo land and wealth would gradually buy up long-term rights to use the lands of other villagers. On the other hand, a system of flexible land redistribution could be sustained, with all households continuing to hold a stake in bamboo production. The fact that the villages in Meihuashan are composed of agnates may reduce conflicts to some extent, and nonagnatic communities, as found in Longxishan and Wuyishan, possibly will not fare as well without regular meetings and a land redistribution system (some have planned to hold regular redistribution meetings; others have not). In both instances, there has been economic incentive to expand family bamboo forests into other forest stands, which usually belong to the collective, eventually replacing more diverse stand types with bamboo monocultures. Certain villages, such as Longgui and Gonghe, are committed to a flexible system, with periodic redistribution of rice and bamboo plots. In Longgui, meetings are held every five years to redistribute both rice and

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bamboo lands. One Longgui resident stated that land was distributed unfairly in 1981 because land area and land quality were not carefully determined. This problem was mitigated, however, when land was redistributed in 1986 and 1991. In Gonghe, meetings are held every ten years, and because the current land use divisions are generally viewed as fair, conflicts are rare. In Guizhuping, though, no meetings were planned. For comparative purposes, of eight villages surveyed in the eastern third of the reserve, one had undergone land redistribution on the basis of household population, three on the basis of old land deeds with adjustment for household population changes, and four on the basis of old land deeds alone. In these villages, seven reported that there would be no meetings to redistribute land. This phenomenon is not limited to Meihuashan: in the Wuyishan and Longxishan Reserves, three of five villages surveyed had no plans to hold meetings. To grasp the economic and land tenure issues surrounding the conversion process, we must understand what happens when a particular family’s bamboo forest expands onto lands belonging to the entire village collective, or onto lands belonging to the state. Because families have the forest (usufruct) rights ( linquan) to rice paddies and present stands of bamboo, and collectives hold the rights to all other mountain lands, the areal expansion of present bamboo stands is (potentially) a conversion of collective land to family-managed land. When bamboo spreads to collective land, the village has the choice either of allowing the land use rights to revert to the family from whose stand of bamboo it spread or of claiming the bamboo as collective property to be distributed to a family in need (within the ongoing system of redistribution that some villages have adopted). If bamboo spreads onto national lands, and reserve managers happen to notice, then all trimming of foliage and other activities that allow it to survive could be curtailed, and other vegetation soon would become dominant. A common response in the mid-1990s was for a village to ignore the situation and for reserve officials to be unaware of it (because of the difficulty of monitoring all the bamboo lands in every village), and for the family from whose plot the bamboo had spread to assume rights to it. In most instances, that particular household would have cleared the underbrush around shoots in a growth year (danian), allowing the bamboo forest to enlarge; for the reserve or village authorities to question the land use rights to new tracts would be highly confrontational. Although the reserve controls timber harvests on collective lands as strictly as possible, it had yet to control the spread of bamboo

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effectively in the mid-1990s, and was allowing villages to decide how to allocate these lands to families as they were converted to bamboo forest. In villages where land tenure conditions are more equitable, there is less pressure for households to compete with neighbors in converting hardwood forests to bamboo. A correlation appears to exist, too, between equitable land tenure (regular redistribution), economic diversification, and economic well-being, although the sample size of communities in this study is too small to constitute conclusive evidence. In poorer villages, such as Majiaping and Guizhuping, more attention to equitable land tenure could benefit people and the environment. In these two villages, which had dramatically low household incomes in the 1990s, bamboo allotments had not changed since 1981, and there were no plans to hold redistribution meetings; some villagers described their situation as “unfair and getting worse and worse” in the future. Those with large amounts of land were earning the most money from bamboo (2,000– 3,000 yuan, or $250–375 per year), while those with little land were earning very little (300–400 yuan, or $38–50). Though there was talk of having a meeting, it had not occurred by 2001. Conceivably, meetings could be held in such villages sometime in the future. More likely, however, is that as a village’s land tenure patterns remain unchanged over time, resistance to change grows stronger; those who have positioned themselves well will probably predominate in most conflicts. Several informants in Guizhuping disagreed about bamboo tenure conditions. Some believed the allotments had become unfair and would grow worse in the future, as household populations changed and some families added more bamboo land to their personal holdings. Another response, given by the elected party secretary of Guihe, countered that under the extant system, “The more one works [to expand one’s bamboo groves] the more one gets” (duolao duode) —a slogan with grave implications for broadleaf forest conservation. Road access and economic diversification are additional important intervening variables in village economic development, and both are directly related to bamboo production and land tenure. The economic significance of road access is exemplified by Majiaping, one of the few villages in the reserve in 1994 that still lacked road or tractor road connections to market towns in the valleys outside the reserve. In Majiaping, geographic isolation has prevented the export of unfinished bamboo poles, and household incomes are among the lowest in the reserve. Under these constraints, Majiaping households have been compelled to export

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a wide variety of portable forest and agricultural products that can be hauled by shoulder pole out of the steep-sided basin where the village lies. Household export products include bamboo durable goods and perishables, pine resin, and livestock (pigs, chickens, and ducks). Bamboo poles are converted into chopsticks or flat, thin strips used in the manufacture of seat covers, bed covers, and other consumer goods. Prices and demand for these products fluctuate through the year, and though villages with road access could sell one unfinished bamboo pole for between 10 and 15 yuan ($1.25–1.88) in 1994, Majiaping households could earn about 7 yuan ($.86) per pole for finished goods. To supplement their meager incomes, a few villagers found work as laborers in distant villages, towns, and cities. Because Majiaping lies in one of the largest expanses of broadleaf forest in the reserve, at the boundary of the core area, reserve directors stated in 1994 that they would prefer to have Majiaping villagers removed from the reserve if plans for an access road ever materialized. By 1998, however, a Liancheng County government directive overrode reserve administrators’ desires to block road construction to Majiaping, and a road is slated for completion within the next several years. In contrast to Majiaping and Guizhuping, Longgui was the first village in the reserve to have its own access road (completed in 1981), and today it has the highest per capita income in the reserve. Road access has allowed residents to export truckloads of pine timber from the village’s collective forestry area (which is being phased out) and bamboo poles from household stands. Rather than being forced into diversification, as in Majiaping, Longgui households have used timber and bamboo revenues to pursue a broad range of commercial activities, such as resin collecting, livestock raising, wild boar hunting and meat marketing, tractor driving (transporting goods to other villages), and opening small businesses outside the reserve. By 1995, several households had begun to process their bamboo in a gas-powered mill, which had been brought to the village on a temporary basis. This was the first sign of mechanized production of bamboo finished products in Meihuashan, and it could further enrich people in every village. Gonghe provides another example of the importance of economic diversification, and families there have pursued many commercial enterprises, such as managing their own stores and restaurants. These ventures often serve two purposes; first, they provide supplementary income and a wide variety of economic opportunities, and second, they remove pressure from family bamboo forests. In Gonghe, for example, entry into the

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service sector has given certain families a considerable economic advantage over most of their counterparts in neighboring Guizhuping. Both of the natural villages (which together comprise the administrative village of Guihe) have about the same population, average family size, number of laborers per family, and percentage of income from bamboo. Actual income levels are markedly different, however, with Gonghe households earning more than twice the Guizhuping average (and nearly three times more on a per capita basis). Not only do Gonghe villagers pursue more service sector jobs (as bus drivers, restaurateurs, and shopkeepers), but one village leader opened a highly profitable (though controversial) woodcarving factory in the 1990s, which exported Cryptomeria carvings to Japan. Unlike Majiaping, Longgui, and Gonghe, households in Taipingliao rely almost completely on bamboo export for their income, but economic conditions in the village indicate that relying on bamboo is lucrative when transport, processing, and marketing procedures are well developed. With access to market towns via a tractor road, villagers earn money by hand-processing bamboo strips and chopsticks and transporting these products to outside markets. The largest family in the village, which has twelve members, transports its own and other households’ bamboo strips to coastal areas, earning greater profits by selling at urban market prices. Though the family was the second largest of all those surveyed and hired the most outside laborers to cut and haul bamboo (fourteen people), it had the highest per capita income (3,509 yuan, or $439). Clearly, the family has created an economy of scale through extensive cooperation among its members and the coordination of labor, processing, and marketing functions. The emergence of such families, however, may signal the beginning of village-level monopolies, with increased potential for exploitation of poorer neighbors. In fact, although land was divided according to old land deeds and adjusted for household population, and redistribution is scheduled to occur every twenty years, by the mid-1990s bamboo boundary conflicts between households were fairly frequent, and several villagers called for an earlier redistribution meeting, but to no avail. The degree of economic competition (and perhaps enmity) between households in Taipingliao was revealed by allegations that those who would have to give up land to other villagers were planning to cut all their marketable bamboo just before the twenty-year meeting. By the mid-1990s, land tenure conditions in Meihuashan appeared

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to be an important factor in income disparities between households, and household income markedly affected bamboo management strategies. Comparisons of the wealthiest families and the poorest families in each village sample reveal that the average area of bamboo forest per capita among wealthier households (2.4 ha, or 6 acres) is 32 percent greater than that of poor households (1.8 ha, or 4.5 acres). Bamboo-related earnings among wealthier families averaged 8,575 yuan ($1,072) per household and 1,559 yuan ($195) per capita, whereas among poor families the averages were 1,963 yuan ($245) per household and 261 yuan ($33) per capita. One of the most serious problems relating to economic disparity and land tenure at the village level is that wealthier families may be gaining a monopoly on land and labor resources. The wealthy are already at an advantage in several ways. First, they can afford to cut bamboo once a year or less, which allows their stands to increase in density and quality. In contrast, poor families must harvest bamboo repeatedly each year, whenever they need money for basic subsistence purposes, and their stands may never reach high densities. Because bamboo culms attain their maximum quality (in strength and flexibility) and economic value after about seven years of growth, it is profitable to forego more frequent harvests. Families with more bamboo forest land not only can harvest more bamboo but, with sufficient surplus income, can afford to let their stands develop longer before harvesting. Under longer harvest cycles, both plant density and culm quality improve, and the economic value of processed poles increases. Denser stands of superior bamboo are equivalent to increased capital. Each pole can be sold at a higher price, and more bamboo can be harvested on a sustained basis year by year. In contrast, poor families that cut from the same stand several times each year are left with low-density, poor-quality culms. In Gonghe, for example, only about 10 percent of the households can reduce their bamboo harvest to a rate of once a year. Richer families also can afford to hire more outside laborers— migrant workers from other counties in Fujian, from Jiangxi Province, and even from as far away as Sichuan Province. The heads of wealthier families may become the equivalent of straw bosses, operating as brokers in the growing competition for jobs, land, and money. At the very least, the hiring of outside laborers to work in the bamboo forests is changing the system of labor relations and interfamilial economic cooperation. At worst, the disparities may drive land degradation by forcing poorer families (1) to sell or lease the rights to part or all of their land to wealthier villagers, (2) to expand their remaining bamboo stands

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into adjacent collective forests at an ever-increasing rate, or (3) to become laborers on others’ lands as they lose their own. Meihuashan Reserve managers have not interfered with individual villages’ methods for managing household contracts on bamboo, choosing instead to allow village leaders to be the arbiters in all but the most intractable disputes. They also have focused on regulations protecting remaining forests and have promoted efforts to increase the density and quality of culms in existing stands. In the early 1990s, reserve regulations forbade the cutting of broadleaf trees, but villagers routinely cut down trees less than 30 centimeters (1 ft.) dbh without legal consequences. Since large trees could not be cut down legally (and fines for cutting large trees had been levied in the past), people often killed them by bark-ringing, which was not officially illegal until February 1995. Propaganda and education campaigns to prevent the cutting of broadleaf forests had largely failed. In response, the reserve issued a notice to all the villages in February 1995 entitled, “On Strengthening Management Measures for the Protection of Broadleaf Trees Within Bamboo Forests.” These regulations included prohibitions on felling and ringing broadleaf trees. Permits to expand bamboo stands are granted only after a site inspection by reserve authorities, though no permit is required for bamboo forest incursion into unforested scrub and grasslands as long as they are within collective lands outside the core area. As of 1998, reserve administrators planned to allocate funding to pay villagers not to clear underbrush when their bamboo had spread into the margins of broadleaf forests. They also moved to protect remaining patches of broadleaf forest, including fengshui forests already protected by village custom, by designating thirtytwo small protected subareas ( baohuxiaoqu) on collective lands in the reserve, where all woodcutting is prohibited. When I left the reserve in August 1995, signs had been placed around some of these protected subareas, and by 1999, more than twenty areas had been demarcated. To reinforce compliance with this policy, reserve administrators have had village chiefs sign contracts agreeing to help enforce the policy of strict preservation in these small, protected zones. A third component of the reserve bamboo and broadleaf management plan has been to encourage villagers to intensify bamboo cultivation in existing stands by clearing the underbrush, delaying cutting, tilling the soil, and using fertilizers. Only the first technique has been used widely. Meihuashan administrators view Wuyishan as a model to be emulated. In the Wuyishan reserve, where intensified cultivation began

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in the early 1980s, bamboo densities average 2,400 culms /hectare (and 6,000 culms /ha in the densest stands). In 1995, Meihuashan administrators hoped to increase the average bamboo density from 1,500–1,800 culms /hectare to 2,700–3,300 culms /hectare within a decade. Their projections indicated that higher densities and longer growing periods would allow about thirty to fifty fully developed poles per mu to be harvested each year as opposed to the estimated five to ten poles per mu a year harvested in the mid-1990s. By 1998, however, reserve managers had detected no measurable increases in average culm density. Without equitable distribution of bamboo land, bamboo densities may never reach the reserve targets. In 1995, marked differences in culm density between villages and between households were already evident. These differences probably will increase with growing disparities in annual income, supplementary income (not derived from bamboo), access to transportation (and markets), and access to land. One might argue that reserve managers should work closely with village leaders and individual households to develop equitable land tenure regulations in each village as soon as possible. This would require an ideological commitment to a form of socialized capitalism, a commitment that some villages have already made. A counterargument could be for allowing communities to make their own land tenure decisions without interference. Some villages do not perceive a need for tenure adjustments; others have initiated redistribution plans without outside coercion. In any case, it is likely that the longer a village goes without tenure readjustments, the greater the resistance to readjustments will be, especially among those who have the most to lose. In 1998, administrators believed that the system of small, protected areas would safeguard the remaining broadleaf forest patches from bamboo intrusion. Ecology of Rice Production

While bamboo management was the economic activity with the most significant effects on wildlife habitat through the 1990s, rice agriculture, the commercial production of vegetables and mushrooms, and the raising of livestock were additional potential sources of ecological degradation in need of further study. And as with bamboo production, each of these activities has both positive and negative environmental and social effects. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers introduce toxic compounds into the terrestrial and aquatic food chains, but the intensification of production allows rice terrace abandonment to continue, opening up new

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habitats for wild fauna and flora. The production of vegetables and mushrooms provides significant income for Meihuashan families, but mushroom growing requires the cutting of chinkapin trees outside the reserve. The raising of large livestock is a boon to subsistence agriculture and may become a lucrative commercial activity, but goats and cattle can trample fragile wetlands, decimate native flora, and overgraze a variety of critical habitats. Although rice paddies comprise only 2.7–4.5 percent of the reserve area, they remain the most important component of household subsistence and the greatest source of chemical toxins in the reserve. The dynamics of rice paddy distribution and household tenure are considerably different from those of bamboo, and rice is grown primarily for household use rather than sale. Meihuashan, like most high-elevation areas of the Wuyi-Daiyun region, has long been deficient in rice production. The central government recognizes this problem, and while implementing the Household Responsibility System, it made villages in the region exempt from “state purchase responsibility” (zhenggou zeren). In other words, each family was free to use or sell rice however it saw fit, paying an annual flat tax to the government instead of the required quota of grain that most peasants must sell to the government at a set price. Even after great gains in rice production after the reforms, by 1986, Meihuashan villages had not reached the national standard of grain self-sufficiency. In seventeen natural villages surveyed, average per capita rice production was 347 kilograms (765 lbs.), while the national standard for self-sufficiency was set at 400 kilograms (882 lbs.). 6 Villagers require less rice than that for their own consumption, but there is rarely enough surplus for commercial purposes. Rice production for commercial purposes is generally seen as a losing proposition (kuiben), caused by the costs of fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, tools, and labor, and the low government subsidies. As a result, there has been a continuous decrease in the ratio of crop area per capita. The most significant abandonment of rice paddy since 1949 occurred from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, when hybrid rice was adopted by most of the villages, and economic reforms turned control of agriculture and forestry back to the family unit. In the 1970s, Meihuashan villages averaged four mu (.27 ha) of paddy land per capita. Implementation of the Household Responsibility System meant that villagers no longer worked in production teams, and there were not enough family members to maintain four mu of rice per person, especially given the low returns of grain or money; while no new paddies have been

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developed in recent decades (and many have been abandoned), there has been a steady natural increase in population. There also has been greater investment of labor in the more lucrative work of managing bamboo. In 1980, there was an average of 2.43 mu (.16 ha) of paddy per person. This figure dropped to 2.20 mu (.15 ha) in 1986 and 2.0 mu (.13 ha) for all eighteen administrative villages. Though official data were not available in 1994, four of the five study villages that provided data averaged only 1.6 mu (.11 ha). These figures suggest a dramatic decrease in paddy land per person in the past decade. This trend seems to coincide with the advent of higher-yielding rice crops, a decrease in grain consumption, and an increase in the consumption of meat, vegetables, and other foods purchased in the market towns. Today, the amount of paddy land each family cultivates varies considerably, but many have reduced their crops to the minimum area sufficient for household consumption, abandoning less-productive paddies and those frequently plagued by rats and wild boar. Most abandoned croplands are high-elevation paddies or those farthest from the village settlement, since they are least productive, most difficult to manage, and suffer the heaviest damage from wildlife. The advent of hybrid crops and modern agricultural technologies brought several chemical agents to Meihuashan, which were poorly understood by state agencies responsible for their distribution. Today, many villagers still are not fully aware of the harmful environmental effects of chemicals. To complicate these matters, at the same time that new agricultural technologies have been introduced, traditional beliefs about agriculture have been expressed more freely. These paradoxical trends follow the removal, during the reform period, of state-sanctioned oppression of local beliefs (or superstition, mixin) and the end of centralized control of production. Families are free to make their own decisions about fertilizers, pesticides, and rat poisons; even certain substances that were made illegal more than a decade ago may persist in local cropmanagement schemes, having been stockpiled in the villages before they were banned. These chemicals affect wildlife in many ways, but given the lack of formal ecological research on this subject in China, the following descriptions are qualitative, and are based mainly on anecdotal evidence. Some of the most serious consequences occur when poisons are directly introduced into the food chain. Rat poisons ( laoshuyao), for example, have become common throughout China, causing severe damage to wildlife populations. Purchased from government stocks at the

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agricultural supply bureaus (nongzimeng shibu) or from traveling peddlers at local markets, at least nine different types of rodenticide are used in Fujian today. About half are hydrocarbons (like Warfarin and strychnine, also common in the West). The liquid substances are poured on pig organs or cookies, which are placed around a rice paddy. In Meihuashan, populations of carnivores that feed on rats and other animals that have ingested the poison, or scavengers that eat the poisoned bait itself, have been decimated. Hunters have noticed a dramatic decrease in the number of red dogs (dholes, or in Mandarin, chai), crab-eating mongooses (shixiemeng), and members of the weasel family that once frequented the paddies. According to interviews conducted in all three nature reserves, rat poison has caused the elimination of nearly all red dogs in western Fujian. Domestic cats and dogs, too, have suffered heavy casualties from rat poisons; today, cats are rare and dogs are not allowed to leave the houses of their owners except when taken out to hunt. Similar effects on domestic animals have been reported all over China, and the cumulative toll on wildlife appears to have been devastating. Pesticides and fungicides, too, have significantly affected the ecosystems of Meihuashan. Ironically, insects and plant pathogens do not appear to have been a major problem in Meihuashan before the introduction of hybrid rice. With villagers producing their own seeds from each year’s crop, local varieties of rice underwent a long-term selection process that increased their resistance. When less-resistant varieties came into use in the region, previously unknown pests followed, and the survival of the rice crop came to depend on agricultural chemicals. As insects and plant pathogens developed resistance to one pesticide, others were adopted. One villager portrayed this ecological vicious cycle with irony: “It’s like with people —the more medicine we use, the more diseases there are.” Even the invasion of a type of woolly caterpillar on ancient trees in the low-elevation groves of sacred Cryptomeria trees is said to have occurred only in the past few years: a natural predator of the caterpillars probably has been eliminated. To protect the trees, villagers in Meihuashan and Longxishan weave thick, coarse ropes from grasses or plant stalks, dip them in pesticide, and tie them around the tree trunks to prevent caterpillars from climbing to the branches and leaves on which they feed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when insect pests first became a problem, villagers experimented with a variety of pest control methods. One year in the early 1980s, there was a particularly serious pest problem in Gonghe. Having no success with other methods, locals devised the

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“solution” of pouring kerosene into the paddy water, then gently hitting the rice stalks with sticks to knock the bugs onto the sticky surface. Afterward, they flushed the water out of the paddies, which carried the bugs with it. One elderly man did not want to use the method. After praying to the gods for help, he told his neighbors he had received assurance that his crop would be okay. But many weeks before harvesttime, his whole crop had already been devoured, while others were able to reap a substantial harvest. The lack of information or understanding of pesticides has led to other mishaps as well, including poisoning by residue on vegetables grown in household gardens. This occurred in Taipingliao when a family ate vegetables from their garden without first washing them thoroughly. Apparently, they had used a pesticide they were unfamiliar with, and had been unaware of the possible hazards. As a result, both parents and two children became violently ill and were hospitalized for a week. Their medical expenses amounted to a year’s income. The most common biocides in Meihuashan are the pesticide DDVP (dimethyl-dichlorovinyl phosphate), known locally as didiwei, and Kitazin, a fungicide known as daowenjing. Although production of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), BHC (benzene hexachloride), and other organochlorine pesticides was banned by the government in 1983, BHC (liuliufen) is still stockpiled in some villages. Fortunately, it is unpopular—in powder form, it is less convenient to use than liquids. For killing insect pests, people prefer to mix DDVP with jia anlin (a substance containing ammonia and phosphorous, judging from its name), a most effective combination, which is also commonly used by those who wish to commit suicide. This combination is said, too, to wipe out frogs, snails, and other aquatic animals, which once were common in the rice paddies. While permanent pesticides (arsenic, lead, and mercury) and highly persistent pesticides (those that stay in the environment for up to twenty years, including DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, and toxaphene) are the most harmful, those that degrade rapidly—organophosphates such as DDVP—are extremely toxic and nonselective. They therefore encourage the rapid development of resistant insects and kill their natural enemies. Though no studies of local pesticide and fungicide use were available, there is a high correlation between weather conditions, insect depredation, and fungus growth. Farmers have developed a routine for responding to these conditions. Insect pests are most numerous from planting time, in April, to the beginning of fall on the lunar calendar ( liqiu), which comes in August.

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Periods of heavy rainfall alternating with intensely hot, sunny days seem to bring on the worst bug problems. If bugs are present after ten days of seedling growth, the farmer sprays the crop with DDVP (using a backpack spray container). After this, the crop is checked frequently for bugs, both before and after seedlings are transplanted. Whenever bugs appear, the whole paddy is sprayed. This customarily happens two to three times a year. By August, the bugs usually have become much less numerous, but a fungal disease known as daowenbing (warm rice disease), which causes deformed rice grains, is a frequent scourge. Between August and the September harvest, Kitazin (daowenjing), an organic fungicidal spray, is applied to the maturing plants. Biocides are not monitored by reserve officials, and each farmer is free to use these and other farm chemicals as they see fit. Over time, there may be perpetual problems with insect pests, the development of pest resistance to many pesticides, and further chemical contamination if integrated pest management is not adopted. 7 Edmonds (1994) points out that integrated pest management was used effectively in many parts of China in the late 1970s but diminished with the return of croplands to individual families in the reform period. The effects of chemical fertilizers on wildlife are more subtle than those of pesticides and rat poisons, but may be equally problematic in the long run. Some of the most direct threats arise from the buildup of excess nitrogen and phosphorous in the paddies and the transport of these pollutants in runoff to streams.8 About 25 kilograms (55 lbs.) of fertilizer are used on each mu of paddy (375 kg /ha, or 826 lbs./2.47 acres). 9 Most of the fertilizer is added just before the plants produce grains. In some villages, little or no organic fertilizer ( human and livestock wastes and ashes) are applied to the rice crop today, although most families still use these traditional nutrient sources on vegetable plots. While agricultural chemicals pose serious risks to humans and wildlife in Meihuashan, especially when used improperly, the intensification of crop production and the economic infeasibility of commercial rice production have led to widespread and continuing terrace abandonment. Depredation by wild boar, monkeys, and rats is a ceaseless problem, especially in the more remote paddies, and distant paddies are often at high elevations, meaning they are less productive because of colder water in their catchments, and they present more hydroengineering challenges. In crop depredation by wildlife, rat damage is generally a greater problem than boar damage because it occurs more frequently. Rats cut stalks at the base and carry the entire rice plant to their dens. Serious rat damage

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may destroy 20 percent of the harvest in the flatlands and 30 percent in mountain areas. Boar damage is less common but more severe. Boar enter the fields less frequently, but they usually come in groups. The worst boar damage is caused when boar wallow in the rice. Villagers say that boar will do this to cool off in the water or to relieve an itch. And they root for bugs and crustaceans when not feeding on the rice itself. Severe boar damage can claim 90 percent of the crop. Before 1990, it was legal to abandon paddies, but since Fujian has the lowest amount of arable land per capita of any province, the government now campaigns actively to prevent the loss of agricultural land.10 The grain bureaus ( liangshi bumen) in each township are supposed to regulate cropland maintenance, but in Meihuashan, they rarely inspect village land use, and abandonment goes unpunished. No one has ever been fined for abandoning paddy, though the practice is commonplace. Even if household paddy land is abandoned, there is a flat per capita tax on it each year. Taxes are levied on the basis of the number of mu per person, at a rate of 10 yuan ($1.25) per mu in 1994. With an average of 2 mu per person throughout Meihuashan, villagers were expected to pay 20 yuan for each family member. Because all will pay the same rate, regardless of the amount of paddy land they use, there is no incentive for the grain bureau to interfere with terrace abandonment. Abandoned paddy can legally be used for agriculture purposes, including rice, fruit orchards, or fishponds, and with the permission of the collective, this can be done even on land abandoned by other villagers. One particularly wealthy Longgui native grew pears and peaches on his own abandoned cropland, but the trees died of neglect. He gave his other paddy land away. A fruit orchard established between Guihe and Jiaotan also failed, suffering intense depredation by muntjac and other animals. Abandoned paddies not reclaimed are soon overtaken by dense grasses, ferns, and other herbaceous plants. After a few years, these are overshadowed by shrubs and small trees. Within sixty years, a maturing mixed forest develops—a stand of trees that resembles older forests, except for the higher proportion of pines and the lack of very large, old trees, which can be found in fully mature broadleaf forests. From the standpoint of ungulate management, it may be wise to maintain some of these open grassy areas as ungulate grazing grounds, but ecological succession will also be determined by the economic interests of villagers, who may find these lands suitable for other commercial ventures.

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Commercialization of Agriculture in the Late 1990s

In the mid-1990s, nearly all Meihuashan households grew vegetables in small family gardens, and like small-scale livestock husbandry, this was an important component of household subsistence. By the end of the decade, however, commercial production of Chinese cabbage and shiitake mushrooms had been initiated by several villages in the southern part of the reserve. These communities had good road access, and certain families and groups had decided to supplement their bamboo income with new types of agricultural products. By 1999, households in Gonghe, Guizhuping, and Jiaotan had begun to grow Chinese cabbage (baicai) on former valley-floor paddy lands close to the village centers. Taking advantage of the cooler summer temperatures associated with higher elevations, villagers transported their produce to coastal urban markets in Xiamen and Shantou (in Guangdong), where cabbage production diminishes in the hot summer. Gonghe, Guizhuping, and Dapingshan began to produce shiitake mushrooms, for export to Japan. Like Chinese cabbage, shiitake mushrooms depend on a cool climate, and some Meihuashan households have long produced mushrooms for personal use and small-scale local trade. Although a large mushroom factory employing several dozen people was established in Shangfu (the town seat of Buyun—outside the reserve boundaries) in 1994, full-scale commercial production was not seen as a feasible enterprise for villages in the reserve, because the mushrooms are grown on logs or in the sawdust of evergreen broadleaf trees. In 1999, residents in the three villages found a way to circumvent the moratorium on broadleaf timber felling in the reserve by importing bags of broadleaf sawdust from Buyun. With the reserve having no rules prohibiting such imports, and with the business being lucrative, a majority of village households have established large-scale shiitake production. Landscapes in these villages have been transformed, as bamboo-walled mushroom sheds have spread across the former valleybottom paddy lands (pl. 11). Villagers begin the production process by introducing spores through holes drilled in the sides of sausage-shaped plastic bags of sawdust. The “sausages” are then laid side-by-side in shady sheds, and the plastic is later removed to allow the mushrooms to reach full size. Although in 1999 hardwood sawdust was produced from small trees legally cut from bamboo forests outside the reserve, the destruction of broadleaf trees for mushroom production could become a serious problem if profits from mushroom sales continue to increase the commercial

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value of hardwood. Reserve managers were not concerned about the issue, predicting that mushroom production within the reserve boundaries would cease as soon as the supply of cheap hardwood had diminished. This, they predicted, would occur within a year, and they did not expect to see the new enterprise last long into the new century. Over the past twenty years, Meihuashan households have made remarkable adaptations to the new market economy, with fairly stable incomes from bamboo sales and increasing experimentation with specialized commercial agriculture. Compared to other vegetation types in the Southeast Uplands, stands of cultivated mao bamboo do not comprise good wildlife habitat, but they remain critical for local development and are the most widely propagated vegetation type in western Fujian’s reserves (bamboo management in Longxishan and Wuyishan is discussed in chap. 10). Along with Chinese fir and Masson pine, bamboo is the most widespread forest monoculture in southern China. The long-term survival of rare fauna and flora in the Southeast Uplands will require large areas of suitable habitat, including lands lying outside the few small, widely scattered nature reserves. With careful management, nature reserves may serve as nodes of superior habitat in a matrix of habitat corridors, but they will not protect biological diversity for long if they become islands in a sea of degraded lands. While the sustainability of bamboo production is likely to depend on land tenure relations in each village, by the end of the 1990s, there were signs that continuing abandonment of rice production and a surge in village cash crop production might provide valuable supplements to household income. Chinese cabbage appeared to hold considerable promise as a sustainable commercial crop, especially if produced with a minimum of toxic fertilizers and pesticides. Shiitake mushroom production, on the other hand, brought substantial short-term profits but depended on a tenuous supply of unsustainably produced broadleaf hardwood from outside the reserve boundaries. Whatever the future may hold for these commercial production systems, they serve as fascinating contemporary examples of the long-standing spirit of enterprise and experimentation that has allowed Hakka and other highland communities to thrive in environments that lowlanders have deemed “marginal.” Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan are regarded as the most valuable reserves in the Southeast Uplands, but none is sufficiently large to protect a viable tiger population. The three reserves and twelve pro-

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vincial, county, and municipal reserves of the Southeast Uplands region should be linked by montane corridors of grassland, wetland, and broadleaf forest. Although eleven of the latter reserves are even smaller than Longxishan, they are evenly distributed across the region and protect important montane ecosystems. The distribution of relict broadleaf forests, although highly fragmented, covers most of the Southeast Uplands and parts of the coastal lowlands. These forests should be targeted for conservation as quickly as possible. Land management initiatives to improve habitat could include management of abandoned rice fields, the periodic clearance of pine and Chinese fir monocultures to keep grasslands open for ungulates, stricter state and local protection of sacred ( fengshui) forests, broadleaf forest restoration, and the control of bamboo forest expansion.

