Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland by Ruth Rogaski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland by Ruth Rogaski Yulia Frumer Ruth Rogaski. Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. viii + 454 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-226-80965-6). Knowing Manchuria is a journey into a mysterious frontier—lands bounded by mighty rivers, vanishing mountains, and delicate flowers, and traversed by death, disease, and desolation. By inviting the reader to join exiles, chroniclers, naturalists, surveyors, medics, and the author herself, the book opens the door to the landscape of knowing. Describing historical actors’ experience of the multilayered environments they’ve encountered, Rogaski shows how “different modes of deploying the human senses” (p. 14) produced knowledge of the region we now know as Manchuria. Spanning almost four hundred years, the collective travelogue relies on a variety of source, the most curious of which are poems, written by people of different statuses and ethnicities. Poems, according to Rogaski, reflect a “kinesthetic sense of encounter” (p. 33) by allowing the reader to experience how it felt to be immersed in particular environments. Together with Rogaski, we follow a seventeenth-century poet, Wu Zhaoqian, exiled by the Qing into an imposing and imposed-upon environment “without names, without categories, without history” (p. 51). We join the entourage of the Kangxi emperor on his quest to find ancestral dragons, and experience the journey simultaneously through the politicized chronicling of the emperor’s scholarly secretary, Gao Shiqi, and the detached measurements of the Jesuit astronomer, Ferdinand Verbiest. Rogaski leads us on an absurd mission to find a hidden mountain, and we accompany a local forager, Aesun, whose skills allowed him to see and know things that escaped the eighteenth century learned Chosŏn surveying expedition. In the nineteenth century, we trail Karl Maximowicz, a Baltic-German botanist in the service of the Russian empire. Thrown into the area by global political turmoil, Maximowicz took advantage of his misfortune to collect, dissect, categorize, and attach his name to plants unknown to him but well-known to the local population. While grim political realities framed the [End Page 160] dynamics of knowing through the book, the chapter on multi-national investigation of fossils of Jehol turns even darker—literally—showing how a knowledge of fossils informed the exploitation of coal resources and of local communities forced to toil in coal mines. We are then reminded of a different kind of “entanglement of the human and non-human environments” (p. 232)—the occupation of the human host by a deadly plague bacillus. If earlier in the book the encounter with rivers, mountains, and flowers feels romantic—even if harsh—chapters six and seven describe the ghastly work of identifying deadly disease. Following the work of Cambridge trained Chinese doctor Wu Lien-teh, the Japanese medics in the infamous 731 unit that conducted human experimentation for the purpose of developing bioweapons, and the Maoist scientists who sought to redeem the region from denigrating label of “plagueland,” Rogaski shows that even within the seemingly same mode of inquiry individual perspectives produced different kinds of knowledge. The book ends with an exploration of knowing by means of labor—labor with newfangled machines, labor with bare hands, labor that leaves traces of fertile soil on human bodies. Together, these episodes show how the object and the objective of seeing/knowing determines the ways of knowing. They also reveal that environments circumscribe the bodily skills necessary for knowing and that the same landscape conceals multiple environments. Finally, the chapters show that even the same people—like the Russian botanist Karl Maximowicz or the Japanese mining specialist Yamagata Miyuki—are able to see and know things differently when they look for different things and employ a different sensorium. Throughout the book, Rogaski generously names multiple scholars who worked on intertwining histories of knowledge, environment, and bodies. Readers interested in Wu Lien Teh’s work on plague will find more information in Wayne Soon’s Global Medicine in China,1 and those with further interests in the politics of field explorations will benefit from Miriam Kadia’s Into the Field.2 Those inspired to know...