The Shed People and the Opening of the Yangzi Highlands

Abstract

The ranges of the Nanling mountain system lie strewn across the provinces south of the Yangzi, wrapping the land tightly in their rumpled and threadbare folds. These are old mountains, their wrinkled slopes patched with brush and blotched by the raw red scars of erosion. Even so, they dominate the environment of the region and loom large in the lives and memories of the people who live among them. It has not always been so. Until the late sixteenth century most parts of the Yangzi highlands were the regular haunts only of hunters and hermits, of Daoist priests and desperate brigands, and of the few poor peasants who crept up from the neighboring valleys to cut firewood and dig for medicinal roots. The mountains were a different place then, their misty heights covered with tall stands of virgin timber broken by occasional grassy meadows, through which roamed deer, tigers, and (or so local opinion had it) the mysterious unicorn. Wild, strange, and barely