One of the earliest descriptions of the vegetation of China is by Li Tao-yuan, fifth century AD. He travelled the whole region from Vietnam to the far deserts of Sinkiang:
. . . In the Hwang-Ho valley, he noted thickets of Corylus and other shrubs; pasture; plains covered with miles of Ephedra; forests of elms; pines; Juniperus growing on cliffs and on the peaks of distant mountains; and mixed hardwood forests.
Farther south, in the upper Yangtze Valley, he noted bamboo thickets; Cupressus on rocky cliffs; and in the gorges, tall forests with numerous monkeys. In the lower Yangtze Valley he found oak forests, evergreen forests . . . in northern Viet-nam he found dense forests and immense swamps that swarmed with herds of elephants and rhinoceros.aa
Early T’ang dynasty China (618–906 AD) with its 50 million people had a very energetic economy. The balance was already clearly shifting away from a “world of human beings winning a living from a vast wild landscape,” to a condition of wild habitats shrinking before a relentlessly expanding agricultural society.
The grounds of temples became the last refuges of huge old trees; in fact the present-day reconstruction of original forest cover in north China is done to a great extent by plotting the distribution of relict stands on temple grounds. In the higher elevations and in the remoter regions some forest remains to this day, but other than temples, the grounds of the tombs of emperors and royal hunting preserves were about the only areas firmly set aside and protected. The importance of watershed protection was understood and sometimes enforced by policy; the emperor Hsüan Tsung forbade wood cutting on Mount Lim, near the capital. But the forests were slowly nibbled away, without any national forest policy ever coming into being. The history of environment in China can be understood in terms of the frog in hot water. A frog tossed into a pan of boiling water, it is said, will jump right out. A frog placed in a pan of cold water over a slow flame will not leap out, and soon it’s too late.
That tool of the poet and painter, the inkstick (even more essential to the Chinese administration), was responsible for much deforestation.
The best source of black ink for the clerks and scholars of the nation was soot, made by burning pine. Even before T’ang times, the ancient pines of the mountains of Shantung had been reduced to carbon, and now the busy brushes of the vast T’ang bureaucracy were rapidly bringing baldness to the T’ai-hang mountains between Shansi and Hopei.bb
The original climax forest of China south of the Huai River was an evergreen broadleaf forest. These were trees of the laurel family such as cinnamon and sassafras, plus chinquapins and liquidambers. Most of the wooded landscape to be seen in south China today is secondary growth. Pines and brush replace deciduous hardwoods after logging or fire. Writing of the lower Yangtze, C.W. Wang notes:
The lower elevations, especially the alluvial plains, have long been under cultivation, and the natural vegetation has been altered almost beyond recognition. The existing vegetation outside of cultivated areas consists mostly of pine and hardwood mixed stands, Pinus massoniana and Cunninghamia plantations and scrubby vegetation.cc
The great plain that reaches from the lower Yangtze River north almost to Manchuria has no original plant life left except salt-adapted plants on the coast. It was once a dense forest abundant with beeches, maples, catalpa, chestnut, walnut, elm, and ash.
Planted farm woodlots are common, however:
Contrary to general belief, the Plain, except for the large cities, is not only self-sufficient in its wood supply, but it produces poplar logs for match factories, and exports Paulownia wood to Japan.dd
The forests of northeast Manchuria are, or were, the last large-scale virgin timberlands in China. In 1913 Arthur Sowerby wrote:
But the forest! Time and again it riveted one’s attention as its millions and millions of trees appeared, clothing the hills, ridges upon ridges, to the horizon. There was no break in the sea of green; there was no gap visible.ee
It is thought that tigers were originally a northern animal, and that some of them moved south, ultimately as far as what is now Bali. The Siberian tiger, with its whiter stripes and longer fur, is the largest. It was considered the Master of the Wild by many Siberian tribal people. There are stories of mountain shaman types, “immortals” and priests who were on friendly terms with tigers. Shih K’o’s whimsical tenth-century painting shows a Ch’an monk napping over the back of a tiger that is also asleep.
Ranging from the subarctic to the tropics, the fauna of China was varied and rich. An east-west line can be drawn following the Tsin-ling mountains and the Huai River that serves as a rough boundary between northern-Asian animals and the animals that range up from the south. The Siberian roe deer comes as far south as these mountains as do the yak, wild horse, and wapiti.
Elephants were widespread in China in early civilized times, and wandered from the south as far north as the plains of the Yellow River. Macaque monkeys are now pretty much in the south, but must have ranged north because they are still found wild in Japan in all the islands except Hokkaido. The Indian Muntjac never goes north of central Yunnan. Cats, lynxes, wolves, martens, bears, weasels, wild pigs, antelopes, sika deer, goral, serow, goats, and many other small mammals mingle through both zones. Bird life can be broken into regions too, but there is obviously more mingling than with mammals. Ducks which winter in India or Vietnam may be summering in Siberia.
