War And Ecology:the Change Of The Yellow River And The Fall Of Kaifeng In The Ming And Qing Dynasties (1642-1662)

Military environmental history is one of the important branches of environmental history research,as it is the embodiment of wars.The innovation of military environmental history consists in researching the traditional military history with the new perspective of environmental history,which manifests the mutual interaction and impact between human behavior and natural environment.In this way,the content and significance of military history could be expanded and enriched.Wars are not only related to human,but also related to nature.The natural environment is no longer an outsider or a passive party to human activities,but a unique existence of its own.Thus,the military wars could be comprehensively and fully presented.In May 1642,Li Zicheng led his army attacked Kaifeng for the third time.The Kaifeng defenders held out without surrendering,and the two sides stalemated for more than four months.Finally,food shortage made it increasingly difficult to defend the city.To destroy Li Zicheng's army,the Ming officers decided to excavate the dam on the southern bank of the Yellow River.It was also the time for autumn flood of the Yellow River.With the combination of man-made dam break disaster and flood,Kaifeng was drowned.The Yellow River flooded the land,silted up the riverway and seriously affected people's livelihood.Until the early years of the Qing Dynasty,Kaifeng gradually revived under the governance of Henan's chief administrators Zhang Zide and Xu Huacheng.The cooperation of man and nature constitutes a classic case of military environmental history.This thesis attempts to explore the unique roles and interactions between human behavior and natural flood and their effects during the siege of Kaifeng by Li Zicheng's army,using military environmental history as a research perspective.The paper is divided into six parts.The introduction focuses on the significance of the topic and the research status,and defines the related concepts.The first chapter studies the Yellow River system before the river burst and the wartime situation in Kaifeng,presenting the original situation before the breakout.The second chapter studies theunique role and interaction of "human behavior" and "flood of the Yellow River" through sorting out and examining the war events.The third chapter analyzes the serious impact caused by the breakwater from the short-term and long-term periods.The fourth chapter studies the restoration and reconstruction measures carried out by the central and local governments in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty.The conclusion is the induction and sublimation of the full text.In the discourse system of existing academic discussions,the existing research and research approaches for traditional warfare history and military environment history are updated and enriched.