8

White Tigers and Azure Dragons Fengshui Forests, Sacred Space, and the Preservation of Biodiversity in Village Landscapes

Of the people who live in Meihuashan’s eighteen hollows, some remain in a condition of self-sufficiency, with a natural [subsistence] economy. Their ancestors, nevertheless, understood the importance of forest conservation; they regarded forests near the villages as sacred, inviolable “fengshui forests.” In comparing these people to the fully-modern and civilized farmers of the towns and villages today, who wantonly and recklessly chop down the forests, one really wonders if there have been any advances in common wisdom. —Zhong Ling, “Scattered Notes on the Eighteen Basins of Meihuashan”

In countless villages of the Southeast Uplands, whether clustered within the confines of a mountain ravine or spread out upon the plain of a broad river valley, sacred forests or individual sacred trees grace the landscape. Known as “fengshuilin” (wind-water forests) or “fengshuishu” ( fengshui trees), they are protected by ancient custom as a critical component of village landscape and cosmology. Soon after arriving in Fujian, I tried to learn as much as possible about the cultural and ecological characteristics of village fengshui forests in Meihuashan, to make comparative studies of such forests in other areas of western Fujian. In the course of field research, I attempted to answer the following questions: How do sacred forests figure in local ideology? Are there different types of sacred forests as defined by local lore or through comparative observation and measurement? Which species are protected and why? How do villagers manage the forests today, and how might this differ from past management practices? How did the forests survive periods of political upheaval and ecological destruction, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Are sacred forests surviving the

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unprecedented environmental degradation associated with an emergent capitalist economy? How do sacred forests fit within the matrix of other vegetation types? And finally, do they contribute to the quality of wildlife habitat and to biological diversity? Fengshui, Fengshui Forests, and Sacred Space

Fengshui is a colloquial term for the ancient Chinese way of conceptualizing and regulating power in the physical landscape. The practice has been used for siting tombs, buildings, and settlements within the natural and supernatural parameters of the landscape to promote harmony between the human realm and the realm of heaven (tian), or the cosmos. More formal, literary terms for Chinese geomancy include “dili” (earth principles), which is also the modern word for “geography,” and “kanyu” (the canopy of heaven and the chariot of the earth), a term emphasizing the cosmic relationship between heaven and earth. The ideational and theoretical systems found in fengshui are inseparable from classical Chinese systems of correlative cosmology, and a tradition of canonical fengshui theory can be traced back to the early Han dynasty (202 b.c.–a.d. 89). Parallel with this “great” tradition have been many local folk traditions, which have both drawn from and informed the broader traditions. These customs can be defined collectively as indigenous forms of environmental management, with possible antecedents in non-Han cultures of southern China. As a theory of siting, fengshui seeks to delineate links between universal (and often invisible) forces and local, visible landscapes, and to mitigate all negative effects such forces may have on humans, while simultaneously enhancing the positive effects. In this context, the fengshui forest is a living expression of the collective desire to maintain peace and harmony with the cosmic powers inherent in the natural environment. The life-force known as qi (cosmic breath or life essence) is believed to flow from heaven and from the earth. Together, these types of qi combine to form varying concentrations of yin energy, associated with the female and known as “terrestrial breath,” and yang energy, associated with the male and known as “celestial breath.” The flow of qi and the balance of yin and yang are mediated primarily by such geomorphic features as mountains, hills, rivers, and lakes, and by the climatic forces of wind, water, and sun (insolation being a main source of yang energy). Qi flow is especially strong in mountains, following ramifying systems of serpentine ridgelines known as long (dragons). Within these ridges are longmai

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(dragon veins), which are conduits for qi. The best sites for villages, as well as for individual homes and tombs, are found within an embracing horseshoe-shaped pattern of mountain ridges and hills (fig. 17). 1 In simple terms, people whose settlements, households, temples, shrines, and tombs are built on sites where yin and yang are in balance may enjoy health, longevity, wealth, and a long line of progeny. Houses are known as yangzhai (yang houses) because of their association with the positive (yang) energy of the living. Tombs are known as yinzhai ( yin houses) because of their association with the negative forces of the dead. Although tombs and houses require different fengshui conditions, ideal sites for both are known as xue, meaning lair, hole, or cave. Building on sites where yin and yang are out of balance can lead to illness, injuries, death, poverty, and other misfortunes. Because qi, in both its malevolent and benevolent forms, works through the media of wind ( feng) and water (shui), the term “fengshui” arose from a vigilant regard for microclimatic conditions; the magical interaction between landforms, vegetation, and weather has always been a matter of ultimate concern for wet-rice farmers. Ghosts and other evil spirits associated with sha (or shaqi, “pernicious qi”) are believed to be most active along straight lines in the landscape, whether natural streams and mountain gaps, or manmade paths, roads, railroad tracks, or power lines. Sha is particularly likely to flow through areas prone to high winds or rapid stream currents. Ideal fengshui sites thus are found where landforms are undulating rather than linear, in places blessed with gentle winds and slow, meandering streams that promote good qi flow. Without the influence of gentle circulation, qi will not enter an area, will not remain long, or will become stagnant. The two main schools of fengshui tradition developed after the Song dynasty (960–1279). The older is known as the form (xingshi) school (or jiangxi [province] school); the younger is known as the compass (luopan) school or Fujian school, since it was developed in Fujian in the twelfth century. By the nineteenth century, fengshui practitioners often used both methods, and the two schools are no longer separated except by the fact that they represent distinctive paradigms for theory and practice. In the form school, sites are evaluated according to their geomorphology, the physical configuration of mountains and watercourses being regarded as the most important determinant of qi flow. In this tradition, the practitioner, or fengshui master (dili xiansheng), must make a thorough reconnaissance of the area around a site, employing visual observation, sensi-

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Figure 17. Top: Household and village fengshui sites. Fengshui texts often explain the components of household fengshui through analogies to the human body. These diagrams show yin forces, yang forces, the mingtang (bright or cosmic court), the xue ( lair, or perfect center for houses, buildings, or tombs, where celestial and earthly qi are balanced), the baihu (white tiger, a hill or mountain to the west), and the qinglong (the azure dragon, a hill or mountain to the east). (Fan 1992) Bottom: In this diagram of village-level fengshui, mountains (labeled 1–4) comprise the main dragon. The village is located at the xue (lair), where yin and yang are balanced. (Fan 1992)

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tivity, and intuition in assessing the conditions of qi flow. The form school was especially popular in the provinces of Jiangxi and Anhui. In the compass school, which is based on Song Neo-Confucian cosmological theory, sites are evaluated on the basis of the cosmological significance of landforms lying in different compass directions from the site. According to this tradition, fengshui masters must be skilled in the use of the fengshui compass, which has up to thirty-eight layers of cosmic symbols surrounding the small central dial. In Meihuashan, the compass is the standard tool and insignia of the fengshui master. The masters, however, disclaim any separation in their practice between the two schools, and they employ complex fengshui manuals as well as compasses in assessing sites. Many studies have been conducted on the literary tradition of fengshui theory, but relatively little has been written about fengshui forests or the practice and significance of fengshui in rural villages.2 According to Feuchtwang (1974), even Chinese classics on fengshui say little about the benefits of trees, focusing almost exclusively on inanimate land forms. In contrast, Lee (1986) states that many fengshui texts on house siting (yangzhai) discuss the effects of trees on human dwellings and their occupants.3 In practice, since forests create shade, block the wind, and control the overland flow of water, they moderate the flow of shaqi. For this reason, they are another important landscape feature in common fengshui practice. As Feuchtwang (1974, 128) states, Although little of trees is mentioned in the manuals, they are one of the most common feng-shui symbols in practice. Trees are wild, entirely natural, yet they live as mountains and watercourses do not, and they are vulnerable. . . . They are the most ubiquitous and sensitive focuses of interest in feng-shui.

This may be especially true in southern China, where fengshui is a ritual focus for kinship groups, and alteration of the village environment is directed toward enhancing fengshui for the community and the individual. A family genealogy from Sichuan states, “When building manors and mansions, the gentry will not fell trees.” Another family genealogy from Anhui states, “Kanyu experts consider it a good practice to preserve vital life-force (shengqi) by piling up earth and planting trees. This practice must be observed and never violated.” Similarly, a village history from Anhui warns, “Every family must take care of the mountains and water around. Plant trees and bamboo as shelters. Anyone who acts con-

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trary to this shall be punished. . . . Keep an eye on the environment and protect it from damage. This is a chore for people of one hundred generations to undertake.” 4 Though the exact distribution of fengshui forests in South China today is unknown, Hase and Lee (1992) and Lovelace (1985) have discussed their persistence in Hakka villages in the New Territories of Hong Kong. In Fujian, a mission report for a social forestry project in Shouning County (in the eastern Min culture region) by the New Zealand Ministry of External Relations and Trade states that fengshui forests are “well protected by the villagers.” 5 Because fengshui has become heavily imbricated with complex overlays of traditional correlative thinking schemes, one must look beneath a highly stylized surface to see a core of sound physical principles for choosing appropriate settlement, building, and burial sites. At its heart, fengshui is an ancient, indigenous environmental science, which is inextricably linked to the soil and water conservation problems specific to wet-rice agriculture. Eugene Anderson and Marja Anderson have characterized fengshui as a system through which rice farmers maintained homeostasis with the environment.6 Lovelace (1985, 359) stresses that fengshui is also “an agent of environmental modification.” In an analysis of Hakka settlement in Hong Kong’s New Territories during the fifteenth century, he demonstrates how the “armchair” pattern of surrounding hills and southern exposure was an ideal geomorphic configuration for village settlement and rice cultivation. Indeed, this topographic pattern is characteristic of nearly all the villages in Meihuashan: Streams begin in the surrounding higher elevations and converge on the valley floor. . . . The presence of multiple streams (branches) meandering across the valley floor would, if controlled, enhance the ease and potential field expansion and overall production by increasing the number of possible taps, places for discharge, and terraces. The presence of numerous streams also serves to aid in the natural control of the drainage’s overall water flow at times of intense runoff, such as during monsoon rainstorms, by dispersing and distributing the overall amount of water. As in feng shui, water in the paddy system should not be allowed to flow too quickly or to stagnate. Instead, a gentle but steady flow is needed. This ensures a constant supply of nutrients that, paralleling the qi of feng shui, should be allowed to penetrate the soil gently. The gradual movement of water also pro-

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vides for the conversion of nitrogen into ammonia, creating the neutral or alkaline conditions that make phosphorous available. (Lovelace 1985, 363–364 )

That generations of villagers have not relied on purely pragmatic terminology to guide them in transforming the environment is not surprising; fengshui is an ethnoscience, providing a blueprint for ecological adaptation, but it is also a magico-religious practice, a spatial framework for social interaction. As settlers converted the wild landscape into an inhabited landscape, they sought to ensure that the village space was a sacred place, protected from the disharmonies of the profane. In villages where water control is the foundation of human existence, fengshui forests are the guardians of cosmological and hydrological well-being. They reinforce the notion of cosmic centrality by defining boundaries around the sacred living space of the village and by protecting the tombs, homes, temples, and fields that lie within. Their preservation by villagers is not merely a passive acceptance of custom but an active process that builds community solidarity. Villagers have had to make sacrifices to protect these groves. With these difficulties, however, the villagers maintain the geographic certainty that their community is securely located within the greater flow of qi that permeates all China. 7 A Typology of Fengshui Forests in Meihuashan

This study focuses on villages within and outside the nature reserve boundaries, providing a wide spectrum of settlement configurations. These include four satellite villages of Gutian township, which lie in the broad valleys and surrounding hills between 650 and 850 meters (2,100 and 2,800 ft.), and seven clustered villages in narrow valleys within the reserve (the five study villages and two others), all but one of which are at elevations between 700 and 1,200 meters (2,300 and 4,000 ft.). Within these eleven villages are about forty-one fengshui forests (some highelevation Cryptomeria groves were difficult to count), or an average of 3.7 per village. Fengshui forests vary greatly in size, shape, and height, commonly intergrading with extensive mixed and broadleaf forests and extending great distances from the village. They are a sanctuary for rare tree species; without exception, the largest specimens in the region survive because they have long been granted sacred status. Fengshui forests provide vital habitat for wildlife, especially birds, and at greater distances from the villages, they are important for ungulates and other large mam-

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mals. After observing several settlements in Meihuashan, you begin to notice that the fengshui forests grow in specific sites among the buildings and landforms that comprise the major contours of the village environment. Some of the forests are within the built environment of the village, while others cover the high slopes of surrounding mountains, passes, and ridges. All are within sight of, or within the same valley as, the village that has protected them. From the similar locations of the forests in each village, a general (and preliminary) typology can be constructed. The typology can facilitate locating forest sites where degradation or deforestation may have occurred. This is common in villages where religious conversion, political upheaval, or other factors have led to the removal of sacred forests. 8 The four most common types of fengshui forests in Meihuashan are the shuitou (headwater) forests, shuiwei (watertail or watergate) forests, fengkou or shanao (windgap or mountain-cleft) forests, and forests that grow on knolls, summits, or slopes in or near the village. Headwater forests are located along the main watercourse, either in the mountains high above the village, or where the main stream enters the village. Headwater forests help check erosion, prevent excessive runoff during heavy rainfall, and prevent down-valley winds (shaqi) from reaching the village. They may be dense stands of old-growth broadleaf or groves of enormous Cryptomeria trees, which are said to have been planted by village ancestors hundreds of years ago. This species is adapted to moist ravine soils and may spread naturally along the steep watercourses over the centuries, as they have received special protection by village custom (pl. 12). Watergate forests are found along stream banks and upper slopes where the main watercourse flows out of the village. I use the English term “watergate” to represent the shuiwei forest’s function of retaining or controlling water flow. These forests are said to hold in the village’s wealth, preventing it from flowing away with the water. Watergate forests may be composed of old-growth broadleaf or Cryptomeria trees. Windgap forests are found in ravines or gaps in surrounding ridges, where wind (or shaqi) can enter the village. These forests are composed of huge Cryptomeria trees. Because the Gonghe and Guizhuping villages are located within a steep-sided valley with many gaps in the ridges above, they have many of these Cryptomeria groves. A map of Gonghe in the Ma family genealogy, said to first have been drafted in the Ming dynasty, carefully depicts these groves, which are still standing today (fig. 18).

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Other fengshui forests, which usually cover hills and slopes in and around the village, are often found behind ancestral temples (citang), earth-god shrines (tudimiao), and other temples (pl. 13). A distinctive example is the crescent moon–shaped forest on an elongated hillock behind the main ancestral temple in Gonghe village, which is depicted on the old map and labeled “yueshan” (moon mountain). This particular fengshui forest provides a good example of how such forests fit within the correlative thinking of village cosmology. A village fengshui expert

Figure 18. Drafted in 1937 from a Ming dynasty original, this map of Gonghe village is said to date from the late fourteenth century. The main ancestral temple and many of the sacred forests and groves have remained nearly unaltered through the centuries. These include the windgap Cryptomeria forests and a moon-shaped broadleaf forest behind the main ancestral hall, a temple that continues as the locus of annual festivals and daily worship. The village configuration, roughly circular and embraced on all sides by mountains, reinforces the idea of cosmic harmony. East is at the top of the map.

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explained that the forest, lying on the eastern side of the village, “represents the moon in the eastern sky day and night, keeping the village from ever darkening.” Furthermore, seven stars (the seven stars of the big dipper in Ursa Major), are represented by the seven manmade pools in front of the forest, and by seven peaks west of the village. These “stars” are believed to follow and protect the moon forest and bring great blessings to the village.9 Directly across the valley from the ancestral temple and moon forest is a mountain called the wenfeng (scholar peak). Following custom, village ancestors are said to have placed an essay between two woks and buried it on top of the peak. The peak repeatedly was built up with rocks, clay, and dirt to make it taller and sharper. This was to ensure that descendants would be talented scholars. Several other villages in Meihuashan designated certain mountains as wenfeng, which in traditional times were built up artificially until the summits appeared to pierce the sky. In Jiaotan, Pingshui (now abandoned), Shangfu, Jinhu, and Zhuling, collective aspirations were met, and stone columns mark the former residences of local men who passed the imperial exams at high enough levels to became officials during the Ming and Qing. The areal size of fengshui forests varies greatly, and some intergrade with other forests, making boundaries imperceptible. Determining the cumulative areal dimensions of fengshui forests in each village surveyed was highly problematic for several reasons—first, because there were several such forests in each village and second, because only the largest forests are recorded on the vegetation map as discrete stands. Visual estimates of length and width were made for thirteen of the stands that were surveyed, however, and the average estimated area of these stands was 6.3 hectares (15.6 acres). This estimate should be viewed as within an order of magnitude only. There are some exceptionally large forests, as well, and at least two forests (in Xiache and Guizhuping) were too large and irregular to measure accurately. In general, forest area varied from a few Cryptomeria trees to broadleaf forests of nearly 1 square kilometer (.4 sq. mi.) in area (in Guizhuping). Threats to the Fengshuilin after 1949

The sociocultural milieu in which village fengshui evolved has been undergoing radical change since the 1940s. Collectivization, communization, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Four Modernizations all have had an effect on village life and the conceptualization of space and place. Beginning in the 1950s, the government

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debunked fengshui as feudal superstition, Buddhist and Daoist icons were smashed, and temples were converted to storage buildings. One of the most potent conceptual forces in the Communist effort to reform and unify China was the drive to rid the countryside of all forms of parochialism. By the mid-1950s, Maoist gospel held that only by destroying placespecific rituals and beliefs, which permeated China down to the level of the village and household, could central authorities succeed in creating a modern socialist state. Village cadres banned all religious practices, and it was considered treason even to talk about fengshui. Villagers referred to the fengshui forests as fengjing (scenic) forests, and when Red Guards or authorities threatened to harvest trees in the forests, brigade leaders or elders often argued that the “scenic forests” provided protection from sun, floods, and high winds, and that they were an important reserve supply of timber. The village chief in Zhuling saved one of the village’s forests from zealots by convincing the head of the commune that the forest provided shade and improved the scenery. During the Great Leap Forward (1958), some villages in the valley near Gutian (such as Bajia) lost most of the trees in their sacred forests to iron-smelting operations. Today, these forests are paltry shadows of their former glory. Not until the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) were fengshui forests in mountain villages such as Zhongcun and Longgui cut, against the impotent protests of the elderly. Even then, only in Zhongcun was a forest entirely cleared, and most village fengshui forests in Meihuashan were spared. Given the overall effects of such waves of change, one might reasonably suspect that fengshui concepts and traditions would, over time, have been eroded to mere fragments of their original forms. But contrary to expectation, fengshui is still part of daily life. Trees, the living symbols of communal fengshui ideology, have largely withstood the barrage of political movements. The effort made to preserve trees and forests in times of duress has helped keep communal fengshui alive. The forests and groves still hold tremendous aesthetic and symbolic power in village identity and collective memory, and with few exceptions, there is little indication that this will change in the near future. The reconstruction or renovation of earth-god shrines and temples in the early 1980s marked a landscape renaissance, and for the past fifteen years, these structures have sprouted like dandelions across the mountains. It appears that the religious landscapes of the past, and the cult of landscape that engendered them, were never obliterated, only temporarily concealed.

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Village Fengshui and Fengshuilin Today

Fengshui is considerably important in daily life, and fengshui forests are protected by the entire community. The placing of each new tomb, shrine, temple, and house is determined in consultation with fengshui masters (dili xiansheng), who use special compasses to divine favorable sites. In some households, the width of doors, the length of tables, and the dimensions of rooms are measured with fengshui rulers to ensure security and blessings. Fengshui also provides explanations for the events of village life. In 1994, the suicide of a Guizhuping woman was attributed, in part, to the bad fengshui of her husband’s house. The loss of a business, illnesses of all kinds, and physical injuries have been ascribed to bad fengshui. A family in Majiaping, after adding a master bedroom to their house, suffered a series of financial losses and family illness. The son, who had built the addition for himself and his wife, suffered from lead poisoning from a lead wine pitcher he had purchased, and he later lost his job with the nature reserve. It was evident to family members that the new room had bad fengshui because it was facing the slope directly behind the village (instead of the alluvial plain in front of the village). Within a year of its construction, the room was no longer used by the family. Some objects were stored in it, and only guests were allowed to sleep there. Fengshui problems in an individual house or tomb often can be adjusted by the family through architectural changes, by planting trees, or through the use of charms placed somewhere within the structure. The fengshui of the village as a whole, however, depends on the cooperation of the entire community, and sacred forests have to be respected by everyone. The customary punishment for cutting a tree from the sacred forest is the loss of a full-grown pig or the equivalent amount of money. Today, this price may depend more on the market value of the tree or trees that have been felled. The proscription on tree harvests is generally respected in Meihuashan, which does not have any fengshui forest guards. The only case of cutting sacred trees reported in recent years was conducted in the form of a business transaction, the details of which are described below. Some sacred forests now serve dual economic and spiritual purposes. In most villages, it is permissible to collect fallen deadwood from the forest floor, and at certain times in the past it was acceptable to trim small trees for fuel used in papermaking. Many villages maintain a policy of open access to the understory of sacred forests, and medicinal herbs may

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be gathered by anyone in the village. Almost half the villages surveyed had allowed the planting of trees and plants within their sacred forests, including tea, Cryptomeria, Chinese fir, mao bamboo, and palm (Trachycarpus fortunei). Some villages collectively harvest such cultivars as bamboo, mushrooms, and Chinese fir. For example, a forest in Xiache village was completely denuded of underbrush sometime in the past, and today bamboo is grown there underneath a high canopy of huge Altingia trees. 10 In Gonghe, bamboo growing in sacred forests can be used only for the benefit of the entire community. Aside from the occasional harvest of communally held resources, little human activity occurs inside the fengshui forests. Hunting may take place in larger forests located some distance from villages, and prohibitions on killing wildlife in the forests apparently do not exist, though typically the forests’ proximity to villages makes large game scarce. Religious activities are commonly carried out on the periphery of the sacred forests, since the forests are close to earth-god shrines and ancestral temples (citang). On the first and fifteenth day of each lunar month, members of each household in the village usually offer some combination of rice wine, incense, and fireworks at an earth-god shrine at dawn and often at dusk. On holidays or events of special ritual significance, a chicken is often sacrificed and its blood offered at the earth-god shrine. In some villages, offerings are made at the ancestral temple every day at dawn. It is common to place incense or rice wine at the base of a sacred tree to receive blessings from a tree spirit. 11 Village festivals are carried out at ancestral temples adjacent to the forests. Through the course of the seasons, the forests serve as a backdrop and even a center for a wide variety of communal and familial rites, and their place in village ritual is renewed regularly during such festivals as the Lunar New Year and Kangpusa (described below), when villagers gather in small groups next to the moon-shaped forest in Gonghe to play gambling games in the shade. Fengshuilin and Biodiversity

In a study comparing the diversity of trees in fengshui and non-fengshui forests, a Meihuashan forester and I conducted eight quadrat surveys in fengshui forests and ten identical surveys in non-fengshui relict broadleaf forests. The results revealed no significant differences in arboreal diversity between the two, although some fengshui forests contained an unusual number of trees of the same species. In some cases, broadleaf

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trees are planted for economic purposes, in others there is no obvious reason why villagers may have planted a grove of the same broadleaf species. An Altingia forest on the slope above Longgui is a good example of the latter. The presence of numerous understory broadleaf trees of other species seems to indicate that the dominance of Altingia will be shortlived if understory trees are not harvested. A hilltop chinkapin (Castanopsis) grove in Zhuling village is an example of intentional broadleaf forest cultivation. The chinkapins, which now form a tall canopy over young, cultivated Chinese fir, were either planted by village ancestors or selectively protected as seedlings. This management effort appears to have been pragmatic, for villagers have long used fallen or cut logs from the grove to cultivate mushrooms. With chinkapins growing in tandem with a multipurpose timber tree such as Chinese fir, the Zhuling hilltop sacred forest has economic value to match its cosmological importance. In summary, current ecological conditions and oral historical accounts support the fact that sacred forests have been protected over the course of centuries, and through the sociopolitical upheavals since 1949. They have functioned as woodlots for fuel-wood collection, too, and as sources for medicinal herbs, bamboo, timber, and mushrooms. Therefore, over the long term, sacred forests have served numerous community functions relating to cosmology, conservation, subsistence, and energy supply. The forests have sometimes included rare and valuable tree species uncommon or absent in remnant broadleaf forests. The most prominent in these surveys was Tsuga longibracteata (changbaotieshan, or Chinese hemlock), which is under state protection. Other rare trees well protected in the fengshui forests of Meihuashan include Chinese yew (hongdoushan; Taxus chinensis var. marei) and Fujian cypress ( jianbai; Fokienia hodginsii). Many if not most of the forty-seven species of protected plants in Meihuashan are more likely to be found in sacred forests than in any other vegetation patches. Threats to the Fengshui Forests in an Era of Capitalism and Resource Competition

Ironically, the communal cults that were strong enough to protect sacred forests over generations, even under duress from central authorities, face some of the most serious challenges to forest preservation at the turn of the millennium, an age of individualism and the private accumulation of wealth. Some of the few negative effects on fengshui forests reported in Meihuashan occurred in the mid-1990s, as a result of the ascendance

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in value of the household economy over the communal good. A single entrepreneur in Gonghe village, a man who happened to be chief of Guihe administrative village, converted dozens of Cryptomeria trees from fengshui forests in the region into wood carvings in a village workshop that employs wood-carvers from Jiangxi Province. The carvings, which depict fabled landscapes, were sold to Japanese middlemen for up to roughly $3,000 apiece. The village chief paid villagers in Guizhuping and other villages outside the reserve to allow the cutting of the giant trees. Along two ravines southwest of Guizhuping, I counted twenty-six fresh Cryptomeria stumps, with sizes ranging from 60–172 centimeters (2–5.5 ft.) dbh (see pl. 4). Tree ring counts dated the older trees at roughly two hundred years old. Because the grove of giant trees had spread down along stream banks of the long mountain streams, and contained more than eighty trees, some villagers may have believed there was little harm in selective felling (a few other Cryptomeria groves of comparable size in the village were not cut). The Guihe party secretary, a native of Guizhuping who was out of town during the negotiating, stated that local people were “not wise enough to protect their own forest,” and that they had accepted minimum payoffs. There were allegations that the village chief had bribed reserve and forestry officials up to the regional (Longyan Forestry Committee) level, coercing them to give him a permit to cut the trees under the pretense that they were dead. By 1995, many villagers in Guihe were angry not only that the wood-carving factory despoliated the sacred forests but also that it provided no income for other local people. In 1994, aside from a couple of co-managers, all the employees were outsiders.12 By 1999, the wood-carving factory had closed. According to villagers and reserve authorities, the demand for Cryptomeria products in Japan had decreased in the wake of the Japanese economic crisis; they also attributed the closing to more vigilant control of the region’s fengshui forests by villagers and reserve authorities. Another threat to sacred forests is insect depredation. Many lowelevation Cryptomeria forests are attacked by a parasitic woolly caterpillar (damaochong, species unidentified). Villagers say the insects were never a problem before the advent of chemical fertilizers for local agriculture. It appears that some natural predator of the caterpillars has been wiped out. Above elevations of about 1,250 meters (4,100 ft.) there are no pests, and the windgap forests do not suffer from parasitism, but in lower-elevation fengshui forests, especially those adjacent to settlements, the bugs are such a problem that locals soak handwoven ropes in insecticide and tie them

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around the boles of the trees. This deters caterpillars from climbing the trees and consuming the leaves, which is what ultimately kills trees. This practice was also observed in Longxishan Nature Reserve and apparently is common in the Southeast Uplands. In many parts of East Asia, rustic bands or belts are tied as adornments around venerable old trees near temples and in sacred groves of all kinds, a practice that no doubt predates the problem of pest depredation. Fengshuilin and Watershed Protection in Meihuashan

As tropical storms hit southern China in the summer and fall, rainfall is often violent and flooding is common. On the night of June 1, 1995, I was visiting friends in a small village in Luxi township (northwest of the nature reserve) when a violent squall hit the area. Within three hours, 20 centimeters (8 in.) of rain fell, and a torrent of water covered roads and fields in many valleys of the region. It was the worst local flood in at least fifty years. Luxi town center and many villages are located along a river in the bottom of a wide valley— a tributary of the Pengkou-Jiuxian River (itself a tributary of the Tingjiang), at an elevation below 400 meters (1,300 ft.). This low valley and its major tributaries have undergone almost total deforestation. Like other heavily degraded landscapes in the region, Luxi’s mountains have a semi-arid appearance from the lack of water storage capacity. Young pine forests are all that hold runoff on the steep slopes, making drought and flash floods common. The massive flash flood of June 1 brought devastation to 1,900 families in nine villages. Floodwaters toppled 226 houses, washed out roads in eighty places, destroyed 111 hectares (274 acres) of rice paddy, and ruined numerous fishponds, causing an estimated 30 million yuan ($3.75 million) in damage. A few kilometers across the mountains to the southeast, the villages of Meihuashan, though hit by equally severe rainfall, suffered very little damage. While this is partially because of the geomorphology of the region— namely, the absence of multiple village settlements in broad floodplains— the amount of vegetation cover undoubtedly played a critical role as well. Sacred forests and other dense vegetation protected the Meihuashan villages quite effectively. A well-built cement-and-stone bridge near Xiache village, which connects Longgui to the outside, was washed out, providing strong evidence that rainfall was comparably intense in that area. There was no other damage in any of the reserve villages themselves, however. From this example alone, it appears that feng-

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shui and fengshui forests are aptly named. They are part of an ancient tradition of hydrological control that deserves further examination and wider emulation. Centripetal Forces in the Religious Geography of Meihuashan

Fengshui forests are critically important refugia for plant species, birds, and other wildlife in Meihuashan. An understanding of traditional village fengshui, and the maintaining of fengshui forest protection, are therefore essential for conservation planning throughout the region. Fengshui provides a unity of place and meaning for each lineage village as an enclave, but it does not provide a spatio-temporal framework for cosmological unity among the villages of Meihuashan (or any other region) as a whole. Although the ethos and language of fengshui have circumscribed intervillage negotiations over land boundaries and the contesting of sacred space, the insular motives of village fengshui have seldom tied groups of villages together in an explicit way. Even after half a century of political restructuring and the formation of administrative villages without respect for intervillage kinship patterns, the patrilineal, patrilocal villages of Meihuashan may still form closer political and economic relations with geographically distant same-surname villages than with neighboring villages of different lineage. This is illustrated by the continuing village boundary conflicts, which have taken on added urgency with the partial privatization of bamboo forests. In 1994–1995, there were ongoing boundary disputes in many villages, including two south of the primary drainage divide: Longgui (in conflict with Dagaoxie, which is north of the divide) and Gonghe (in conflict with Luodi, north of the divide, and with Liling, its neighbor to the south). These conflicts have a direct bearing on forest resource degradation. With Longgui and Dagaoxie, for example, Dagaoxie paid a secret remittance of illegally harvested timber to Longgui, after Longgui villagers discovered timber cutting on their land. Neither village wanted to inform reserve authorities, since the reserve would have required a share of the profit. Before the era of communist rule, conflicts between neighboring villages were sometimes severe, and fengshui feuds were not uncommon. In many cases, this led to the desecration of tombs and the digging of trenches to cut a neighboring village’s “dragon veins” ( longmai).13 Conflicts between villages that shared neither consanguinity nor proximity could be even more severe, especially when banditry, warlordism, and other forms of predation were involved. Thus, Luodi and

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Pingshui villages (the latter of which is now abandoned), lying north of the drainage divide, frequently attacked villages south of the divide, and formed alliances with other northern villages, such as Majiaping. Schisms like these were exacerbated during the Chinese civil war, as Guomindang troops and Communist militias were united with local communities and fought battles that pitted one village against another. The mutual antipathy between certain villages has never fully died down, and actually appears to be reemerging with the degeneration of central control and the rise of exploitative entrepreneurialism. Villagers from Luodi, which has jurisdiction over large tracts of reserve land north of the drainage divide, have operated the most destructive illegal logging operations in the core area of the reserve. They complain of unjust persecution by reserve officials, who they say discriminate against them in matters relating to timber quotas and illegal logging. Given the fractious history of village fengshui and territorial disputes, conflicts that insularize villages and lineages, it is important for conservationists, planners, and residents themselves to recognize the customs that have linked villages that might otherwise have reverted to continuous feuding and resource expropriation. Perhaps to counteract the isolating and insularizing tendencies of village fengshui and lineage traditions, to ensure good relations with villages where daughters were to spend the duration of their married lives (another important unifying social force), and to group together for defense against aggressive warlords and bandits, some traditional religious rites of solidarity have extended beyond the immediate compact settlement to embrace the community of other villages within the same or nearby drainage basins. Within a group of villages this might mean building a communal temple, as in the efforts of Longgui and five other communities to reconstruct the historic Five Towns Temple, which was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, villages in the southern and eastern parts of today’s reserve participate in fire-walking ceremonies, which tie them together in common devotion to a heavenly deity known as Wuguzhengxin. For another group of villages, south of the divide, the most important rite of solidarity is the annual Kangpusa (Carry the Buddha) ritual, which revolves around a historical figure named Zhang, “the living Buddha,” and the sacred mountain where he is worshipped, Horsehead Mountain (Matoushan). The religious geography of this cult unites villages in the southern part of the reserve and south of the reserve in a low-level communal and ecclesiastical framework. For daily social life, this type of alliance

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with more than twenty villages in the area may be more important to a particular village than its grouping with the twenty-four other villages that happen to fall within the boundaries of the reserve. The most important ritual activity is the annual fall Kangpusa procession, which apparently developed soon after the temple was established, about five hundred years ago. The procession is a harvesttime festival where the Buddha and several attendant deities are carried on litters with shoulder poles from village to village. In each community, they reside in the ancestral temple (citang) for two to three days amid grand celebration, eating, drinking, gambling, fireworks, family reunions, outdoor movies, and intense worship. This is the largest holiday aside from the Chinese New Year, in late winter–early spring. The ancient religious geography of the ritual procession, centered on the most important holy mountain in the area, acts as a powerful centripetal force for local people at a time when southern China is undergoing a religious renaissance of historical significance. Mountain areas of China have long been centers of religious hermitage, monasticism, and pilgrimage, and nature conservation in many parts of China will depend on incorporating these cultural activities into reserve planning. Like many such sites, Matoushan is surrounded by a large expanse of ancient sacred forests. Though Matoushan lies outside the reserve boundaries, the managers of the Meihuashan Nature Reserve have already begun plans for operating tourism and pilgrimage facilities there. Sacred Landscapes and Conservation Efforts in Meihuashan and Beyond

The religious geography of Meihuashan is a critical part of local identity and sense of place, worthy of research in its own right. Sacred forests and holy mountains are also a form of indigenous nature preservation, with much greater historical precedence in the region than any form of statesanctioned conservation. One of the challenges for reserve managers and residents today is to combine these modes of conservation, to find common ground, and to ensure that local efforts and national policies are in synchrony. There may be considerable room for cooperation between traditional sacred forestry schemes and modern, “scientific” approaches. This should not be attempted without extensive participation and planning by local people. Attempting to adopt a “sacred forest approach” will be futile if it is not motivated by local initiatives and indigenous perceptions. A report from the New Zealand government’s Shouning County

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(Fujian) Social Forestry Project makes the following recommendation for project members: [ They should] launch a “geomantic trees” planting activity in the project villages. A technician will go to the village in the planting season to show the villagers slides of tree planting technology and slides about New Zealand. The farmers will choose a place near the village for geomantic trees themselves and be provided seedlings freely. Refer to village’s tradition [sic] to select the tree species. . . . Chinese cedar and camphor . . . are the most popular species for geomantic trees. The trees must be planted strictly according with the technology introduced by the project so that the geomantic tree activity can play a role in the technology transfer. (Hung 1993)

There is indeed a demonstrated need for the regeneration of forests in much of Fujian, including parts of Meihuashan, and protecting biological diversity will require more efforts to cultivate forests, especially broadleaf forests. Still, the suggestion that local people would work with central authorities to cultivate “sacred” forests may be an optimistic view based on a somewhat paternalistic approach to local culture. There is scant evidence that broadleaf trees (unlike Cryptomeria and Chinese fir) have been planted by local people. However, the communal tradition of protecting sacred broadleaf forests may bode well for future efforts to preserve remaining broadleaf forests and to cultivate new ones. And in part because of their superficial similarity to fengshui forests, the nonfengshui broadleaf forests now protected within the newly established baohuxiaoqu may be more likely to receive local protection. As the New Zealand report recognizes, though, the ultimate criterion for which forests can be considered to have fengshui value most likely will depend on their proximity to villages. In many parts of China, the Maoist ban on such “feudal superstitions” as fengshui, the vandalism of temples and tombs, and the building of roads and other infrastructural features not only reshaped the physical appearance and function of rural lands but also transformed the principal structure and meaning of the cosmologized landscape. This geographical holocaust could have amounted to a change of world order for parts of rural China. In the mountain communities of Meihuashan, however, these changes appear to have amounted to a hiatus rather than a permanent revolution. Fengshui and local religion still thrive, even if in modi-

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fied forms, and local people can still claim responsibility for having protected most of the remaining rare tree species in the reserve. Ironically, the influences of a growing capitalist system have placed some of the sacred forests in jeopardy. The dynamic forces of a market economy combined with the unforeseen pressures of a declining state welfare system may turn out to be much more perilous for local forest management than were the ideological revolutions of the past. The time may soon come when central authorities must step in and make “fengshuilin preservation” an official policy.

