Policing Survival: The Epistemic Status of Famine Botany in Late Imperial China

Abstract This article examines how Jiuhuang bencao was codified, circulated, marginalized and reactivated in late imperial China, asking what these changes suggest about attitudes toward famine relief and useful knowledge. Compiled in the early Ming by Prince Zhu Su, this treatise transformed famine foods from marginal curiosities into a branch of botanical knowledge. I argue that the text's fluctuating status was dictated not merely by its intrinsic utility, but by how this botanical knowledge intersected with shifting ecological realities and institutional capabilities. As the dynastic relief apparatus faltered, late Ming officials disseminated Jiuhuang bencao as an administrative supplement. By contrast, the High Qing subjected this knowledge to an epistemic reordering. While bibliographers of Siku quanshu recontextualized the text as an archival curiosity, the editors of the imperially commissioned Shoushi tongkao excluded it entirely, suppressing its crisis-management blueprint in favour of an idealized vision of agricultural abundance and administrative omnipotence. Yet driven by the ecological and institutional collapses of the late nineteenth century, famine botany regained its administrative relevance, resurfacing even in the 1889 Palace Examination. By mapping these shifts, this article reveals how the boundaries of useful knowledge are continually redrawn to reconcile ecological limits with the performance of imperial benevolence.