Crossing the Frozen Frontier: Ice, Climate, and Warfare in Ming and Qing China

Speaker: Tristan Brown, Associate Professor of History and the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Chair, MIT

Moderator: Eugenia Lean, Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures; Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Columbia University

Tristan Brown discusses his forthcoming project, “Crossing the Frozen Frontier: Ice, Climate, and Warfare on the Ming and Qing Norther Frontiers.” This article intervenes in both environmental and military history by examining how the seasonal freezing of rivers and terrain across the Ming and Qing dynasties’ northern frontiers reshaped the geography of war in early modern East Asia. Drawing on Chinese and Manchu sources, it traces how winter ice crossings became a defining tactical feature of frontier conflict. For the first two centuries of the Ming, Mongol cavalry routinely exploited frozen waterways such as the Yellow River and mountain corridors through Shanxi and Shaanxi to bypass walled defenses, raid deep into agrarian heartlands, and threaten strategic centers including Beijing. Ice altered patterns of movement, compromised fixed fortifications, and forced the Ming state to contend with winter terrain as an unpredictable component of military planning. These dynamics intensified during the Ming-Qing transition, when new forms of steppe-imperial conflict and state consolidation redefined the strategic use of climate and terrain at the coldest point of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. In reframing frozen landscapes as dynamic instruments of frontier warfare, this study advances an integrated environmental and military historical approach to state power, climate, and mobility.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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