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9

Eating from the Mountain Hunting Traditions, the Wildlife Trade, and Wildlife Management

Kao shan chi shan, kao shui chi shui (Living in the mountains you eat from the mountains; living by the water you eat from the water). — Ancient Chinese proverb

Nature conservation has emerged as a scientific and practical discipline in China only in recent years, and wildlife management techniques, by North American standards, are almost nonexistent or rudimentary in all but a few nature reserves. Indigenous forms of land and wildlife management, on the other hand, date from the earliest use of fire by huntergatherers of the later Pleistocene. Traps and weapons were used by the earliest settlers of the region to hunt game and remove dangerous carnivores, and these indigenous tools diffused throughout China and across Asia during periods of intercultural contact and waves of migration that may never be fully reconstructed. In southeast China, rural villagers were not the only people involved with controlling wildlife, however, and the history of human-tiger encounters shows that representatives of the imperial government relied both on cosmological strategies (prayers and supplication to heaven) and practical techniques (military aid, hunting, and trapping) to subdue what was viewed as a quasi-divine adversary. Indigenous wildlife management in Meihuashan and the rich body of local lore concerning wildlife and hunting provide a guide to the technologies and techniques of hunting and trapping, and to the historical process of human adaptation to regional ecological conditions. In the Southeast Uplands, one can still find traps and weapons composed entirely of local natural materials, evidence of a long tradition of hunting and trapping that has begun to be modified by new technologies only in recent decades. Documentation of these living artifacts has been one of

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the primary goals of this study, and one that I hope will further our knowledge of the cultural history of China. In the Southeast Uplands region during the 1990s, local people continued to make wildlife and landscape management decisions of consequence, even as the government sought to standardize rules and procedures, and minimize local deviation from national and provincial conservation policies. In-depth interviews with hunters in the Southeast Uplands indicated that conservation officials in southeast China could enhance their effectiveness through a deeper understanding of indigenous wildlife management practices. With sufficient incentives, nature reserve officials can work cooperatively with local residents, devise policies sensitive to local needs, and draw on the expertise of those who are closest to the country’s protected wildlands and wildlife. For the purposes of this study, wildlife management can be defined as “making decisions and taking actions to manipulate wildlife populations and their environments,” usually with the aim of increasing or stabilizing the populations of favored species and reducing the populations of undesirable species. 1 While official efforts to manage wildlife in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve since the reserve’s founding in 1985 are critically important, these must be placed within the broader spatial and temporal contexts of traditional wildlife management in the Southeast Uplands. To this end, I conducted indoor and field interviews with ten hunters in six villages in the Meihuashan Reserve and four villages outside the reserve. This was followed by several interviews in Longxishan and Wuyishan. Our discussions focused on seasonal hunting patterns, traditional perceptions of wildlife and wildlife management, the government fur trade of the 1960s–1980s, and current perceptions of wildlife conservation. During the first day of field research in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, I discovered that certain local hunters not only were willing to discuss the history of hunting but also were eager to display their weapons and their quarry, and even to demonstrate their hunting ability “in the field.” Although I avoided illegal hunting forays because of obvious legal ramifications and ethical issues, I inadvertently observed poaching on several occasions, and wild game was served fairly frequently in village homes and in restaurants within larger settlements outside the reserve. Certain informants discussed hunting methods during walking interviews and wildlife research. This method was especially useful, because wild animals and their signs were frequently discovered in the field, and

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it was not unusual to see hunters, hunting dogs, pitfalls, snare traps, explosives, and dummies (to scare animals away from bamboo groves) while walking along the mountain trails. Building rapport with hunters and former hunters was less difficult than I had anticipated. As in other phases of the research, I developed working relationships (guanxi) and friendships through many ritualized exchanges, including the giving of gifts, the sharing of meals and lodging, the consumption of locally produced rice wine, and the celebration of and participation in holidays and festivals. Several interviews involved ancient tiger-hunting techniques that today are familiar only to a few elderly specialists. These methods appear in some of the earliest written records on hunting in the region. Hunting and Trapping: Traditional Technologies and Techniques

Gazetteer records mention various methods for capturing and killing wildlife, especially tigers. Tigers presented the gravest threats to the populace and to the legitimacy of the state, and there are more records of tiger depredations and of human responses to them than for other species. When supplication to the gods failed, residents had several ways to capture or kill a tiger, including the use of granite or bamboo cage traps and deadly groundset crossbows triggered by triplines. Granite cage traps have long been known as huchu (literally, “tiger closets”). At least two types are known, the first a rectangular roofed enclosure made of granite pillars (see pl. 1), and the second a portable cage made of large mao bamboo poles. Both types had an entrance with a sliding door that slammed shut when triggered, and a separate compartment in the back used as a holding pen for the bait, usually a live goat or dog. Tiger closets were probably most effective in areas where tigers were numerous or particularly bold. To enter a cage trap, a tiger would have to be unafraid of man-made structures, a characteristic trait of maneaters. Though the gazetteer records mention instances when traps were used successfully, only two people interviewed could remember a time when traps had been effective in the twentieth century. In the second half of the century, tigers generally were too scarce and too wary to be lured into baited cages. Though granite traps had the advantage of durability, they could not be moved after construction. A granite huchu trap said to date from the Tang dynasty (618–907) still stands near a Buddhist temple on Jiuxianshan (Nine Immortals Peak) in the Daiyunshan Nature Reserve. The remote mountain temple, located amid granite boulders in the high grasslands, probably suffered from recurrent tiger depredation,

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and the trap helped protect monks and visitors, perhaps also providing a source of medicine and income from the sale of tiger parts. Bamboo traps had the advantages of being portable, cheap, and easy to construct. An elderly caretaker at the Jiuxianshan temple recalled the capture of tigers in traps made from large bamboo poles, noting that unlike boards, the hard, slick, cylindrical poles could not be chewed apart. Another ancient method for killing tigers, but one that remained effective through most of the twentieth century, was the groundset crossbow (pls. 14 and 15), known locally as digong (ground bow) or nu (a very old word meaning “crossbow”; see glossary). When triggered by an animal striking the tripline, the bow shot two bolts, the metal points of which were coated with a lethal toxin. Gazetteer records contain many documentations of She people having been hired to kill problem tigers, and the crossbow diffused into Han culture from indigenous hunters, such as the Miao, Yao, and She, many centuries ago. 2 The poison used on crossbow bolts was secret, and the techniques of locating and killing tigers and other large game do not appear to have diffused beyond a few tiger-hunting families. The plant-based ingredients of this substance, passed down in these families for generations, is derived from the roots of several species, but which species and what processing techniques go into the deadly concoction are not revealed to outsiders. Observers state that a drop of the substance placed on the tongue causes an immediate local anesthetic effect, and that 30 grams comprised a lethal dose. For unknown reasons, extreme humidity could render the substance ineffective. The poison apparently entered the animal’s bloodstream through the injury site and through ingestion from licking the wound, and the animal died almost instantaneously. Another method for using the ground bow was described by a village chief in Meihuashan who collected bee poison by placing the gall bladder of a pig into an underground wild bee nest. After many bees had stung the tissue, it was used as a toxin (though probably not a lethal one) on crossbow bolts to kill wild boar. Besides tigers and wild boar, groundset crossbows have been used to kill a variety of large mammals, including big cats (leopards and clouded leopards), red dogs, and ungulates (serow, and members of the deer family). This technique persisted into the 1980s and may still be used today. Until the 1960s, men who were trained in use of the crossbow for killing tigers were much sought after whenever villagers suffered from tiger attacks. Even in the 1960s, when automatic rifles were available,

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tigers were so scarce that only specialists could kill them. These men knew how to read the tracks and signs necessary to predict which trails tigers would traverse (tigers tend to walk on paths when possible). The hunters would then set their crossbows out and make periodic checks on them, as a trapper does with a trapline. The best-known tiger hunter in the Meihuashan region, Huang Zaiqiu, today is in his early seventies. An extremely active man, he can climb a steep mountain path faster than most local people half his age. Huang, who is known as a “liehushijia” (master tiger hunter), appears to have close affiliations with members of the She minority. 3 He was hired by the reserve during the late 1980s and early 1990s to help with tiger research, and still performs field checks when the reserve receives reports of tiger signs. Huang comes from a line of at least four generations of tiger hunters, all of whom relied exclusively on crossbow traps. Though he remembers when some people used cage traps in the 1920s, these have not been effective since tigers became less common and more wary. In his prime, Huang knew at least one other crossbow hunter, a man from Guangdong with the surname Li (or Lei), with whom he hunted. Li was a member of the She minority, and Huang indicated that Li and other tiger hunters were worshipers of the She god Panhu (Panhu Wang), an indication that they follow She traditions. 4 Huang became well known in the Minxi region between the 1940s and 1980s, when he killed ten tigers and numerous leopards, clouded leopards, dhole, ungulates, and other animals that happened into the bow traps. Huang killed two tigers in the 1940s, when he says they were abundant throughout the region. His first quarry was a man-eater that had roved through Datian County (Sanming Prefecture), boldly entering a bathhouse to kill one of its victims and an outhouse to kill another. The government gave him a reward of 1,000 yuan ($125) in silver bi (coins) as a bounty. He then killed three tigers in Shanghang County, including one that weighed more than 440 pounds. Most of the tigers were sold in the market in Nanyang, and it is easy to imagine the pandemonium surrounding such an item. Echoing Caldwell’s accounts, an elder resident of Gutian recalled how before being taken to market, the dead tiger had a sack tied over its head to prevent onlookers from removing the whiskers, invaluable elements in Chinese medicine. Every bit of the carcass could be used in medicine: organs, bones, meat, skin, and fur. Claws and teeth were made into children’s necklaces to ward off evil spirits. When asked about the habitats where he set his traps, Huang said that tigers preferred to travel along paths through the grasslands. These human

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and animal trails followed the ridges and peaks of the mountains and high hills. In contrast to Caldwell and other Western hunters of the early twentieth century, Huang did not seek out tiger dens, preferring to place his crossbow in favorable locations along a trail frequented by tigers. To determine the tiger’s whereabouts, Huang raked patches in the middle of the trails to serve as track pits. Roughly 30 centimeters (1 ft.) square, they recorded the passage of tigers and other animals. Huang confirms the observations made by Western naturalists that tigers were common even in areas with little forest cover, though he disagrees with regional lore which holds that tigers avoided the forests. Huang is one of the last of a long line of tiger-hunting specialists, men who knew more about the habits of the South China tiger than anyone else. He killed his last tiger in 1982 and quit hunting in the late 1980s, when the reserve gave him money to help with tiger recovery efforts. Huang last saw tiger signs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and has not looked for them since. Huang’s passing will mark the end of an era when humans and tigers held a more equal sway over the uplands. The groundset crossbow, a weapon invented in southern China for killing tigers, has been used recently by at least one hunter interviewed, but with the recent influx of modern weapons and stricter bans on hunting, it too may soon disappear. Hunting and Trapping: Current Technologies and Techniques

In the 1990s, few tigers and few tiger-hunting specialists remained, but destructive weapons were surprisingly common, and a variety of quarry were taken for home consumption and commercial exchange. Hunters and trappers in Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan Nature Reserves share a rich body of local knowledge concerning many species of vertebrates, and an array of hunting techniques and management strategies. These include traditional devices and techniques like pitfall traps (fig. 19), bamboo-and-stick snare traps (pls. 16 and 17), groundset and hand-held muzzle-loaders (fig. 20) (pl. 18), and the use of specially bred hunting dogs, which are used to pursue boar and sometimes serow (fig. 21). Modern hunting devices and techniques include shotguns and small-caliber rifles, headlights for night hunting, exploding bait, and steel leghold traps (fig. 20). The following techniques were observed in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, and this discussion is most applicable to the Hakka, who inhabit mountain villages of the Meihuashan region. Pitfall traps have long been used in Meihuashan to capture wild boar,

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Figure 19. A traditional wild boar pitfall trap near Gonghe village. To attract boar, sweet potatoes were placed in the trap and also were grown on dirt covering sticks over the hole. Attracted by the sweet potatoes, a boar would jump over the fence and plunge into the pit. These traps rarely, if ever, are used today.

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Figure 20. A short-barreled muzzle-loader, used in a gun trap, and a steel leghold trap.

though they are less frequently used today. The remains of these traps are a fairly common sight in the mountains of western Fujian, but few hunters have continued to maintain the pits in recent years since modern guns have become common. To construct a pitfall trap, the hunter dug a hole roughly 3 meters (10 ft.) deep and 2 meters (6.5 ft.) in diameter. The dirt was carried far from the trap site, because a boar’s sense of smell is very keen, and piles of fresh dirt are believed to make them suspicious. After the hole was dug, a bamboo fence was built around it, and the top of the hole was covered carefully with sticks, leaves, and dirt. Sweetpotato or other root-crop cuttings were placed in the dirt, in the pit, or both, and those on the surface would begin to germinate and grow. When a boar smelled the sweet potatoes, it would leap over the fence and crash to the bottom of the pit, where it could be shot and removed. Because wild boar are said to cross ridges at the lowest passes, pitfall traps were dug in mountain saddles, as is evident from the location of many crumbling holes and encircling fences in them today. The most common type of traditional trap in Meihuashan, and probably in other parts of the Southeast Uplands as well, is a type of rat trap

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or vertical snare trap. In Meihuashan, these are made with a thick strip of mao bamboo bent into a bow shape, with the flexion holding tremendous potential energy. Yellow bamboo is used for the cordage that keeps the bow bent, and white-leaf bamboo is used for the trigger mechanism. In Wuyishan, a variant of this trap is made of sticks, with a bent sapling providing power. The bamboo bow trap stands about 60–70 centimeters (24–28 in.) high when flexed. It is set across small-animal trails in the underbrush to capture large rodents, such as bamboo rats (Rhyzomis pruinosus), a favorite food item; bandicoot rats (Bandicota indica); “mountain rats” (Rattus spp.); small Indian civets (Viverricula indica); Chinese bamboo partridges (Bambusicola thoracica); and other pheasants and partridges. New traps are made each year, and traplines are set in winter, when the animals are more prone to follow trails. In other seasons, food is more abundant and animals spend more time off-trail, consuming the abundant forage. Traplines consist of between twenty and thirty traps, with up to one hundred traps per line being set in exceptionally good habitat,

Figure 21. A hunting dog in Guizhuping recovering from an attack by a wild boar. In the last stage of the hunt, when a boar stands its ground, injuries to men and dogs are common. This dog lost a large patch of fur and skin to a pair of sharp tusks.

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such as the wetlands of Xiaoyang, in the core area of the reserve. A couple of trappers from Gonghe are said to have caught twenty to thirty animals and birds after each set of a trapline a hundred traps long in Xiaoyang during the winter of 1993. Given the long local history of rodent meat production and consumption, Meihuashan’s directors have discussed its potential as an export to improve village economies. Other traditional traps and snares include tripline-triggered bamboo tubes (which shoot a poison arrow), string or rope snare traps, rockfall traps, and gun traps. 5 The gun trap, a derivative of the ground-set crossbow, is placed on the ground or on rocks next to a trail, to be triggered by the passing of an animal when it makes contact with a tripline. One version of the gun is a short-barreled muzzle-loader that can be made at home. These are still used in Meihuashan and other areas today. Until a general ban on guns was imposed in Meihuashan, in March 2001, the most common hunting weapon was the black-powder muzzleloader, a long-barreled musket found in villages all over the Southeast Uplands and probably throughout rural southern China. In some parts of China, these firearms are known as niaoqiang; in the Southeast Uplands, they are called “niaochong.” 6 Both terms appear in Chinese dictionaries translated as “bird gun” or “fowling piece.” In Meihuashan, these guns, which resemble artifacts from the American frontier era, have for years adorned the walls of many village homes. In the 1990s, some newermodel breech-loaders appeared, which were much easier to load and shoot, and thus more problematic for wildlife conservation. The muzzleloaders, though common, were used mostly by nonspecialized hunters to kill wild boar, muntjac, and other common animals. Until the gun ban, the cumulative effects of these primitive weapons was probably severe in Meihuashan, and reserve managers reported that even after many guns were handed over to authorities, hunting in the reserve had yet to be completely controlled. The low level of enforcement of game laws outside protected areas indicates that hunting pressure is still severe throughout western Fujian. The deadliest modern weapons in the Southeast Uplands in the 1990s were shotguns and rifles, and though they were not as common as muzzle-loaders, their numbers were increasing after the economic boom of the 1980s. Guns and ammunition are often made and /or repaired by hand. Powder can be purchased in the market towns; shot, balls, and wadding can be fashioned from scrap materials at home. Even commercial shotgun shells are made of brass, so they are durable and can be

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reloaded many times, and hunters make their own slugs from wheel bearings; even without commercially available shells, shotguns are likely to proliferate. The confiscation of guns, as carried out in Meihuashan and other reserves, may be a necessary policy for protecting wildlife throughout southern China. Dogs are another tool in the indigenous hunting complex. Locally bred boar-hunting dogs, known as tugou (local dogs), are part of a native hunting tradition that may have its roots in the pre–Han Miao-Yao-She culture complex. 7 The long-term association between people and dogs in the Southeast Uplands is evident in many ways. Dogs are a favored food among the Hakka, and puppies sold in the periodic markets are mostly for consumption, dogmeat being held as particularly nourishing and medicinal. In the mountain villages of Meihuashan, though, dogs are raised for hunting, and I never observed dogs there being raised for meat. There was no indication that this was practiced in the villages in historical times. In fact, the relationship between Meihuashan hunters and their dogs is close and even affectionate to a degree that one might find surprising after repeatedly witnessing the culinary sacrifice of puppies during festive occasions in the larger valley towns. Though hunters live and work closely with their dogs, training dogs to hunt boar does not seem to require much time. Good dogs pursue game and instinctively try to avoid clashes with boar. If no game is located, or if the hunter calls off the hunt for lack of time at the end of the day, a few sharp blasts on a thumblength bamboo whistle summon the dogs across great distances. Hunters take great pride in fine hunting dogs, and they take care to ensure that individual dogs are healthy and that their offspring are not mutts. Nevertheless, the recent introduction of many other breeds to the region may threaten the tugou stock, which has not been registered in official international registries. Tugou have a distinctive morphology and coloration; they have stocky bodies and are relatively small, standing roughly 45–50 centimeters (17–20 in.) at the shoulder. Their broad heads taper to medium-length, narrow muzzles. The ears are medium length and erect. Their coats are typically gold to tan, sometimes with dark or black along the back, though some individuals in Wuyishan were solid black. The tails are fairly long, somewhat curled, and bushy. In color and morphology, the dogs bear a strong resemblance to the dhole. Bred to pursue and hold wild boar at bay, these dogs are strong and fierce, and can be very intim-

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idating to strangers. Most of them are now restrained on chains to keep them from ingesting rat poison, which has caused the death of many dogs and cats in recent years. Once they are set loose, the dogs enter the mountains eagerly and begin to rove widely in search of quarry. On a typical boar hunt, hunters enter the mountains with one or two dogs. The dogs may run a kilometer or more away from their master, charging through underbrush along animal trails as they pursue the quarry through the mountains. Besides wild boar, the dogs will pursue serow, bear, and other large animals, and though hunters mention the practice less frequently, the dogs have been used to hunt serow in their haunts among the boulder fields and cliffs of the montane grasslands. When the scent of an animal is strong, the dogs bark repeatedly in a high pitch. When the game animal stops and turns to “take a stand,” the dogs face it, and the rhythm of their barking becomes slower and more regular. The hunter hurries to the scene as quickly as terrain and foliage will permit. While the dogs are expected only to keep the animal occupied, it is common for a cornered boar to charge the dogs with great ferocity, biting and slashing with its sharp tusks. During my tenure in Meihuashan, two dogs in Guihe village were seriously injured in skirmishes with wild boar; one dog sustained a broken leg (which the owner treated with great care until the dog had recovered fully), and the other had a large patch of skin and fur torn from its shoulder. Dogs are not the only ones to suffer casualties during the hunt, and hunters must exercise great care in approaching the melee for a shot at the boar. As one experienced hunter, a local village chief, said, “Hunting requires skill and good eyesight. Boars are dangerous. If you miss and only hurt the boar, it will get you, and many people around here have been injured. If you can’t deal with it, you shouldn’t try it. Boar are worse then bears and tigers [referring to big cats in general].” The danger of boar hunting was illustrated by an incident in Meihuashan while I was living there. One day, a fifty-year-old Majiaping man was hunting wild boar in the northwestern part of the reserve. Happening upon a huge boar, which he estimated to be about 300 pounds (though wild boar seldom exceed 200 pounds), he raised his muzzle-loader and fired. The boar was only injured, and it charged the man. The man jumped down into an old, abandoned bamboo soaking pit, and the boar jumped in after him, tearing a huge gash in the man’s rear. It then proceeded to jump out of the pit and take a stand at the edge, watching the man for almost half

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an hour. The man was later treated in a hospital in the town of Xinquan, and his medical fees totaled more than 2,000 yuan ($250), the equivalent of roughly a year’s earnings. In the 1990s, many hunters and trappers employed a wide range of traditional and modern methods to take different prey species, depending on the conditions of terrain, season, or time of day. Some techniques have been used for a long time but became more popular or developed into a modified form in recent years, often because of the availability of new materials or production methods. Two such traps are the exploding bait trap and the steel leghold trap. Use of the steel leghold trap has been banned in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, but the explosive trap, which is used specifically to keep wild boar from eating bamboo shoots, is permitted. The explosive trap was used as far back as the 1950s, and perhaps earlier, but has become more common since the advent of cheaper and better commercial gunpowder. The trap consists of a contact explosive wrapped in a rat skin and placed in a shallow, cylindrical hole. The top of the hole is covered with a small cap rock. Many of these traps are placed in a given area within a bamboo grove, especially during the spring, when bamboo shoots emerge. Boar root around in the groves, searching for underground shoots. Smelling the rat skin, they move the rock and bite the rat skin, causing the powder charge to explode. Bamboo groves of Meihuashan sometimes have small signs stuck in the ground warning humans of these minefields. Factory-produced steel leghold traps, another recent addition to the local panoply of modern mechanical devices, were introduced to the region in the 1980s. These traps are far more powerful than traditional bamboo or stick catch traps, and are believed to have caused tremendous damage to wildlife since the 1980s. More than half the hunters interviewed had used steel leghold traps, though they did not reveal how often and under what conditions. The most poignant evidence of the destructive effects of illegal trapping on tiger and leopard populations came from incidents involving steel leghold traps. The first occurred on my first trip to Meihuashan at the end of 1992, when a clouded leopard that had been confiscated live in a local market died in captivity at the reserve. The animal had been caught in leghold traps, two or more of which are sometimes placed together to ensure success. This may have been the handiwork of a commercial trapper, who could afford to set up an entire trapline of steel legholds. These traps are capable of injuring tigers, as occurred in Meihuashan as recently as 1990 (see chap. 7).

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Among the most popular game species in the Southeast Uplands today are masked palm civets (Paguma larvata), pangolins ( Manis pentadactyla), Reeve’s muntjacs, wild boar, and bamboo rats. Most if not all of these species are eaten in homes and restaurants throughout the region, and poaching is on the rise as consumer demand for game increases. In the 1990s, wild boar were the only legal game within reserve boundaries, but to hunt boar legally, one had to obtain a hunting permit from the reserve and a gun license from the public security office. Hunting could take place only in the reserve’s buffer zone; no hunting was allowed in the core area of the reserve. Hunters could gain permission to hunt other wildlife in special circumstances, but licenses had to be obtained at the provincial ministry of forestry in Fuzhou. With the ban on guns in 2001, even such regulated hunting of wild boar is not likely to be permitted. As a result of stronger enforcement and the ban on guns, reserve officials believe that poaching has decreased substantially in the past two years. In the Wuyishan Nature Reserve, many villages had their guns confiscated in the early 1990s after a rash of poaching incidents, and today poaching is mostly by poor farmers from Jiangxi Province. Until at least the mid-1990s, reserve officials turned a blind eye to the unlicensed hunting of wild boar and Reeve’s muntjac inside and outside the reserves. Similarly, lax enforcement outside the reserve and in other areas of the region present a grave threat to members of the deer family, such as crested deer, common muntjac, and black muntjac (farther north in Fujian Province). The rationale for the policy was that the populations of these species were abundant and must be controlled to prevent excessive agricultural damage, especially to rice plants and bamboo shoots. The popularity of boar hunting, and its general acceptance by reserve managers, also stemmed from the assumption that it was a cultural and economic necessity, regarded from an ecological perspective as relatively harmless. Though the latter assumption is untrue, especially if the goal is to protect the prey base for tigers, it was well known that the enforcement of game laws regarding wild boar could cause the already simmering local hostility toward the reserve to intensify to unmanageable levels. With stronger law enforcement in Meihuashan and Wuyishan, officials believe that poaching in the reserves is subsiding, but hunting patterns in Meihuashan villages in the 1990s indicate that some hunters are capable of circumventing the law, and game management over larger areas will require a much greater commitment from government agencies. Though most people who hunted wild boar in the 1990s were non-

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specialists, who hunted only during the rice harvest season and spent the nights in huts by the paddy to shoot at crop raiders, other hunters and trappers specialized in hunting boar with dogs and taking economically and ecologically valuable species through a variety of means, which often require greater skills and knowledge. 8 Even nonspecialist hunters can cause a considerable amount of damage in their often random encounters with wildlife; they tend to shoot any wild animal they happen to see. In the past, they did not devote much time to hunting, and they seldom encountered rare species of animals. By the mid-1990s, however, hunting was becoming more popular in Meihuashan, and more nonspecialists were spending more time hunting. This was probably the result of greater availability of commercially produced headlamps, which induced many young men to become involved with nocturnal spotlight hunting. Though there were no systematic patrols for controlling poaching anywhere in the region, fines and imprisonment were imposed on a few hunters for poaching monkeys, clouded leopards, and other animals, and several people were arrested for attempting to sell wildlife in township markets. One of the most outstanding cases involved a man prosecuted for selling a clouded leopard in Zhangping County, after having set a trapline with fourteen steel leghold traps. The man was sentenced to three years in prison. In another case, in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, a twenty-eight-year-old man from Taipingliao was fined 6,000 yuan ($750) in 1993 for shooting and selling a rhesus macaque. Punishments like these are a strong deterrent to selling wildlife on the open market, but lax enforcement means that poachers can continue to kill and sell wildlife so long as they do it discreetly. Therefore, wildlife management will be most successful if law enforcement is coupled with incentives for conserving nature. My discussions with hunters indicated that many are eager to see improvements on both fronts. Hunting Specialists and Their Quarry

Serious hunters do not curtail their activities at any time of year, but spring and fall are peak boar-hunting seasons. Although the rainy season, lasting from December to April, makes hunting very difficult, it is the time of year when bamboo shoots emerge, and hunters are active day and night when the weather permits. Intensive hunting takes place in the fall, too, when boar invade the rice paddies at harvesttime. Peaks in boarhunting activity in the fall and spring may be as much a response to the predictability of the boars’ seasonal movement as to a real threat to the

(continued on next page)

Mongoose

Masked palm-civet “Foxes” (li) Fox Raccoon dog Badger Ferret badger

Fox Kuntian dog Kuntian pig, pig badger Weasel badger, “two-heads black” Crab-eating mongoose

Huli Kuntiangou Kuntianzhu, zhuhuan Youhuan, liangtouwu Shixiemeng

Fruit fox

Shanyang

Guozili

Mountain goat

Chiji Wuzhang, heiji

Common (Indian) muntjac Crested (tufted) deer Total muntjacs and crested deer Serow

Common Small Mammals

Wild pig, mountain pig Yellow muntjac, mountain muntjac Red muntjac Black muntjac

Yezhu, shanzhu Huangji, shanzhang

English Equivalent

Wild boar Reeve’s (Chinese) muntjac

Common Ungulates

Species

Local Name (Mandarin) *

Table 3. Ethnozoology and Hunting Practices in the Meihuashan Region

7

(I.D.) (I.D.) 9 8

9 9

No. Hunters Hunting This Animal

8.3 (I.D.) ‡

25.7 † 1.7

9.6 18.5

Animals Killed /Yr. (Average)

Tiger Leopard Clouded leopard Golden cat Asiatic black bear Dhole (red dog)

Large Carnivores and Omnivores

Large Indian civet Small Indian civet

Less-Common Small Mammals

Macaque (two species) Porcupine Flying squirrel Bamboo rat Bandicoot rats and other rats Rabbit Pangolin Leopard cat

Species

Laohu, huanan hu Bao Yunbao Youxihu Gouxiong Caigou, chai

Da lingmao Xiao lingmao

Houzi Haozhu Feili Tulun Shan laoshu Shan tuzi Lianli †† Baomao

Local Name (Mandarin) *

Tiger, South China tiger Leopard Clouded leopard “Stream-following tiger” Dog bear Dhole dog, dhole

Big spirit cat ‡‡ Small spirit cat

monkey Hao pig Flying fox [meaning unclear] Mountain rats Mountain rabbit Carp Leopard cat

English Equivalent

Table 3. Ethnozoology and Hunting Practices in the Meihuashan Region (continued)

1 3 5 (I.D.) 4 2

1 1

5 1 2 2 (I.D.) 3 5 (I.D.)

No. Hunters Hunting This Animal

< 1.0 < 1.0

< 1.0 < 1.0 < 1.0

1.5 < 1.0

7.5 1.0

9.8§ 25.0 15.0 5.5 **

Animals Killed /Yr. (Average)

Yeji

Wild chickens

(I.D.) (I.D.)

6 2

‡‡ Lingmao could be translated as “quick cat,” “fairy cat,” or “spirit cat.” All three combined could best illustrate the impression that these animals can appear and disappear in the wink of an eye. Harry Caldwell (1924) devotes a chapter to “foxes” and “spirit cats,” which were believed to possess magical powers.

†† Other names for the pangolin include the common name chuanshanjia (“wears mountain armor” or “pierces the mountains best”), and the widely used vernacular name dilong (“earth dragon”).

** Though only two hunters mentioned “tulun,” others may not have regarded catching bamboo rats as “hunting.” Nearly everyone in the region, on finding a sandy mound and a hole near a patch of bamboo, will set about digging up the rat burrow until the large rodent or rodents have been seized. Hundreds or thousands of rats are culled in the reserve each year.

§ This figure is probably accurate for the early 1980s and before; today, monkeys are relatively rare in Meihuashan, with perhaps three to five troops in the entire reserve. Hunters still encounter them today, but annual culls do not seem to be high.

‡ Estimates were nonquantifiable. All hunters kill these species periodically, but many people are unable to identify them except as “li.” Civets frequently are included in this category. When the survey was conducted, data were insufficient for framing the question in a more quantifiable manner.

† This is the average of hunters’ estimates of their total annual harvest of all muntjacs and tufted deer (not the sum of estimated kills for each species). Some hunters did not know if the animals they had killed were tufted deer or were common muntjacs.

* Some of these words are Mandarin versions of names from local Hakka dialects. Where local names were undetermined or did not differentiate species (as with muntjacs), the common Mandarin name is used.

