Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 440 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$45.00, cloth; US$45.00, ebook. ISBN 9780226809656.
This remarkable book is in fact eight mini books, each self-contained, but looping back to find familiar places and common themes. As the title suggests, this is a book about knowing, specifically how to know a place. Scholars have already portrayed China’s vast Northeast as a site of cultural cosmopolitanism or as various iterations of imperial imaginary. Ruth Rogaski has done something quite different, taking the reader on eight individual voyages of discovery, each representing a different way that knowledge is fitted into a framework of referents and values.
In the first chapter, we follow two early Qing exiles as they leave Beijing, creating poetic landscapes that transition in tone from tragic loss to terror at the sheer emptiness of the northern expanse. In the second, the imperial tour of the young Kangxi emperor traverses the same landscape, seeing not tragedy, but sites of glorious history, ancestral benevolence, and literal dragons. To the Jesuit cartographer Ferdinand Verbeist, part of the same tour, the region was a terra incognita to be mapped into the knowable gridwork of latitude and longitude. The third chapter recounts efforts to locate the border-spanning mountain Changbaishan/Paektusan, focusing on the different reasons why it was so important to Chinese and Korean viewers to visually witness the peak. The middle chapters view Manchuria through the eyes of scientific encounter. Chapter 4 is a story of human interaction with the Manchurian bioscape, contrasting the efforts of German-Russian botanist Karl Maximowicz to make knowable the delicate flowers of the Amur River Basin, and of the Manchu officials to make these same plants useful. The fifth chapter examines the famous fossils known as the Jehol biota, the “dragon bones” that to some signified the dragon vein that connected to a source of vital energy at Changbaishan, and to others denoted the existence of a different sort of subterranean power: coal. The sixth follows the search for plague bacillus Yersinia pestis through two parallel landscapes: across the flat, grassy plains that were home to burrowing rodents, and inside the human and animal bodies that played host to epidemic disease. Chapter 7 remains with the topic of disease, following the efforts of Chinese and foreign scientists to explain the sudden emergence of infected voles as an act of American biosabotage against the new People’s Republic. The final chapter revisits many of these sites in a story that combines discovery with transformation, both of the landscape and of the thousands of settlers who shaped the “Great Northern Wasteland” into Mao Zedong’s dream of a vast mechanized breadbasket.
Two points from this excellent and original study stand out: first, it is a book about Manchuria, rather than one that just takes place there. The physical and political landscapes are integral to each of the stories. It is hardly unique for people to paint geography with social meanings such as innate power or pestilence. Rogaski grounds these imaginations in Manchuria’s changing political significance, noting how indigenous fauna was inscribed and reinscribed with meaning, or why the contest over the honour of naming a flower or plague bacillus was more than just a matter of scientific vanity.
Second is the author’s ability to speak the esoteric languages of systemic knowledge. Each chapter portrays historical actors experiencing the unfolding of a new landscape, and subjecting their discovery to distinct frameworks of expert, technical knowledge. Along with the different ways of “knowing” Manchuria, these chapters show how knowledge is filtered through such languages as poetry, filial piety, cartography, botany, paleontology, geology, bacteriology, wilderness survival, and muscle memory. Even more impressive than her ability to draw on historical sources in multiple languages is Rogaski’s ability to code switch between these genres of exposition. Rogaski shows effortless virtuosity with each genre, guiding the reader with equal deftness into the ox cart of a Qing dynasty exile, the autopsy laboratory of a plague research unit, or the dormitory cot of a sent-down student, managing along the way to pull a process of personal, often emotional discovery out of even the driest writing, while remaining cognizant that each process of discovery was also one of performance, aimed to please a specific audience ranging from the international scientific community to the occupant of the dragon throne.
Knowing Manchuria is a joy to read, very much of the Jonathan Spence school of historical writing. Scenes and individuals are described with a cinematic eye, albeit one that at times borders on excessive. A book needs to be readable, and this one certainly is, but I did occasionally feel that the author, facing a choice between acknowledging a messy historical reality and a smooth linear narrative, chose the latter.
At the same time, there is an ouroboric quality to a book that so intensely analyzes the intellectual subjectivities of others without acknowledging its own. I am not asking the author to don the hairshirt of disavowing all “scholarly gaze,” but did find it striking that she was so present at the book’s opening, with the plea to sensorially know a place by treading the ground and cracking its shale in your own hands (15–16), as well as in the trek up Changbaishan that makes up the concluding chapter. Yet in between, the authorial voice disappears entirely in a first-person sense, while remaining very perceptively present in the sense of sympathies and preferences.
Knowing Manchuria is deeply grounded, thoughtfully argued, and engagingly written. It is also enduringly relevant, an example of historically specific research that presents immediate parallels to the ways that knowledge and authority are wielded in both personal reflection and public discourse.
Thomas David DuBois
Beijing Normal University, Beijing