| Shanxi is one of the crades of ancient China’s civilization, it has a long history and profound culture, but during the long development period, there were natural disasters now and then which caused great loses and harm to people’s production and life, so far we still can not completely resist these natural disasters. The period between Ming and Qing was a special historical period, it contained a period of two natural disasters:"the universal period in the Ming and Qing dynasties" and "the universal period in the late Qing dynasty, these two disasters always broke out at the same time, so the ecological environmental deterioration and frequent natural disasters were the typical environmental characteristics of Shanxi Province during this period. History of natural disasters in Shanxi is the important research field for the disaster and famine history, the regional disaster history and the history of science and technology in Shanxi, but academia’s research on the history of natural disasters in Shanxi’s historical period especially the ages between Ming and Qing dynasties at present is still weaker than researches in other areas, so the research on the rules and technologies in prevention and control of Shanxi’s natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties can not only enrich the research field in the history of regional disasters and expand the depth and width of the local history of science and technology, but also has important practical significance for today’s prevention on natural disasters in Shanxi.This paper uses the following historical books as its basic database: "chronology of the history of Shanxi’s natural disasters""record collections of China’s meteorology in three thausand years""collections of ancient China’s significant natural calamities and abnormal chronology""ceremony of China’s meteorological disasters (Shanxi)" "collections of historical earthquake datas in Shanxi province"this paper refers to many ancient books: offical history, records in the Ming and Qing dynasties, expecially, province annals and county annals of Shanxi, and stone carving materials to screen all kinds of natural disaster records one by one, and use county as a unit to do statistics on many kinds of disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, such as: drought, waterlog, hailstorm, locust plague, frost, wind disaster, earthquake, plague and etc, building a database of time- space distribution of Shanxi’s natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties. On the basis of this database, this paper collects and calculates datas with the help of Excel, draw the time changing trend and space distribution diagrams of Shanxi’s various kinds of natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties with the help of Sigmaplot and Photoshop, it vividly and intutively reflects the characteristics of the time changing trend and the space distribution of all kinds of natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties. On this basis, we sum up the characteristics of Shanxi’s natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, study the impact that those natural disasters caused to politics, economy and society at that age. This paper analyzes the causes of natural disasters at that age from two aspects:natural variation and human activities, and futher studys every prevention technology and resistance technology in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties. The paper is based on the intrinsic logical relationship of "disaster statistics-law of disaster-disaster characteristics and influences-cause of disaster-prevention and control of disaster" to develop, there is a close contact between chapters and the chapters are linked with one another well, all of which constitute the systematic study of Shanxi’s natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties.This article includes three parts:introduction, main body (five chapters) and conclusion.The introduction part mainly describes the purpose and significance of this paper, the domestic and foreign research situation, research ideas, research methods and research difficulties, innovation and deficiency.The main body of this paper can be divided into five chapters, the first chapter describes the foundation of statistics and measurement of Shanxi’s natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the second chapter describes the time and space distribution characteristics of various natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties, the third chapter describes the characteristics and influences of Shanxi’s natural disasters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the fourth chapter is the analysis of the causes of natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties, the fifth chapter is about the prevention and control technologies of natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties.The first chapter is the basis of the paper, providing a precise statistical basis and specification for defining an analysis of the natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties. The occurrence of natural disasters is closely linked with the natural environment, this chapter first introduces the characteristics of Shanxi’s natural environment from two aspects:geography and climate.As in ancient times the records of natural disasters were mostly using the county as a unit, disaster was a great thing for a county in ancient times, so they were recorded in the county annals. The rich local Chronicles in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties provide substantial historical materials for this study, the scientific nature and accuracy of the statistics, this study uses county as a unit to do statistics of the frequency of all kinds of natural disasters in each county during the Ming and Qing dynasties. According to the "atlas of Chinese history" and "atlas of Shanxi’s history", this paper reviews the history of the administrative divisions and changes of Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties, to