Note: I.D., insufficient data

Pheasants, partridges, and relatives Raptors (owls, hawks, and eagles)

Birds

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farmers’ livelihood. In pursuit of other game species, some farmers hunt all year long. Others are less active in the hottest months of midsummer, when heat and snakes make mountain traverses uncomfortable and somewhat risky. With far fewer opportunities to hunt in winter and early spring (because of the incessant wet-season rains), many people do little but stay inside for a few months, run household businesses or stores, and wait for the skies to clear. Hunters have their personal preferences for the best time of day to pursue their prey, and certain methods are associated with diurnal or nocturnal hunting. Responses were evenly divided between those who preferred daytime hunting, those who preferred hunting at night, and those who hunted during night and day. Most hunters use dogs for daylight pursuit of boar, and headlamps (without dogs) for night hunting. While spotlight hunting, men move quietly through broadleaf and mixed forests searching for such species as the masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), the meat of which is the most favored of wild delicacies. At night, these forests and adjacent rice paddies and bamboo groves harbor Reeve’s muntjac, rabbits, an occasional boar, and many other species. Day or night, most men hunt individually or in pairs. This was not true before the 1980s. Both Caldwell (1924) and regional gazetteers refer to the regional tradition of encirclement hunting (weilie), a technique in which a group of hunters forms a line or circle, typically in the open montane grasslands, driving game in front of them until someone has a clear shot. 9 This technique was closely connected to the tradition of annual burning, since only grasslands could be negotiated on foot and allow for clear views of the quarry. Before the 1950s, fire was sometimes used as a component of the game drive, an indication of its traditional role in game management, but encirclement hunting became quite effective without fire after rifles were distributed to local militia units during the first decades after 1949. 10 In Dayuan village, a hunter explained that groups of five to six people used this technique very successfully until 1984, when guns were confiscated by the government. This marked the end of weilie hunts, and only muzzle-loading niaoqiang and leghold traps have been used there up to the present. The hunters in this survey had hunted and trapped more than thirtyfive animal species and an unknown number of bird species (see table 3). Some hunters mentioned that before the opening of the nature reserve, they hunted a much wider variety of species, but for fear of fines and imprisonment, they were limited to hunting boar and muntjac. This

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statement may have been true in many cases, but mostly it allowed for a freer discussion of hunting practices under the pretext of discussing “the way we used to hunt.” Another “truth” was revealed on several occasions, when informants contradicted themselves by shooting animals they had professed to no longer hunt. Aside from wild boar and Reeve’s muntjacs, the most commonly killed ungulates include serow, common muntjac, and crested deer. Other common prey include large and small mammals: masked palm civets, large Indian civets, small Indian civets, monkeys (rhesus and Tibetan stump-tail macaques), porcupines, “foxes” (including foxes, raccoon dogs, mongooses, weasels, and badgers), flying squirrels, bamboo rats, other rats, rabbits, pangolins, and leopard cats. Hunters bag large carnivores and omnivores less frequently than small ones, but these species are rarer and more vulnerable to exploitation. In the past decade, in Meihuashan, hunters have killed leopards, clouded leopards, golden cats, Asiatic black bears, and dholes (or red dogs). A hunter from the remote village of Dayuan even claims to have shot two tigers on separate occasions in the 1970s, a story that seems credible because tiger signs discovered there by the same villager in the early 1990s were verified by experts. Birds may be especially hard hit by random hunting; hunters favor gallinaceous game birds, such as pheasants and partridges (of which there are at least six species in the region), but all other species appear to be fair game. Owls and other raptors seem to be specially targeted, probably because of their size and beauty. Amphibians and reptiles are caught in a variety of ways, for medicinal and culinary ends. These include mostly snakes, turtles, and frogs (especially Rana spinosa, which inhabits mountain streams). Snakes are also killed because villagers perceive them as a threat; whether venomous or nonvenomous species, all snakes are regarded as harboring poisons with varying degrees of toxicity. Oddly enough, certain lizard species (apparently geckos and possibly skinks as well), known locally in Meihuashan as “four-legged snakes” (sijiaoshe), are feared by some as the most lethal “serpents” in the area. This belief seems especially remarkable considering that cobras and king cobras are still common in the region, as are numerous other poisonous snakes, including three other species in the cobra family (Elapidae) and five species in the viper family ( Viperidae). These and other poisonous snakes cause many injuries and fatalities in the region every year. The hunters estimated how many animals they harvested in an average year, but these figures are to be taken as general approximations, and

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often the question was posed addressing the number of kills a year before the game laws and nature reserve were established (in the mid- to late 1980s). Other sources of inaccuracy include problems of local taxonomic tradition—the tendency to lump many species together, as with “foxes,” or to use local names interchangeably for several species.11 This problem is further complicated by the fact that hunters periodically bag animals they simply cannot identify. As one man put it, “Sometimes we shoot things that we don’t understand.” The mustelids (weasels and badgers), viverrids (civets), and herpestids (mongooses) probably cause the greatest confusion. For these reasons, rather than being a comprehensive checklist of prey species, the survey was a first exploratory attempt to see what the hunters were willing to discuss and to elicit information accordingly. Quantitative results therefore should be viewed as preliminary figures, which could be used to develop a more comprehensive survey. With these caveats in mind, the survey results provide a simple profile of hunting in the region. Of particular note are the high numbers of wild boar and muntjacs (especially Reeve’s muntjacs) killed each year. All the hunters surveyed focused primarily on these ungulate species, since they are the most abundant and provide ample meat and medicinal material. Both species have high reproductive rates and can adapt to a wide variety of environments and disturbance regimes (see appendix). They favor areas where less-disturbed habitats, such as montane wetlands and broadleaf forests, intergrade with anthropogenic landscape patches, such as rice paddies, fruit orchards, and recently cleared Chinese fir plantations. Under a regime of ongoing ecological disturbance, landscape heterogeneity, and generalized hunting, adaptability and high reproductive rates give these species a considerable advantage over other ungulates. If annual harvests were carefully regulated, these species could continue to thrive. Wild boar and Reeve’s muntjac populations are resilient enough to sustain populations of large carnivores and to provide for a limited hunting season with controlled bag limits. More specialized, less-common ungulates, such as crested deer, serow, and common muntjac, will require much stricter protection, at least in the near term. Ungulate species that are nearly extinct in the region obviously could not withstand the compounded pressures of habitat degradation and hunting; this group includes the water deer, the sambar deer, and the sika, or Meihua deer. A couple of hunters believed that a few individual sambar deer might still survive in the core area of the reserve, but no

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substantive evidence supported this claim. Ironically, reserve officials seemed unaware of the fact that, for all intents and purposes, the three deer species no longer existed in the reserve. If these species are extant in the Southeast Uplands, their survival will depend on intensive human intervention. Deer farms, such as the Sika deer farm in Longxishan and a new one in Meihuashan, could provide bases for reintroduction to the wild. Because of their delectable meat, masked palm civets have been sought after by hunters throughout China since ancient times, and hunting pressure in Meihuashan appears to be fairly intense. Spotlight hunting, the most effective means of bagging the guozili (fruit fox), occurs from late summer to early winter, when this mostly arboreal member of the civet family can be found in fruit trees, especially those bearing sweet, tart fruits, such as the red bayberry (yangmei; Myrica rubra).12 The effects of hunting on local and regional palm civet populations are difficult to gauge without a more detailed study. Populations of both the large and small Indian civets, however, have been in serious decline in the past couple of decades, according to local hunters. The same holds true for other “foxes,” especially those that once inhabited the scrub thickets and forests adjacent to rice paddies. Since the advent of rat poison and chemical pesticides and fertilizers, certain once common mustelids, such as the crab-eating mongoose (Herpestes urva) and the ferret badger (Melogale moschata), have practically disappeared. The wiles of these predatory omnivores were once legendary, but villagers’ reports of losing half a flock of ducks in an afternoon to one rapacious mongoose or ferret badger are now a thing of the past. Pangolin trapping and trading is another topic in urgent need of longterm research, for pangolins are being decimated at an unprecedented pace, and there is little if any reliable evidence on the size and sustainability of the natural population. The scales, tongue, and meat of this scaly anteater are highly valued in the marketplace. The meat is considered a delicacy and, along with the other parts, a highly efficacious traditional Chinese medicine. In the urban restaurants of Guangdong Province, a live pangolin can fetch 1,000 yuan ($125), which was the equivalent in the 1990s of a Meihuashan family’s annual per capita income. When the meat is sold, it always has a bit of the tongue in it, for the tongue is regarded as one of the most valuable parts medicinally. For this reason, tongues are never sold whole. The meat is sold for 80–100 yuan ($10–12)

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per jin (.5 kg, or 1.1 lb.). Scales are sold for 30 yuan ($.03–.04) per jin. They are ground into a powder, believed to have antiseptic properties, which is rubbed on wounds to kill germs, or is eaten to cure carbuncles. Pangolins are attracted to recently burned areas, where ants nest around dead stumps. After an area is burned, pangolins colonize it quickly, digging neat shafts down to their chambers. Adult pairs and offspring reside in the burrows, leaving only to eat ants and other insects and larvae. Locals believe that a pangolin uses its tongue as bait, sticking it out and letting it rest on the ground or in an ant nest. After the ants cover it, the pangolin retracts its tongue and has a meal, a trick repeated many times during the course of a day. To catch pangolins, hunters set steel leghold traps near their burrows. Though local hunters deny that they hunt pangolins, fearing arrest, one Meihuashan hunter described how outsiders poach pangolins, entering the reserve to set up clandestine camps. Though the man expressed disapproval of the pangolin poaching, he did not hesitate to sell pangolin soup in his restaurant whenever he got the chance. A pangolin poacher’s camp discovered between the villages of Gonghe and Mawu was made by people from Tongxian and Nanyang, in Shanghang County. Two men lived there for six months in 1994. Although local people opposed the poachers’ activities, they claim they could not catch the men. In fact, pangolin poaching is common in southern China, and there is no question that this species, which is under second-level state protection, is taken by the tens of thousands each year, and is consumed in homes and restaurants throughout the country. The monetary value of wildlife at the local level and in regional markets provides further incentives to kill wild animals. All but two of the hunters surveyed sometimes sold their quarry or parts of it, though only one of the men was regarded as a commercial hunter. And all the hunters provided meat and medicine to their families and friends. Most hunters occasionally sold their products within the informal village economy, but the commercial hunter earned about 60 percent of his annual income by selling wild boar (presumably in rural townships or to middlemen connected to urban retail markets). While the medicinal values ascribed to wildlife are questionable from a Western scientific perspective, postslaughter waste is minimal; meat, organs, blood, bones, hide, fur, whiskers, and other parts are important ingredients in the vast Chinese pharmacopoeia.

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Hunters are in a unique position to judge how animal populations have changed in recent decades, and all have noticed increases of some taxa and decreases among others. Although this information is anecdotal, there are no wildlife population studies being conducted in the area, and hunters are the most reliable data source. Since the 1950s, the big cats have suffered the most dramatic and obvious population decreases. Before 1949, livestock depredation by leopards and, to a lesser extent, by tigers was a recurring problem. In the past thirty years, attacks have seldom occurred. Most hunters have seen leopards and clouded leopards, and several have shot these animals, but only one man claims to have seen tigers. The hunters seemed for the most part to have a logical grasp of the causes of this decline, and a few cited anthropogenic environmental effects and ecological factors: overhunting, an increase in road building and general construction, the use of chemical pesticides and rat poisons, the proliferation of leghold traps, and the low reproductive rates of large carnivores. Many hunters and others in Meihuashan commented on the more recent decline of dholes, which are said to have virtually disappeared in just the past five to seven years. This phenomenon is attributed by most people to the effects of rat poison in the food chain. Because their own dogs and cats died off from eating poisoned bait and dead rodents, people surmise this is what has happened to the caigou. Most hunters also believe, for the reasons discussed above, that pangolins, monkeys, sambar deer, snakes, frogs, “foxes,” ferret badgers, and mongooses have suffered dramatic declines in recent years. As might be expected, ecological disturbance has had the opposite effect on more opportunistic species, and several taxa are believed to have increased in abundance. These include wild boar, Reeve’s muntjacs, rats, certain species of snakes, pheasants, rabbits, and serow. Some hunters attribute these changes to the decline of such predators as big cats, foxes, and dholes. Attitudes toward Conservation, Wildlife Management, and Reserve Authority

As part of the interviews on hunting practices, subjects were asked about their own views on game management in the nature reserve and other areas. Opinions ranged from strong support for heavy regulation (some even stated that the reserve was not doing enough to protect wildlife) to hostile opposition to wildlife management and the nature reserve. Within the broad spectrum of beliefs, there was underlying consensus that the

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interests of the reserve and the state are, at present, in conflict with the interests of the village and the villager. The state and the village represent two levels of organization, with different philosophical approaches and economic relationships to local natural resources. Even those who support the idea of the reserve and wildlife conservation see rampant poaching as evidence that the two systems are not in accord. At one extreme, villagers in Majiaping and Luodi feel cut off from the reserve management, deprived of any possible benefits of association with the reserve, and severely hindered by restrictions on land use and hunting. They are bitter about fines and short periods of imprisonment imposed on villagers alleged to have poached or illegally cut timber in the reserve. Villagers in Majiaping are angry about the lack of government support for health care, education, transportation, and communications. They are keenly aware of the fact that their land encompasses the most extensive broadleaf forest and the best wildlife habitat in the reserve. Some say that if conditions do not improve, they will consider their land separate from the reserve, and all resources would become the de facto property of the village. As one Majiaping hunter put it: Protection is only needed for rare species. There is no need for protection of boars, muntjacs, and monkeys. I will only help the reserve do their job if they manage the villages better. In the meantime, we will all hunt like crazy. . . . Wildlife is my enemy and I am its enemy. If it comes in front of my gun, I will shoot it. Only if the reserve uses local people and supports them will people support the reserve in research and management. We can wipe out a lot of animals. . . . You can sell a monkey in Fuzhou for one thousand yuan, or a monkey brain for one hundred yuan. Without international support, the government won’t be able to handle this— the Communist Party is too corrupt. The villagers are the real masters and owners [zhuren] of the reserve, and the management better recognize this.

The same man stated that if things did not improve for his village, the villagers would not hesitate to set fire to the mountains, which would likely lead to the firing of the current reserve leaders. Residents from other villages expressed similar hostility, though it was usually expressed with less passion. Some hunters suggested that the reserve would fail in its basic goals if hunting, illegal woodcutting, and corruption were not strictly curtailed. One man quipped in disgust that the reserve should be

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called “The Meihuashan Nature Destruction Area” (Meihuashan Ziranhuimiequ). Another hunter and wildlife enthusiast accused the reserve managers of dereliction and greed: If you’re going to protect wildlife, you must be really strict and control hunting, especially poaching by outsiders. . . . Poachers from Changting [County] and Jiangxi [Province] camped up near the Qingcai wetland last year. They never came down to the villages and villagers never fooled with them, no one cared. . . . [Also], the reserve staff should not eat what they confiscate, nor should they eat wildlife in the villages. The headquarters buys snakes, frogs, and pangolins! [Note: this practice was discontinued in the mid-1990 s.] They have more power [than others] and they should be fairer and use that power to protect wildlife. The reserve people eat more wildlife than old, experienced hunters do!

Other hunters believed there was “no need for protection because animals just eat the crops.” These people were unhappy that they could not hunt legally, and they did not want to be “managed” in any way. While they recognized the significance of nature conservation for the nation as a whole, they believed it held no significance for themselves or other locals. In contrast, some hunters’ view was that wildlife could be a magnet for tourism, and an “animal world” could be developed at the reserve to bring jobs and money to the villagers. One of the most passionate statements in support of conservation came from a man believed to have killed some of the last tigers inhabiting the reserve, a man who had strong beliefs about the value of wildlife (as several hunters did): This area has so many wild animals and birds! There should be one or two people in each natural village who will be employed as wildlife managers. If [the reserve] doesn’t do this, they really can’t protect wildlife. Right now they aren’t really an effective organization. From 1984 to now they still haven’t let people know what they can and can’t hunt. We understand the goals and the rules, but as long as there’s wildlife around, we’ll hunt. . . . There’s no contact between the reserve and the villagers, they never come down and investigate the real situation. The reserve doesn’t protect animals, they tell us not to hunt. How can we not hunt in our spare time? They need to have us protect resources. I get mad when I see them. . . . If you’re

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going to manage, manage well, if you’re not going to manage, don’t [pretend to] manage!

On the subject of tiger conservation, the reserve’s primary mission in the 1980s and 1990s, this hunter had some passionate words of wisdom: “Tigers will be like dragons; there will be paintings, but no evidence of their real existence. If you scare people with a dragon and it doesn’t exist, it’s a lie. Have you seen dragon paintings? Your descendants will call you a liar if you paint a fine picture of a tiger and it no longer exists!” From these statements and the data collected on hunting patterns, it is clear that a regional system of wildlife management, including hunting regulations and patrols by game wardens, must be developed as soon as possible. Until the Meihuashan Reserve’s gun ban in 2001, gun licenses and boar-hunting permits could be purchased at township government headquarters for about 30 yuan ($3.75), but few hunters bothered to buy them because there was little chance they would be checked. Outside the reserve, bag limits and hunting seasons have not yet been established. These would be constructive first steps, especially if villagers were incorporated into a wildlife conservation system as wardens and managers, and if the system were based on a sound legal and scientific framework. Animals and Landscapes: Magic, Ritual, and Superstition

Sometimes, when muzzle-loaders and steel leghold traps fail to keep wild boar out of the rice crop, it takes a thin strip of bamboo paper with some characters scrawled on it to do the job. The Daoist tradition of writing charms ( fu) to ward off evil or to bring good fortune is used by at least one man in Meihuashan, a village chief, to protect his community from boar depredation. The village chief, a master hunter who may have shot as many boar as he has warded off with charms, places the fu in the four corners of the village, and, he says, there are no boar problems. The same man writes fu to be ground up and drunk in medicine and for several other purposes. According to local people, it is the writing— the symbolic force of sacred script— that holds talismanic power over animals and spirits. The connection between animals, gods, ghosts, and sacred writing is also embodied in fire-walking ceremonies. These village rites of purification are performed in Longgui, Xiache, and a few other communities in the southern and eastern parts of the Meihuashan Nature Reserve. In

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a given village, the fire-crossing is held at irregular intervals, once every five to ten years, when village gods inform the people that the community is in danger and a purification ceremony is needed. For example, speaking through a medium at a wenshen (ask-the-spirits) seance held in March 1995 in Longgui, a heavenly god called Wuguzhengxin told the people to hold a fire-walk in April. The god warned that many calamities (zainan) would strike the village in the spring and summer, and people would need protection from ghosts. The people were also warned to stay out of the woods for several days, because snakes would be especially numerous. At a later spirit session, the gods revealed that the threat to Longgui village would not be as severe as they thought, and the firecrossing ritual would not be needed. The villagers decided to go ahead and hold the ceremony anyway. In preparation for the ritual, villagers followed a strict vegetarian diet for three days. On the day of the ritual, they bathed and assembled at a small building that served as a schoolhouse and assembly hall. Two shamans led the ceremony, going in and out of trance from sunrise to sunset, dancing, chanting, waving swords, writing characters, and sanctifying—with liberal libations of rice wine —the blazing pyre that had been constructed in front of the building. The two men repeatedly asked for Wuguzhengxin’s blessings and tossed crescent-shaped divining blocks to the ground, waiting for a response. In Chinese Buddhist temples, only when one block faces up and the other faces down is the god’s response positive. The striking difference this time was that the crescents were made not of wood but from serow horns cut lengthwise and suspended from a long, red string. Both shamans tossed the horn-crescents many times during the ritual, picking them up with a jerk of the string only to cast them out yet again. When asked why the blocks were made from serow horns, they answered that it had always been done that way throughout the Minxi region. The serow, whose horns are used for the divining crescents, is the largest and most majestic ungulate of the rocky montane grasslands and cliffs. People of the Southeast Uplands have long marveled at the animal’s agility in steep terrain, and they attribute its sure-footedness to a sticky substance secreted from its hooves. The serow has always thrived in the annually burned montane meadows, and therefore is closely associated with the mountain spirit (shanshen) or “mountain genie” (Caldwell 1924).13 With these connections, the importance of serow horns in communicating with local gods is no surprise.

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The religious significance of the serow is expressed in two other ways. First, when a serow wanders into a village, town, or city and is caught, rather than killing and butchering the valuable animal, people tie a red ribbon around its neck and return it to the mountains for good luck. This is seen as a great blessing, occurring more frequently than one might expect, and often drawing newspaper coverage. Second, while hunters sometimes offer incense and trophies of the hunt to village gods at temples and earth-god shrines, the trophies are mainly limited to birds and boar heads. Serow (and some say muntjac) cannot be offered. Though there was some confusion over why the rule persisted, some people thought it had to do with the fact that serow were related to cows (they are in fact members of the Bovidae) and that an ancient taboo existed against offering cows and other grazing animals to the gods. Reptiles and amphibians seem to hold a particularly prominent place in local animal lore; this is especially true of snakes. Snakes are alternately venerated and despised in nearly every culture around the world, and the same is true in China; a treatise on the significance of snakes in Chinese culture could fill volumes. For this reason, the following comments are limited to a few of the beliefs encountered in Meihuashan. In general, snakes are feared by the villagers, and are killed on sight. At least ten species of poisonous snakes inhabit the area (including cobras and king cobras), as well as a subspecies of the Indian python (Python molurus binittatus), which can grow to 6–7 meters (20–23 ft.) long. Snakes are feared not only because they turn up in all kinds of places in and around the villages, including inside houses and even in beds, but also because they are believed to hold grudges. Snakebites are scrutinized, for they provide an indication of the degree of revenge intended by the serpent. If one fang mark is present, it means a mistake on the part of the snake, which can be attributed to bad luck. The presence of two fang marks means that the snake intended to bite a person but it was a case of mistaken identity. Three fang punctures mean that the snake was seeking revenge against a person (probably for killing one of its relatives), and a four-hole bite shows that the snake intended to kill the person. A bite from a protective “mudsnake” (nishe), a species said to live near streams, means a person need never fear snakebite again, for he or she will never be bitten by any kind of snake thereafter. An animal that superficially resembles a snake but has different magical powers attributed to it is the earthworm, particularly a very large

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species or subspecies (up to 40 cm, or 16 in., long). Local men will not step over one of these worms, preferring to walk around it because they say the worm can spray an invisible liquid. If the liquid hits a man in the crotch, it will make his scrotum swell to the point that walking is difficult or impossible. While the obvious phallic association with these worms needs no further explication, the source of the belief may be slightly more complex. Swelling of the scrotum may have been observed over generations in males suffering from filariasis (elephantiasis), and the cause of the disease may have been attributed to the earthworm. 14 An equally fanciful set of ideas surrounds the shanshen, or mountain spirit. According to frog hunters, this apparition sometimes makes its presence known at night by leaving large, wet, humanoid footprints on rocks in streams where hunters seek their quarry. Though the spirit will not harm humans, it will help the frogs escape, making further hunting futile. Frog hunters use sharp, rice-cutting knives to clean their catch. When footprints are found, the men rap on each track ten or more times, to scare off the shanshen and allow the hunt to continue. Certain reptiles and amphibians may be regarded with awe and dread because they can live in water, underground, aboveground, or in all these realms. Many hunters even refrain from shooting land mammals if they enter water; according to tradition, muntjac and other ungulates should not be shot while in the water or just after emerging from water. Conversely, turtles and other aquatic animals should not be taken when found on land. Animals that appear to have an ambiguous or protean relationship to aquatic, subterranean, or terrestrial habitats are especially dreaded, and this may explain the long-standing blend of fascination and trepidation surrounding the pangolin. The pangolin, with its armor of thick scales (which are actually relict hairs), neatly excavated tunnel-home, and ability to eat ants and curl up in a ball when disturbed defies categorization; its very existence lies at the heart of ambiguity and mystery. Because of its scaliness, locals think of it as a type of “mountain fish” (shanyu). In fact, some of the common names for the pangolin reflect its ethnotaxonomic location among the fishes. 15 People avoid live pangolins because of their strange and powerful magic, for a careless encounter with the lianli could cause illness, injury, loss of money, or any number of other misfortunes. People believe a pangolin can safely be eaten if someone else catches it and cleans it, but no

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one dares to catch or kill a pangolin without first chanting an incantation, a verbal aegis against any evil the little anteater may conceal beneath its plated shield. A brief examination of the structure and contents of the pangolin chant reveals some important facets of the relationship between people and wildlife in the Southeast Uplands. Different versions of the chant are used in different villages, even within a relatively small area, such as Meihuashan. Undoubtedly, numerous variations are used in other subregions of the Southeast Uplands as well. The chants translated below were collected in a few Hakka villages of Meihuashan and Longxishan. Three functional features appear to be universal in these chants: first, establishing an affinal relationship—the pangolin is a neighbor who is addressed more or less respectfully; second, asserting dominance by the human addressing the pangolin; and third, explaining how the human is going to benefit by catching or killing the pangolin. The invocation may be humorous (perhaps more so to outsiders than to locals) or even taunting, but its intent is serious. The pangolin is not to be dallied with or taken lightly, and a formal explanation or challenge is the best way to escape revenge. Whereas the tiger may disappear when government is good and society is at peace, the pangolin is rooted in its home place —the dilong (earth dragon) is a master of the mountain. The pangolin chants below (and the second epigraph at the beginning of chap. 1) are spoken by pangolin hunters before the kill to guard against bad luck. The first two lines of the chants begin by addressing the pangolin (“You are a pangolin—lianli”) and establishing a relationship with it (“I am a lilian”). Though the inverted word “lilian” has no meaning in itself, it identifies the person as an equal (if opposite) of the pangolin. One hunter stated that it is much more generous than that: “It means we are ‘tongnian’ [literally, born in the ‘same year’],” or peers. The second couplet may continue to describe the parallel but separate workaday worlds of the pangolin and the peasant (“You work the mountains, I work the fields”). The final couplet attempts to seal the pangolin’s fate, coercing it to submit and explaining how this will benefit the human in wealth or longevity. Pangolin hunters in Gonghe village (Meihuashan) use the following incantation: Ni lianli Wo lilian

You’re a pangolin I’m a lilian

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Pao shang ye shi ni si Pao xia ye shi ni si.

If you run up, it is you who will die If you run down, it is also you who will die.

The next pangolin chant is used in Shipaichang village (Longxishan): Ni lianli Wo lilian Ni jiu yan qian Wo jiu qian nian.

You’re a pangolin I’m a lilian You’re right here before my eyes So I will live a thousand years.

Another pangolin chant from Shipaichang mentions soy sauce and salt (you yan), two of the traditional four (with firewood and rice) basic necessities: Ni lianli Wo lilian Ni jiu yan qian Na ni huan you yan

You’re a pangolin I’m a lilian You’re right here before my eyes So I’ll grab you and trade you for soy sauce and salt.

Failure to respect the pangolin can lead to death. A Gonghe villager described the fate of his neighbor who caught and ate a pangolin but somehow failed to placate its spirit. A month afterward, the man’s hair fell out, and after another month he died. This fatality may have had nothing to do with the pangolin, but it reaffirmed ancient patterns of belief. Indeed, few people in industrial and postindustrial societies of the late twentieth century sing or talk to wild animals. Mao Zedong and other architects of socialist China did not have this type of behavior in mind when they envisioned a “modernized China.” In the past fifty years, the bulk of Communist Party propaganda has promoted science and industry, and debunked the supernatural. My discussions with hunters in Meihuashan indicated that although wild animals have been trapped, hunted, denounced as enemies, butchered, and sold in markets and pharmacies at home and abroad, they have yet to be demythologized. The relationship between rural people and wildlife in the Southeast Uplands is distinctive in several ways. First, a good deal of the age-old lore concerning the magico-religious characteristics of wild animals has survived the ideological pressures and influences that have swept through China in the past half-century. Second, the region is a source area for the Chinese medicinal market. The importance of wild animals in Chinese

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medicine appears undiminished at the turn of the millennium, and the market demand for wildlife appears to be growing. Many Westerners regard the Chinese penchant for wildlife consumption as an unthinking type of gluttony, but more accurately, it is part of a complex cultural tradition. In China, wild plants and animals are fundamental components of an ancient, canonical, ethnomedical system (and myriad local traditions), which has no analogue in the West. In China, even many urban people consume wild fauna and flora as food and medicine, and the degree of interdependence between people and natural resources is becoming increasingly clear; as many species become rarer and more expensive, the demand for their body parts continues to grow. Though there may be little remorse in China for the passing of rare species, there is a high degree of psychological and cultural dependence on the tonic effect that these species are believed to contain. Whether this can be transformed into constructive conservation action remains to be seen. 16 As people accumulate more disposable income, they will either have to change their tastes or seek alternative sources of animal products, in the form of substitutes or pen-raised animals. Nature reserves, such as Meihuashan, will be very important both for outsiders, who come to visit, and for residents, who engage in an ongoing and changing encounter with wildlife on a daily basis. Still, the relationship between residents and reserve managers has often been discordant, and this has a direct bearing on wildlife and habitat management. Villagers must become more deeply enfranchised in all aspects of research, management, and economic development in reserves and other rural areas of the Southeast Uplands and beyond.

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Vital Connections Linking Nature Conservation and Cultural Ecology in Southeast China and Beyond

When the Tao is present in the world, The horses haul manure. When the Tao is absent from the world, War horses are bred outside the city. — Laozi, the Daodejing

The most effective way to resolve resource management problems in inhabited protected areas is to ensure as much input and involvement by local residents as is politically possible. Stevens (1997) divides indigenous involvement into three levels: consultation, co-management, and indigenous management. While consultation with local inhabitants is seen as the most basic foundation for successful management, co-management, or even full management by local people (indigenous management), provides a much more comprehensive framework for sustainable conservation. A new approach (or perhaps a new paradigm), known as “community-based conservation,” is beginning to take root in international conservation circles, and the “Yellowstone Model” of uninhabited protected areas is undergoing intensive reevaluation.1 Even the most democratic, pluralistic societies, however, often have substantial legal, institutional, and cultural barriers to local involvement in protected-area administration. In authoritarian political systems, as in China today, these barriers may at first glance appear to be even more severe. But rural land tenure conditions in China are unique, and local involvement in protected-area management is, ironically, much more promising in many ways than it is in the United States and many other democratic capitalist countries. Though many of the civil rights that Westerners hold as “inalienable” are not yet part of the Chinese legal code, the land tenure systems developed for rural collectives over the past half-century and

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modified in the past fifteen years provide a strong foundation for protected-area co-management. In rural southern China, communes and collectives have kept agricultural and forest lands in the hands of administrative and natural villages, and the Household Responsibility System has returned a growing portion of these lands to household management since the early 1980s. Unlike land tenure conditions in developing countries undergoing economic growth in a more classic capitalist mode (and in some socialist countries as well), relatively few villages in southern China have had their common forest lands and common property resources entirely requisitioned by the central government or (as often occurs subsequently in neoliberal capitalist systems) by agribusinesses, land speculators, miners, grazers, or other entrepreneurs who lease the “government lands.” For this reason, the context of resource management conflicts in protected areas of southern China is very different, and as to community land tenure stability, more positive, than in many other countries. Collective land tenure may prove especially promising for developing community-based conservation over large areas outside existing reserves, to meet the habitat needs of large carnivores. On the negative side, the hundreds of recently created inhabited nature reserves in China typically are run by forestry bureaus and the environmental protection agencies in the Confucian and Chinese Communist traditions of top-down administration. Beyond basic issues of village subsistence and land tenure, which fall within the legal purview of the responsibility system, little or no consultation with local people transpires on nature conservation and other reserve management policies and practices. In this political context, co-management may prove to be a long, uphill struggle, and indigenous management, in most cases, will continue to be more difficult to achieve. Equally troubling is the lack of coordination between reserves and the national government needed to protect reserves from regional and local bureaucrats, who too often view protected areas as potential tourism or natural resource extraction areas. Bureaucratic control by manipulative low-level agencies is unlikely to serve the long-term interests either of conservation or local people. Perhaps the greatest hope for community-based conservation will come from within village-level democracy, which has begun to develop since the national implementation of village elections in the early 1990s. 2 Direct political representation of villagers’ interests, combined with greater local participation in reserve policy-making and day-to-day management, may lead to a more truly “community-based” conservation

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system. Chinese villages have endured nearly a half-century of top-down governance with little organizational pluralism, but two decades of growing economic and social mobility may portend an opening of social space, which some political analysts believe will lead to the development of a civil society. Without a well-developed NGO network in China, there is hope that village governments will continue to develop as autonomous social and political organizations, with the power to fulfill their own welfare functions in coordination with other state organs. Village communities located in and around nature reserves will face an especially complex array of challenges in the coming decades, as collective lands are affected by regional, national, and international land use and conservation schemes, one of the most salient examples of which is the tiger reintroduction program now under way in Meihuashan. Though village-led conservation initiatives have not been a prominent feature in rural China to date, conservation programs integrated with local needs and interests have already proved to be the most, if not the only, effective methods for protecting nature. Conditions in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve today show that local people desire greater participation in reserve policy-making and management practice, especially as it pertains to their own interests. Still, all the reserve’s administrators and the vast majority of the workers are nonlocal people (though most are Hakkas from Longyan Prefecture) assigned to the Fujian Forestry Bureau after graduating from regional forestry technical institutes. In 1994, the only villagers on reserve payrolls were elected or appointed village forestry representatives ( linyeyuan) and the cooks and occasional laborers who worked at the two main management stations in Xiache and Chendi, and in the reserve headquarters in Gutian.3 In 1996, Ma Shengxue, a Gonghe man who worked closely with me on several research projects in 1994 and 1995, was hired to monitor village resource management practices in the southern part of the reserve. By 2001, two additional Guihe villagers had been hired to do fire watches for seven months of the year, from September to April. Despite these limited signs of progress, a growing number of people must seek employment in cities and towns outside the reserve while continuing to live within it. Labor out-migration has become advantageous, but permanent out-migration is not a desirable option. Along with greater labor mobility, however, there has also been an increase in educational mobility, with a remarkable increase in the number of young people who attend college. Although exact figures are not available, students from many of

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the reserve villages had matriculated at well-known universities all over China by 2001. This development bodes well for greater co-management, and any graduates who may return to Meihuashan to work in the reserve are likely to become the best liaisons between local people and government agencies at all levels. An increased degree of consultation and co-management could bring tremendous benefits to the reserve’s social, economic, and physical environments. The most pertinent conservation challenge in Meihuashan today is to enable villagers to develop the local economy in ways that benefit wildlife and habitat conservation. If more villagers in Meihuashan can begin to view nature conservation as being in their own best interest, there will be less poaching, less deforestation, and more harmony between the reserve administration and local people. With these goals in mind, the following is a discussion of the prospects for greater consultation and eventual co-management—the groundwork for participation by local people as administrators, managers, and researchers. Similar frameworks could be applied to inhabited nature reserves throughout China. Prospects for Implementing Co-Management in the Meihuashan Nature Reserve

Recognition of shared interests and a sense of mutualism lie at the heart of community-based conservation. In this regard, reserve directors and other high-level administrators would be well advised to conduct annual meetings in each reserve village to discuss socioeconomic and resource management issues. This would provide a regular forum in which villagers and directors could voice expectations, resolve conflicts, and engage in a continuous planning process. Many villagers complain that reserve directors have never even visited their villagers. This situation has led to local antipathy toward the reserve as a whole. While consulting with villagers on a regular basis, reserve administrators also need to assume more responsibility for improving socioeconomic conditions in the villages. As social service advocates, reserve managers could work alongside trained staff from government agencies in the two counties and one municipality to improve education, health care, telecommunications, transportation, and poverty-relief programs in the villages. In 1994–1995, residents in several villages asked that I make a special request to the reserve administration on their behalf to have more funding for basic infrastructure and social services. Many villages have been severely

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affected by the decline in state social services and infrastructural support since the initiation of economic reforms in the early 1980s. Today, transportation problems have been largely resolved, but good health care, electricity, and decent elementary education are still lacking. Between 1997 and 2001, the reserve administration contributed an increased share of bamboo tax revenues to road improvements, and relations between the reserve and the villagers improved. Still, reserve staff complain about a lack of political power and financial resources to administer social services to an area encompassing two counties and one municipality, with seven townships, nineteen administrative villages, and twenty-five natural village communities. Governmental administration of the area is divided among numerous county and municipal agencies and the nature reserve itself, resulting in uncoordinated and sometimes conflicting policies and procedures. In the mid-1990s, some reserve staff considered the Longxishan Nature Reserve a much more soundly managed protected area because it was a discrete administrative unit, where all government functions and services were united under one roof. This type of political unit conceivably might be more appropriate for Meihuashan and other reserves, and such structural changes probably could make local participation more tenable. By 2001, however, the Meihuashan Reserve’s administrative status within the State Forestry Administration was raised from an administrative office (guanlichu) to an administrative bureau (guanliju). With more political power and better funding, the reserve purportedly was becoming more effective at fulfilling its mandate to promote village economic development. Whether a community focus can be strengthened as the reserve management embarks on a highly ambitious South China tiger recovery project remains to be seen. In a fully developed co-management system, village committees could assume full responsibility for much of the forest and wildlife resource management work, including the planning, monitoring, and patrolling of timber, bamboo, and wildlife utilization practices. The linyeyuan could lead village forest resource committees in these activities, in coordination with goals set at annual meetings with reserve directors. 4 Village wildlife management and patrol committees could work within these groups or separately. To improve village self-sufficiency and raise household incomes, administrators could pursue an economic development program that subsidizes value-enhancing, nonpolluting bamboo processing, and connects village production to external market networks.

