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Abstract

This dissertation examines the Ming Empire’s rule in Yunnan through the dual lenses of technology and transculturality, with water control serving as its central focus. It argues that shuili 水利—conventionally translated as “water conservancy”—functioned not as a neutral technical domain but as a historically specific technological culture: a configuration of material practices, technical skills, labor organization, cultural norms, and moral meanings forged in the irrigated landscapes of Jiangnan and subsequently projected as a universalizing template for imperial rule.

The study traces the history of this shuili during the eleventh-century Song reforms, matured through Southern Song land reclamation and waterwork construction, and traveled to Yunnan as part of early Ming’s colonization project. There, it encountered resilient indigenous hydrosocial orders centered on hillside watertanks, fragmented landholding, and ritual authority vested in dragons, Buddhist acharyas, and lineage networks. Rather than a simple imposition of “Chinese” techniques, Yunnan's hydraulic transformation emerged through negotiated encounters: imported Jiangnan norms reshaped local ecologies, while being constrained and reworked by environmental limits, cosmological geographies, and the uneven distribution of technical resources.

By the late sixteenth century, this colonial graft revealed structural limits. Provincial decision-making centralized even as hydrological knowledge remained diffuse and embodied in local practice. The resulting crisis exposed how imperial technological cultures are vulnerable to information asymmetries, maintenance failures, and the fragility of transmitted skill. Treating shuili as mobile, contested, and hybrid, the dissertation offers a transcultural history of technology that grounds imperial statecraft in the material, organizational, and symbolic work of governing water.