The wars and rebellions that punctuated China’s ancient dynasties have inspired epic books and films. Now it seems the course of the nation’s history may have been influenced by a rather more mundane force: the weather.
China’s archives track the lives of the country’s clans over the last millennium in voluminous detail. This inspired David Zhang at the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues to scour the documents for links between conflict and climate. They found that periods of cold weather preceded 12 of the 15 major bouts of warfare they studied.
The link makes sense, they say, since…