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Bamboo Forest Allocation and Management

Mao bamboo cultivation represents both the greatest near-term economic hope and the greatest long-term threat to wildlife habitat in the reserve, making it an issue of central importance. Broadleaf forest conversion and bamboo land tenure are common problems throughout southern China. 5 In 1991, bamboo forests (including those not cleared of underbrush and adjacent trees) covered 20.3 percent (4,510 ha) of the total land area of the reserve, and understory clearance has been occurring at an unprecedented rate. By 1998, the estimated area had increased to 25 percent. The most immediate sustainable forestry problems in Meihuashan, therefore, surround household bamboo management practices and the question of equity in the system of village allotment of household bamboo plots. Without equitable land tenure patterns and more or less equal opportunities for economic profit, it is less likely that bamboo forests can be well managed, and the conversion of ecologically valuable forest types to pure stands of bamboo may continue to accelerate. Households have been allotted a certain amount of what was once collective bamboo forest land to manage their own plots. Allotments were made in the early 1980s on the basis of family size, old family land deeds from the era before collectivization, or both. As discussed in chapter 7, a few villages agreed to redistribute land at given intervals (of between five and twenty years) as family populations changed, but many villages made no such agreements. In the mid-1990s, after nearly fifteen years of household management, there were already complaints that some families have amassed a disproportionately large area of bamboo forest by expanding into former collective forests, while others have relatively little. Though no appropriate standard amount of bamboo forest per capita has been determined, household data show land tenure disparities between households. These disparities may reflect unfairness in the allocation of plots, but they also reflect different rates of bamboo forest expansion (resulting from differences in management practices between families) and different rates of household population growth. Disparities in per capita bamboo holdings affect income levels, although there are important intervening variables, such as family size (including the number of adult laborers and young and elderly dependents) and degree of household economic diversification. Some families have been successful cultivators and entrepreneurs, while others have sunk into poverty. Poor families (those with annual per capita incomes of between 200 and 999 yuan, or $25 and $125), are under pressure to

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harvest bamboo several times a year; bamboo is used like a bank account, with withdrawals made whenever cash is needed. With few or no other major sources of income, these families are under the greatest pressure to expand the area of their present bamboo groves by encouraging lateral displacement of adjacent forest stands. Wealthy families often can let bamboo grow for a long time, allowing it to become large (increasing its economic value) and to form dense groves. Those whose entrepreneurialism is focused on bamboo exports have, in most instances, already expanded their original plots and continue to do so. This expansion often causes the loss of broadleaf and mixed forests, constituting a serious threat to the ecological integrity of the Meihuashan Reserve. The economic reforms of the early 1980s unleashed productive labor forces that, for the most part, had lain dormant under communal ownership and collective management schemes. Families gained a new stock in bamboo forests as private managers and most responded by working hard to maximize production and profit. Even under present conditions of growing inequity, it is unlikely that villagers would ever choose to revive a collective system of bamboo management, and enacting such a plan without local support would be draconian. Given the potential ecological damage of “bamboo desertification” and the inequities of household bamboo land tenure patterns, however, the most prudent approach may be to encourage village communities to consider a full range of land tenure management options and to provide alternatives for households that suffer disenfranchisement. It is critical, however, that such changes do not adversely affect village and familial bamboo management strategies and that they are fully supported by a majority of villagers. Once the area and location of bamboo growth zones is established, it would be useful to address the problem of inequitable land tenure conditions. In villages such as Longgui, Gonghe, and Taipingliao, where household allotments of bamboo forest were based on family size, and redistribution meetings are held every five, ten, or twenty years, there may be no need for adjustment; the villages have created what are arguably the fairest land tenure arrangements possible. In Majiaping, Guizhuping, and many other villages in the reserve, the situation is less equitable. Not only did many of the villages divide bamboo forests on the basis of outdated land deeds, but they have no plans to hold redistribution meetings. Certain families are becoming wealthier (and sometimes more powerful), and those who hold the most land may be entrenched and unyielding on the issue of land reform. Because this situation is likely to

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intensify and create greater competition and pressure on unconverted forests, it would be in the best interest of local people and local ecosystems to standardize and regulate village land tenure systems: all villages would adopt the policy of holding regular meetings to redistribute household bamboo allotments. This could be successful only if villages adopted the policy willingly,and possibly some villages or powerful villagers would not support such a policy. For this reason, a referendum in each village would be the most feasible way to address the issue, and reserve administrators could facilitate in this process. Adding Value: Bamboo Products and Marketing

Reserve administrators could be important in bamboo forest tenure reform by paying large landholders for land losses incurred through redistribution and encouraging them to invest in nonpolluting collective cottage industries, which would add value to bamboo by creating finished products. By the mid-1990s, administrators and villagers had already discussed this possibility. In the fall of 1994, administrative village leaders accompanied reserve directors on a tour of the Wuyishan Nature Reserve, and there was some consensus that village bamboo industries provided an economic model that should be emulated in Meihuashan. Families that establish these micro-industries and employ other villagers could win increased subsidies for lost land. In 1995, the most critical barrier to village- and household-based industry was lack of a secure market network. By 2001, however, entrepreneurs in Buyun had begun to develop trade connections, and three large bamboo-processing factories for the production of bamboo sleeping mats had been established in Shangfu (seat of the Buyun township government, just south of the reserve). Several villages in the southern part of the reserve were selling poles directly to these factories, and more significantly, each of the twenty-five reserve villages had developed at least one to three household bamboo-processing workshops. This turn of events may mark the revival of a stable village bamboo industry and a greater degree of nearterm economic security for the people of Meihuashan. New Policies for Containing the Bamboo Desert

A direct and immediate measure to prevent the continued spread of bamboo into broadleaf and mixed forest habitats would be to clearly demarcate boundaries around acceptable bamboo cultivation zones in the reserve and to implement a system for internal regulation of these zones

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by villagers themselves. With the per capita area of bamboo forests varying between villages, the areal extent of bamboo zones could be limited to a standard maximum per capita area for each village according to population size. Given the paucity of adequate data on per capita bamboo land tenure, a recommended standard would be premature at this time.6 The important point is that the plan would limit bamboo expansion to an agreed-upon areal maximum and within zones determined to be least detrimental to surrounding ecosystems. Once the outer boundaries of these zones were demarcated, with stakes or other immobile markers, villagers could be subsidized by the reserve to increase the density of culms within their plots. The productivity of the labor force would not be diminished—it would simply be concentrated on a set area with an increasing density of bamboo culms. Before 1995, laws prohibited the cutting of broadleaf trees, but they were not strictly enforced, and there were no laws against ringing trees to make them die later on. According to a forest manager in Meihuashan, leaders of the Provincial Forestry Bureau had been unaware of the problem, and it had not been discussed as a policy issue. A director of the Fujian Forestry Bureau, however, stated that the spread of pure bamboo forests (in which most other vegetation has been cleared) was a problem that would be dealt with very seriously. In 1995, reserve administrators adopted several measures to protect broadleaf forests. The first was to issue a decree protecting broadleaf trees in and around bamboo forests. This regulation prohibited tree cutting and tree ringing, and stated that expansion of bamboo forests into adjacent forests was illegal unless approved by reserve officials and the county forestry committee. Proposed expansion sites were to be inspected by reserve officials before permits would be issued. According to this rule, bamboo forest expansion without a permit was legal only if adjacent areas consisted of grassland or other “wasteland” ( huangdi) (defined as “nonforested” land) under collective ownership. This policy may prove effective in conjunction with the demarcation by reserve foresters of thirty-two critical broadleaf forest zones designated as “protected subareas” ( baohuxiaoqu). Twenty-six of these strictly protected areas, most of which fall within collective lands, lie within the buffer zone, and six are at the borders of the core area. All the subareas, ranging from a few hectares to about 65 hectares (160 acres), are off limits to any form of commercial exploitation. By 1999, village chiefs had signed contracts stating that they would help the reserve enforce the rules regarding these new protected areas. Local sup-

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port for the miniprotected areas could be a very effective complement to the proposed bamboo containment strategy. These bamboo management policies may prove to be very effective models for sustainable forest management in bamboo-producing areas throughout southern and central China. Extractive Activities and Grazing on Collective and Government Lands

When asked to name the most serious management problem in Meihuashan in 2001, a top reserve official replied promptly that it was the failure of the government to pay a promised 10 yuan ($1.25) per mu subsidy to villagers for restrictions on forestry production on collective lands in the buffer zone. But villagers still use collective land for sideline economic activities, and these activities have required careful monitoring. In areas that have not been allotted for household agriculture or bamboo cultivation, or preserved as village sacred forests or small protected areas, villagers may raise cattle and goats and gather wild medicinal and food plants. A few outside specialists pay fees to set up small camps on village lands to extract pine roots to produce tar. Regulation of economic activities in the buffer zone is the responsibility primarily of village leaders, but when land tenure conflicts or legal violations occur, reserve managers often intervene. Pitch production should be strictly managed, and damage to the forest should be assessed on a regular basis. In the late 1990s, pine resin collecting, which had been an important source of income for some families, was banned because of the extensive damage already caused to pines throughout the reserve. Although a broad spectrum of relatively low-impact economic activities continue on government and collective lands, these lands still encompass a wide variety of plant and animal habitats, which account for most of the reserve’s biological diversity. On government lands, most of which are in the core area, no economic activity is legally permitted, but cattle grazing and illegal plant and timber harvesting continue. Grazing by yellow cattle and goats may be destructive to understory vegetation and should be carefully monitored. Cattle may be especially destructive to the montane wetlands, where their hooves compact the mud and trample wetland plants. Though there were only a few small herds of cattle, with less than fifteen cattle per herd in the reserve in the mid-1990s, wetlands should be grazed at levels sustainable for bog ecosystems. Similarly, though only two or three small herds of goats were in the reserve

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in the mid-1990s, goats are a recent addition to the ecosystem, and they may cause even greater damage than cattle. For this reason, household goat raising should be monitored carefully until its ecological effects are better understood. Ecosystem Restoration

A top priority for wildlife conservation in China should be to ensure that a high degree of habitat heterogeneity is maintained. In the mountains of southern and central China, this would include ample tracts of broadleaf and mixed forests, montane wetlands, and montane grasslands. The vast stands of stunted pines that have replaced open grasslands since the prohibition of burning have very little value as wildlife or plant habitat. They help prevent erosion, but wind, cold weather, and thin soils impede their developing into forests of significant stature and biodiversity. Their very density makes them impenetrable to many species of mammals, and they hinder access to montane wetland and grassland habitats. To promote the development of high-quality habitat— more representative of lessdisturbed subtropical montane ecosystems—high-elevation pine forests should largely be replaced by broadleaf and mixed forests, with many small patches and some large tracts of open scrub-grasslands at elevations above 1,500 meters (5,000 ft.). This long-term habitat restoration could be accomplished with village labor hired by the reserve to work under the direction of village forest resource management committees. The program would be a sound investment by the nature reserve, providing jobs and small timber for local people, and giving them a greater role in land management and nature conservation. In 1995, reserve managers had already begun to conduct a small-scale tree propagation project at the reserve headquarters (outside the reserve boundaries), at an elevation of about 700 meters (2,300 ft.), and by 2001, they had begun planning a reforestation project in the captive tiger breeding area, at elevations between 1,200 and 1,400 meters (4,000 and 4,600 ft.). These are good pilot projects for similar reforestation projects at low and middle elevations, but ecosystem reconstruction on the more severely degraded granitic soils of the higher elevations may require soil enhancement in an agroforestry regime using rapid revegetation techniques. These methods have proved successful in degraded landscapes in other parts of southern China, and would be suitable in Meihuashan at elevations up to 1,500–1,600 meters (5,000–5,250 ft.), and in ravines and other sheltered areas at high elevations. The first step is to plant native

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trees and leguminous cover crops (mostly vines and shrubs) to fix nitrogen and retain soil moisture. 7 Deep-rooted plants can be grown with shallow-rooted plants, and fast-growing leguminous trees can be grown with other fast-growing tree species to establish a forest cover within a few years. After some degree of forest canopy cover has been established, the seedlings of slow-growing trees, which form the most important components of indigenous forest ecosystems, can be planted (and tended when necessary). Once these members of the beech family (especially Castanopsis and Cyclobalanopsis), the laurel family, magnolias, and Camelliaceae (tea family) have become established, the return of broadleaf forests would be relatively rapid, requiring only a few decades. In exposed areas with thin soils above 1,500–1,600 meters (5,000– 5,250 ft.), and in wetland areas at all elevations, dense pine stands that impede grazing and ungulate movement should be cleared by regular cutting and burning. The opening of montane meadowlands and connective pathways would be tremendously beneficial to ungulates and the large carnivores that prey on them. Periodic burning of these meadows would increase soil nutrients and promote the growth of tender herbaceous forage (as in the young Cunninghamia stand discussed in chap. 8). Though controlled burning has not been practiced in Fujian (at least not under the guise of scientific forestry), there is ample precedent (despite controversy) for this forestry practice in the United States. Local forest management committees could oversee the conservation of these anthropogenic meadows, and less ecologically sensitive low-elevation grasslands could be grazed by village cattle. This would relieve pressure on the wetland grazing areas, unique alpine headwater zones that are critically important foraging and watering areas for wildlife, especially during the dry season. Until they are better understood, cattle grazing should be kept within acceptable levels. Enlisting Local Support to Control Illegal Timber Harvests

Another critical role of the forest management committees would be to control illegal timber harvests in the reserve. In the mid-1990s, numerous incidents of illegal timber extraction occurred, even in the core area of the reserve. If village committees had a vested interest in conservation, such as permanent full-time or stable part-time or seasonal employment with the nature reserve, they could become much more effective forest monitors than the forest police who are currently employed.8 In general,

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reserve staff members have shown very little interest in enduring the difficulties of entering the mountains on foot to make the necessary inspections that sound management would entail. Villagers, on the other hand, are accustomed to hiking deep into the mountains and will gladly do so, especially if there are wages to be earned for their efforts. While shifting more responsibility for forest management to village forestry committees, the reserve could also allow selective tree felling by villages. Large-scale commercial timber operations are inappropriate, but the felling of trees for village construction materials should be permissible, especially under a permit system. At another level, reserve administrators must guard against corrupt forestry practices, such as the payment of bribes to villagers and forestry officials in exchange for permission to cut Cryptomeria trees in village sacred forests. If the nature reserve’s position on such matters were unequivocal and backed by legal action, village forest committees could be the most effective watchdogs. The enhanced security and enforcement powers of the new Meihuashan Nature Reserve Administrative Bureau (established in 2001) have already led to more effective forest resource protection in the reserve. Promoting Sustainable Agriculture

As with bamboo land tenure conditions, there should be long-term monitoring of agricultural land tenure patterns in the reserve villages. Cropland tenure disparities, however, while already apparent, do not appear to be an urgent issue because households are not in competition to maximize grain production. In fact, with rice grown mainly to meet familial subsistence needs rather than government quotas or market demands, rice paddy land may continue to decrease as families require less grain for self-sufficiency. In an increasingly commercial and cash-oriented economy, rice production is not profitable for Meihuashan villagers. Only if the cultivation of other agricultural products becomes highly lucrative for Meihuashan villagers will competition for cropland intensify, and this was just beginning to occur in several villages at the end of the 1990s. At present, the most important goal is to restore a system of sustainable agriculture, but one that is more intensive than the traditional, preindustrial methods. The land-extensive organic rice and horticulture of the premodern period had few harmful effects on the environment (aside from the conversion of biologically diverse ecosystems into agro-eco-

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systems), but farmers cannot return to a low-production, labor-intensive approach, nor do they desire to do so. Instead, there should be small-scale, high-yielding organic agriculture, low in chemical pesticides, rodenticides, and synthetic fertilizers and high in green manures and traditional household wastes. Cai and Yao (1991), writing on natural resource utilization in Meihuashan and the need to protect nonagricultural lands from reclamation as the reserve population expands, have suggested that local farmers should increase productivity within small areas by implementing thorough agricultural reform. Arguing that land quality and crop productivity could be substantially improved, they call for the construction of a better irrigation network, the practice of winter plowing and soil aeration, an increase in the use of fertilizers—especially organic household and livestock wastes—and the selection of crop varieties more suited to local conditions. Some families have already begun to grow modified varieties of red rice, which locals have a food preference for and which is more productive (per unit area) than traditional tall varieties. If these cultivars are not already resistant to pests, continued experimentation may yield varieties that are. With small, short-term subsidies, nature reserves in China will have the opportunity to become models for sustainable agriculture, with the objective of more than simply minimizing environmental degradation— of enhancing landscape ecology and cultural diversity. Administrators and local people should work together to improve subsistence and commercial agriculture. Some specific goals might include propagating more pest-resistant heirloom crops; practicing integrated pest management; promoting organic fertilization; increasing subsidiary agricultural production and household incomes by improving vegetable market gardening and fruit orchard management; and selling produce in the growing urban specialty markets. 9 To their credit, Meihuashan Reserve directors have already allowed villagers to develop small-scale commercial agriculture. In the early 1990s, Mawu villagers established 100 mu of tea and 170 mu of fruit orchards, with plans to expand both of these activities to 500 mu each. Beekeeping is practiced in some villages, and the reserve agreed to subsidize the expansion of apiaries in Mawu, Guizhuping, and Dapingshan. In Gonghe, Guizhuping, and several other villages, shiitake mushroom sheds sprang up in the late 1990s, and commercial cabbage production also became an important source of household income. Though shiitake

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production was not economically or environmentally sustainable, relying as it does on hardwood sawdust, villagers in 2001 began to switch production to common store mushrooms, which require only rice straw and other green manures. These patterns of change show that local commerce still bears a resemblance to the mountain economies developed by Hakkas and shed people in centuries past; it is based on flexible patterns of adjustment to the demands and price fluctuations of urban coastal and international markets. But while village and household economies could until recently be characterized as subsistence-oriented commercialization without the accumulation and investment of capital, today they are rapidly developing connections with the larger regional and international trade system. This speaks well for indigenous patterns of adjustment to political economic changes in the core, but the growth of regional and international capitalism, with its mega-scale conglomerates, can place household and village-based private enterprise at risk. The success of commercial bamboo processing and agriculture in Meihuashan may hinge on developing the kind of cooperative marketing system based on coordination between households, villages, and reserve managers that has been successful in Wuyishan. Reserve administrators must be receptive to local peoples’ ideas on development and reserve management, and local people must be part of a partnership for conservation rather than being reduced to a modern form of sharecropping. Recruiting Local People as Wildlife Managers

Hunting and wildlife management are activities with which local people have long historical experience. Local knowledge of wildlife and habitat is one of the most important assets for nature conservation in such protected areas as Meihuashan, and with good planning, local people can become the most active wildlife managers and researchers, and the most successful entrepreneurs. Village wildlife management could be integrated with the proposed system of forest resource management committees. In a proposal submitted to the Meihuashan administration, which I co-wrote with a local villager, we suggested seven steps to implement indigenous co-management of wildlife resources. These included establishing a wildlife management and research committee, with elected representatives from each of the twenty-five natural villages, who would receive training in wildlife management techniques from NGOs and

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governmental organizations and become eligible for reserve employment; 10 initiating wildlife research and management projects, including village wildlife surveys; developing observation posts and incorporating the use of blinds, cameras, camera traps, video, and radio telemetry; and monitoring legal and illegal hunting, trapping, and fishing activities and incidents in each village. Research results can be used in a longitudinal study of wildlife population and habitat utilization patterns. Data could contribute to a GIS (Geographic Information System, already in development in 1995) and other databases. Reports should also be used to evaluate wildlife management and to design long-term planning and project development. Photographs, video, reports, and other information could be distributed to local news media to develop interest in the nature reserve and in wildlife conservation as a whole. After establishing several observation areas and blinds, the committee could select the most reliable ones as visiting sites, for scientists and eco-cultural tourists to observe wildlife firsthand. Within six months after this proposal was submitted to the directors of the Meihuashan Nature Reserve, the person who co-wrote the proposal became the first villager hired by the reserve to work in forest and wildlife resource management. The establishment of a wildlife committee is somewhat contrary to Chinese top-down administration, as some reserve leaders were quick to point out, and even the prompt hiring of one villager came as a surprise to those outside the reserve leadership. Return of the Tiger: A Program for Captive Breeding and Reintroduction

The success of these proposals for developing community-centered conservation in Meihuashan—by integrating village land use, local knowledge, and economic development with strategies for protecting natural resources—will depend on an unprecedented degree of cooperation between villagers and reserve staff. But even deeper commitments from all parties will be needed to fulfill the latest conservation initiative in Meihuashan. In May 2001, the State Forest Administration published a document entitled “Development of a Captive Breeding and Reintroduction Program for South China Tiger Recovery: A Feasibility Report.” 11 In simple terms, the plan proposes to raise tigers, ungulates, and other species in an elaborate captive-breeding facility, which was already under construction in 2000 on 332 hectares (820 acres) of land

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requisitioned from the villages of Liling and Mafang. During the first five years (2000–2005), six additional tigers (for a total of twelve) will be brought from zoos and provided with optimal conditions for breeding, in the meantime becoming semi-wild by gradually progressing to a diet of live food. During this time, they will live in five separate enclosures for pairs and possible offspring, isolated from human contact in a 49hectare (121-acre) zone of Masson pines, grassland, and scrub, and monitored with radio telemetry and closed-circuit TV. With access to caves, streams, and ponds, and learning to kill live rabbits, pheasants, goats, muntjac, sika, serow, sambar deer, and wild boar, the tigers will become “semi-wild” ( banye). In the meantime, with luck—and, some might argue, through an act of divine intervention—a wild tiger will be captured and bred with the captive population to strengthen the gene pool. Then, from 2005–2010, semi-wild tigers will move to a 49-hectare zone of broadleaf forest, pine, and bamboo to live in virtual independence, being monitored mostly with radio telemetry and from watchtowers. By 2010, retrained “wild” tigers will be returned to open lands, where, according to the authors of the plan, they will breed with remaining wild individuals, thus nurturing local populations in Meihuashan and presumably in other reserves. Though the plan does not specify how and where retrained tigers will be released, the assumption is that if there are enough retrained tigers, they will be reintroduced in many areas across southern China to rebuild the metapopulation. 12 To many biologists, the expectation that a handful of tigers will jump through the series of flaming hoops required to eventually repopulate southern and central China may seem like an expensive pipe dream. After all, no one knows whether zoo-raised tigers will learn to kill large prey, whether retrained tigers will survive outside the controlled conditions of a large enclosure, whether reintroduced tigers will find and breed with wild tigers, or whether the population of South China tigers is too inbred to survive over the long haul. Acceptance of the plan by Western scientists and funding organizations ultimately may rest on whether the State Forestry Administration can rethink its ideological commitment to the purity of the “South China tiger” and embrace a vision of helping “the tiger return to southern China.” Breeding tigers from Southeast Asia or India with tigers from southern China would greatly increase the viability of the Chinese tiger population and the entire reintroduction plan. Western observers should keep in mind the fact that as long as the Chi-

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nese economy continues to grow steadily, and as long as the CCP is committed to returning tigers to the wild, reintroduction will be viewed as a state-supported engineering project; all apparent obstacles will be attacked, just as tigers were attacked and nearly annihilated in the extermination campaigns of the 1950s. The Meihuashan program is expensive and risky, but its success— or partial success—could be tremendously significant for tiger conservation in China and abroad. The ten-year program in Meihuashan is projected to cost $2.5 million to implement, including, among other things, expenses for construction, veterinary services, water treatment, manure and solid waste management, animal monitoring equipment, housing, administrative offices, research facilities, and a visitor education center. Eighty percent of the funds are expected to come from the national government and 20 percent from provincial, prefectural, and county or municipal sources. While ultimate success will not be assured until viable populations of several hundred tigers are secure in the wild, successful reintroduction of even a few tigers would be a tremendous source of hope that tiger populations can be revived in a region where they now appear doomed to extinction. This could set an important precedent for the reintroduction of tigers elsewhere in Asia. The successful reintroduction of a large number of tigers would provide important data on how to manage tigers in a fairly densely populated landscape, and it would be a world-class conservation achievement for China that could go far in moderating international condemnation of the country’s environmental management problems. The authors of the proposal also note that the ecological benefits associated with returning the top carnivore to the wild are manifold, including reforestation and ecosystem restoration, renewal of hydrological and nutrient cycles, and increases in biodiversity as greater areas of land become more strictly protected. Social benefits they cite include the promotion of conservation consciousness (ziran baohu yishi), environmental education, and an understanding of the significance of the long-term relationship between people and tigers. If the initial plan succeeds, it will have significant effects on humans and ecosystems in Meihuashan and other mountain regions for many years to come as tigers are reintroduced to areas with sufficient prey populations and habitat heterogeneity. Villagers once again will share the land with tigers. Many villages probably will be forced to relocate, as recommended in the “China Action Plan for Saving the South China Tiger”;

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still others may choose to move to safer ground at lower elevations or in valley towns and cities. In the near term, however, the captive breeding facility at Meihuashan affects only a few villages around the southern boundary of the reserve, as roughly one hundred tourists come each day to admire tigers, deer, and macaques in a facsimile of their natural habitats. More visitors means more restaurants and lodges, and service enterprises are bound to flourish. If this was unclear to the people of Liling and Mafang before the facility was built, the Forest Lands Expropriation Agreement, which they signed with the Meihuashan Comprehensive Development Corporation (the business unit of the reserve administration) in October 1999, spelled out the benefits plainly. For a sum of just under $20,000, the reserve purchased collective lands from the village for what was to become the “Longyan China Meihuashan Park,” which would include the tiger-breeding and reintroduction facility, the herbivore-raising area, a snake mountain, a monkey mountain, an arboretum, and other facilities. With these parklike features in place, the reserve is now promoting tourism and local economic growth even as it launches one of the most ambitious wildlife management programs ever. Tourism: Prospects and Problems

This and other evidence shows that the economy of the Meihuashan region is beginning to diversify and that service sector occupations may soon absorb a more substantial portion of the labor force. The development of nature tourism and other economic initiatives could be important in this transition. Besides the Meihuashan Park, reserve planners have said that attractions could include a hot spring in the village of Xiache, which already has been enclosed in an open-air bathhouse; a reservoir near Xiache, and nearby reservoirs at Wanan and Shangfu (in Buyun); and the sacred Buddhist mountain of Matoushan. Since residents of Xiamen and Zhangzhou can now reach Meihuashan in one day by car, the potential for nature tourism appears to be significant. By 1995, guestrooms had been prepared in anticipation of the first tourists. According to one management plan, the headquarters could hold twenty-eight guests a day, the management station in Xiache could house twenty visitors a day, and because other lodging could become available, the greater Meihuashan area could accommodate up to twenty thousand lodgers a year. 13 By 2001, roughly one hundred to two hundred people had even begun to hike from Guihe village up to the observation

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tower in the core area each month, and Ma Shengxue was seeking ways to keep them from leaving trash and making excessive noise in the reserve. If tourism develops as expected, it will be important for villagers to share in the profits from such things as entrance fees, food and lodging, local transportation, and reserve tours. Because tourism is not permitted in the reserve without the consent of reserve directors, and there has been relatively little tourism within reserve boundaries, there should be ample time and opportunity to control the development of the industry, strictly prohibiting all activities that have direct or indirect detrimental influences on human and natural communities. Reserve administrators and villagers should reach an agreement on standards for minimumeffect nature tourism, including regulations on lodging, building codes, signs and advertising, vehicular transportation, and controls on visitor numbers and activities that could have serious effects on vegetation, wildlife habitat, local landscapes, and cultural identity. In a prudent tourism development plan, vehicular traffic and tourists would be kept far from reserve boundaries, and only select groups of guided hikers would be allowed into the reserve on foot. Given the rapid economic and political changes in Meihuashan during the past decade, dramatic changes in the demand for tourism should be expected in the near future. For this reason, if the reserve is to meet the objectives of nature conservation and local economic development, there must be regular and ongoing dialogue between reserve administrators, local people, and regional authorities. Conservation and Development in the Wuyishan Nature Reserve

Comparative research in the Wuyishan and Longxishan Nature Reserves (fig. 22) has focused on historical settlement, cultural patterns of environmental change, and economic development. Interviews with reserve managers and villagers revealed regional consistency in such patterns as the historical practice of burning the mountains; a long history of mountain-valley trade, which included international linkages; village economies based largely on the cultivation of mao bamboo (and, in this instance, tea); and little tourism (Wuyishan has a tourism area, but it is outside and separate from the nature reserve). These traits are common to mountain communities throughout most of the Southeast Uplands region. Historical patterns, economic conditions, and administrative features, however, make each reserve unique and warrant extensive comparative study. Historical patterns of village settlement, ethnicity, agri-

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culture, fengshui practice, and hunting have been discussed in previous chapters; the following comments pertain to current economic development and reserve administration in Wuyishan and Longxishan. In the mid-1990s, these reserves were widely regarded by forestry officials and some local people as having more harmonious relations between residents and managers than in Meihuashan, making an analysis of their economic and administrative strengths instructive.

Figure 22. Wuyishan Nature Reserve.

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The Wuyishan Nature Reserve was established in 1979 as a national nature reserve run by the Provincial Forestry Bureau. In 1987, the reserve became one of ten UNMAB Biosphere Reserves in China. Since its founding Wuyishan has been the largest reserve in the region, with an area of 556.7 square kilometers (215 sq. mi.). Within the reserve are three administrative villages (Tongmu, Aotou, and Dapo), encompassing seventeen natural villages in the transition zone of the reserve (outside the core area) with a total population of more than 2,600 in 1994. Surveys I conducted in five natural villages (Guadun, Aotou, Sangang, Huangxizhou, and Jiangdun) showed that in 1994, the average number of inhabitants per village was 176, with between five and seven families (with different surnames) in each village. 14 Most of the villagers belonged to the northern Min or Jiangxi dialect groups, with between two and six generations of in situ settlement, but two Hakka families, one in Guadun and one in Sangang, had ancestors who had migrated from Ninghua and Changting five to six generations ago. Many of the Jiangxi-related peoples settled the area in the late Qing, escaping starvation, overcrowding, and political turmoil in the lowlands to the west. In the five villages surveyed, the estimated average annual per capita income was 1,600 yuan ($200). 15 Though estimated average per capita income was much lower than the estimated average (in 1994) of 2,300 yuan ($288) for the reserve as a whole, it compared very favorably with income estimates in Meihuashan. 16 Recent data show that by 1996, per capita income in Meihuashan had risen to 1,798 yuan ($225), while by 1997, per capita income in Wuyishan was 2,890 yuan ($361). Higher incomes in Wuyishan are largely the result of a longer history and greater investments of time, money, and collective effort in the development of bamboo cultivation, processing, and marketing, and to a higher degree of economic diversification. Although there were some forest resource tenure conflicts between local people and the reserve management when the reserve was first established, reserve and forestry officials say that these subsided as bamboo sales brought a steady increase in household income. Unlike the villagers of Meihuashan and Longxishan, Wuyishan villagers mentioned no ongoing conflicts or disagreements between local communities and the nature reserve management. When the reserve was established, villagers and reserve managers began to seek ways to improve bamboo cultivation and marketing. All the villages surveyed distributed collective forests on the basis of household size rather than old land deeds, and two agreed to redistribute land

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every fifteen years. Although the per capita income was only 200 yuan ($25), almost all the villages had access roads (in 1995, all but one village had an access road or a tractor road, or were in the process of building roads), and all the villages had electricity. As in Meihuashan today, villages with road access sold bamboo poles, which were trucked out of the reserve for use as scaffolding. Between 1985 and 1991, villages began to convert bamboo to more valuable products, responding to market demands for chopsticks, thin sticks for barbecuing, bamboo mats, automobile seat covers, and fine floor tiles. Some poles are still sold for scaffolding, but most are processed locally. Villagers initiated the shift to industry independently. Households did not undertake the transition on their own, but under an umbrella of collective support that remained undiminished in 1999. The twelve villages of Tongmu, for instance, formed a cooperative bamboo-processing company named after a government slogan, the “Company [That] Enriches the Farmer” (Gongsi Jianongfu). Although the company is owned and managed by locals, the Fujian provincial government arranged with the provincial foreign trade bureau and private companies to order and purchase products from the Tongmu company, and this trade continues. The company, in turn, orders products from individual villages and households (depending on their specialties and capacities) on a consignment basis. In 1995, an estimated 72 percent of household income in the five villages surveyed was derived from bamboo. Some villages and some individual households also have machines in village or household workshops. These are leased, purchased (often with bank loans), or used on a subcontract basis and allow the villagers to sand, shape, polish, or heat-dry bamboo parts (depending on which products they specialize in). The parts can be sold to the Tongmu company or other private companies. In one village (Guwangkeng), which is far from Tongmu and has only tractor road access, residents started their own multiproduct bamboo factory and wholesale business. In Sangang village, the administrative center of Tongmu, increased local capital has been invested in a teaprocessing plant and other cottage industries. By 1998, there were thirteen businesses in the three administrative villages, producing bamboo products, tea, springwater, and even “snake wine” (a tonic derived from snake blood and bile), and engaging in some forms of “ecotourism” (consisting of transporting tourists along the major roads to view the scenery). Unlike the situation in Meihuashan, relative prosperity in Wuyishan

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in the 1990s meant that forest degradation by villagers was not viewed as a significant problem. Flourishing local enterprises necessitated the hiring of workers from Jiangxi, Sichuan, Zhejiang, and counties in other parts of Fujian. To control population pressure, these people are given temporary residence permits, and they are not allowed to build houses or settle in the reserve. And though the reserve has become a source area for illegal timber trade for impoverished people from Jiangxi, legitimate forest production reputedly has not given rise to environmental problems. Reserve administrators were in disagreement about whether the spread of bamboo was adversely affecting adjacent ecosystems, but the situation did not appear to merit forest protection measures like those taken in Meihuashan, and there were no protected subareas. A 1994 study stated that 7,938 hectares (30 sq. mi.) of mao bamboo grow in the reserve, which is 14 percent of the total land area. 17 The geomorphology of Wuyishan has shaped land use patterns and the configuration of wildlife habitat. Commercial land use, settlement, roads, and other human activity and infrastructure are confined mainly to the long, narrow graben valley bottoms and adjacent lower mountain slopes. 18 Many villages are at elevations between 650 and 1,000 meters (2,100 and 3,280 ft.), and above the villages, bamboo stands, and tea plantations lie extensive broadleaf forests and mixed forests up to 1,600 meters (5,250 ft.). Because of this distinctive altitudinal zonation pattern, there appears to be little wildlife at lower elevations and abundant wildlife at higher elevations. A wildlife survey along a ridge above Guadun, at an elevation of 1,300–1,460 meters (4,265–4,800 ft.), documented numerous signs of muntjacs, crested deer, wild boar, pheasants, and Asiatic black bear. A former hunter from Guadun stated that wildlife was rare in the valleys and on the slopes but abundant on the long ridgelines running for many miles through the reserve. According to one administrator and several villagers, poaching was not thought to be a serious problem. Except for some poaching by outsiders, especially from neighboring Jiangxi Province (mostly for frogs, especially Rana spinulosa), there was little hunting by villagers, for most of the guns were confiscated in the late 1980s. Snares made by villagers from tree branches and natural fiber were observed above Guadun in 1995 and 1999 (see pl. 17). Unfortunately, because few systematic wildlife censuses have been conducted since the founding of the reserve, there are no data indicating how conservation policies have affected animal populations.

