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Water is the focus of much of the research of Dr Ling Zhang, Umur Lecturer at ����Ӱҵ College and a Fellow in Chinese History.

Ling attended St John’s College, Cambridge as a postgraduate student from 2003 to 2009. A brief role of assistant professor at Newcastle University followed before 15 years at Harvard University, Yale University, and Boston College. She swapped Cambridge, Massachusetts for a return to East Anglia and was admitted as a Fellow of Caius in October.

Initially focusing on medieval Chinese economic history and Chinese history of science and technology, Ling’s attention has shifted to environmental issues, in relation to fauna and flora, soil and air, disasters and infrastructure, and their relationships with humans. “History is not only a human history,” she says. 

Water, Ling says, has already become a global political and geopolitical challenge, amid the climate crisis, resource competition and population growth.

She is now writing a book on the geological and ecological history of the Xin’anjiang River in east China, where a large hydroelectric project took place in the mid-20th century. Ling was born and brought up in Hangzhou, down the river from the dam.

She says: “This medium-sized river has historically been a navigational path for merchants and goods. It was important economically. In the middle of the 20th century the government realised that China needed to achieve energy self-efficiency in order to power its heavy industries. 

“For a region along the eastern coast without coal or oil, the government decided to build a ‘mega’ dam. That filled up a reservoir with 18 billion tons of water – more than half of the volume of Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam.

“To accumulate that amount of water, you need to displace a lot of people. Here it was 300,000 people. More than a thousand villages and towns, the oldest of which could date back to the second and third centuries, had to be drowned. Massive human settlements as well as habitats of animals and plants vanished in order to make way for something we call a ‘natural’ resource to generate energy.”

Less than 70 years on from the dam’s completion, the region is unrecognisable.

Ling adds: “Now it’s beautiful and green, with 90 percent of coverage of trees. That’s where people go to look for ‘nature’ because it’s ecologically and aesthetically pleasing. But that is a human-made entity for the sake of generating electricity.”

With the dam in place, the region changed. Ling’s book looks at historically important issues, such as geological changes, microclimate shifts, compensation to the natives who relocated out of the region, economic and cultural activities, the rise of eco-developmental industries, and their diverse impacts on multispecies and nonhuman things. 

“It’s now a historical dam. The functionality and main usage have already switched. Electricity is no longer its own product,” she says. Similar stories are replicated globally. 

Every day, Ling meditates on the complex relationship between humans and water.

She says: “Every day I cycle along the river and it’s beautiful. But think about how people maintain the meadows, how we regulate the River Cam, how we drained and restore the Fens, how we negotiate and determine the territory for houseboats and the access by punting companies. What about pollution? What about flooding, especially in the context of the rising climate change?”

She is enjoying being part of the Caius community, in a college which was first established in 1348 by Edmund Gonville – 20 years before the fall of the Mongol regime in China and at the height of the Black Death, both significant events to a historian like her – and refounded in 1557 by John Caius. Another previous Master, Joseph Needham, was an inspiration.

She adds: “Joseph Needham was my intellectual forefather. I was trained as a historian of science and technology. I can’t tell you how many days I spent in the Needham Research Institute going through my own research. I still go back to consult his collection. The idea of coming to Caius, the home of Needham, is very attractive. To work in this institution, which emerged from the historical moment when medieval human beings struggled with horrific pathogen and unfathomable environmental forces and which, given resilience and creativity, is now thriving with world-leading scholars in humanities, sciences, and social sciences, is a great privilege.

“Interdisciplinarity is the driving force behind my research, but where to start? You just have to talk to people. Being in a college like this, blessed with invaluable conversations and potential collaborations, supports this kind of research.”