One guide to environmental practice in China was a kind of farmers’ annual schedule, called the Yüeh Ling (“Monthly Ordinances”). In describing the timing of appropriate tasks and preparations through the cycle of the year, it takes a conservationist tone, with “warning against gathering eggs, destroying nests, and hunting young or pregnant animals.”ff It allows an autumn hunting season. The teachings of Buddhism were never accepted by the Chinese to the point that total prohibition of taking life could be made law, although Emperor Hstian Tsung actually tried. At one time he even issued an edict banning the killing of dogs and chickens:
Dogs, as guardians and defenders, and chickens, which watch for daybreak, have utility for mankind comparable to that of other domestic animals. We may rightly make the virtue of loving life extend everywhere, and, from now on, the slaughter and killing of these will in no case be allowed.gg
Such an edict was unenforceable. So with the shrinking forests, animal and bird life also declined. The pressure on certain species was intensified by their real or supposed use for medicine. All parts of the tiger were considered of medical value. The horn of the rhinoceros was prized as material for a beautiful wine cup, and the powdered horn greatly valued as an antidote to poison. So the rhinoceros is no longer found in China, and illegal poaching today on rhinoceros preserves in India is for the Chinese market. Wild elephants “trampled the cultivated fields of Honan and Hupeh in the fifth Christian century”hh and the tribal Man people of the south domesticated them, training them even to perform at parties for Chinese envoys. Elephants also are gone now. A more widespread animal, the Sika deer, has almost been exterminated for the trade in antlers-in-velvet, also of value as medicine. “Economic interest also prevented the protection of kingfishers, whose feathers were used in jewelry, of muskdeer, which provided a popular scent for ladies of fashion, of martens, whose furs gave style to martial hats, and of alligators, whose tough hides were used to cover drums.”ii
Dr. Edward Schafer’s paper on “The Conservation of Nature under the T’ang Dynasty” sums it up:
All of the psychological conditions necessary to produce sound policy for the protection of nature, both as an economic and esthetic resource, were present in T’ang times. But though enlightened monarchs issued edicts, conformable to the best morality of their times, these were ignored by their successors. In short, there was no permanent embodiment of these advanced ideas in constitutional forms. And so they were ultimately ineffective.jj
Moreover, the common sense of farmers embodied in the Yüeh Ling (of which Schafer says, “It appears that the Yüeh Ling was a more important source of moral conservationism in that period than the doctrines of either the Buddhists or the Daoists” kk) was often directly contradicted by the official class:
Sometimes even city parks and avenues suffered because of the demand for fuel. For example, certain officials in the capital city devised a scheme to finance donatives for the imperial troops, at a time when firewood was dear and silk was cheap, by cutting down the trees which embellished the city, and exchanging the wood for textiles at great profit.ll
The environmental good sense of the people was not unrelated to their ongoing folk religion and the power of countryside shamanesses. Just as wild habitat was being steadily cut back, the ancient local shrines of the people were being gradually demolished by Confucian officials:
A notable example is that of Ti Jen-chieh—in our own century transformed in the sagacious Judge Dee of van Gulik’s detective novels—who after an inspection tour immediately south of the Yangtze in the seventh century, was gratified to report that he had destroyed seventeen hundred unauthorized shrines in that region.mm
And in the eleventh century, the brilliant scientist-humanist-official Shen Kua experimented with making ink out of naturally-occurring petroleum, called “stone oil,” saying:
The black color was as bright as lacquer and could not be matched by pinewood resin ink . . . I think this invention of mine will be widely adopted. The petroleum is abundant and more will be formed in the earth while supplies of pine-wood may be exhausted. Pine forests in Ch’i and Lu have already become sparse. This is now happening in the Tai Hang mountains. All the woods south of the Yangtze and west of the capital are going to disappear in time if this goes on, yet the ink-makers do not yet know the benefit of petroleum smoke.nn
He was one thousand years ahead of his time.
a C.W. Wang. The Forests of China, Marla Moors Cabot Foundation Publications Series #5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961) p. 19
b Edward Schafer. “The Conservation of Nature Under the T’ang Dynasty,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 5. (1962) p. 300
c Wang, p. 103
d Wang, p. 85
e Wang, p. 35.
f Schafer 1962, p. 289
g Schafer 1962, p. 303
h Edward H. Schafer. The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: UC Press, 1967) p. 224
i Schafer 1962, pp. 301–2
j Schafer 1962, p. 308
k Schafer 1962, p. 289
l Schafer 1962, p. 299
m Edward H. Schafer. The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: UC Press, 1973) pp. 10–11
n Sir Joseph Needham. Science and Civilization in China, Vol. III (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959) p. 609