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The variegated topography of Meihuashan and other reserves creates a complex mosaic of habitat types in them, and human activities are not clearly separated from wildlife habitat by elevation. For this reason, the development of cottage industries that create significant levels of noise pollution (as in Wuyishan) should be undertaken with great care in other reserves. Also, though economic development in Wuyishan has been highly successful and apparently free of significant environmental degradation, there has been a substantial flow of national and international funding for the reserve, including grants and loans from the United Nations (via the China Biosphere Reserve Network) and the World Bank. 19 It would be surprising if none of this funding had been allocated to the improvement of socioeconomic conditions in the reserve, and it would be premature to assume that Wuyishan is a flawless prototype for grassroots sustainable development, as it would be to assume that Dazhai was a faultless model for land reclamation. 20 The Longxishan Nature Reserve

The Longxishan Nature Reserve was established as a provincial-level reserve in 1989 and became a member of China’s Man and the Biosphere Program (along with the other two reserves) in 1993. With an area of 63.7 square kilometers (24.5 sq. mi.), Longxishan is much smaller than the other reserves, but it encompasses montane broadleaf and mixed forests along the ridges and upper slopes of a U -shaped massif, with elevations up to 1,620 meters (5,300 ft.) (fig. 23). Wildlife habitat in the reserve is regarded by experts as very good, and Koehler (1991) found two ground scrapes made by tigers within the reserve boundaries. The reserve is touted as a model for unified management, because all the roughly 1,122 residents occupy ten natural villages within the administrative equivalent of one township. In other words, the nature reserve has taken on the role of a township, with full administrative control over all aspects of village life. Before being designated a reserve, the area was administered as a special collective forestry, bamboo, and pastoral production zone established in 1979 and known as the “Longxishan Forestry, Pastoral, and Paper Multiple Production Area.” Today, the reserve headquarters contain the offices of family planning, business management, land management, national guard, taxation, criminal justice, fire prevention, and public security. 21 Most of Longxishan’s inhabitants are Hakkas, whose ancestors migrated from overpopulated areas of Changting County in the Qing

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dynasty. They settled in Longxishan, apparently as shed people, to produce bamboo paper for international export. They built paper workshops in the mountains above what later became the village settlements (although settlements may have been founded by earlier immigrants). Many remote workshops in the reserve are still operational. During the political unrest of the early twentieth century, many villages reverted to banditry for survival. Today, most of the villages have three to seven family groups (each with a different surname), with three to seven genera-

Figure 23. Longxishan Nature Reserve. The core area consists of all areas outside the designated bamboo production zones.

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tions of in situ settlement. In 1994, the nine villages had a population of 1,128, with an average of 125 inhabitants per village. The average per capita income was 1,708 yuan ($213) for the reserve as a whole. In interviews I conducted in three of the ten township villages (Shipaichang, Yujiaping, and Shangdi), estimates of per capita income averaged 1,190 yuan ($149). In stark contrast to the village economies of Meihuashan and Wuyishan, the three villages surveyed derived only 30–50 percent of their income from bamboo. This is a fairly accurate reflection of village economies in the reserve as a whole. The most important products include poles for scaffolding, bamboo shoots, handmade paper (used for calligraphy or for burning as an offering to ancestors, depending on the grade), small sticks for barbecuing, chopsticks, and bamboo mats. Villagers also rely heavily on income from raising livestock, especially yellow cattle, goats, and pigs. Many work outside the reserve as laborers, and a few as shopkeepers. In 1994, the nine villages of Longxishan had a total of 1,800 goats, 200 head of cattle, 2,000 rabbits, and an average of 20 ducks, chickens, and other fowl per household. The reserve had recently begun a sika deer husbandry project, raising the deer in an enclosure for eventual harvest for the medicinal market. Within the reserve there are also three mechanized paper factories, a down factory, a small foundry, a bamboo mat factory, a printing factory, and several companies that buy and distribute handmade paper. Economic diversification in Longxishan is a necessity born of scarcity. Bamboo forests comprise about one-third of the reserve area (30,000 mu, or 20 km 2 ), and there is an average of only 26.7 mu (1.78 ha, or 4.4 acres) of bamboo per villager, which has been distributed according to family size. The village of Shipaichang has an average of only 5 mu (.3 ha, or .7 acre) of bamboo forest per person. Reserve administrators wanted to protect as much forest land as possible, thus only bamboo forests and the small areas of rice paddy (totaling only 24–33 ha, or 59–81 acres) were designated as collective land. The rest of the forest land was designated as the core or experimental areas of the reserve. Villagers complain they do not have enough bamboo to make ends meet without relying on other sources of income. Administrators from other reserves hail Longxishan as a great success, where conflicts between residents and managers have been minimal, but many villagers expressed dissatisfaction with the system of resource management and administrative control. In 1995, residents in two of the three

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villages where I conducted research complained of inequitable land tenure conditions, contracts for bamboo-shoot harvesting that were granted to outsiders, excessive control and corruption among reserve leadership, and an alleged imbalance of power among villages because of their former positions within preexisting (communal and postcommune) administrative structures. One lesson the Longxishan Nature Reserve provides is that unified administration gives reserve leaders tremendous power, but administrative power also requires reserve managers to take responsibility for all aspects of village life. Whether a nature reserve can effectively assume the comprehensive role of a township government remains to be seen. As in Meihuashan, success will depend on greater local consultation and participation in reserve management and administration at all levels. Recommendations for Nature Conservation in the Southeast Uplands and Beyond

To ensure the long-term survival of rare fauna and flora in the Southeast Uplands, suitable habitat must be conserved over large areas, including those lying outside the few, small, widely scattered nature reserves. Nature reserves should serve as refuges for diverse assemblages of plants and animals within a matrix of habitat corridors, but they will not protect biological diversity for long if they become isolated fragments. Mountain conservation corridors are becoming a key strategy in regional conservation planning worldwide. The World Commission on Protected Areas ( WCPA) of the IUCN is actively promoting schemes linking isolated mountain protected areas to lowland habitats and to other highland protected areas. IUCN and the WRI (World Resource Institute) are making an inventory of conservation schemes around the globe that protect “ecoregion corridors.” 22 The Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan Reserves are regarded from a biological standpoint as the most valuable reserves in the Southeast Uplands. In 1995, they were the only regional members of China’s Biosphere Reserve Network. None of these reserves, however, nor the Daiyunshan Nature Reserve in Dehua County, is sufficiently large to protect a viable tiger population. To protect large carnivores, which require the most extensive habitats, and to ensure the survival of many plant and animal species sharing their habitat, these four reserves and eleven smaller provincial, county, and municipal reserves in Fujian

Figure 24. Habitat fragmentation and the nature reserves of Fujian. The fourteen nature reserves in the Southeast Uplands region of Fujian are widely scattered among remaining broadleaf forest areas, and bamboo cultivation threatens many of them. Masson pines and shrub species predominate in the surrounding areas (in white) (see table 4).

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should be linked by montane corridors of grassland, wetland, and broadleaf forest (fig. 24 and table 4). Although the latter reserves are even smaller than Longxishan, they are evenly distributed across the region and protect important montane ecosystems. For the long-term protection of such large carnivores as tigers, leopards, clouded leopards, and golden cats, Fujian’s reserves must be joined with protected areas in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and other southern provinces. The distribution of broadleaf forests, although highly fragmented, covers most of the Southeast Uplands and parts of the coastal lowlands. These areas should be targeted for conservation as quickly as possible. Although mapping, demarcating, and protecting montane habitat corridors in Fujian alone will require the coordinated efforts of the Fujian Forestry Bureau and local people, it should not require the amount of state and international financial support per unit area used for the management of nature reserves. Current patterns of land use at elevations above 1,200 meters (4,000 ft.) could be integrated into a large-scale nature conservation plan. These sparsely populated areas are predominantly grasslands, conifer forests, mixed forests, bamboo forests, and broadleaf forests. Economic land use in high-elevation zones is already legally restricted by state-controlled timber quotas on collective land and even stricter regulations on nationally owned land. Land management initiatives to improve habitat could include the periodic burning or clearance of pine and Cunninghamia monocultures to keep grasslands open for ungulates; stricter state and local protection of sacred ( fengshui) forests; broadleaf forest restoration; demarcation of bamboo forests, and the establishment of small, protected areas on collective lands in critical habitats. Wildlife management initiatives should include controlling poaching; controlling the proliferation of guns, traps, and explosives; and banning the most persistent rat poisons and pesticides. Management practices in high-altitude zones within the nature reserves could serve as useful models for corridor management. Recruiting local participation in a project of this scale would be the most effective way to harmonize economic land use practices and nature conservation goals. This has been initiated with considerable success in large protected areas in other parts of the world. One of the best examples of participatory conservation and development at the macroscale is the Annapurna Conservation Area in Nepal, a 7,600-square-kilometer (2,934-sq.-mi.) region with 118,000 inhabitants. 23

Table 4. Nature Reserves of Fujian Province Name

Administrative Status

Area (km 2 )

Reserves in the Southeast Uplands 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

Wuyishan Shaowu Jiangshi Jianou Wanmulin Sanming Shi Luobuyan Sanming Geshikao (Sanming chinakpin, Castanopsis kawakamii, reserve) Minxi Meihuashan Pingnan Yuanyang, Mihou (Pingnan Mandarin duck and rhesus monkey reserve) Dehua Daiyunshan Minqing Huangzhulin Yongchun Niumulin Nanjing Yaredai Yulin ( Nanjing subtropical rainforest reserve) Jiangle Longxishan Nanping Mangyangshan Yongan Tianbaoyan

N, CBRN, IBRN C C C C

565.27 11.87 1.76 3.27 11.25

N, CBRN P

221.33 10.40

P, CBRN C C C

97.31 2.32 1.56 .21

P, CBRN C C

63.71 42.78 18.45

Reserve in Coastal Fujian 15. Longhai Hongshulin (Longhai mangrove forest reserve)

C

2.0

Sources: Fujian Province Agricultural Regionalization 1986; Chinese National Committee 1995. Note: The official name of each reserve begins with the county, municipality, or region where the reserve is located. Reserves are administered nationally (N), provincially (P), or by a county or municipality (C). Members of the International Biosphere Reserve Network are designated “IBRN.” Members of the Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network are labeled “CBRN.” The numbers preceding each reserve name correspond to the map in figure 24.

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Preserving biodiversity in the Southeast Uplands depends on the well-being of local human communities and on their support for conservation actions. Nature reserve administrators understand this dynamic and are engaged in a long-term effort to promote sustainable development. While it would be brash to make predictions about the future of conservation and development in the reserves discussed above, future relationships between people and wildlife in the vast areas lying between these reserves is even more important, and is more difficult to forecast. This book has described historical relationships between humans, wildlife, and landscapes in China’s Southeast Uplands region. It has also attempted to place current conservation issues in the context of a vast and turbulent stream of modern social, political, and environmental change. Archival research, historical documents, and oral histories reveal a long and continuous pattern of interaction between the state, local people, and wildlife. Numerous ancient beliefs, customs, land use patterns, hunting technologies, and wildlife management strategies have survived to the present. Others have been developed or introduced recently, and all have important implications, both positive and negative, for wildlife conservation. Like many peripheral mountain areas around the world, western Fujian has experienced periods of relative isolation and internally mediated development on the one hand, and intensive management by central authorities or occupation forces on the other. During the tumultuous course of the past two centuries, the Hakkas and other long-term inhabitants of the region have not been passive survivors. They have remained actively engaged in adapting to and exploiting exogenous and endogenous social, economic, political, and environmental forces. In Meihuashan, Longxishan, and Wuyishan, village subsistence, commerce, and custom have shaped the montane landscapes and wildlife habitats in distinctive and dynamic ways. The firing of the mountains, the building of agricultural terraces, and the propagation of bamboo forests have left these areas with a complex and fragmented vegetation mosaic. Still, wildlife populations and habitat conditions are far superior to those of the surrounding lowlands, where human settlements, anthropogenic grasslands, pine and coniferous monocultures, and extensive agriculture replaced original biotic assemblages long ago. Subsistence and commercial production continue to claim a significant part of the landscape in all three reserves, however, and local people are likely to adapt

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to and, as much as possible, tailor nature conservation schemes and other policies imposed by central authorities to suit their own needs and values. For this reason, among many others, it is essential that reserve administrators and local people work together in a coordinated fashion to define and achieve conservation goals. The Fujian Provincial Forestry Bureau and local governments must recognize the significance of local cultural traditions and environmental knowledge, and allow local people to assume more importance in reserve management. Village landscapes are rich with vernacular architectural features and land use patterns, some of which, like fengshui forests and periodic burning, can actually contribute to local and regional biological diversity. Furthermore, houses, ancestral halls, temple bridges, earth-god shrines, and fengshui forests are important cultural symbols, endowing village landscapes with local character, meaning, and historical significance. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that cultural identity in small, insular communities, bounded as they are in southern China by a communal ethos defined by fengshui, ancestor worship, and a certain degree of communal labor, are uniform, or that dynamic shifts in the relationships within and between communities are not likely. If anything, village histories reveal that political, demographic, socioeconomic, and ecological flux have been an almost constant feature of upland life. In the 1990s, individual responses to the economic constraints of living in the Meihuashan nature reserve varied considerably. A growing number of people found employment outside the reserve, a few found work within the reserve administration, and some profited from cutting trees in the sacred forests or by selling wildlife parts, but the vast majority remained heavily dependent on bamboo cultivation and commercial agriculture for a living. In the near-term of the next decade, careful bamboo stewardship and low-impact commercial agriculture, along with environmentally friendly service sector diversification, may provide a sound foundation for economic development in all three reserves and in similarly endowed protected areas throughout China. Perhaps the greatest human resource in the Southeast Uplands in the new millennium is the strong sense of community discernible in the cultural ecology and social interaction of each village settlement. This feature may never be fully comprehended by outsiders, since it is a product of long centuries of being in place, of generations of making and remaking a particular village, its fields, its forests, and its mountains. In Mei-

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huashan, for example, fengshui and sacred forests, lineage records and ancestral halls, communal rites of solidarity, wet-rice agriculture, and bamboo cultivation have all shaped and bounded each community. Although these aspects of life were altered and sometimes jeopardized by the ideological passions and socioecological engineering of Maoism; they could not be uprooted. Each village in its own valley, in its own basin, or on its own promontory, surrounded by the biological wealth of montane forests, meadows, and wetlands, makes the concept of the inhabited nature reserve all the more compelling. As a community of interlinked villages, part of a new system of nature conservation in an ancient landscape, it is a place we can all learn from. Cynics will respond that people and nature are fundamentally incompatible and should be kept apart, and Western researchers of the Chinese environment have tended to focus on rural natural resource degradation, overlooking the instances where local people have had a positive influence in conservation. 24 The recent and alarming evidence that human destruction of panda habitat in the Wolong Nature Reserve actually accelerated after the reserve was established in 1975 demonstrates that a tremendous amount of work remains both inside and outside protected areas, even in regions that support China’s most celebrated nature reserves. 25 But it would be terribly simplistic to characterize montane village land use patterns throughout the country as unmitigated land degradation. There are important exceptions at regional and microgeographic levels, and this holds true for many subregions throughout China’s tropical and subtropical zones as a whole. The diversity of land use patterns and local culture in China deserves more nuanced observation, informed by the perspectives of landscape ecology and cultural ecology, spatial frameworks that encompass regional environmental history, environmental perception, and the relationship between resource utilization patterns and biological diversity. These processes are interrelated with patterns of ethnicity, local knowledge, belief systems, and economic development. China’s village-level agriculture, forestry, fengshui, hunting, and perceptions of wildlife will continue to profoundly affect the relationship between people and nature. Nature conservation efforts should be seen in broad regional and microregional contexts, such as the ones this study has attempted to provide for the Southeast Uplands. Sustainable development, co-management (or indigenous management) of protected

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areas, and the preservation of habitat corridors between protected areas will not transpire through legislation alone. Local people are often the final arbiters of ecological change. The success of nature conservation therefore ultimately will depend on our collective understanding of local and regional landscapes, and of the people who have inhabited and shaped them and who continue to call them “home.” We must learn to focus not only on the vast territorial needs of the tiger but also on the everyday work and play of the pangolin.

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Appendix Life Histories of the Five Major Wild Ungulates of the Southeast Uplands

Wild Boar (Sus scrofa) Yezhu (wild pig); local name, shanzhu (mountain pig) The wild boar is found throughout temperate, subtropical, and tropical Eurasia and North Africa. Though domestic pigs are descendants of the wild boar, and can still interbreed with it, there are considerable differences in behavior and appearance between the two. The wild boar has a coarse, brownish, bristly coat that commonly turns gray with age. Its head is long and narrow. In males, the upper canines form tusks, which grow outward and upward. The lower tusks grow upward and are sharp from rubbing on the upper tusks. Boars can grow up to 1.5 meters (5 ft.) long and 79 cm (31 in.) high at the shoulder, weighing 91 kilograms (200 lbs.). In China, the wild boar is common from the northeast south to Hainan Island, and west to Xinjiang. In the Southeast Uplands, it is very common, especially in mountainous areas. No special state protection covers the animal, and hunting is not managed in a scientific fashion. Wild boar commonly travel in packs, with anywhere between two and forty individuals. Older males tend to be solitary. Often feeding in groups, boar are omnivorous and will eat all parts of many kinds of herbaceous plants; the roots, bark, nuts, and fruits of certain woody plants; and a variety of other things, including insects and the carcasses of dead animals. They tend to uproot great swathes of earth as they forage, digging holes when they smell edible roots. I found holes nearly a meter (39 in.) deep and equally wide where boars had excavated the rhizomes of bracken fern. Holes at the bases of pine trees indicate where boars have eaten the bark of exposed roots. In spring, shoots of mao bamboo erupt from underground rhizomes in groves managed by village families. The boars sleep on low ridges or summits in forests above the bamboo groves during the day, making forays into the groves at night to feed on the ten-

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der shoots. This is when villagers implement various tactics to keep boar and monkeys out of their bamboo plots. As spring passes to summer, some wild, uncultivated bamboo species sprout shoots, and the boar feed on at least three species in the high-elevation forests: shi zhu (stone bamboo; Phyllostachys nuda), genzhu (root bamboo), and bianzhu (whip bamboo; Phyllostachys nigra). In summer, boar also eat yangmei (bayberries), the tart, juicy fruits of Myrica rubra, which grow in the broadleaf forests and are also favored by villagers. In fall, boar frequent rice paddies, trampling the rice plants and sometimes rolling over them as they feast on the golden grains. In Meihuashan, as in other areas of the Southeast Uplands, boar damage to rice paddies is sometimes extensive, occasionally wiping out entire crops. Along with depredation by rats, boar foraging in rice paddies has been a major catalyst in the abandonment of terraces that are farthest from the villages. Caldwell (1924) observed villages that had been completely abandoned after suffering devastating crop damage by wild boar. Reeve’s muntjac ( Muntiacus reevesi) Huangji; local name, shanzhang The Reeve’s muntjac is one of four members of the genus Muntiacus found in China. The smallest species of muntjac, it averages about 79 cm (31 in.) long and 42 cm (16.5 in.) high at the shoulder, and weighs a mere 10–15 kg (22–33 lbs.). Like other muntjacs, males not only have antlers (short, with long pedicles) but also long upper canine teeth, which are used in combat during the rut (all year long). Muntjacs emit a warning or location call resembling a dog’s bark, thus its other English name, “barking deer.” M. reevesi, endemic to southern China, is found throughout the subtropical regions of the country, from about the Qinling-Huaihe ecotone south to the coastline, on Taiwan, and west to Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu. The limiting factor controlling its northernmost range is snow. The population appears to be stable despite huge annual harvests, and it has the highest breeding rate of the Cervidae family. Females become fertile at five to seven months and typically breed five times in three years, producing one fawn per parturition. In 1991, Sheng (1991) estimated the population at between 2 million and 2.5 million. The annual harvest, estimated at 650,000, is not managed scientifically, and there is no special state protection for the animal, but populations may be

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very resilient if protective measures increase. Sheng also attributes the high population to the acceleration of forest clearance, which creates brush and successional forest habitat, and to a decrease in the leopard population: other than humans, the leopard is the main predator of muntjacs. Reeve’s muntjac is the most popular mountain game species in southern China. Like other deer, its meat and organs are regarded as medicinal foods, and its antlers and bones are ground up and sold as medicine. Tufted (or Crested) Deer (Elaphodus cephalophus) Maoguanlu; local name, shanzhang or heiji The crested deer is found only in China. Restricted to the subtropics, its range is similar to that of Reeve’s muntjac, except that it does not occur in southernmost China or Taiwan and is found farther west in Yunnan and Sichuan, and not as far north in easternmost China. In contrast to Reeve’s muntjac, the crested deer population may be in some danger of decline as a result of hunting. Sheng (1991) estimates that in the 1980s, 100,000 were taken annually, from a total population of about 400,000– 500,000. The population and reproductive capacity of this species is much lower than Reeve’s muntjac. Like muntjacs, male crested deer have long canine teeth and pedicles at the bases of their antlers. Their common name comes from the black tuft of hair on the forehead. It averages about 95 cm (37 in.) long (15–20 cm [6–8 in.] longer than Reeve’s muntjac), 55 cm (21.5 in.) high at the shoulder (slightly taller than Reeve’s muntjac), and weighs about 20–25 kg (44–55 lbs.), almost twice the weight of the muntjac. The crested deer’s lower reproductive rate is a function of its seasonal breeding and late sexual maturity; it cannot reproduce until one and a half years of age. It mates in winter and spring, and gives birth to one fawn in late spring or early summer. In Meihuashan, crested deer signs were almost as common as those of the Reeve’s muntjac, but the former were found at higher elevations (roughly 1,300– 1,800 m [4,300–5,900 ft.]). In the Meihuashan landscape, crested deer are common in high-elevation grasslands, montane wetlands, and high mountain broadleaf, pine, and mixed forests. They are less common with decreasing elevation and, unlike Reeve’s muntjacs, do not capitalize on the low-elevation anthropogenic disturbance patches typically in relatively close proximity to human settlements.

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Serow (Capricornis sumatraensis) Sumenling; local name, shanyang The serow is a type of mountain goat, classed in the Bovidae, which includes cattle, antelope, sheep, and goats. It is found from northern India to southern China, and throughout the Indo-Chinese peninsula and Sumatra. In China, its distribution is similar to that of Reeve’s muntjac and the crested deer. It is found in mountainous areas throughout the subtropics, from Gansu and the Qinling Mountains in the north to the southern coastal hills in the south, and from Taiwan in the southeast to Yunnan in the southwest, with its range extending into Southeast Asia. The serow is listed in the “China” section of the 1994 IUCN “Red List of Threatened Animals,” a database of species that are “globally threatened as of late 1993,” maintained by the World Conservation Monitoring Center. Compared to the small cervids with which it shares the Southeast Uplands, it is a very large animal. It grows to a length of 1.8 m (6 ft.) and 1 m (3.3 ft.) high at the shoulder, and weighs up to 140 kg (315 lbs.). Its brown-black, coarse coat contrasts with a stunning whitish mane, which when seen among the cliffs and boulders in the high mountain grasslands where it resides, makes it resemble a small horse grazing in a secluded patch of meadow. Its horns are short, only 15 cm (6 in.). Serow tend to live alone or in small groups, with a distinct territory a few square kilometers in area. They feed on grass, shoots, and leaves. In Meihuashan, serow are found almost exclusively among cliffs and boulders in the high montane grasslands and broadleaf-covered headwater ravines, from about 1,500 m (5,000 ft.) to the summit of Gouzinao, at 1,811 m (6,000 ft.). They spend hours basking in sunlight in patches of grass or on rocks near mountain summits. On hot days in spring and summer, they retreat to nearby broadleaf forests to drink and graze along streams below the summits. Indian (or Common) Muntjac ( Muntiacus muntjak) Chiji; local name, shanzhang (same as M. reevesi ) The Indian muntjac includes twenty subspecies found throughout India, east to Southeast Asia as far south as Java, and in southern China. In China, the distribution extends from a core area in Yunnan Province (in the southwest) eastward to Fujian, southward to Hainan, and westward to southeast Tibet. It is better adapted to tropical conditions than are the

APPENDIX

crested deer or Reeve’s muntjac, and its distribution does not extend as far northward. In the Southeast Uplands, its northernmost limits are in central Fujian, southern Jiangxi, and northern Guangdong. It is not found in Hunan. The Indian muntjac is similar in appearance to the Reeve’s muntjac, but is larger and has longer antlers (males only in both species). It grows to about 95 cm (37 in.) long, is 55 cm (21.5 in.) at shoulder height, and can weigh up to 25 kg (55 lbs). Like Reeve’s muntjac, it has no fixed breeding season and is highly prolific. Females go into estrus shortly after giving birth and can produce a fawn every seven months. Its population in China is estimated at more than 600,000, and the annual harvest is between 100,000 and 150,000. There is no special state protection for the animal, and hunting it is not managed in a scientific fashion. This muntjac appears to be the least common of the five selected ungulates in the reserve but appears to be more common at low elevations (<800 m [2,600 ft.]). It is probably common outside and on the periphery of the reserve.

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1. Chuanshanjia also means “expert at burrowing into the mountains”; pangolins can burrow 8 feet (2.4 m) into the ground in three to five minutes. 2. See chapter 3 for problems with the concept of “tiger subspecies.” 3. In “T’ien-mu Mountain Ascended in a Dream: A Farewell Song” (Liu and Lo 1975). 4. Viederman 2001. 5. Friedman 1994. 6. MacKinnon 1996; Pan 2000; Bennett 1999a, 1999b; Viederman 2001. 7. Peet and Watts 1996; Stevens 1997a; Proctor 1998; Zimmerer 2000. 8. Schaller 1993. 9. For comparison with British India, see Gadgil and Guha 1992; Kenny 1995. 10. Caldwell 1924; Andrews 1917; Smith 1928. See chapter 3. 11. Taiwan, which is smaller than most provinces, has six national parks, nineteen nature reserves, thirty-five forest reserves, and thirteen wildlife refuges, covering 19.2 percent of the total land area (Government Information Office 2001). 12. PRC Government 1988. 13. Waley 1978; Menzies 1988a, 1988b. 14. Caldwell 1924; Smith 1928; Longyan Prefecture 1992. 15. Caldwell 1924, 28–29. 16. China also has been a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) (signed 1981); the Convention on Biological Diversity (signed 1992); Agenda 21 (signed 1992); and Ramsar

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Convention on Wetlands (signed 1992), which is being implemented with help from the WWF through the National Wetland Conservation Action Plan (2000). 17. Li and Zhao 1989. 18. The largest protected area in the world is Greenland National Park, which is mostly an ice cap. Li and Zhao 1989; IUCN 1990; Chinese National Committee for Man and the Biosphere 1995; Fu Yongcheng, pers. comm., 1995; People’s Daily, April 4, 2001; Shaller 1998. 19. Harkness 2000; Lu 2001. An extreme example is a reserve in Guangxi where staff must buy tickets to enter the protected area for routine duty ( Jim Harkness, pers. comm., 2001). 20. PRC Government 1994. 21. For examples among indigenous peoples in Yunnan’s Xishuangbanna, see Daniels 1996. 22. In 1995, an estimated 80 percent of China’s nature reserves contained human settlements within their boundaries, and the World Bank would provide no money to nature reserves or other conservation projects that included forced emigration (Ruan Yunqiu, pers. comm.). 23. In the Yancheng Nature Reserve, for example, financial shortfall led to the opening of the core area to sandworm farming, mud-snail digging, a reed farm, ostrich farm, and shrimp farms. Despite more than 1.1 million yuan in earnings from these destructive activities, no expenditures were made for patrolling, education, interpretation, or research ( Viederman 2001). 24. Liu et al. 2001. Outside the reserve, family-planning policies are stricter and fuel-wood harvesting is less severe, since many households have switched to coal, electricity, and other energy sources. 25. Cronon 1996; Peet and Watts 1996; Stevens 1997a; Zimmerer 2000. 26. Scott 1998, 6. CHAPTER 2 A Mountain Mosaic 1. Pannell and Ma 1983. Zhao (1986) defines this region (the Wuyi-Daiyun Mountains) as the most mountainous of four subregions within the Southeast Coast Evergreen Broadleaf Forest Region. Skinner (1985) places it at the western boundary of the Southeast Coast macroregion. 2. These are Dehua, Yongchun, and Anxi (in Quanzhou municipality),

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which also have rugged terrain and a long-standing dependence on mountain resources. 3. Vermeer 1990; Fujian Province 1994. 4. Lin 1990; Qiu 1993; Zhu 1994. 5. Wang 1961; Hou 1983; Lin 1990; Comprehensive Research Editorial Team 1991; Qiu 1993. 6. Lin 1990; Comprehensive Research 1991; Qiu 1993. 7. Zhao 1986; Sheng 1991; WRI 1992; Schaller 1993; MacKinnon 1996; Ma et al. 1999. 8. Evidence of anthropogenic regional extinction is abundant. The remains of rhinoceros, elephant, a type of buffalo (Bibos geron), Malayan tapir, and subtropical species of snakes, deer, boar, and other animals have been found in archaeological sites dating from as late as the mid-Holocene in Zhejiang (Pearson 1983), and from the late Pleistocene as far north as Beijing (Zhoukoudian) (Whyte 1983). Historical documents indicate that in the tenth century a.d., wild elephants were still living in Fujian and the Changjiang Valley, and peacocks, now limited to southern Yunnan, ranged east through southern Guangdong (Schafer 1954; Zhu et al. 1979). Ma (1987), Zhu et al. (1979), and Zhang (1999) provide chronological maps of the vastly diminished distributions of parakeets, peacocks, the wild Indian elephant, the Sumatran rhinoceros, Père David’s deer, gibbons, the Malaysian crocodile, the Yangzi alligator, and other vertebrates, all but the last two of which have been pushed south and southwest by expanding human populations. 9. Ma et al. 1999. 10. Nietschmann 1992; Stevens 1997a. 11. The persistence of yuanlou (round buildings, also known as tulou, earthen buildings), circular fortresses that housed extended families or entire villages, are examples of Hakka perseverance in a hostile land. These distinctive rammed-earth structures, which dot the landscape in the western Min region, were built to withstand sieges by bandits, soldiers, or other Han peoples. They are still inhabited in many parts of Yongding and Nanjing counties, and significant numbers have been built since the 1950s (Laude 1992; Knapp 2000). 12. Cohen 1996; Leong 1997. 13. Lebar, Hickey, and Musgrave 1964; Pulleyblank 1983; Shi 1985. The She and Yao share a well-documented history of dog worship, belief in the

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myth of Panhu (or Pangu), a dog-ancestor, worship Pangu totems, and have proscriptions against eating dogmeat. 14. Hakka tradition also discouraged polygamy and conspicuous consumption, while encouraging frugality and simplicity. Marriage to non-Hakkas was rare, viewed as a betrayal of one’s ancestors. Violators of such norms were seen as having been corrupted by the Yue, the Minnan, or other “Southerners” (Moser 1985). 15. As with many groups in the northern Min region, Wuyishan settlers migrated from Jiangxi province in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to rent land (under permanent tenancy contracts) and to produce the world-famous Bohea (northern Min for “Wuyi”) tea. This black tea (along with the oolong and pekoe) became the region’s staple export to the West (by way of Guangdong middlemen and the East India Tea Company). Much of the work force consisted of single male migrant laborers (Gardella in Vermeer 1990). 16. Some villages still had several large trees at places in the landscape where one would expect to find sacred broadleaf forests or groves of Cryptomeria. Some of these sites even had old remnants of earth-god shrines, almost completely engulfed by vegetation. Elderly villagers acknowledged that these had been fengshui forests at some time in the past. 17. Another possible explanation for why Wuyishan lacks fengshui forests may relate to agriculture. Only five of the seventeen natural villages of Wuyishan produce rice, with combined paddy areas amounting to only a few hectares. These paddies were established in the 1960s, in the wake of government campaigns to increase grain production. Tea cultivation does not require intensive water control, and fengshui forests may have been less important in the agro-ecosystem, gradually losing their place in the landscape for functional (though perhaps subliminal) reasons, besides the cultural reasons discussed above. Tea farming, though, did produce serious erosion in parts of Minbei during the late Qing (Gardella in Vermeer 1990). 18. Simmons 1989. 19. Hou 1983; Zhao 1986; Richardson 1990. 20. Only Taiwan has a higher percentage of coverage (55.08 percent). This figure is based not on canopy closure but on the percentage with forest or scrub of any kind, in any stage of growth. Reforestation accounts for an impressive 58.44 percent of the forest area in Fujian. There is much room for improvement, however, because the total amount of land designated as suitable for forestry in Fujian is much greater than the present

