“Where Treasures Arise:” Mining Knowledge, Mining Sites, and the Spatial Rationalities of Mineral Resources in Qing China

Abstract

A comparison between nineteenth-century Europe and Qing-dynasty Yunnan reveals how mining knowledge shaped ways of understanding and organizing mineral resources in space. In Europe, stratigraphic geology, prospecting technologies, and mapmaking generated new rationales to understand mineral resources and their distribution in space, a process entangled with the rise of the nation-state and its exercise of power over the qualities of its territory. In Qing China, due to the lack of modern mining and geological knowledge and the gulf between miners and officials, mineral resources and their distribution were understood purely by reference to mining sites, in particular chang (廠 mine, literally “factory”). Territorial administration, taxation, and transportation were the primary mechanisms utilized to organize these mining sites, and through them governments and officials controlled information on mineral resources and envisaged their spatial distribution. The map was not an authoritative tool for presenting mineral resources in space but instead demonstrated more the Qing's hegemony and local governance than the pursuit of precision. Drawing upon Margo Huxley's insights into spatial rationality, this study problematizes space in the epistemic understanding of mineral resources in a pre-modern context and reassesses historical implications of the legibility of nature for political rationalities governing natural things.