Shortly before dawn on 24 July 1832, imperial Beijing fell silent. Under official orders, there were to be no loitering merchants and no hammers ringing out across the city, not even the sound of cartwheels trundling on stone. That day, as the streets grew quiet, the emperor, Daoguang, who had completed three days of fasting, walked through the city at the head of a ceremonial procession. While normally such a spectacle would have been met by streets emptied of people, this time the emperor, stripped of the garments that symbolized his power, walked on as Beijing’s citizens watched. Dressed in pleated yellow and embroidered purple, he came humbly on foot.
When he reached the Circular Round Altar, a three-level roofless structure of white marble designed to face the sky, he stood on the uppermost platform on the Heaven’s Heart Stone and read what sounded like a carefully crafted self-indictment, lamenting his failures and asking the celestial powers where he had gone wrong. “If my offences are numerous and my sins grave”, he said, “let the punishment fall on my person alone. Do not destroy my people. I prostrate myself and beg Heaven to grant a swift, life-saving rain."
The emperor’s statement reflected the political challenges he faced: corruption, a fiscal crisis and a severe drought. By the summer of 1832, northern China had gone months without rain, an event which, when read through the deeply embedded Confucian philosophy of Tianren Ganying (the mutual resonance between Heaven and humans), was understood to be no mere accident. This drought was a warning, sent from above to teach the nation about the ruler’s flaws and moral failures. The result was Daoguang’s performance, a ritualistic form of weather modification meant to recalibrate the relationship between humans and Heaven.
According to the imperial chroniclers, the act was a marvellous success. Records suggest that soon after, rain finally began to pour over the dry Chinese lands, helping the emperor consolidate his once-crumbling power. This time, thanks to the rains, Daoguang would narrowly avert the threat of civil unrest—albeit only temporarily. Just seven years later, the kingdom would be at war with Britain in the First Opium War. Then, after further disasters befell the Celestial Empire, including infrastructural failures that led to widespread famine, a bloody civil war—the Taiping Rebellion—would finally break out and claim the lives of tens of millions of people.
More than a century later, on 8 August 1958, the once reigning Confucian tradition of striving for harmony between Heaven and Earth that had guided Daoguang succumbed to a new Maoist dictum: “Humanity should conquer nature.” On that day, as a pilot lifted an aircraft into the sky from an airfield in Jilin province, in north-east China near the border with Korea, his instructions were simple: fly into the cloud bank, release the material and observe the results. This would be the first deployment in China of a far more novel form of weather modification: cloud seeding.
Originally developed in the US in the immediate post-war period by General Electric as part of its pioneering government-backed weather-altering Project Cirrus, cloud seeding was meant to trigger the formation of ice crystals and precipitate snow or rain, with the overall goal of weakening hurricanes. Soon, via the then-enthusiastic sharing of technical expertise, equipment and meteorological knowledge between the US and the Soviet Union, the technology would reach China. That flight over Jilin would therefore come to mark an event with vast implications for the country’s future. Over the next few decades, China would develop the most advanced weather modification programme in the world.
Due to its geographic location and diverse climatic conditions, China has long struggled with unstable weather patterns that have resulted in recurrent drought and flood. For thousands of years, the country has cycled through stages of devastating famines and natural catastrophes, many of which have seeded cataclysmic wars and political unrest. Dynasties have risen and fallen on the patterns of the rain. And, as we can see in both the flight over Jilin and the emperor’s prostration, the will to control those cycles has been both enduring and fractious.