The great discoveries of modern geology in eighteenth-century Europe shattered the reigning worldview upheld by the Christian church and opened the way for a radical rethinking of the progress of time, human history, and the place of humanity in its global-planetary and cosmic context. How did scientists in China grapple with the great challenges posed by the new geology when the discipline was taken up there? How and why did the rethinking of time, history, and humanity play out differently in the making of modern China? These big questions are not addressed in Grace Yen Shen's Unearthing the Nation, whose index does not include terms such as “history” or “time.” With its narrower historiographical focus, however, this book is still highly valuable. Unearthing the Nation gives us a riveting narrative of how Chinese scientists imported and eclectically adapted modern geology for Chinese use, from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century. It complements recent publications in Chinese on the same period, by Zhang Juchen and others.
The introductory chapter offers an overview of late-Qing explorers such as Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen and explains how Western visitors, incursions, and concessions helped spark Chinese interest in the new sciences of the earth.
Chapters 2 and 3 center on the professional lives of four key founding figures in Chinese geology—Zhang Hongzhao (H. T. Chang), Ding Wenjiang (V. K. Ting; Ting Wen-chiang), Weng Wenhao (Wong Wen-hao), and Li Siguang—along with their many and varied Chinese and foreign colleagues and collaborators. (The lack of a concordance to the names under which these scientists published their voluminous Chinese and non-Chinese publications will make it difficult to track all these important scholars.) The rich experiences of this first generation of Chinese geologists during their studies abroad (in Japan, Scotland, Belgium, and England, respectively) are largely omitted, except for brief, tantalizing notes—in the very rewarding second chapter on the establishment of the teaching and practice of geology—about the pride in field research they had acquired by taking part in fieldwork outside China. This commitment to field research set them apart from many other scientists and also helped forge emotional ties to the land. The rich third chapter delves into the growth of geology as a simultaneously Chinese and global science during the fertile, cosmopolitan 1920s.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the institutional and academic challenges posed to geologists by the wars and the narrow nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s. Shen argues that a certain geologist's patriotism—a sentiment linked to the very subject matter of the discipline—caused most Chinese geologists to stay on the mainland after the Civil War.
Unexpectedly, the book does not provide a justification of its title, Unearthing the Nation, a phrase that implies the excavation of something that was there already, waiting to be uncovered. But this, of course, cannot be: no nation exists in nature. The introductory discussion of nation and nationalism stops short of laying out the author's views on the role of these concepts in the historical period under question, and there is no sustained discussion of how China changed from an empire that included huge land areas conquered by imperialist force and annexation, to “a modern nation” that claimed the conquered territories as natural possessions of the “new” nation-state. The term “imperialist” in the book applies overwhelmingly to Western powers, almost never to China, except as a nonconsequential appellation (“the Qing empire”). As a result, the persistent legacy of empire and conquest that continues to vex China today never comes to the fore. And this is strange, since the geologists, as this book suggests in several interesting vignettes, had a certain role in asserting the imperial conquests as organically and naturally belonging to the “new” nation. Shen writes in passing that when “China's geological pioneers … were collecting rocks and fossils … they were in a sense studying China directly” (p. 4). But that is of course pure fantasy, since rocks and fossils have no intrinsic social identity. From my anthropological perspective, the scholarly challenge here would be to produce an analysis of how and why these geologists would concoct and maintain such a fantasy.
Because the book abstains from addressing the ways in which geology acted as a catalyst for self-reconceptualization, it also neglects to integrate the story of Chinese geology with the development of the intimately related fields of paleontology and archaeology, even though for a number of the personalities involved in the story of geology during this era, paleontology and archaeology were central to their raison d'être. These new sciences all required retelling history in a new framework of time. The histories of these sciences together provide the raw materials for a much-needed analysis of the modern Chinese reconception of time, including “geological time,” in relation to China's historical and mythic conceptions of the past. Such an analysis will need to connect the story of geology with attempts to study the modern transformation of older, imperial-era Chinese concepts of time and past history—such as has been attempted in part by Huang Chun-chieh, John B. Henderson, Huang Ying-kuei, Wang Ming-ke, Zhan Xiaobai, Ren Hai, and others. And it will require at least some review, also absent here, of indigenous, premodern Chinese geology—not to show the “precursors” to modern scientific geology, but as a prerequisite for discussing the essentially social order of time, history, and identity.
In sum, there is a vast and challenging field of future research—the social transformation of “time” and “history” in relation to the powers that be—for which this book's rich materials on the introduction and growth of modern geology in China offer considerable help.
