China Water and Soil History Network

Central Intelligence Agency maps of "Communist China" from the Library of Congress. Follow links for higher resolution images. Communist China, precipitation (1967). Note the charts showing the seasonal distribution of precipitation for selected sites in particular regions. https://www.loc.gov/resou...

Access these fascinating maps (and a few others) on the European Soil Data Centre website. Geological Map of China (1989). Soil Map of the People's Republic of China. [Revised Version Based on the FAO/Unesco Soil Map of the World] (1990). China. Thematic Map. Agriculture, Vegetation, Topographical M...

This StoryMap contains a set of maps and images that supplement my article "'Water Has Aroused the Girls' Hearts': Gendering Water and Soil Conservation in 1950s China" in the journal Past and Present. You can access a pdf version of the article here.

This StoryMap accompanies the article "Transform the Land, Train the Youth: Water and Soil Conservation Teams and State-Induced Migration in mid-1960s China," which I published in a special edition of the Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 on state and migration in Chinese history. The article is ope...

Lanzhou, Gansu, 1941 These StoryMaps contain photographs depicting agriculture, the environment, and land use in Gansu 甘肃 and Qinghai 青海 provinces from 1932-1940. The images come from the Carter D. Holton Collection at the Harvard-Yenching Library. Photographs have been geotagged based on the descri...

Future Dam Site in the Jing River Valley. Source: Sigurd Eliassen, Dragon Wang's River (New York: J. Day Co., 1957). This StoryMap uses a series of historical photographs to illustrate the transformation of a diversion dam on the Jing River from its initial planning and construction in the early 193...

Loess Terraces. Pingliang, Gansu. This StoryMap contains a series of photographs depicting agriculture, the environment, and land use in Northwest China's Shaanxi 陕西, Gansu 甘肃, and Ningxia 宁夏 provinces in 1936. The images come from a photograph album from Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr.'s trip to northw...

Picture of Mao on wall of former school building in Gounan village, Baishui County. In April 2020 I published an article titled "The Contradictions of Conservation: Fighting Erosion in Mao-Era China, 1953–66" in Environmental History that discussed water and soil conservation campaigns in Shaanxi Pr...

This ArcGIS Storymap and this Storymap contain more than 100 photographs taken by Walter C. Lowdermilk in 1943 during his travels in Gansu 甘肃 and Shaanxi 陕西. On the road from Baoji 宝鸡 to Shuangshipu 双石铺, Shaanxi. Mules and wagons transporting timber and fuelwood to market from the Qinling 秦岭 Mountai...

This ArcGIS Story Map contains nearly 100 photographs that Lowdermilk took in 1943 during his travels in Gansu 甘肃 and Shaanxi 陕西. Because this set features some well-known sites, many of which I have visited, the task of finding more recent images for comparative purposes has proven easier than with...

I have finished another ArcGIS map containing a second set of photographs that Lowdermilk took in Sichuan Province 四川省 at the conclusion of his 1943 survey. Walter C. Lowdermilk Sichuan Photographs 2 I also did another quick "virtual repeat photograph" experiment using images with captions containin...

In my previous post, I mentioned that attempts to do historical-current repeat photography to facilitate environmental history research might benefit from crowdsourcing. After Stevan Harrell brought that post to the attention of his colleague at the University of Washington, Daniel Abramson, Dan pro...

Many of the images in the Walter C. Lowdermilk collection at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library come from Huajialing 华家岭 in Gansu Province 甘肃省's Tongwei County 通渭县, where Lowdermilk took numerous pictures of terraced slopes and gullies. You can view a set of those photographs, which also contains some i...

These two maps contain over 100 photographs taken in Qinghai 青海 by Walter C. Lowdermilk during his 1943 survey of northwest China. In addition to some truly breathtaking vistas, the first set features images of the Yellow River, active sand dunes, Xi'ning 西宁, Qinghai Lake 青海湖, forest plantations, be...

Click the link below to view an ArcGIS map containing 60 photographs taken by Lowdermilk in August 1943 while travelling in Northwest China's Gansu corridor (河西走廊). Walter C. Lowdermilk Gansu Corridor Photographs I am wondering about the stele pictured in the photo above, but have not researched the...

I have finished another ArcGIS map containing the photos that Lowdermilk took in Sichuan Province 四川省 before and during the first leg of his 1943 trip from southwest to northwest China. You can access the map via the link below. Walter C. Lowdermilk Sichuan Province Photographs 1 This photo of Lowde...

Almost a decade ago, I published an article in the Journal of Asian Studies (download it here) on migration, land use, and environmental change in a place in north-central Shaanxi Province 陕西省 called Huanglongshan 黄龙山. During World War II, China's Nationalist government resettled thousands of people...

The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley holds a collection of nearly 800 historical photographs taken by the American soil and water conservation expert Walter C. Lowdermilk  in 1943 during his investigative tour of northwest and southwest China. These images document the agra...

The China Soil and Water History Network features research outcomes and source materials related to the history of land use, environmental change, and water and soil conservation in northwest China’s Loess Plateau region from the early-twentieth century to the present. The goal of the project is to...