Event Description
The importance of excrement as fertiliser in Chinese history has been widely recognized by economic historians and environmental scientists researching sustainable agriculture. Kenneth Pomeranz among others has argued that fertiliser, including so-called nightsoil, was the requisite environmental ‘pressure’ valve for maintaining soil fertility in Chinese agricultural regimes (in northern and southern China), and thus parity with Europe (specifically Northern England and the Netherlands) until the divergences of the 1800s. Other scholars, such as Ruth Rogaski, Yongmin Xu, and Nicole Barnes, have explored how Chinese officials and hygienists in late imperial and republican China grappled with the urban sanitation problems posed by excrement. But what of possible links between human waste and other industries? David Cressy’s work on the saltpeter men of England suggests the diverse applications possible for excrement, both urine and feces, including its use as a feedstock to produce potassium nitrate—a key ingredient of gunpowder. Daoist texts suggest similar industries existed in Tang China (618-907 AD). Taking as my case study a recipe recorded in the Northern Song (960-1127 AD) for a fenpao (糞砲), literally a “shit bomb,” and a late Ming (1628-44) treatise that instructs how to put the excreta of soldiers to use during a siege, this talk builds on the work of Francesca Bray and Jacob Eyferth identifying texts as a fraught locus between tacit and intellectual knowledge to propose a more capacious approach to the study of excreta in Chinese history—one that includes bio-chemical warfare of the middle period (900-1400).
Event Speaker
Benjamin Sinvany, graduate student in East Asian Languages and Cultures
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders. No registration required. Please join via Zoom. Please email Stephanie Reitzig at [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Science Studies Working Group.