grasp the geographical locations of the counties of Shanxi Province in Ming and Qing dynasties.The second chapter is on the basis of the above statistics to analyze the characteristics of the changes of time and space distribution of various kinds of natural disasters (drought, waterlog, locust plague, hailstorm, frost disasters, storm, earthquake, plague) in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties. First of all, this paper, by using dynamic analysis and ten years as a unit makes a time changing diagram of all kinds of natural disasters, in the diagram we can intuitively see the fluctuation changes of all kinds of natural disasters in the corresponding period, the average times of disasters and the moving average. Second, draw a diagram of seasonal distribution and month distribution of natural disasters; we can see the characteristics of the season in distribution and month in distribution of each natural disaster. Finally, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the spatial distribution of various natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties, using county as a unit to make diagrams of space distributions of each disaster and further study each disaster’s main distribution area in Shanxi.The third chapter is on the basis of the second chapter, through analyzing characteristics of the space distributions of various natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties, we study the overall characteristics of the natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties and the influences they had on Shanxi’s politics, economy and society at that time. Shanxi’s natural disasters during the Ming and Qing dynasties had many characteristics:wide variety, high frequency, wide distribution, a close correlation between disaster and disaster, obvious seasonal characteristics. The serious natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties brought about serious damage to the social environment which was based on the small-scale peasant economy at that time, a large number of labor migrate or dead, the victims often risked danger in desperation and revolted which would caused social unrest, even the replacement of dynasties if they couldn’t get effective relief. Disasters made people completely go beyond the righteousness recommended as the center of the Confucian’s bottom line of moral, they sold their children, ate their children, and ate the dead, these cruel scenes are very common in historical records.In the fourth chapter, the author analyzes the reasons of natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties. Disaster has a dual nature:natural and social, the natural change is the original power of various disasters. The period between Ming and Qing dynasties was a special astronomical period which was a history of climate change, the 16th century and the 17th century were regarded as "the universal period in the Ming and Qing dynasties", and the period between 1810 and 1911 was called "the universal period in the late Ming period". As the weather was becoming colder, the sunspot activity was weak, the torque effect of the nine stars converged in the center of the earth and cosmic rays all of which caused varieties of disasters during the universal period which had many characteristics:variety of disasters, high frequency, huge intensity, therefore the universal period was also called as a mass of natural disasters. From the disaster recording table of the county, we can see that the times of the natural disasters happened in county during "the universal period in the Ming and Qing dynasties" and "the universal period in the late Ming period" was significantly higher than in any other historical period, it shows that the changes of nature has direct effect on the occurrence of natural disasters. Besides, the unique geographical and climatic environment in Shanxi is also prone to natural disasters. Compared with other regions of the same latitude on the north China plain, Shanxi has a higher ground, more mountains, larger temperature difference, less rainfall, drier climate, colder weather, all of these lead to high frequency of natural disasters. Besides, with the increase of population and the improvement of productivity, human’s ability to transform nature is also growing, human’s activity plays an increasingly important role in the occurrence of natural disasters. Some disasters in history is due to a direct result of human activities, such as people dug up the dams in the wars to attack the cities which caused towns flooded, this kind of phenomenon repeatedly took place in the long history; A large number of casualties in the war also led to the outbreak of the plague; human activities as large-scale army reclamation, peasant reclamation, merchant reclamation, building, cutting firewood and smelting during the Ming and Qing dynasties caused serious destruction of forest vegetation in Shanxi, deteriorating ecological environment, serious soil and water loss were also important factors for the frequent occurrence of natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties.The fifth chapter discusses the prevention and control technology of natural disasters in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties. Facing the serious disasters, Shanxi’s ancestors in the long practice adopted various technical means to respond actively, some of the technologies were in a leading position all over the country, and obtained certain achievements in the prevention and control of natural disasters, so they have a certain reference value for preventing and reducing the current disasters. Drought is the worst natural disaster in Shanxi, in order to prevent drought disasters, ancestors in the Ming and Qing dynasties built a large number of irrigation and water conservancy engineering to irrigate in Shanxi, major drainage springs had been developed in various degrees in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties, the construction of farmland water