Abstract
Rich historical documents relating to irrigation management have been preserved in Shanxi, attracting the attention of researchers. Scholars already regard irrigation as a major theme in Shanxi's historical development. This paper attempts to situate irrigation in the context of environmental and institutional change, re-examining the significance of irrigation in Shanxi society. Further, this paper analyzes the influence of irrigation on daily life through the eyes of officials, irrigation leaders, and peasants. By discussing irrigation from a variety of different perspectives, it can be seen that the instability of Shanxi's environment was the factor limiting the efficacy of irrigation. Although tax and corvée reforms implemented in the mid to late Ming made ordinary people take on irrigation management, in reality local officials used the land-water-corvée principle to even more strictly regulate irrigational development and affairs. This was the case to such an extent that, in their operations, non-governmental irrigation organizations not only had to make good the damage caused by environmental factors, but also had to respond to demands for tax or corvée labor from the local authorities. Caught up in this situation, however, though people knew that irrigation brought certain benefits, they also clearly understood that when they used irrigation they became subject to various outside controls. As a consequence, water conservation through effective irrigation was by no means a common goal of everyday life shared by all in Shanxi society, but rather a response to environmental and institutional change, and the result of mutual interaction between people of various identities.