Ecological Environment and Social Changes of Wuyuan in the Ming and Qing Dynasties

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, as a small mountainous county in the south of Anhui and the northeast of Jiangxi, Wuyuan had been a partition of Wu and Chu under the jurisdiction of Huizhou. With the charming scenery and the superior ecological environment, the gathering clansmen practiced cultivation to attain to flourishing education, cultures and businesses, forming a harmony between human and nature. Although the ecological environment of Wuyuan was once destructed to some extent by social changes, such as the change of times and ages in late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the Shed people's excessive deforestation in mid-Qing dynasty and Xianfeng's war disasters in late Qing dynasty, it had been recovered gradually by the local government, the county's basic administrative units and the local clans.