Hao LI

10.18399/acta.2026.29.1.003

Chang 瘴 (C. zhang  miasma)  medical compilation  knowledge circulation  penal geography  regional hierarchy

This article examines how chang 瘴 or “miasma,” functioned as both a medical term and a cultural–spatial idiom. Existing scholarship has largely treated chang (C. zhang) either through retrospective diagnosis or through the south–oriented disease geography of imperial China. By drawing on medical compilations, official records, collected works, and geographic writings, this article shows how chang gradually became a versatile and usable concept. Rather than treating chang as a simple borrowing from the south of China, this article argues that the concept, though derived from Chinese regional and climatological discourses, was reconstructed within the Korean context. This process unfolded even as medical and literary texts continued to preserve inherited southern etiological templates. Over time, miasma attribution shifted from a broad southern orientation to more explicit administrative enumeration and, when it comes to late Chosŏn, to a stronger association with the southern maritime fringe. Miasmatic lands (changji 瘴地) should be understood not as an environmental condition but as a historically produced designation shaped by knowledge circulation, governance, and embodied movement.