journal

Ruth Rogaski’s Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland is the 2023 winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history. Treating Manchuria both as a region in its own right and as a contested, nation-defining borderland for multiple empires, Rogaski has produced a multifaceted history encompassing flying voles and subterranean dragons; Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese, and Indigenous polities; wetlands, taiga, and sacred mountain environments; and an array of human actors including emperors and poets, farmers and soldiers, botanists, paleontologists, and bacteriologists.