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Periodic climate cooling enhanced natural disasters and wars in China during AD 10–1900
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Recent studies have linked climatic and social instabilities in ancient China; the underlying causal mechanisms have, however, often not been quantitatively assessed. Here, using historical records and palaeoclimatic reconstructions during AD 10–1900, we demonstrate that war frequency, price of rice, locust plague, drought frequency, flood frequency and temperature in China show two predominant periodic bands around 160 and 320 years where they interact significantly with each other. Temperature cooling shows direct positive association with the frequency of external aggression war to the Chinese dynasties mostly from the northern pastoral nomadic societies, and indirect positive association with the frequency of internal war within the Chinese dynasties through drought and locust plagues. The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han, Tang, Song and Ming are more closely associated with low temperature. Our study suggests that food production during the last two millennia has been more unstable during cooler periods, resulting in more social conflicts owing to rebellions within the dynasties or/and southward aggressions from northern pastoral nomadic societies in ancient China.
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“As a result, the peasants were extremely discontented with the Qing Government.81”
From Climate change and Chinese history: a review of trends, topics, and methods (2015) · cites this paper as [81]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Zhang, Z., Tian, H., Cazelles, B., Kausrud, K. L., Bräuning, A., Guo, F., & Stenseth, N. C.
- Affiliations
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- University of Oslo (NO)
- Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (DE)
- Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Zhang, Zhibin
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2010-07-14
- Volume
- 277
- Issue
- 1701
- Pages
- 3745-3753
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- PMC
- PMC2992701
- OpenAlex
- W2165391243
- Cited by
- 116
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 13 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 3.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Nanjing Normal University
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Geology and Paleoclimatology Research
- Social Sciences › Archeology › Archaeology and ancient environmental studies
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agronomy and Crop Science › Climate change impacts on agriculture
- Keywords
- global cooling, historical climate variability, natural disasters, locust plagues, drought, floods, rice prices, temperature reconstruction, dynastic collapse, social instability, nomadic invasions, food production, ancient China, paleoclimate
- MeSH terms
- China, Disasters, Population Dynamics, Warfare, History, 15th Century, History, 16th Century, History, 17th Century, History, 18th Century, History, 19th Century, History, Ancient, History, Medieval, Climate Change
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