What is Local Knowledge? Digital Humanities and Yuan Dynasty Disasters in Imperial China's Local Gazetteers

Abstract This paper focuses on the historical politics of disaster records in Chinese local gazetteers ( difangzhi 地方志). Using records of mulberry crop failures as examples, the authors ask how gazetteer editors collated Yuan disaster records—initially collected to help prevent disasters and authorize the legitimacy of dynastic rule—in gazetteers and, in so doing, made them into ‘local’ knowledge. Digital humanities methods allow for both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and the authors deploy them to demonstrate how, in structured texts like the Chinese local gazetteers, they could help combine close reading of specific sections and larger-scale analysis of regional patterns. In the first part, the authors show how disasters were recorded in a Yuan Zhenjiang gazetteer to facilitate taxation and disaster prevention locally—a strategy rarely traceable in subsequent gazetteers until the Qing. In the second part, the authors shifted their perspective to the historical accumulation of data and what that reveals about the reception of Yuan disasters: whereas local gazetteers from the north generate long chronologies of mulberry disasters from the Ming to the Qing, others depict the south as disaster-free.