Hot Springs in China: A Therapeutic History (1000-1945)

Abstract:

In contrast with the abundant research on the history of hot or mineral springs in Europe, Japan, America, and their colonial regions, research on Chinese hot springs, both in the premodern and modern period, has remained largely neglected. Focusing on sites along the Qinling mountains range, including the famous Huaqing Hot Springs, the book situates local case studies within broader national and global exchanges of knowledge about healing waters. It reveals that hot springs in China were not merely natural sites of leisure but contested therapeutic landscapes. At these sites, official and religious managers of the bathhouses, self-treating patients, medical pilgrims, lay medical intermediaries, and ordinary bathers and travelers from diverse regions, classes, genders, and occupations encountered one another. It traces the transformation of these sites from premodern sacred therapeutic landscapes into modern spas and sanatoria. Yet important continuities remained in how hot spring treatments were understood and experienced. By tracing transformations alongside continuities across the longue durée, the book shows how the therapeutic landscapes of hot springs emerged through ongoing negotiations among natural environments, spatial reconstructions, intellectual and scientific inquiries, cultural imaginations, and lived bodily experience.

Bio：

Fei Huang is Professor of Chinese History and Society, Department of Chinese Studies, University of Tübingen. Her research interests concentrate on the interdisciplinary combination of landscape studies, environmental history, history of the body, cultural geography, historical anthropology, art history and material culture studies on China and the dynamics of globalization between the 16th and 20th centuries