Sources
The materials for investigating the history of mining and metallurgy in the region of southwest China and highland Southeast Asia are archaeological finds and other material remains, written records, and oral traditions.
Archaeology
In terms of material remains, this leaves built structures, such as temples, furnaces, bridges or graves, wastes, such as gangue heaps and slag dumps, left on site or recorded by fortuitous coincidence. More or less scientific records of such remains are reports and photographs of visitors of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as mineralogical and geological surveys and industrial records that cover slags and gangue as resources. Less scientific but not necessarily less well-informed are local informants who either had hands-on experience in recent mining, the re-exploitation of slags or in traditional metallurgy. Due to erosion, war destruction and the building boom, built remains are relatively scarce. Most structure date to no more than 200 years, with occasional earlier remains. A handful of records on remains date to the late 19th century, but the majority are recent. Personal accounts of informants interviewed over the last few years evidently usually reach back no further than the 1970s, and at most reflect on conditions no further back than the 1930s. It should be noted, however that these oral and written records often constitute the only sources on remains that are no longer in existence and on landscapes completely transformed during the last few decades.
Written sources
comprise traditional historic records and inscriptions on stone tablets or – more rarely - cast in metal.
Traditional historic sources concerning the region are Chinese records from the Han period (206 BCE-221 CE) onwards, some Sanskrit and Chinese records of the Dali 大理 kingdom from roughly the 10th to 14th centuries, and a few Burmese, Vietnamese, Yi 彝 (formerly usually called Lolo), and Thai texts of the 18th and 19th centuries. As most texts beyond the Chinese traditions of history writing, historic geography, and private notes and diaries are concerned with genealogies and matters of religion, written records basically boil down to Chinese materials. Due to the distance of the region from the centre of Chinese empires, Chinese records tend to generalise and rarely contain specific information. This applies into the period of imperial rule down into the 15th century. Down to the late Ming, sources records on the topics are few and far between, and specific information on sites of exploitation and metallurgical technologies are not available.
Ming records contain some mention of mines with specific names in the context of taxation and regional administration. More specific records set in with surviving private writings, such as travel and biji 笔记 accounts that record observations or information that authors considered interesting or curious. An exceptional work of this type is Song Yingxing’s 宋应星 (1587–ca. 1666) famous technological encyclopedia Tiangong kaiwu 天工开物.
More detailed official records set in from 1739, when Yunnan province became the supplier of copper for the imperial mints, Guizhou the supplier of zinc, and western Sichuan a secondary supplier of copper. We may safely assume that provincial and local governments maintained administrative structures that taxed and supervised mines. Only some excerpts from documents and tax records survived in local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志) and in central government records. During the period from 1739 to the mid-19th century civil wars, the central government attached high importance to coinage and hence registered matters concerning monetary metals in the Southwest. It should be noted, however, that the administrative rules were operated by fiscal guidelines in a partly fictional system of a state that was too benevolently Confucian to exist. In real terms, regulations dictated budgets that covered only a fraction of actual costs and prices below survival rates of producers (Kim and Yang 2019a).
The best-known administrative structure set up in this context is the “copper administration” (tongzheng 铜政) of Yunnan province, a set of regulations that defined tasks added to the responsibilities of existing provincial and local officials and serving mainly the procurement of copper for the Beijing mints. Similarly, less documented structures existed for Guizhou zinc, as well as for the taxation and licensing of other mines that worked other metals and/or were not assigned suppliers of the Beijing mints in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan.
The important systemic aspect is that the multi-tasking demanded from the officials led to de-facto delegation of government tasks to either the unofficial government staff of private secretaries, clerks and runners, or of local elites. At any time, a sizeable proportion of the local officials were absent from their seats because they were on their way from or to Beijing after their appointment, to receive new appointments elsewhere, or ordered to serve as transport officials for state mint metal transports – a task that commonly took at least a-year-and-a-half. At the same time, the mines were an important source of provincial revenue. In fact – though not on the official records – Yunnan province maintained a sizeable mining administration, certainly with accounting, taxation and supervising specialists.
We know of the existence of this institution because Wu Qijun 吳其濬 (1789-1846) had a handbook for mining administrators printed in 1844, the Diannan kuangchan tulue 滇南矿产图略. This work is a compilation that contains excerpts from an earlier and lost work of the 18th century, thus documenting a continuing tradition. The 1844 compendium is the only source that specifically records mining and smelting technologies of the southwest that in additions provides 12 pages of illustrations. Alongside this work, brief records on mines with information relevant for taxation and a few excerpts from descriptive accounts in local gazetteers and biji works are the extent of material down to 1850. Moreover, many specific records date relatively late. As Wu Qijun, in the early 19th century, more scholars of influence pursued interests that were not immediately useful for career-oriented advancement and even had such works printed. A number of writings and reminiscences were printed or re-discovered after the civil wars and preserved in the context of modernisation and of recording an age now recognised as past.
