ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2010
Periodic climate cooling enhanced natural disasters and wars in China during AD 10-1900.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 116 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Evolution of the Asian summer monsoon and regional karst ecological environment since the middle ages in Southwest China.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Correlation analysis between the occurrence of epidemic in ancient China and solar activity.Science China. Earth sciences · 2023Article
- Long-term decrease in Asian monsoon rainfall and abrupt climate change events over the past 6,700 years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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- Climate change affected the spatio-temporal occurrence of disasters in China over the past five centuries.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Rainfall, temperature, and Classic Maya conflict: A comparison of hypotheses using Bayesian time-series analysis.PloS one · 2021Article
- Simulating the route of the Tang-Tibet Ancient Road for one branch of the Silk Road across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.PloS one · 2019Article
- Scale-dependent climatic drivers of human epidemics in ancient China.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Recent warming evidence inferred from a tree-ring-based winter-half year minimum temperature reconstruction in northwestern Yichang, South Central China, and its relation to the large-scale circulation anomalies.International journal of biometeorology · 2016Article
- Article
- Wavelet analysis in ecology and epidemiology: impact of statistical tests.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2014Article
- Unfavourable environment limits social conflict in Yuhina brunneiceps.Nature communications · 2012Article
- The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2011Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent studies have linked climatic and social instabilities in ancient China; the underlying causal mechanisms have, however, often not been quantitatively assessed. Here, using historical records and palaeoclimatic reconstructions during AD 10-1900, we demonstrate that war frequency, price of rice, locust plague, drought frequency, flood frequency and temperature in China show two predominant periodic bands around 160 and 320 years where they interact significantly with each other. Temperature cooling shows direct positive association with the frequency of external aggression war to the Chinese dynasties mostly from the northern pastoral nomadic societies, and indirect positive association with the frequency of internal war within the Chinese dynasties through drought and locust plagues. The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han, Tang, Song and Ming are more closely associated with low temperature. Our study suggests that food production during the last two millennia has been more unstable during cooler periods, resulting in more social conflicts owing to rebellions within the dynasties or/and southward aggressions from northern pastoral nomadic societies in ancient China.
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