The Order of Water: Rainmaking Rituals and the Making of Knowledge in Song-Dynasty Mingzhou

Abstract

This dissertation examines rainmaking rituals in Song-period Mingzhou (modern Ningbo) as a key site where environmental uncertainty, knowledge, and local governance were brought into relation. In a coastal region marked by recurrent drought, tidal intrusion, and fragile freshwater systems, water functioned both as the material foundation of social life and as a persistent source of disruption. With a particular focus on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this study explores how hydraulic engineering, rainmaking rituals, and local textual production operated as mutually constitutive processes that rendered environmental uncertainty intelligible and actionable within social order. Existing scholarship on Song local society has made significant advances in explaining the formation of regional social structures through economic development, the expansion of the examination system, and the consolidation of literati networks. Parallel strands of research on local knowledge production have further shown how gazetteers and other forms of local writing organized local experience into authoritative cultural narratives. Yet within these frameworks, religious practices have often been treated as secondary or merely symbolic, leaving insufficiently examined the role of ritual as an operative mechanism in the production of local knowledge and the organization of social order. In particular, the ways in which ritual mediated environmental crisis, structured collective action, and shaped the distribution of interpretive authority remain insufficiently theorized. This study addresses three interrelated questions. How did local society in Song-period Mingzhou develop a form of administration that integrated hydraulic management, administrative institutions, and religious ritual under conditions of ecological instability? Through what processes were experiences of environmental crisis and ritual intervention recorded, transmitted, and stabilized as authoritative forms of local knowledge? And how did rainmaking rituals, in moments of acute environmental stress, function as institutional mechanisms for mobilizing resources, negotiating authority, and reconstituting social order? This dissertation argues that in Song-period Mingzhou, environmental uncertainty fostered the emergence of a hybrid administrative formation in which engineering practices, ritual procedures, and textual production were mutually articulated and operated together. Within this formation, rainmaking rituals took the form of formalized sequences of collective action that rendered unpredictable environmental phenomena publicly interpretable and administratively actionable. Ritual efficacy was articulated in processual terms, taking shape through a sequence of ritual performance, narrative interpretation, textual inscription, and institutional recognition. Through these interrelated processes, episodic experiences of drought and ritual response were consolidated into durable forms of local knowledge, while simultaneously reconfiguring relationships among officials, literati, religious practitioners, and local communities. By placing environmental uncertainty at the center of analysis, this dissertation shifts attention from the stability of local institutions to the processes through which instability was rendered governable in Song China. In Mingzhou, rainmaking rituals formed part of a broader configuration in which administrative practice and knowledge production were structurally integrated, making it possible for environmental crises to be interpreted and acted upon. Local knowledge emerged from this process as a historically situated and continuously reworked form of understanding, shaped through the repeated articulation of response and explanation. Within this framework, ritual functioned as a means of organizing interpretation, shaping how authority was claimed and recognized. The “order of water” thus refers to an ongoing process in which environmental conditions, practical action, and forms of knowledge were continuously brought into alignment, enabling local society to maintain its capacity to respond to ecological uncertainty.