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forest coverage (73 percent; 89,790 km 2, or 34,668 sq. mi.) (Gao 1991; Zhu 1994). 21. Menzies 1988b; Gao 1991; Chandler 1994. 22. Zhou 1986. CHAPTER 3 Lord of the Hundred Beasts 1. The Classic on Mountains and Oceans [Shanhaijing] and the Ancient and Modern Literary Compendium [Qinding gujin tushujicheng] abound with images of fanciful beasts and semihumans both from within and beyond the Chinese empire. There is some resemblance, in this respect, to medieval European views of wild creatures, as found in bestiaries and on navigation maps. 2. In the Middle Ages, the domestication of feral animals, the taming of wild animals, the clearing of wild land, and the conversion of local pagans were central to the establishment of monastic orders. Glacken (1967, 310) describes how “monks entered the forests . . . ‘sometimes axe in hand, at the head of a troupe of believers scarcely converted, or of pagans surprised and indignant, to cut down the sacred trees, and thus root out the popular superstition.’ . . . St. Benedict . . . cut down the sacred grove at Monte Cassino, a survival of pagan worship in a Christian land. St. Sturm ‘seized every opportunity . . . to impress upon them [the pagans] . . . that they should forsake idols and images, accept the Christian faith, destroy the temples of the gods, cut down the groves and build sacred churches in their stead.’” 3. Lu and Sheng 1986; Xiang, Tan, and Jia 1987. Herrington (1987, 57) provides morphologic evidence that the historic distribution of the South China tiger represents the center of origin for the eight subspecies of tiger known to have existed until modern times, and that Panthera tigris amoyensis is the most unique and primitive subspecies. This idea has been challenged more recently, especially by Kitchener (1999). 4. Xiang 1983; Tan 1984, 1987; Xiang, Tan, and Jia 1987. See the alternative views of Kitchener (1999) and Wentzel et al. (1999) below. 5. Chang 1977; Pulleyblank 1983; Mei and Norman in Pulleyblank 1983. 6. Temple 1986. 7. See He and Wen 1980; Huang 1985; Li 1987; Perdue 1987; Schoppa 1989; and Chai 1991 for examples. Marks (1996) also relates economic development and land degradation to changes in the distribution of tiger

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attacks in the Lingnan region (Guangdong and Guangxi) (see below). Liu (2001) has examined the relationship between tiger attacks and the settlement of the Southeast Uplands in the Ming and Qing. 8. We should also consider the limitations of gazetteer-based data. We can assume that recorded events represent a mere fraction of actual tiger encounters, and that surviving records may represent only a fraction of those originally kept at the local level. We must assume that uneven patterns of reporting, recording, and transcribing provide only a very general impression of the actual number of events, casualties, and animals involved. The ambiguity of singular and plural noun status in Chinese also leaves the reader in the dark about the number of people or tigers involved, and 77 percent of the records did not specify the number of casualties except, in many cases, through the use of quantifying adjectives like “many,” “countless,” “without number,” and so on. 9. This is hardly surprising if we consider Richard Perry’s (1965) estimate that at least 1 million Asians had been killed in the past four hundred years, an average of 2,500 a year. 10. The white tiger (baihu) is described in the Huhui [Tiger anthology], a late-Ming compilation of tiger lore from Tang, Song, and Ming sources (Hammond 1991): Tigers that lived to the age of five hundred years were said to turn white. The white tiger was a symbol of kindness, “appearing when the ruler was humane and caused no harm” (Huhui), and it remains an important symbol in fengshui (see below) ( Williams 1974). 11. Leong (1997) translates the term as “shack people.” The author follows Menzies (1988b) and Averill (1983) in using the term “shed people.” 12. Wiens 1967; Averill 1983; Menzies 1988a; Vermeer 1990; Leong 1997. 13. It is important to differentiate between the settlement histories of interior areas that were settled during this period of dislocation and resettlement, and those that had been established generations earlier during different migration streams. Meihuashan fits in the latter category, and its present-day twenty-two– to thirty-generation, single-lineage mountain villages had been established before the wave of coastal settlers and other shed people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Each village of Wuyishan and Longxishan, however, now includes several surnames, representing multiple migration paths with, in most instances, three to seven generations of settled history. It is clear from this evidence and other data collected in field interviews that these villages were established in an era of internal migration and socioeconomic flux, characteristic of the shed people migrations. Dehua County, site of the Daiyunshan

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Nature Reserve, probably has the longest history of forest disturbance of any of these areas, both because it is lowest in elevation and was settled by the earliest wave of Han migrants, and because it was a major center of porcelain production by the Song (960–1279). The industry required huge supplies of firewood for kiln firing. Qiu (1993) demonstrated through pollen analysis that before Dehua County was established, in a.d. 933, large areas had already been clear-cut, and the primeval broadleaf forest had been replaced by pine forests. 14. The melanic tiger was a phenomenon that reappeared through the centuries; there are three records of melanic tigers from the four-province gazetteer survey, and Harry Caldwell’s book Blue Tiger (1924), named after the melanic (“blue”) form, documents his attempts to collect a specimen of such a tiger, one or several of which he spotted on numerous occasions. 15. Man-eating is believed to become a problem only when natural prey is unavailable in sufficient numbers, or when a particular tiger resorts to killing a person because of inability to catch wild prey. Once a tiger learns that people are a possible source of food, they may lose fear of humans altogether and enter villages or larger settlements in broad daylight to hunt (Caldwell 1924, 1953; Corbett 1944). 16. Such attacks in Fuqing and surrounding areas during this period are absent from the gazetteer record. Gaps in the record were probably typical, and this may have been especially true during the chaotic years between 1911 and 1949. 17. The Liji [Book of rites] relates that Confucius met a woman living with her family in a remote area infested with man-eating tigers. Asked why she lived in such a remote and dangerous place, she responded that it was the only way to avoid an oppressive government rule. 18. The connection between poor government, societal disorder (luan), and tiger depredation has lasted to the present, and some villagers in Meihuashan today say that the rise of the Chinese Communist Party brought order, and as a result tigers “went away” (zoule). 19. Kam-biu Liu, pers. comm. 20. Probably a “fu,” or written charm with magical properties. 21. Lopez 1978; Cohen 1994; Salisbury 1994. 22. Hammond 1991. 23. Numerous folk tales describe tigers showing great deference to officials, bowing down to the magistrates in court (Hammond 1991). Marco

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Polo’s account describes tigers bowing to the great Kahn: “On the Feast Day a great Lion [tiger] is led to the Emperor’s presence, and as soon as it sees him it lies down before him with every sign of the greatest veneration, as if it acknowledged him for its lord; and it remains there lying before him, and entirely unchained. Truly this must seem a strange story to those who have not seen the thing!” (Polo 1992). 24. Hammond (1991, 89–90) translates a passage from the Xintang shu: “Before [the arrival of a certain official at Huoshan in Anhui in the ninth century a.d.] . . . the tea-pickers . . . had been so afflicted by tiger attacks that they laid traps to catch them and dispatched hunters to shoot them, to no avail. After he was posted to the area as prefect [the official] stopped the trapping and hunting of tigers, and the threat disappeared.” There are also instances of tiger problems ceasing when new, more virtuous, officials take office. 25. Caldwell (1924, 46) also discusses an interesting myth about a grass blade in every tiger’s stomach, which holds a lesson about the tiger’s magnanimity and local people’s assessments of authenticity: [The sages] claimed that because of the benevolent spirit of the tiger, which prompts it to leave the head and parts of a kill for some less fortunate of its kind which on account of old age or otherwise is unable to kill enough to maintain it, the gods have placed in the stomach of this king cat this blade of grass, which oozes out nutrition so the kindly animal is thus protected from ever suffering from hunger. . . . The gentry standing around when the animals were being skinned were bidding high for the blades of grass, but upon finding there were none announced with disgust that the animals were not true tigers. 26. See Knapp (1999) on the use of tiger amulets in vernacular architecture. Knapp also points out that in southern Fujian, the Minnan word for “tiger” (in Mandarin, hu) is homophonous with the word for “luck” (in Mandarin, fu); thus, the tiger is associated with good luck. 27. Cohen (1994, 61) describes the medieval European use of animals as religious “exempla” in sermons, bestiaries, and encyclopedias: The animal was . . . not only inferior to the human in a hierarchy of government. It was also farther removed from divinity. The Aristotelian teaching, attributing a rational soul to man alone, fitted in well with the Christian tradition. . . . The use of animal symbolism here had nothing theological about it. It was merely

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an effort to bridge the distance between two perceptual schemes by using familiar examples. . . . The preachers yielded nothing when it came to the confusing of categories. 28. Zhongguo jingjidongwuzhi ( Shou 1962); Zhongguo yaoyong dongwuzhi [China’s medicinal animals], 1982. 29. As the Yule-Cordier translation notes, “The conception of a Tiger seems almost to have dropped out of the European mind during the Middle Ages. . . . Hence Polo can only call the Tigers, whose portrait he draws here not incorrectly, Lions” (Polo 1992, 399). Polo’s account also includes descriptions of how tigers were trapped in Fuzhou (see chap. 10) and of their use as hunting animals during imperial outings. 30. Caldwell uses this term because the Chinese word for “civet” ( lingmao) can be translated “spirit cat.” The name “lingmao” is also commonly used in the Southeast Uplands to denote several small and medium-size mammals, such as foxes, civets, leopard cats, and mongooses. 31. After the 1873 expedition of Jesuit naturalist Père Armand David, and his discovery of many “new” species in the village of Guadun, a stream of Western collectors and naturalists visited Wuyishan. Based on work in the villages of Guadun and Dazhulan, expeditions by La Touche (1896– 1898), Clifford Pope (1925), and others added a long list of vertebrates and invertebrates to the Western taxonomy. Bird species first found there include the short-tailed parrotbill (Paradoxornis davidianus), silver pheasant ( Lophura nycthemera), white-necklaced hill partridge (Arborophila torqueda), and red-tailed laughing thrush (Garrulax milnei). 32. In the village of Aotou, in the Wuyishan Nature Reserve, I interviewed a seventy-one-year-old former hunter who had worked for decades as a specimen collector and taxidermist. In the 1940s, he and his brothers had worked with a German naturalist. After 1949, he and his six children continued to hunt commercially, selling parts and specimens to collectors from China and abroad. The man still has an attic full of bird and animal specimens, mostly from before the 1980s. Wildlife populations in Wuyishan are said to have been severely and perhaps permanently (for some species) decimated by specimen collectors. 33. Panwar notes the following, and work by Karanth (1999) strengthens this argument: Paradoxical as it may appear, the interspersion of human habitation through these forested tracts enhanced the habitat productivity for the deer and the antelope, and hence, also for the tiger.

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. . . People maintained large areas around villages as pastures and open forests in order to meet their fuelwood and pasture needs. Rotating fallow marginal lands with the long cycle “slash and burn” cultivation practices further enriched these habitats. In a low people:forest ratio that held well at that time, the rural ecosystems complemented the quality and extent of tiger habitat. (1987) 34. It was probably incidental that the media selected Dehua for their documentary. There were many other places in Fujian and other provinces that could have produced the same or better results. In a 1991 interview, Mao described propaganda filmmakers seeking footage of a live tiger. Because the team was unable to find one, a stuffed tiger was held by two men squatting in high grass behind it. They emulated a tiger’s walking motion by easing the dummy forward through the grass. Later, a clouded leopard was caught. After seriously injuring the film director, it was tethered with a cable through the back leg and made to stand within an encircling group of “victorious hunters” (Mao Piao, pers. comm.). 35. Lu and Sheng 1986. Despite increased international control of trade in wildlife and wildlife products after the formation of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in 1981, a CITES report showed that by 1989, China had exported 89,656 catskins, about 66 percent of the world total (reported) of 136,825 ( WRI 1992). Though this report does not indicate species, it shows that wild cat populations were relentlessly decimated by slaughter through the 1980s. 36. Xiang 1983; Xiang, Tan, and Jia 1987; Tan 1984, 1987; Lu 1987; Xu 1988. 37. For example, in May and June of 2000, two different parties of peasants in a rural township in Wuyuan County, northern Jiangxi, reportedly saw tigers, one group while hunting snakes at night, the other while picking berries, in broad daylight. Around the same time, more than a thousand kilometers away, officials in the Xishui Nature Reserve reportedly found tiger tracks along the banks of the Chishui River, a tributary of the Changjiang, in northern Guizhou. 38. State Forestry Administration 2001. 39. Huang Zhaofeng, pers. comm.; State Forestry Administration 2000. 40. Tilson, Traylor-Holzer, and Jiang 1997; Tilson, pers. comm. 41. Kitchener 1999; Wentzel et al. 1999. 42. Tilson’s research has been funded by Save China’s Tigers, an international organization launched in London in 2001 by Li Quan, a Beijing

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native who now resides in the United Kingdom. SCT’s primary mission is to work with the Chinese government and international tiger conservation experts to develop innovative methods to reestablish a wild population of South China tigers. 43. Tilson, pers. comm., 2001. 44. Lan 1999. CHAPTER 4 The Wealth of Mountains 1. Including two small outlying regions (fig. 10), the reserve has an area of 225 square kilometers (90 sq. mi.). The outlying section to the north lies on Baishi village lands. 2. The Minxi (west of the Min River) region is synonymous with Fujian’s Hakka culture region. Politically, it consists of the Longyan administrative region—six counties and one municipality. Within this area, the five westernmost counties are predominated by speakers of Hakka and Hakka-related dialects. 3. This is abundantly evident in Meihuashan, where villages have been abandoned, destroyed, or both, eventually disappearing beneath the dense foliage. The village of Zhongmenqi and a village between Jiaotan and Mawu were abandoned between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The latter is marked only by an earth-god shrine housing an iron incense burner; legends recount how a person could walk through the entire settlement during a rainstorm under the eaves of the densely clustered houses and stay dry. Foliage around the earth-god shrine had recently been cleared, and an archaeologist accompanied me to examine the incense burner, which bears an inscription blessing village descendants, and the date when the urn was cast—in the forty-fourth year of the Ming Wan Li reign (1616) (Fu Qisheng, pers. comm.). The villagers were named Wu. They moved to Wulang village, which is still inhabited by the Wu family. Village abandonment has also occurred recently; in 1986, villagers in Daxie (elevation 270 m [4,166 ft.]) began to abandon their houses, moving downslope to Dapingshan, where a new road allowed easier access to outside markets, and where paddy lands were more productive. By 1993, the twenty to thirty wooden houses of the village were empty, and dense weeds had begun to overtake the village. 4. Longyan Prefecture 1992. 5. In Gonghe, a man whose family was fortunate enough to have been classified as “poor farmers” ( pinnong), free of the scrutiny and persecution

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that “rich peasants” ( funong) and “landlords” (dizhu) suffered, helped hide a landlord’s copy of the village ancestral record. Years later, the book was given to the landlord’s son. The father had been executed. I spent many hours interviewing the son, an elderly man with a keen interest in village history and fengshui. 6. For more detailed settlement histories of the other villages, see Coggins 1998. 7. The main ancestral temple is dedicated to the ancestor who settled the village, Ma Wangfu. In the third generation, there was a family with five sons, the eldest of whom was named Ma Zhengtong. Zhengtong’s tomb was well placed and had good fengshui, but two of his younger brothers’ tombs were not, and the other two had no children. The descendants of the two brothers with bad tombs had to emigrate; thus all those remaining in Gonghe were descendants of Ma Zhengtong. In the thirteenth generation, probably in the early to mid-Qing, there were four brothers, to whom all of today’s villagers trace their ancestry. This accounts for the four secondary ancestral temples in the village, some of which today are inside people’s homes. People of the same sublineage are more likely to conduct business together than they are with descendants from one of the other three sublineages. Brothers, cousins, uncles, and other closely related people are afforded the most favorable treatment of all. The problem of lineage-based factionalism (zongpai) is not seen as a severe problem in Gonghe (yet). The phenomenon is returning to many other parts of China, however, as revived lineage organizations gain power (Ma Shuwen, pers. comm.). 8. Qing populations are believed to have been higher than present populations (in parentheses) by the following percentages: Qingcaoyuan (130), 200–300 percent; Chijiashan (205), 150–200 percent; Xiaogaoxie (180), >66 percent; Dutou (140), 50 percent; and Beikeng (330), 51 percent. Tremendous population growth in Meihuashan during this period has been documented by Chinese researchers as well (see Comprehensive Research 1991). 9. Shed people, if they were present, did not establish themselves long enough to form lineage villages or even lasting membership within preexisting villages. Even today, migrant laborers in Meihuashan live in village homes or in bamboo and plastic shacks, on a temporary basis. In periods of economic prosperity, this has resulted in rapid village population growth and subsequent decline. In contrast, groups of in-migrants in Wuyishan and Longxishan were able to establish residence in pre-

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existing villages, and now there are many different surnames in each community. 10. Leong 1997; Skinner in Leong 1997. 11. Marks takes issue with environmental historians who “categorize agroecosystems as either capitalist or ‘traditional,’ ” and view the “transition from subsistence- to market-oriented agriculture as the process of capitalist transformation” of the global environment (1996, 77). 12. Tufei were often village lineage groups. In Meihuashan, the Luos of Tieshanluodi village were and are ( justly or not) infamous for acts of violence. Longgui residents recall public beatings and killings carried out by bandits from Luodi and Pingshui (now abandoned); many people fled or hid when gangs attacked. In 1994, a family-planning worker was killed in Luodi, and reserve workers were uneasy there because of local enmity toward the reserve. CHAPTER 5 Three Rises, Two Falls 1. Comprehensive Research 1991. 2. Chen, Huang, and Fu 1995; Fu Qisheng and Ma Shuwen, pers. comm. 3. Longgui and especially Majiaping resemble the more classical CCP revolutionary stereotypes of exploitation of the many by the few. In Longgui, the richest villager, Luo Bifeng, came from a family that had earned money selling bamboo in Meicun. Bifeng rented his land to other villagers, loaning them money for grain, tools, weddings, and other expenses, and gaining more land by confiscating it when debts were unpaid. The landlord in Majiaping was from Kanzibao, in Liancheng County. Having saved money from a business there, the man moved to Majiaping in the early 1900s, became a moneylender, and allegedly introduced opium to the villagers. Many of the villagers became addicted and gave the man land in lieu of payment for their fixes. Eventually, the landlord controlled all the land and all business and labor transactions, even after moving back to Kanzibao. In the pre-1949 years, he was active in the Guomindang, which brought political difficulties to the village later on. 4. Becker 1997. 5. Official population figures for the reserve may be inaccurate because there may be unregistered children in each village, and I found substantial discrepancies between the population figures provided by village officials, police departments, and the nature reserve. Still, in relative terms,

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there is a much greater population density (fifty to one hundred people per square kilometer) in the Southeast Uplands region as a whole; in the surrounding interior basins and coastal plains—some of the most densely populated regions in China—rural population densities reach four hundred to six hundred people per square kilometer over large areas (Zhao 1986). 6. Farmers in the region could have one child, but if it was a girl, a second child was permissible after the first had reached age four. 7. The forest road was built north of the village as part of a forestry area (linchang), which was established after the village access road was built (1983) but before the reserve was opened (1985). The reserve continued to issue permits to the village, but these were smaller each year, until they were phased out in the late 1990s. The forest area and the low population of Longgui helped make it the wealthiest village in the reserve. 8. Other itinerant workers settle along streams to extract and process forest resources. Inside the reserve, this is limited to small groups who process pine pitch. Outside the reserve boundaries, encampments of small groups of laborers (including some with families) from other counties in Fujian specialize in bamboo cutting and hauling (as laborers for local villagers), and in the manual production of bamboo paper. Their peripatetic lifestyles resemble those of the shed people of centuries past. Similar groups are said to specialize in cultivating Chinese fir. 9. Fujian Province 1994. 10. Records for natural village and household incomes are inadequate. Since the economic liberalization of the 1980s, household income is highly variable between families. Even individuals do not necessarily have good records of money earned, because the government demands only flat per capita taxes. Also, moneylending, multiple informal income sources, and the bartering of labor and material goods are common. CHAPTER 6 Burning the Mountains Note on the epigraph: The “eighteen basins” (shibadong) for which Meihuashan is famous are montane wetlands. Many such wetlands occupy the nature reserve at elevations above 1,300 m (2,265 ft.), and they are an important resource for humans and wildlife. The “golden armchairs” ( jiaoyi) probably connotes favorable fengshui sites, where mountains surround and protect a tomb or dwelling on three sides, with the fourth side open to the south.

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1. Before the late 1980s, when the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers began to affect agro-ecosystems throughout South China, people gathered tiger-stripe frogs (Rana tigrina) from rice paddies at elevations below about 900 m (3,000 ft.). Today, the people of Meihuashan often hike deep into the reserve to illegally harvest shiren (or shidong), a frog species under state protection. The most popular kind of turtle appears to be Platysternon megacephalum, known for its fragrant meat and for the medicinal value of its shell. In the Longxishan area, more than 1,000 kilograms (2,204 lbs.) of the shell were gathered in 1963 alone (Comprehensive Research 1991). 2. The variety of sweet potato cultivated in Meihuashan had a long, thin tuber that rotted when hung up to dry. For this reason, the crop had to be sown each year with seedlings purchased in the market towns, and the seedlings had to be imported from Longyan. In the pre-Communist era, people lacked the time and labor supply to maintain sweet potato crops. There may also have been a preference for other sources of starch. 3. As Pulleyblank (1983, 428) states, “The word She, also read yu, means ‘slash-and-burn cultivation,’ and it may be that the people became known as Shemin or Sheman because of their use of this agricultural method.” The word “she” appeared early in Chinese literature: “The Erya . . . states that ‘in the first year (a plot of land) is called a clearing (zai), in the second year it is called a new field (xin tian), in the third year it is called a “she” (or yu)’” ( Jiang 1985, 113). “She” and “yu” are defined as “to cultivate land by first setting fire to it, or land that has been cultivated for some time” (Liang 1973). Jiang adds that the She probably earned their name from the practice of swidden cultivation (daogenghuozhong, “to till or plow with a knife and plant or sow with fire”) and that this is reflected in their ancestral records. Shi (1985, 45) notes that there are more than one hundred She (pronounced “xie” in toponyms) placenames in Fujian, and most are within the western and northern Min regions. 4. These figures should be taken as approximations; they are not based on formal surveys. In comparison, average rice production in Longyan Prefecture in 1993 was 307 kg/mu (5 tons/2.5 acres), and 321 kg/mu (5.3 tons/2.5 acres) for Fujian as a whole (Fujian Province 1994). 5. See Coggins 2001. 6. Best 1979. 7. Longyan Prefecture 1992. 8. Ibid.

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9. Fujian Province 1994. 10. Longyan Prefecture 1992. CHAPTER 7 Habitat Conservation in the Post-Reform Landscape 1. Methodological strategies and concerns are discussed in Coggins 1998. 2. An important exception is the 40-hectare (98-acre) wetland called Xiaoyang, a marshy bog of very high biological value in the southeast corner of the core area. 3. On October 31, 1994, a ground scratch was discovered in a pine forest at an elevation of 1,330 m (4,360 ft.), 6 km (3.7 mi.) from the nearest villages (Gonghe and Guizhuping). The scratch was 60 cm (24 in.) long (including the litter pile at the end of the scratch), 10 cm (4 in.) wide, and 10 cm (4 in.) deep. It was attributed to a tiger when discovered by He Lian, a zoogeographer with the Fujian Provincial Museum (at the time, I was outside the reserve waiting for permission to enter). He Lian has seen five or six such scratches in the reserve, mainly while in the company of Gary Koehler, a cat specialist who conducted research on tigers for the World Wide Fund for Nature in 1990–1991. Some people debate whether such scratches are made by tigers or leopards. 4. For comparative purposes, in five villages (not individual households) surveyed in Wuyishan, the estimated average was 72 percent, and in three villages in Longxishan, it was 40 percent. 5. Of eight villages in the eastern part of the reserve, where this information was sought, one had undergone land redistribution on the basis of household population, three on the basis of old land deeds with adjustment for household population changes, and four on the basis of old land deeds alone. 6. Comprehensive Research 1991. 7. In other parts of eastern China during the 1960s, pesticides wiped out the natural enemy of the plant hopper (la chan; Nilaparvata lugens), and a crisis in rice production occurred between 1970 and 1972 (Edmonds 1994). 8. Before 1960, very few chemical fertilizers were used in China. During the mid-1960s and 1970s, however, there was a dramatic upsurge in the availability and use of chemical fertilizers throughout the country. By 1989, China’s average annual fertilizer usage was estimated at 208 kg /ha (458 lbs./2.5 acres), 80 percent of which was nitrogen; this was twice the world average (Edmonds 1994).

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9. This figure is comparable to the highest provincial averages of nitrogen application in China, which, in 1988, occurred in Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu (Smil 1993). 10. In some rural areas of Fujian, local officials have established “small agricultural protected areas” (nongye baohuxiaoqu), with signs demarcating paddy lands where other development is prohibited. CHAPTER 8 White Tigers and Azure Dragons 1. Feuchtwang 1974; Lovelace 1985; Lee 1986. 2. Exceptions include Hase and Lee 1992; Lovelace 1985; and Menzies 1996. 3. In the Yin-yang Fengshui Commentaries [Yin-yang fengshui jiangyi], trees are evaluated according to five criteria: (1) the symbolic value of particular species (e.g., coniferous evergreens, such as pine, represent longevity); (2) the morphological and metaphorical aspects of certain species (e.g., weeping willows planted near the front gate could lead residents to commit suicide by hanging); (3) practical and pragmatic issues (e.g., trees to the north block the north wind); (4) the location of family members within a house (e.g., heads of household sleep in the northwest rooms, so large trees should not be planted near that part of the house); and (5) the physical condition of particular trees at a site (indicating the status of qi circulation; i.e., if trees are luxuriant, there is healthy qi and vice versa) (Lee 1986). 4. Fan 1992, 42. 5. Hung 1993. 6. Anderson and Anderson (1973, 34, 50) describe fengshui as follows: Basically a very practical system whereby a village is situated such that it does not take up farmland or lay itself open to floods and typhoons. . . . A well-sited village is protected from the elements. Typhoons, heat, waves, storms and the like are broken in their force by the hills, spurs and groves. Erosion is limited by trees and terraces. Floods do not affect the sites for they are on elevated spots. The flowing streams assure a constant water supply, and (with frequent rains) flush salt from the fields. . . . The village does not take up the best farmland, which lies below it in the valley. . . . Wealth flows into the villages as the streams do, according to popular belief, and grows there like the lush vegetation.

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7. For example, the Ma family genealogy delineates in great detail the dragon veins that flow from the great source of qi, in the Pamirs of western Xinjiang and through the Kunlun range before forming three branches. One branch flows into Guangdong and Fujian. Entering Fujian in the western Min region, it goes through Wuping County, from which one branch heads into Liancheng County, through the village of Majiaping, and to the summit of Youpoji (a mountain in the reserve’s core area). Two of the veins extend south through Gonghe village, one going all the way to the coastal city of Xiamen. 8. This was the situation in Wuyishan after villagers converted to Catholicism or Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when many villages destroyed or abandoned their earth-god shrines, adopted Western-style tombs with crosses, and stopped maintaining sacred forests. 9. The relationship of the stars to the moon is described as “qi xing gan yue” (seven stars follow the moon). Most of the ancestral temples in villages of Meihuashan still have reflecting pools in front, to reflect and intensify qi. 10. Altingia gracilipes is a relative of the sweet gums. One giant tree in Xiache measured 182 cm/dbh (71 in.) and was some 30 m (98 ft.) tall. Regional newspapers credited me with “discovery” of the largest tree found in Meihuashan since the establishment of the reserve. The reserve director boasted that the tree was more than one thousand years old, but a reserve forester noted that the species is fast growing, and the tree could not exceed three hundred years old. The press used the first figure, which shows, among other things, that the age and size of trees is still very important in China, a culture that for centuries has venerated “king trees” (shumuwang). 11. Offerings to individual trees usually are made when parents pray for the recovery of a sick child by sacrificing to the “wood element” (one of five elements with water, metal, fire, and earth in Five Elements Theory). The sacrifice includes tying a red cloth to the tree trunk and burning incense at the foot of the tree. 12. An essay in the Fujian Daily indicates that fengshui degradation may be common. Calling fengshui trees and forests a “national treasure,” the author decries their destruction as the result of the “explosion of the materialist demands.” In a poignant conclusion, he writes, Is it the surging economic tides or the excessive poverty of the nation’s people that have caused them to start destroying and

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selling even the shady bracken [grottoes beneath sacred trees and forests] that the ancestors have left for us? In a developing economy, it is no wonder that even a few ancient trees at the foot of a village cannot remain! They have been eyewitnesses through the years of wind and rain, they are history, they are shadows of our ancestors! My honorable and pitiable fengshui trees! (Fang Ye 1994) 13. Even the neighboring villages of Gonghe and Guizhuping have had at least two fengshui feuds in the past few centuries. The first is reputed to have started when Guizhuping villagers dug graves on a slope that severed a dragon vein ( longmai) into Gonghe, and dogs and chickens in Gonghe fell silent for three days and nights (a classic symptom of fengshui disturbances). Gonghe residents realized the graves were bad fengshui, so they dug a trench above the graves, cutting off qi flow. The graves were abandoned thereafter, and the curse was broken. The second conflict also involved a new graveyard; in this instance, the people of Gonghe had found an excellent site for tombs. As in Gonghe, the people of Liling were alarmed when dogs and chickens fell silent for three days. They removed urns and bones from the graveyard, and it was never reestablished. CHAPTER 9 Eating from the Mountain 1. Hardin 1992. 2. Lebar, Hickey, and Musgrave 1964; Temple 1986. 3. No one in the reserve mentioned it, but Huang may be a member of the She nationality, although She normally have the surname Zhong, Lan, or Lei. The tiger hunter and his family live in Tongxian township, high in the hills between a She village and the Guanzhuang She autonomous township. Not wanting to appear rude, I never inquired about Huang’s ethnic identity, but Huang is a worshiper of Panhu, the She dog-god. 4. The She use the names “Panhu” and “Pangu” somewhat interchangeably, as in songs to the god called “Panhu ger” or “Pangu ger” (Shi 1985). There may be some syncretic connection between the dog-god Panhu and the Han people’s legendary “first king,” Pangu. The latter was the “Chinese Adam,” the first person, who was also the creator and first ruler of the universe ( Williams 1974). In any event, there is a clear connection between She (and Miao-Yao) ethnicity and traditional methods of tiger hunting (Lebar, Hickey, and Musgrave 1964).

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5. Though I never observed the bamboo-barreled arrow-shooting trap, one Longgui resident described the device in great detail. Its power is derived from the spring action of a bent tree 5–6 m (16–20 ft.) tall and about 20 cm (8 in.) in diameter. The meter-long bamboo barrel is secured about 40 cm (16 in.) aboveground. Sometimes poison is put on the tip of the arrow. The trap has been especially popular with mushroom growers, to protect their production logs from Reeve’s muntjacs. 6. They are also known as “tuqiang” (local guns or homemade guns), and villagers often repair or rebuild their own guns rather than replace them. As a result, accidents from exploding barrels are not uncommon. These weapons are primitive, but Tibetan hunters on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau still use matchlock rifles, which are fired by lighting a wick and placing it in an external powder bowl. 7. The She have a taboo against eating dogs, which stems from the worship of the dog-god Pangu (Shi 1985). The She are still avid hunters, and the tugou breed may well have its origins in the prehistoric She culture or in earlier local or regional cultures. 8. The hunters I spoke with were all specialists to varying degrees. They ranged in age from thirty-six to fifty-five, with an average age of fortyfour, and an average of twenty-one-and-a-half years’ hunting experience. They stated that 30–100 percent of all hunters in their villages were nonspecialists, who hunted boar defensively, whereas only one or two people in each village hunted methodically. Most of the informants were in positions of power in their natural or administrative villages, having been elected village secretary or village chief in recent years. Their social status and relative wealth may have allowed them to hunt with a sense of impunity and afforded them leisure time for hunting, as well as money for the purchase of guns, ammunition, and dogs. Each of them regarded hunting as one of their most important pastimes, and several made a substantial portion of yearly income from the sale of meat, hides, organs, and bones. Many of them killed endangered species, which had received state protection only in recent years. All but one lived in or near the reserve and had hunted in the reserve on numerous occasions. All but one had mostly hunted close to home, sometimes ranging farther afield but always within the Longyan municipality and Liancheng and Shanghang Counties. One man, a professional boar hunter, had hunted in several other counties in western Fujian. 9. Longyan Prefecture 1992. 10. In the Longxishan Nature Reserve, villagers described how professional monkey hunters from Hunan Province once operated in the area. A

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group of about thirty people would surround a montane forest where a troop of macaques resided. They would set a series of fires around the perimeter until the forest became an isolated patch with no way for the monkeys to escape. One person went into the forest, dug a hole, and placed sweet potatoes, rice, and other bait at the bottom. The monkeys eventually entered the hole, where they were netted, sometimes ten or more at a time. In the small forest patch, the monkeys faced starvation unless they ate the bait, and the hunters could catch a hundred before moving on. 11. Even the word “tiger” (laohu) is sometimes used to refer to other big cats, a linguistic vagueness that no doubt has increased as tigers have become extremely rare. To refer to the “actual” tiger, one can use the more specific term, “South China tiger” (huananhu). 12. The fact that the masked palm civet is frugivorous may explain why it is considered a delicacy, for fruit-eating mammals are the most favored game species in several other cultures that rely on wild meat for subsistence and commercial purposes (Robinson 1996; Robinson and Redford 1994). 13. According to Caldwell (1924), villagers in southern and central Fujian (eastern and southern Min peoples) regarded the serow a “son of the hill genii [sic]” and were “afraid to molest the animal when alive, [but] they barter and even fight over flesh, bones, and blood of the victim.” Even hunters who would pursue serow (probably under some form of magical protection as with pangolin hunters today) were concerned about the mountain spirit. Hunters worried that “the genii of the mountains, known as the ‘The Booster of the Hills,’ would warn all the serow of our plans to invade their sanctuary, and they would all scurry far back into the range and hide themselves in the home of this god” (Caldwell 1924). Hunters in Meihuashan hold similar beliefs about the shanshen’s protectiveness toward frogs today. 14. Filariasis, widespread in tropical and subtropical regions around the world, is caused by nematode worms, such as Wuchereria bancrofti and Brugia malayi. The larvae of these worms are spread by mosquitoes. In humans, the parasites live in lymph nodes and lymph vessels of the limbs, breasts, and genitals, where they cause lesions, swelling, and impaired circulation. Advanced cases sometimes lead to elephantiasis, typically involving the swelling of the scrotum and legs. 15. The most formal Chinese name for the pangolin found in scientific writings is chuanshanjia (“wears mountain armor,” “wears a mountain shell,” or “first-rate mountain borer”). The term most common among the

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Hakka of western Fujian, lianli, appears to be a local pronunciation of the Mandarin word lingli (see glossary). Ling in one sense means “carp” or “dace” (fish); in another it means “mound” or “tomb.” Li (see glossary) means “carp” as well. The English translation thus would be “mound carp” or simply “carp.” Other names for the pangolin in the southeast include dilong (earth dragon), long li (dragon carp), and qianlijia (money carp shell). 16. In 1998, 1,012 farms in twenty-two provinces were breeding rare and threatened animals for commercial and conservation purposes (Benewick and Donald 1999). These farms may help meet the demand for Chinese medicine, but their effectiveness for conservation is unproved. CHAPTER 10 Vital Connections 1. West and Brechin 1991; Western and Wright 1994; Stevens 1997a; Zimmerer 2000. 2. Under this policy, villagers elect members of the local community to serve three-year terms as officers and representatives in the administrative village council. In Meihuashan, these six positions are secretary (shuji), the highest-level position; chairperson (zhuren), the secondhighest position; forest officer (linyeyuan) (although these may also be appointed or removed by the reserve at any time); treasurer and recordkeeper (wenshu); public safety officer (zhibao zhuren); and women’s representative ( fudai zhuren), in charge of family planning and women’s issues. 3. In the 1990s, local people who lacked forestry degrees had little chance of obtaining work in reserve management. The village forest managers (linyeyuan) were the main exception, and their pay was low compared to that of regular reserve staff. There were thirteen village forest managers in 1995. They were responsible for enforcing local forest management regulations and for acting as liaisons between the reserve and the administrative villages. Most of the work revolved around monitoring timber and bamboo harvests. The linyeyuan were first appointed by reserve administrators in 1986, a year before Meihuashan became a national-level reserve, and many have retained their positions to the present. In 1994, a village forest manager with eight years’ experience was earning 1,440 yuan ($180) a year. This was roughly equivalent to one-third the salary of a regular forester employed by the reserve in the same year (discussed below). Some linyeyuan have been selected by villagers in local elections (after candidates were approved by reserve authorities).