As mentioned in the section on the modern transformation, the mid-19th civil wars constituted a devastating rupture. From the late 19th century, modernising elites, often including the mining entrepreneurs, invested much effort in industrial development. The branch railway line built by the Gejiu mining magnates to link Jianshui and Gejiu to the French railway line from Ha Noi to Kunming is the now picturesque evidence of such efforts. Written materials provide an inventory of over 2000 sites of historic mining as well as descriptive records on traditional technologies and organisational structures. Actual transformation was hampered by difficulties of transport and communications, the shortage of capital, and political volatility down to the late 1980s.
In addition to the records preserved in print or as manuscripts and committed to writing with an intention of serving as historic documents, stele inscriptions cut in stone constitute a form of public announcement that records specific detail with the intention to lasting commemoration but without the perspective of making it into history books. As is the case with the other material remains, the number of surviving inscriptions is relatively small. Nevertheless, stele inscriptions that record temple constructions, gravestones, and a few public announcements that settle legal or other local conflicts are particularly important sources on specific local conditions.
Oral histories
comprise stories and legends preserved in local storytelling traditions as well as local knowledge on sites that may or may not be still in existence. Sherds of oral histories are found in descriptive ethnographic records and some stories and legends on mines can be found in published collections of “local historical materials” (wenshi ziliao 文史资料), usually somewhat condensed and purged of content with sexual overtones and other unsuitable attitudes. Local traditions attached to sites relevant to historic mines are generally restricted to records on temple sites. The bulk of oral histories used in this project has been collected during our fieldwork. We mainly collected information on sites, such as a smelting site converted to a field in the 1970s after the removal of most slags, a temple of which only the name survived, or mines that have long caved in but the informant explored in his youth. Other oral histories concern traditional technologies that were used in the 1950s, the 1970s or even in the 1990s, names of otherwise unrecorded locations, and stories and legends. Another aspect concerns family histories handed down orally and at times handed down or reconstructed as written genealogies. Both written and oral family histories that record the number of generations from the time when the family arrived in the village provide valuable information on local history and specifically on the duration of Han-Chinese settlements. The collection of oral histories evidently is obviously limited by linguistic and cultural competence. Our research in this field is restricted to Han and Muslim Chinese communities, and with some limitations to other Chinese-speaking communities. Vu Duong Luan has extended the collection of oral histories to Northern Vietnam.
Approaches
The survey of sources demonstrates an overall scarcity of materials on the history of mining and metallurgy. Sources on specific areas, sites and technologies are mostly rarely available down to the 19th century. In other words, research based on existing written materials is frustrating. It is, moreover, increasingly frustrating as history progresses from the ancient to the early modern period. Archaeological records permit some insights specific and well-founded insights into ancient metallurgy and, with sufficient patience, promises further revelations. Historic records of the last millennium, however, are thinly sown and therefore offer little possibilities of assessing the sources by comparative analysis. They are moreover unreliable. Most authors were visitors to the region and possibly recorded vague hearsay, biased or misunderstood information. Even worse, the official records of the Ming and Qing reflect official sanctioned conditions that often differed considerably from actual situations and practices. Historical research can reconstruct the representation of the imperial rule as it was intended and presented to the emperor but ends up in impenetrable fog when searching for concrete people, practices and technologies. The options of traditional approaches of historic research are limited.
At the same time, we do have comparatively rich sources that date to the period of modernisation. Transitory materials are records compiled on the basis of still accessible documents and oral traditions of the period before the 19th century civil wars, such as the lists of formerly exploited mineral deposits of the early 20th century, or descriptions of technologies that entirely or largely predate the onset of transformations caused by the shift from working ores to the re-exploitation of slags as well as to industrial methods. Finally, remains, traditions and stories of the more recent past require collecting in fieldwork as well as careful analysis, yet provide rich materials. Moreover, each fieldwork visit provides new materials and thus expands the sources and offers new insights.
For these reasons, this project mainly focuses on fieldwork, while using the dense and reliable records of the early period of modernisation for preparatory work. Direct preparation of fieldwork is the geolocation of sites, which mainly employs materials of the first half of the 20th century and approaches of historical geography. Research on technologies similarly begins by analysing late traditional materials of the 19th and 20th century. On this basis, we then add material analysis of specimens and insights gained in fieldwork. Furthermore, we again employ historical geography to undertake focussed spatial analysis of specific areas. These involve GIS for the reconstruction of settlements and populations, roads and rivers, and patterns of land use to contextualise mines and their roles in the context of societies, environments, technological exchange, and economic networks.
The combined approaches of this project will not resolve all mysteries in the history of mining and metallurgy of southwestern China and highland Southeast Asia in the early modern period. The documented fieldwork will, however, unavoidably produce new materials and new insights. As the modern building boom, mineral exploitation and the cultural transformation of digital mass media erases remains and local traditions, it is also a contribution to preserving records for future research. The archaeometallurgical analyses provide scientific insights, while geolocation and spatial analyses permit targeted fieldwork and contextualisation.
