As a typical mountain area at the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in Southwest China, the Erhai Lake Basin has uneven precipitation (frequent droughts and floods), affected by the Southwest Monsoon in Asia and significant vertical zonal differences determined by local topography. Though with such harsh physical environment, this area sustained development in ancient times and has been considered a typical resilience case in many studies. With extensive investigation of various historical archives, this paper explores the situation and changes of water management in the Erhai Basin during the past 300 years, and aims to identify local factors in maintaining resilience to water stresses. Findings indicate that various strong and smart social regulations (governance, institutions, plans, management, motivations, orders, donations, dedication, etc.) enabled a wise development of many water conservancy projects that set up an effective irrigation system at the flat basin center. Lots of stream dams, sluice gates and terraced croplands jointly further enabled water storage, drainage and irrigation at the surrounding hillside areas. Additionally, by adopting drought-resistant and cold-resistant crops, agriculture production kept increasing and successfully fed the growing population. The complex but systematically developed river canal system, with its dams, reservoirs, and sluice gates, as well as adaptive cropping strategies, together maintained and enhanced the resilience of local communities to hydrological hazards. Over the 300 years of the study period, the changing water environment and the developing water conservancy projects showed a resilience loop, which offers a simple but valuable perspective on building human-water resilience in face of current and future water crises in this region and beyond.

This study focuses on the northern catchment of Erhai Lake that lies in the heart of the ancient Southern Silk Road (the Tea-Horse Roads) in southwest China. The hydrologic environment of this region is complex and evolved under significant human impacts, especially after large populations migrated after 1382 under the policy of military tillage. This led to increased pressures on the human-water relationship of this region but also stimulated social resilience to water stresses. This paper investigates the manner in which local people addressed the conflicts of utilizing limited water for people, livestock and irrigation until 1912. The approaches of statistical analysis, spatial analysis and correlation analysis were adopted, and historical data on floods, water conservation projects, plants, and disease were collected to support a detailed examination of the evolution of the human-water relationship in the study area. The results indicate that: (1) the evolution of the hydrologic environment, including the river system and the hydro-chemical environment, had a close correspondence with human activities; (2) local people constructed various water conservation and engineering facilities and changed their farming structures to cope with water stresses, which partly contributed to the break out and spread of Schistosomiasis japonica; (3) the resilience of the human-water relationship became weaker as the management of water projects diminished; (4) the sustainable development of the human-water relationship could be maintained through regular water management and environmental governance. These findings emphasize the influences of social policy and human activities on the resilience of the catchment and improve our understanding of resilience theory.

This study adopted an empirical analysis to explore social resilience to major natural disasters along the Tea-Horse Road (THR) in southwest China and to understand why and how the THR and its connected communities maintained and developed over a long period. A set of archive data, literature re-analysis, statistical data, monitoring data, and surveyed materials were collected and qualitatively and quantitatively analysed to support a holistic investigation of disaster impacts and social resilience. The results indicate that (a) natural disasters occurred frequently but were distributed over place and time and had various impacts, which left possibilities for maintaining social development with diverse and specific coping strategies; (b) strong central and local governance continually improved infrastructure and engineering technologies, and collaboration in social networks with local experience and disaster cultures were the major contributing factors that enhanced social resilience at various levels; (c) the THR area demonstrated various features of social resilience to natural disasters in terms of spatial-temporal scales, where the combination of multiple resilience measures enabled the resilience of the entire social system at various places over long time periods. Generally, larger social systems with diverse response capabilities were more resilient than small and individual entities over a long time scale. The study highlights that the THR region withstood frequent natural disasters but maintained a general development of social economy, transportation, and advanced technologies, and performed a positive transformation to a more resilient status. Overall, this paper describes the scale effects of multiple resilience measures along the THR and calls for specific studies on social resilience and transformation of diverse social entities over multiple spatial-temporal scales.