conservancy engineering in Shanxi had exceeded the total number of engineering of Henan and Shanxi at that time. Sinking drought resistance was commonly used during the Ming and Qing dynasties, such as in the Ming dynasty’s wanli 27(1599 years), a total number of 1300 wells for irrigation were dug up in Jiexiu county. As was described in Wang Xinjing’s "the advantages of wells":technology in well was better than in any other province. There were a great number of mountains in Shanxi, but farms for irrigation were less than 6%, so there was no water for irrigation in these areas. Facing this drought climate environment, Shanxi’s ancestors in long-term’s agricultural practice summarized a set of farming system which included intensive cultivation, drought prevention and soil conservation, through making full use of water and nutrients in the earth; they won the biggest harvest in the arid climate condition. Flood prevention included the comprehensive technical means of "block-scatter-use" to build dams in towns and rivers, there were cofferdams almost in every village. Ancestors in the age of dayu had realized that by simply using the method of blocking couldn’t prevent flood, so in the Ming and Qing dynasties there were many water diversion and hydrophobic projects. Especially at the entrance of the mountain, flash floods often broke out, it’s difficult to stop them, building water diversion channels couldn’t only lead water to the safe river, ensured the safety of the people, but also the water could be used by villagers near the canals to irrigate which could achieve the goal of changing harm to benefit. Drainage channels, lakes and ponds in town, ancient cities, moats outside of town played an important role in resisting floods. As one of the frequent locust area, people of Shanxi in the process of fighting against the locust, summed up a set of more scientific locust preventing technology system(dig up and kill the eggs of locusts-kill hoppers-neutralizing the migratory locust). Ancestors in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties used ropes to scrape frost, smoke to melt frost, grass to cover and soil to bury to fight against frost. Shanxi has a long medical tradition, during this period not only did many physicians with both good ability and moral sense sprung up, but also were the Chinese herbal medicine resources very abundant in the diversified geographical environment. After the occurrence of the plague in the Shanxi province during the Ming and Qing dynasties, on the one hand, the Chinese government sent doctors and medicines to the people and direct relief operations, on the other hand, many folk physicians threw themselves actively to the disaster to save people, using acupuncture, medication, fumigation, wear, vaccination, keeping the environment clean and etc to prevent and control plague. They made o significant contribution to the folk of plague prevention in the case of extreme lack of official medical. In terms of resisting the wind disasters, at the top of the two-foot-tall tower of the round temple in heng mountain of Shanxi’s Hun Yuan county, stood a iron flying bird, called Hou Feng bird or windy bird which was the only remaining phoenix shaped container at present in our country, so far it still has the function of indicating the direction of wind. In addition, there were a number of agricultural technologies to resist wind and lodging by using the method of enhancing the intensity of crop stalks, such as:plow land deeply, harvest in time, dry and roast the fields. In fighting against earthquake disasters, "earthquake" in Ba Gong of Shanxi’s Yu Xiang County summarizes many earthquake preventing and controlling technologies, such as warning before the earthquake, including acoustic and gigantic phenomenon, abnormal weather, abnormal animal, response measures in earthquake, etc. Besides, some ancient architectures’earthquake prevention technologies in Shanxi was excellent, just as the tower in Ying county still stood for thousand years although experienced many strong earthquakes, it reflects the high level of seismic technology, provides valuable physical samples for the modern buildings of our country.The conclusion part includes three parts:firstly, it summarizes the full text; secondly, it points out the deficiencies of the present study and the directions where we still have to work; thirdly, it comes up with three ideas and suggestions on the history of disasters.Shanxi is a disaster-prone area, the occurrence rules, characteristics, effects, reasons, and prevention and control technology of the disaster have typical representatives. In today’s society, science and technology developed well, the food production is increasing year by year, national reserves are rich, for major natural disasters, our country has perfect emergency treatment methods. However, with the rapid growth of social wealth, there emerges many new environmental problems, such as exhaustion of water source, air pollution, dust storms which seriously affect the human’s survival environment and bring great threat to human’s health, to deal with these problems is becoming more complicated and difficult. Through a comprehensive analysis of the natural disasters and its prevention technology in Shanxi’s Ming and Qing dynasties and combined with the current development status in Shanxi, this paper argues that Shanxi, as a big resource province, has a large number of mountains and ravines, but it has severe soil and water loss problem, natural disasters happen now and then, We must not ignore the potential threats of natural disasters, so we need to constantly enhance the scientific research on disasters, protect the ecological environment, draw lessons from advanced experience both at home and abroad, take history as a mirror and build a modern disaster prevention system, we will try our best to provide a harmonious and stable developing environment for the construction of socialist modernization. |
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