Reeds, Snails, and Parasites: Schistosomiasis and Wetland Ecology in China’s Yangzi Delta from the 1870s to 1949

This article highlights the necessity of historicizing wetland ecologies in order to understand the history of zoonotic disease in modern China. It examines how increasing commercial cultivation of reeds in the Yangzi Delta in the late nineteenth century turned riverine areas into disastrous zones of the parasitic disease schistosomiasis. After the incessant wars of the mid-1850s sabotaged the hydraulic systems on which local economies relied, reeds, which had previously been cultivated only as a means to supplement agricultural incomes, became the primary crop in the delta basin, especially in Kunshan and Qingpu. The specialized and expanding reed-farming industry reshaped riverbanks into new habitats for lowland species, including freshwater snails—a major host of the waterborne schistosomiasis larvae. By adopting widespread reed cultivation, farmers thus inadvertently created conditions for the parasitic disease, which in turn overwhelmed urban and rural areas across the Yangzi Delta in the first half of the twentieth century.