Of Minds, Morals, and Methods: Combining Moral Meteorology and Disaster Relief in Historiography of China’s Disaster Management

Abstract

In this working paper, I argue that disaster management in high Qing period can be better understood by simultaneously considering the historiographies of how governing elites understood disasters at the metaphysical level and the administration of disaster relief. During High Qing late imperial China, the regime encountered rapid changes in population, economy, and environment. Following how environmental historian Mark Elvin describes the prevalent ideology that guided Chinese governing elites on implicating human conduct with the manifestation of disasters as “moral meteorology”, I link it to the granary system so as to underscore how these two related but separate streams of historiographical work are inextricably related. I further discuss the role of ever-normal granary (changping cang, 常平仓) in disaster relief administration, nothing how its purpose went beyond solely grain provision in the wake of disasters. In the paper, I also point out that the multipurpose granary system, with its intensive demands for resources and attention, finally collapsed by the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, I propose that the approach of combining intellectual and administrative historiographies offer a useful general framework to examine the historiography of disaster management beyond the high Qing period or imperial China.