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Abstract

This dissertation examines the dynamics of knowledge production and transcultural interactions in Ming-Qing China and Tokugawa Japan through the lens of famine plant manuals, i.e. writings that center on edible plants for use in times of food shortages. I argue that this genre was created out of the specific socioeconomic settings in pre-modern East Asia where food shortage proved to be a recurring theme, by a transnational epistemic community that shared interests in the natural world and concern for governmental affairs. My inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of knowledge transformation and cultural interconnections: in the historical world of the Sinosphere where the learned elites shared a “high culture” written language and a rich literary tradition, most visibly embodied by the Sinitic script, concepts were expressed in words that did not cross borders via translation, but via their recontextualization and co-articulation in new socio-cultural and linguistic realities. Drawing evidence from administrative manuals, medical texts, local gazetteers and private notes, my findings suggest four main points concerning the shuffling classifications and hierarchies of famine food knowledge. First, despite that state intervention in famine relief was framed as Confucian signs of benevolent rule, famine plant manuals were created as responses to the limitations of the governments’ capacities to implement relief campaigns. Second, although derived from the bencao (materia medica) genre, famine plant manuals were largely devoid of medical interest and thus provided an alternative approach to natural history. The understanding of famine foods was shaped by the accessible natural resources and by epistemic interconnections within pre-modern East Asia, and such understanding also transformed the planning and utilization of the natural world, generating new knowledge about it. Third, although the increasing availability of textual knowledge about famine plants benefitted from the flourishing commercial publishing industry, the production and circulation of famine plant manuals featured a not-for-profit logic, underlined as a benevolent and charitable cause. Fourth, famine plant manuals negotiated between diverse knowledge fields, with statecraft and bencao in particular. On the one hand, they were tailored to governmental purposes and became absorbed in an all-encompassing famine relief discourses. On the other hand, they broadened the range of objects of investigation in the study of the natural world and suggested a de-medicalized approach.