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4. A comparable system is found in the Annapurna Conservation Area in Nepal, where villagers have received training and technical support to assume responsibility for all aspects of forest management. Stevens (1997b, 248) makes the critical point that “what has been achieved in the Annapurna region is the result of a partnership, and not solely either grass-roots or top-down initiative.” 5. MacKinnon 1996; Zhong et al. 1998; Coggins 2000. 6. This is a highly complex and critical issue. At one extreme, the per capita area limit could be set at the per capita level already attained by the most bamboo-rich villages in the reserve (Chijiashan, Qingcaoyuan, and Xiaogaoxie in the northeast section of the reserve), but forests in these areas have already been converted largely to bamboo, and the per capita rates there are probably too high to prevent bamboo desertification in other areas. Several other important variables come into play, including variation in land quality; variation in the degree of reliance on bamboo between villages; the lack of an objective standard for per capita income level; and the lack of an agreed-upon percentage of the reserve land area that could be devoted to bamboo. These issues would have to be discussed by reserve administrators and villagers until acceptable standards (perhaps including subsidies for villagers with lower quotas) were devised. 7. Trees and leguminous cover crops have been used in ecosystem restoration and agroforestry systems in Guangdong Province, Xishuangbanna (in southernmost Yunnan Province), and Hainan Island ( Wadley 1995). In Fujian, there are 79 genera in the Leguminosae family, with 212 species. Several native tree species in this family could be used for multiple economic purposes (Parham 1995). 8. In the 1990s, the several dozen forest police employed by the reserve rarely patrolled the interior of the reserve in a systematic fashion. Most of their monitoring took place at bamboo inspection stations on roadways entering the reserve, while large amounts of timber were carried out of the reserve on the shoulders of porters who used remote mountain paths. 9. Accompanying the rising incomes in China is a growing demand for healthy, uncontaminated foods. By 1995, the demand for organic produce in major cities, such as Beijing, had led to a small but growing revival of commercial organic farming in exurban hinterlands. 10. In 1995, one young reserve manager, who had the equivalent of a technical or associate’s degree in forestry, earned about 15 yuan ($1.88) a day, although this varied according to the tasks he was assigned on any given

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day. Assuming an average of six workdays a week for about forty-eight weeks a year, his annual salary was roughly 4,320 yuan ($540). In contrast, a forest worker (linyeyuan) in Majiaping earned 120 yuan ($15) a month, or (assuming eleven months of work per year) 1,320 yuan ($165). Some villagers are willing to work as forest workers for low wages, perhaps because working for the reserve gives them power, but in that position they also have time to earn income from the same sources as other households, that is, bamboo and other enterprises. 11. State Forestry Administration 2001. 12. Ibid. 13. Fujian Meihuashan 1991. 14. The figure for average number of inhabitants per village may be skewed to the high side, since the figure given for Aotou (380) may include both natural villages of the administrative village. 15. This figure is based on semiformal interviews conducted in each study village. It is a rough estimate, as I was given only one estimate per village, and there were no means for calibrating the data with official reports or other verbal estimates of village or individual household incomes. 16. The five villages surveyed in Meihuashan had average populations of 191, and average per capita incomes of between 1,021 and 1,226 yuan ($127 and $153). 17. He 1994. 18. Village bamboo cutters take advantage of the long, straight valleys and parallel ridges of Wuyishan, and they never have to carry bamboo. Bamboo poles are cut, slid down chutes to the valley bottoms, and dragged along gently sloping trails to the villages. In the rugged hills and mountains of Meihuashan, bamboo is laboriously shouldered up and down slopes, often by women. There are no long, straight grabens and few bamboo slides running down the mountain slopes. 19. For instance, in the late 1980s, the reserve received a 930,000 yuan loan ($250,000 in 1988) from the World Bank. 20. Dazhai was a model village carved out of the loess plateau in eastern Shanxi Province in the early 1960s. The village of 160 people was purported to have used its own labor force and funds to reclaim heavily eroded farmland by terracing the loess slopes with stone bunds and constructing stone-lined drainage ditches to divert floodwaters. During this time, housing was improved, and grain yields increased to where the village not only was self-sufficient but also augmented its sale of grain to the

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government. These achievements were celebrated by Mao Zedong, who exhorted the masses with the famous slogan, in agriculture, study dazhai. The large, red characters bearing this command can still be seen on decaying walls in villages of the Southeast Uplands. Salter, after a visit to Dazhai in 1977, concluded that there may have been outside support. As he notes, rather cynically, “To believe . . . that such monumental modification was authored by fewer people than in a good-sized introductory cultural geography class becomes . . . a problem” (1992, 207). 21. One village ( Jiangjunding) technically is still outside the reserve boundaries because of a land use conflict. The villagers have not agreed to allow their collective lands to become part of the reserve, but the village is still governed by the reserve. Much of the socioeconomic data for this section come from the Jiangle County Development Bureau (1994). 22. Schelhas and Greenberg 1996; Hamilton 1997; Terborgh and Soule 1999. 23. Stevens 1997b. Other fine examples are provided by De Lacy and Lawson, Eaton, Herlihy, and Nietschmann (though the last two are still in the planning stages) in Stevens (1997b). 24. Smil 1984, 1993; Schaller 1993; Edmonds 1994; Liu et al. 2001; exceptions include Pei 1985 and, to a lesser extent, MacKinnon 1996. 25. Liu et al. 2001.

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Glossary of Selected Chinese Terms

Chinese Terms Mentioned in the Text Chinese (Pinyin)

Chinese Characters

English Equivalent

baishouzhiwang

king of a hundred beasts

hu

tiger

juefen

fern flour

laohu

tiger

nu

crossbow

shanfen

mountain flour

she (xie for place-names)

She (nationality), burnt field

Chinese Terms (Common or Local Name) for Other Animals Mentioned in the Text English Name

Chinese Characters

Chinese (Pinyin)

wild boar

yezhu (shanzhu)

Reeve’s muntjac

huangji (shanzhang)

tufted deer

maoguanlu (heiji)

serow

sumenling (shanyang)

common muntjac

chiji

pangolin

chuanshanjia (lianli)

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administrative village (Xingzhengcun), 95 agriculture: commercialization, 192 –194; sustainability, 261–263, 313n. 9; swidden (“slash and burn”) and She people, 305n. 3. See also pesticides; rice; rodenticides; vegetables Altaishan Range, 36, 37 altitude and land use (zones), 156 ancestral records (family genealogies — zupu), 97–98, 301–302n. 5; and village fengshui, 308n. 7 ancestral temples (citang), 46, 119, 281; and fengshui forests, 203, 207; in Gonghe, 302n. 7, 308n. 9 Andrews, Roy Chapman, 74 Aotou Village, Wuyishan: bracken fern and, 149; Western naturalists in, 299n. 32 Aristotle, 52, 298n. 27 arrow-shooting trap, 225, 310n. 5 Asiatic dhole (red dog, chai), 52, 55, 89; wild dogs, 73 Austro-Asiatic people, 40, 54 Baishouzhiwang (tiger as “Lord of a hundred beasts”), 67–68 Bamboo, 50, 90, 154; allocation and management, 177– 185, 254–256; as commercial forest crop, 175; coverage in Meihuashan, 176; coverage in Southeast Uplands, 277; desertification, 175–185, 254, 256–258, 313n. 6; distribution, 154–155; ecol-

ogy, 155; edible species, 139 –140; finished products, 175; forest tenure, 177–180; harvest quotas, 127; and household economy, 129, 175–185, 254–256, 306n. 4; and household income, 176–177, 254–256; household management of, 90, 136, 155, 176–185; Pl. 10; in Longxishan, 274–275; poles, 175; processing and addition of value, 133, 256; rate of spread, 175–176; reproduction, 155; shoots as food, 139 –140; tax revenues from, 253; in Wuyishan, 270–271, 314n. 18 bamboo paper production, 62, 90, 102–104, 155–157 bamboo rats (Rhyzomis pruinosus): as food, 138; trapping of, 224 Bamianshan Nature Reserve, Hunan, 81–82 banditry (and outlaws — tufei ), 105, 303n. 12 bears (Asiatic black bear), 52, 55, 89; feeding nests, 174–175; in Wuyishan, 272 biological diversity, 34–3 7; Fujian, 35; Southeast Uplands, 35 biosphere reserve (international biosphere reserve), 7, 16, 21 bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum): as food, 112–113, 147–149; juefen (fern flour), 317; propagation, 147–150; shanfen (mountain flour), 317; world distribution, 149 bridge-temples (qiaomiao), 119, Pl. 6

332

INDEX

broadleaf forest, 49; conversion to bamboo, 175–185; and ecosystem restoration, 259 –260; in Longxishan, 273; as wildlife habitat, 164–165, 168, 169 –170; in Wuyishan, 272 Buddhism, 46; and Cultural Revolution, 205; icons, 128; temples, 119; and tourism at Matoushan (Horsehead Mountain), 267 buffer zones (in nature reserves), 15, 90, 91 burnt fields (shetian, xietian), 142, 145 Caldwell, Harry, 47, 64, 68, 69, 71–74, 77, 299n. 30 Caldwell, John, 47, 48, 64, 65 camphor (Cinnamomum camphora, zhang), 128 carnivores: evidence in Meihuashan, 172–175; montane wetland habitats and, 172. See also clouded leopards; leopards; South China tigers; tigers Central Min dialect, 39 Changbaishan Range, 36, 47 Changjiang ( Yangzi) River, 13, 35, 36, 56, 62 Changtang Nature Reserve, Tibet, 14–15 Chebaling Nature Reserve, Guangdong, 81–82 Chinese Biosphere Reserve Network (CBRN), 16; Longxishan, 273 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 24, 105–106; and forest conservation, 4; and nature, 2, 12–13, 75; and tiger problems, 1, 297n. 18; and tiger reintroduction, 266 Chinese fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata), 31, 45, 49, 50, 61, 114; accelerated harvest, 162; market value, 128–129; timber quotas, 128. See also wildlife habitat Chinese medicine, 5–6, 69 –70, 248;

and animal farming, 312n. 16; snake wine as, 271 Christian missionaries, 8, 46, 52, 70–74, 76; Catholic and Protestant, 46 Christian theology, 52, 69, 71–72, 76; animals as exempla, 298–299n. 27; and destruction of sacred groves, 295n. 2; and loss of sacred groves in Wuyishan, 202, 308n. 8 chuanshanjia. See pangolin CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), 291n. 16, 300n. 35 clouded leopard, 89; evidence in Meihuashan, 173–174 collectivization, 111–112 communes (gongshe), 112 conceptions of nature, 8; colonialism and , 7–8, 23, 70–76; CPC and, 75– 78; wildlife conservation and, 3–10, 266 Confucius, 297n. 17. See also Mandate of Heaven ( Tianming) Conifer monoculture, 49 core areas (in nature reserves), 15; Longxishan, 274, 275; Meihuashan, 90, 91; Wuyishan, 269 correlative thinking, 52, 203 crested (tufted) deer (heiji, maoguanlu), 317; appearance (morphology), 287; grassland habitat, 168, 287; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 287; pine forest habitat, 169; population, 287 crossbow. See ground-set crossbow trap Cryptomeria (Chinese cedar), 93, 98, 135; in fengshui forests, 201–204, 207, 209 –210, Pl. 12; illegal harvests and marketing, 132, Pl. 4; insect pests, 188 Cultural Revolution, 14, 46, 49, 97, 113–114; agricultural production in, 141; destruction of fengshui forests during, 204–205

INDEX

Daimao Shan Range, 20 Daiyunshan Nature Reserve, 19 –20 Daoism, 46, 68; charms and icons to ward off wildlife, 66, 242, 297n. 20, Pl. 2; and Cultural Revolution, 205; icons, 128; Laozi and Zhuangzi, 3; temples, 119 Davids, Père Armand, 74; discoveries in Wuyishan, 299n. 31 Daxinganling Range, 36, 37, 47 deforestation, 25, 48, 75, 296–297n. 13. See also illegal logging Dehua County, 62, 292–293n. 2; porcelain production and forest disturbance, 296–297n. 13; tiger hunting documentary, 77–78, 300n. 34 diet and subsistence, 137–140. See also bracken fern Dinghushan Nature Reserve, Guangdong, 14 earth-god shrines (tudimiao), 119, 281, Pl. 7; and fengshui forests, 203, 207 economic reforms. See land tenure and economic reforms ecosystem restoration, 259 –260, 313n. 7; and habitat corridors in Southeast Uplands, 276–279 elephants, 55, 293n. 8 ethnolinguistic (cultural) diversity: Meihuashan, 94–95; Southeast Uplands, 37–41 exploding bait (traps), 228 extinction, 293n. 8 famine (the Three Bad Years, 1959–1961), 112–113 fengshui (“wind-water,” geomancy), 99, 119, 281; and ancestral temples, 203, 308n. 9; compass, 199, 206; as dili (earth principles), 196; and environmental management, 200–201, 210–211; as ethnoscience, 201; in

everyday life, 206; and Hakka villages, 200; and intervillage conflict (feuds), 211–212, 309n. 13; as Kanyu, 196; masters, 197–199, 206; principles, 196–201; schools, 197; significance of term, 197; suppression of, 204–205; wenfeng (scholar peaks), 43–44, 204; yin, yang, and qi, 196–197. See also fengshui forests fengshui forests ( fengshuilin), 21, 45, 46, 92, 93, 98, 135, Pl. 12, Pl. 13; biodiversity, 207–210; and broadleaf forest habitat, Pl. 13, 168; decline in Wuyishan, 46, 294n. 17, 308n. 8; destruction of, 204–205, 208–210, 308–309n. 12, Pl. 4; and giant trees, 308n. 10; management and enforcement of rules, 206–207; offerings to trees, 308n. 11; and protected subareas, 214; in reforestation efforts, 213–214; research on, 195–215; and sacred space, 196–204; trees in fengshui theory, 199 –200, 307n. 3; typology, 201–204; and watershed management, 200–201, 210–211, 307n. 6. See also fengshui Fengyangshan-Baishanzu Nature Reserve, Zhejiang, 81–82 fern flour ( juefen, shanfen), 147; production, 148 filariasis, 245, 311n. 14 fire: and bracken fern cultivation, 147–150; effects on Meihuashan vegetation, 151–153; and rice production, 142, 145; and southern landscape, 145–146; state prohibition of, 149 –150; and swidden cultivation, 146; threats of forest arson, 240; wildfire, 150 fire walking, 151, 243 flooding, 60, 210–211, 307n. 6 frogs, 138, 305n. 1 fruit orchards (as wildlife habitat), 163–167

333

334

INDEX

Fujian Provincial Forestry Bureau, 127, 281 Fuzhou, Fujian, 20, 31, 89 Fuzhou-Eastern Min dialect, 38, 39 game species and other prey, 231–239 gazetteer records, 54–70; gaps in twentieth century, 297n. 16; limitations of, 296n. 8 golden cat, 89 Gonghe village, Meihuashan 91, 98–99 grain first policy (yiliang weigang), 49, 113; high production (gao shengchan), 141 grazing (livestock), 258–259, 260 Great Leap Forward (dayuejin), 24, 49, 112–113; destruction of fengshui forests, 204–205 ground-set crossbow trap, 54, 66, 78, Pl. 14, Pl. 15, 219 –221; nu (crossbow), 317 Guadun village, Wuyishan, 21, 46; as site of biological discoveries, 299n. 31 Guizhuping village, Meihuashan, 91, 100, Pl. 11 guoyun (fate of nation), 1 Hakka, 2, 29, 37–47; cultural ecology, 42–44; cultural values, 44, 294n. 14; and fengshui, 45–46, 200–201; gender roles, 44; in Longxishan, 273–274; relations with She, 41, 59 –61; settlement of Meihuashan, 90; settlement and vegetation change, 157–158; women and marriage, 44, 294n. 14; in Wuyishan, 270; Yuanlou (round buildings), 293n. 11 Hakka-related dialect, 39, 45 Hmong culture group, 40 Houhan Shu (Book of the Later Han Dynasty), 53

Huanghe (Yellow River), 13, 36 Huangshan Pine (Pinus taiwanensis). See pine forest Huhui (Tiger Compendium), 67–68 hunters: attitudes toward conservation, 239 –242; non-specialists, 230; specialists, 230–239, 310n. 8. See also hunting and trapping; indigenous wildlife management hunting and trapping, 216–248; customs, 11–12; and meat consumption, 138; monkeys, 310n. 10; poaching, 241, 272, 305n. 1; regulation and enforcement, 229 –230, 242; rituals, 245–247; wild boar, 227–228. See also arrowshooting trap; game species and other prey; muzzle loader; pitfall trap; shotguns and rifles; snare traps; steel leghold trap; tiger trap hunting dogs (tugou), 224, 226–227 Hupingshan Nature Reserve, Hunan, 80, 82 illegal logging, 129; control of, 260–261; in Wuyishan, 272, 313n. 8 Indian muntjac (Common muntjac, chiji, Muntiacus muntjak, shanzhang), 317; appearance (morphology), 289; distribution, 288–289; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 288–289; population, 289 indigenous wildlife management, 11–12, 216–230; decline of 12–13, 75; definition, 217; and religion, 73, tigers, 65–67 Indomalayan Realm, 34 IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature, World Conservation Union), 16, 29, 34 Jinggangshan Nature Reserve, Jiangxi, 81–82

INDEX

Jiulianshan Nature Reserve, Jiangxi, 81–82 Jungar Basin, 36 Kangpusa (Carry the Buddha) ritual, 212–213 Kill the Tiger Movement (Dahuyundong), 76–78 Koehler, Gary, 21, 79 –80, 121 Kunlun Range, 36 labor outmigration, 129 landlords (dizhu), 109, 110, 111, 303n. 3 land reform, 109 –111 land tenure, 25; bamboo and, 177–180, 254–256; collectives and, 17; economic reforms and, 175, 177–178; land reform (1950s) and, 109 –111, 306n. 5; nature reserves and, 16–18, 250 Leopards (bao), 32, 52, 89; evidence in Meihuashan region, 175; and Reeves’s muntjac population, 287. See also clouded leopard Liancheng County, 97 lianli ( linli). See pangolin Loess Plateau, 36, 47 Longgui Village, Meihuashan, 91, 101–102; boundary dispute, 211; economic primacy, 131–132; timber management, 128, 304n. 7 Longxishan Nature Reserve, Fujian, 20–23, 39, 273–276; bamboo management and trade, 274–275; economic diversification, 275; Hakkas in, 273–274; household economy in, 275–276 Longyan Municipality, 20, 48; average income, 131 Longyan Prefecture, 20, 31 Majiaping village, Meihuashan, 91, 100–101, Pl. 5; poverty, 131

Man culture group, 40, 53 Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), 2, 65, 87; and tigers, 298n. 24 Mangshan Nature Reserve, Hunan, 81–82 Mao Zedong, 282; and Dazhai, 314n. 20; and feudal superstition, 214 Marco Polo, 70; and tigers, 297n. 23, 299n. 29 Marks, Robert B., 103, 146, 303n. 11 masked palm civet (guozili, Paguma larvata); 229, 231, 234, 237, 311n. 12 Masson pine (maweisong, Pinus massoniana), 49, 152, 156, 169, 265 mega-reserves, 24 Meihua deer (meihualu, Sika, Cervus nippon), 81, 265 Meihuashan Forestry Department Office, 127 Meihuashan Nature Reserve, 19 –29, 39, 45, 52, 81, 89 –95; co-management prospects, 252–253, 312n. 3; tiger breeding and reintroduction, 264–267 Miao minority nationality, 40, 53, 54; as tiger hunters, 219 Ministry of Forestry, 10, 79. See also State Forestry Administration minority nationalities, 9, 17. See also Dai; Miao; She; Yao Min River, 20, 89, 94 Minxi Region (Southwest Fujian), 301n. 2 mixed forests (broadleaf and needleleaf ), 165, 169 mongoose (crab-eating mongoose, Herpestes urva), 62, 188, 231, 235, 299n. 30 monkeys (macaques), 52, 55; bamboo shoot depredation, 170; crop predation, 144, 151; hunting, 310n. 10 montane shrub and grassland, 156,

335

336

INDEX

157–158, 168–169; restoration, 259 –260 montane wetland: in Meihuashan lore, 304 (note on the epigraph); protection and restoration of, 259 –260; as wildlife habitat, 163–165 Mountain Spirit (Shanshen), 245 muntjacs. See crested (tufted) deer; Indian muntjac; Reeve’s muntjac mushrooms, Pl. 11; commercial production and export, 130, 192–194, 262–263 muzzle loader, 77, Pl. 18, 225, 310n. 6; in gun trap, 223, 225 mythical animals, 51, 295n. 1. See also weretigers Nanlingshan Range, 36, 79 Nanman culture group, 40 Nanping Prefecture, 20, 31, 48 Nationalist Party (Guomindang), 105–106 National Natural Forest Protection Project, 13 natural village (zirancun), 95 Nature Conservancy, The, 7 Nature Reserve Law (1994), 15 nature reserves: history in China, 11, 14–16; and other protected areas in Taiwan, 291n. 11; of Southeast Uplands, 276–279. See also Daiyunshan Nature Reserve; Longxishan Nature Reserve; Meihuashan Nature Reserve; Wuyishan Nature Reserve NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 5, 7 North China Plain, 36, 47 Northern Min dialect, 39, 45 opium addiction, 105 Palearctic Realm, 34 pandas, 7, 17

pangolin (Chinese pangolin, Manis pentadactyla, chuanshanjia, lianli, dilong), 1–3, 317; chants, 1, 246–247; chuanshanjia, 291n. 1; 311n. 15; as mountain fish, 245; trapping and poaching, 237–238 Panhu (She and Yao Dog-god), 293n. 13 Pengmin. See shed people pesticides and fungicides, 188–191, 306nn. 6, 7 pigs (domestic): and pork consumption, 137 pine forest: and ecosystem restoration, 259 –260; in reforestation, 152–153; and vegetation history, 152–153, 156–158; as wildlife habitat, 164–165, 169. See also Masson pine pitfall trap, 221–223 production brigades (shengchan dadui), 112 production teams (shengchandui), 112 protected area management strategies, 8–9; in Annapurna, 313n. 4; in China, 15–16, 249; co-management, 249, 281; consultation, 249; indigenous management, 11–12, 249; Manchu hunting enclosures, 11; in Meihuashan, 249 –254; unified administration (Longxishan), 273, 276; and village-level democracy, 250, 312n. 2. See also protected subareas protected subareas (baohuxiaoqu), 90, 257 Qinghai-Xizang (Tibetan) Plateau, 36 Qinling Range, 36 Quan, Li, 300n. 42 Reeve’s muntjac (Chinese muntjac, huangji, Muntiacus reevesi, shangzhang), 317; appearance (morphology), 286; bamboo forest habitat,

INDEX

170; broadleaf forest habitat, 170; damage to orchards, 167; fallow rice paddy habitat, 167, 168; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 286–287; montane wetland habitat, 164; population, 286–287; signs of predation on, 175 religious rituals. See fire walking; kangpusa rice, 31, 92–93; ash fertilizer, 142; consumption, 138–139; environmental impacts of, 141, 185–191; hybrid varieties, 142–143; paddy cultivation, 141; production in household economy, 129, 186–187; and rat poisons, 187–188; rice wine, 138; self-sufficiency, 186–187; sustainable production of, 262; terrace abandonment, 144–145, 190–191, Pl. 9; and village population, 103. See also pesticides and fungicides; rodenticides; wildlife habitat roads, 123–126; and bamboo production, 180–185; dirt roads, 123, 124; mountain footpaths, 123–124; paved roads, 123–125; reserve contributions to, 253; tractor roads, 123; village economy and, 132–133 rodenticides, 187–188 sacred geography (as centripetal force), 211–215 Sangang village, Wuyishan, 21, 46 Sanming Prefecture, 20, 31, 48 Save China’s Tigers (Organization), 300n. 42 Schaller, George, 7, 34 Scott, James C., 24 serow (Capricornis sumatraensis, shanyang, sumenling), 317; appearance (morphology), 288; broadleaf forest habitat, 288; grassland habitat, 168, 288; habitat survey, 164; life history and habits, 288; pine forest habitat, 169;

religious significance, 243–244, 311n. 13 shamanism, 73, 243 Shanghang county, 97 She (minority nationality), 2, 29, 40–41, 53, 54, 317; dog-god (Panhu) worship, 293n. 13, 309n. 4, 310n. 7; as swidden cultivators, 305n. 3; as tiger hunters, 66, 219 –220, 309n. 3. See also minority nationalities shed people (pengmin), 2, 59 –63; in Meihuashan, 296n. 13, 302n. 9; similarities with modern itinerants, 304n. 8 shotguns and rifles, 225–226 Sichuan Basin, 47 snakes, 146, 243, 244 snake wine, 271 snare traps: bamboo bow trap, Pl. 16; for bamboo rats, 223–225; stick snare trap, Pl. 17; types, 225 South China tiger (Huananhu, P. t. amoyensis), 51–86, 89; captive breeding and reintroduction program, 81–86, Pl. 3, 251, 264–267; conflicts with humans, 53–65; gene pool, 84–85; grassland habitat, 168; historical management of, 65–67; as original subspecies, 295n. 3; reserves for, 81–82; shot in Meihuashan, 121; signs discovered in Meihuashan, 172, 306n. 3; signs discovered in southern China, 80, 300n. 37; studies of conflicts with humans, 295n. 7 Southeast Uplands Region, 18, 29, 30–46, 292n. 1; biogeography, 34–37; climate, 32; cultural geography, 37–46; habitat fragmentation in, 276–278; land degradation in, 47–50, 61; soils, 32; vegetation, 33–34 Southern Min (Minnan) dialect, 39

337

338

INDEX

Sowerby, Arthur de C., 38, 47, 48, 73, 74 spirit cats, 299n. 30 State Forestry Administration (former Chinese Ministry of Forestry), 14, 16, 81; and South China tiger recovery, 264–267. See also Chinese Ministry of Forestry steel leghold traps, 228; and clouded leopards, 172, 173; and tigers, 172 Stevens, Stan, ix, 249, 313n. 4 sweet potatoes: in boar traps, 223; for subsistence, 139, 305n. 2 Taipingliao village, Meihuashan, 91, 101, Pl. 13; population peak, 103–104; population decline, 104–105 Taklimakan Desert, 36 Taoyuandong Nature Reserve, Hunan, 81–82 Tarim Basin, 36 Tea, 31, 62, 294n. 15 Tianshan Range, 36, 37, 47 Tigers, 1–3, 51–86; baishouzhiwang (king of a hundred beasts), 317; blue tigers (melanic tigers), 62, 71, 297n. 14; cosmology and, 56, 65, 66, 67–70; deference to officials, 297n. 23, 298n. 24; and good luck, 298n. 26; habitat mosaic in India, 299n. 33; hu (tiger), 317; used for hunting, 299n. 29; Indian tiger (P. t. tigris), 53; Indochinese tiger (P. t. corbetti), 53, 85; linguistic vagueness, 311n. 11; man-eating, 63, 64, 72, 297n. 15; Siberian tiger (P. t. altaica), 53; Sumatran tiger (P. t. sumatraensis), 85; talismans, 68–69; Pl. 2; tiger cult, 59; tiger suicide (zibi), 66; virtue of, 298n. 25; white tigers, 56, 198, 215, 296n. 10. See also South China tiger tiger trap (tiger closet—huchu), 66, Pl. 1, 218–219; decline of, 220

Tilson, Ron, 84– 85, 300n. 42 timber management: quotas, 127, 128. See also illegal logging tourism: Meihuashan, 267–268; Wuyishan, 268, 271 traps and weapons, 76, 216–230. See also exploding bait; ground-set crossbow; muzzle loaders; pitfall trap; snare traps; steel leghold trap; tiger trap typhoons, 66 UNMAB (United Nations Man and the Biosphere Program), 7, 16, 21; Wuyishan, 270 vegetables: commercial production, 192–194; household production of, 140; subsistence and diet, 139 –140. See also sweet potatoes vegetation: forest coverage in Fujian and Taiwan, 294n. 20; patterns in Meihuashan, 171; patterns in Southeast Uplands, 277; synoptic view of anthropogenic change, 156–158, 161–162 village economic development (since 1949), 117–126; and changing house types, 117–119; Pl. 5; comparison with other regions, 130; and hydropower, 119 –123; and income, 131–133, 304n. 10; and roads, 123–126; and telecommunications, 126 village histories: abandonment, 301n. 3; Meihuashan, 90, 95–102 village land use, 92–93, 135–137 village population change (Meihuashan): current, 114–117, 303n. 5; and family planning policy, 116, 304n. 6; Qing dynasty peak, 102–104; 302n. 8; twentieth-century decline, 104–106, 115–116 village trade patterns, 97

INDEX

weretigers, 51 Western Min Hakka dialect, 39 wild boar (shanzhu, Sus scrofa, yezhu), 52, 55, 317; appearance (morphology), 285; bamboo forest habitat, 170; broadleaf forest habitat, 170; crop predation, 144, 151, 286; fallow rice paddy habitat, 167, 168; grassland habitat, 168; hunting, 227–228; life history and habits, 285–286; pine forest habitat, 169 wildlife conservation: history, 3–10; recruiting local people, 263–264, 313n. 10; restoration and protection of corridors, 276–280. See also hunters, attitudes toward conservation; indigenous wildlife management wildlife conservation laws, 10; history, 10–14 wildlife habitat, assessment in Meihuashan, 163–172; bamboo forests, 170; broadleaf forests >1,000 m, 168; broadleaf forests <1,000 m, 169–170; Chinese fir (Cunninghamia), 166–167; fruit orchards, 167; mixed pine-broadleaf forests, 169; montane grassland, 168; montane wetlands, 164–166; pine forests, 169; rice paddies, 167 wildlife products: Foreign Export Departments (waimaozhan), 13, 78; rural trade, 13–14, 78, 237–238, 248; U.S. trade sanctions against (1994), 5. See also Chinese medicine Wolong Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province, 17, 282 wolves, 52, 55

World Bank, 7, 292n. 22; in Wuyishan, 314n. 9 World Wildlife Fund (Worldwide Fund for Nature), 7, 19, 21, 79, 84, 291n. 16 Wulingman culture group, 40 Wuyi-Daiyun Range, 20, 30–31, 85 Wuyishan Nature Reserve, Fujian, 20–23, 39, 268–273; bamboo management and marketing, 270–271; ecological conditions, 270–273; economic diversification, 271; fengshui decline, 294nn. 16, 17; household income, 270; illegal timber cutting, 272; poaching, 272; settlement history, 294n. 15; tea production, 294nn. 15, 17; village populations, 270, 314n. 10 Xiamen, Fujian, 20, 31, 78 Xianyou-Putian Dialect, 39 Xiaoxinganling Range, 36, 47 Yancheng Nature Reserve, Jiangsu, 292n. 23 Yao (Minority Nationality), 40, 53, 54; dog-god (panhu) worship, 293n. 13; swidden cultivation, 146; as tiger hunters, 219 Yellowstone Model, 4, 249 Yihuang Nature Reserve, Jiangxi, 81–82 Yue culture group, 40, 42, 44 Yunnan province, 34, 36, 37, 47, 53, 292n. 21 Zhangzhou, Fujian, 89, 267

339

About the Author

Chris Coggins is an assistant professor of Geography and Asian Studies at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1985 with a B.A. in East Asian Studies he studied biogeography and cultural geography at Louisiana State University, where he earned an M.S. in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1998. He has published articles on his research in China in the Geographical Review, the Journal of Cultural Geography, and the Proceedings of the New England–St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society. He lives with his wife and two sons in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.