Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series - Clark Alejandrino

Launching in February 2022, the Environmental Exchanges Seminar Series is an opportunity to showcase and discuss innovative new research that engages with key themes in environmental history. On 29 March 2023, the Centre for Environmental History at ANU held their second Environmental Exchanges Seminar for the year with Clark Alejandrino (Trinity College) speaking about his recent work on Chinese typhoon histories.
When the female Typhoon Mother transformed into a male Wind God: a high-resolution history of typhoons in Qing China
Preliminary reconstructions of historical typhoon landfall data for Qing China reveal that there was an uptick in storms landing on the southern coast during the brief but consequential Yongzheng emperor's reign (1722-1735). The increase in storm frequency produced a small ritual back-and-forth between the emperor in Beijing, looking to promote the worship of his imperially-sponsored Wind God, and villagers from a remote peninsula looking to promote their local cult to a Typhoon Mother spirit. Not only does the history of this little typhoon drama reveal how imperial and local interests were negotiated in the context of a change in climate, it suggests ways we can move from paleoclimate data and low-resolution climate correlations to high-resolution climate histories.
Clark Alejandrino (BA Ateneo, MA USyd, PhD Georgetown) is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College where he teaches Chinese, Pacific, and Environmental History. He is most interested in the environmental history of China, especially its climate and animal history. He is finishing a book on typhoons in the history of the south China coast.
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