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hacked out of the loess are reverting to nature. In what locals call the “3-3-3” system, farmers replant one-third of their land—the steepest, most erosion-prone slopes—with grass and trees, natural barriers to erosion. They cover another third of the land with harvestable orchards. The final third, mainly plots on the gully floor that have been enriched by earlier erosion, is cropped intensively. By concentrating their limited supplies of fertilizer on that land, farmers can raise yields enough to make up for the land they have sacrificed—that’s the theory, anyway. To help the transition along, farmers are compensated with an annual delivery of grain and a small cash payment for up to eight years. By 2010, the program covered more than 56,000 square miles of gully villages, an area the size of Iowa.

At first glance, it seems that a dictatorship would be perfectly suited to accomplish this task. The government can simply order loess dwellers to stop growing millet and plant almonds without worrying about property rights or political protest. It can direct whole villages to go into the hills en masse and plant saplings, millions upon millions of them, in small pits shaped like fish scales. And when the farmers and fields are shifted around, the planners can point to their accomplishments with pride.

Things look different on the ground. Provincial, county, and village officials are rewarded if they plant the number of trees envisioned in the plan, not whether they have chosen tree species suited to local conditions (or listened to scientists who say that trees are not appropriate for grasslands to begin with). Farmers who reap no direct benefit from their work—they are installing trees that do not produce fruit, cannot be cut for firewood, and supposedly stop erosion miles from their homes—have little incentive to take care of the trees they are forced to plant. The entirely predictable result is visible on the back roads of Shaanxi: fields of dead trees, each in its fish-scale pit, lining the roads for miles. “Every year we plant trees,” the farmers say, “but no trees survive.”

During my visit the lines of dead trees dotted the slopes like contour marks, stretching for miles. The harvest was over, and farmers were about to be marched back in for another try. Tree by tree, the government was trying to undo the accidental legacy of the global silver trade.

1 The reader will have noted that I barely mention Dutch and Portuguese trade in Asia, which centered on spices, and focus on Spain and the galleon trade. This is partly to simplify a complex narrative, but mainly because the Spanish empire, the first truly global enterprise, is more germane to this book. In addition, the Netherlands and Portugal were entangled with that empire: the former not wresting full independence from it until 1648; the latter, long independent, forced by dynastic mishaps to accept a Spanish king from 1580 to 1640.

2 Chen was not the only sweet-potato smuggler. According to a nineteenth-century gazetteer, the Chinese doctor Lin Huailan successfully treated a sick Vietnamese princess in 1581. At a banquet in his honor, he was served sweet potatoes. Vietnam had banned exporting the tuber to China “on penalty of death,” the gazetteer recounted, but Lin decided to take some anyway. “While crossing the border, he was questioned by a [Vietnamese] border official. Lin answered truthfully, and requested that the officer secretly let him through. The officer said: ‘As for what happens today, being a servant of the country, it would be disloyal of me to let you pass; however, being grateful for your virtues, to deny you would be unrighteous.’ He then drowned himself. Lin returned, and the tuber spread across Guangdong.”

3 The ethnic group generally indicated by the word “Chinese” is the Han. The Manchu were pushing Han from the Chinese core into peripheral areas settled by other peoples.

4 Agriculture was not the only cause of deforestation. China consumed huge quantities of timber as fuel and building material. To get the wood, platoons of workers went