Agricultural History
What About the Elephants?

Chinese farmers and elephants to not mix,

writes Mark Elvin in his seminal book "The Retreat of the Elephants", his widely acclaimed environmental history of China. 

Yet the idea that elephants were once widely used in Chinese agriculture remains a fascinating idea.

From the Han dynasty on, the use of elephants for ceremonial use has been sparsely documented and in the Song dynasty even a "Department for Raising Elephants" 养象所 was established (see Elephants for Ceremonial Purposes in the Qing Dynasty (2019) ), but for their use in agriculture only a single source seems to exist:

孔雀巢人家树上。象大如水牛。土俗养象以耕田，仍烧其粪。Peacocks nest in trees near the people, and elephants are as large as water buffalos. They customarily raise elephants to till the fields and burn their excrement. 

This passage from the 《云南志》, a text better known in the west at the 《蛮书》, the "Book of the Barbarians", a ninth-century Chinese work about everything then known about the region that later became Yunnan province, seems to confirm the use of elephants in agriculture, but one has also to realise that its author almost certainly never visited the region he wrote about there. 

While elephants were certainly captured and trained, mostly for ceremonial use and also occasionally in warfare, their use in fields to plow the land seems unlikely, simply for their high maintenance costs compared with buffaloes. Elephants require shade and, when in captivity, need to be bathed regularly to keep their temperature down, probably limiting their use to clearing forests, something they are still being used for in parts of Burma. 

Historical lore is full of stories related to elephants, such as this explanation of the origin of the village name Mangzhang 芒掌, a small village just south of Menglian 孟连:

芒掌就建在放牧⼤象的菜混掌⼭坡之下，所以叫芒掌。（召罕嫩 2004, p. 21) [Mangzhang was built below the Caihunzhang slope where elephants were pastured, and thus was named Mangzhang]

(I speculate here, but the Chinese character 掌 could have been chosen for its similarity to the Dai Lü word jaaŋ , meaning a grazing area (see Dai Lue Dictionary).)

When it comes to the historic record, first of all it is notable that elephants are absent. There are no elephants on the bronze drums from the ancient Dian period about two thousand years ago that otherwise depict domestic scenes. No other images or statues of elephants depicting them in agricultural use have been found either. 

That does not mean that elephants were not used at all. As early as the Jin dynasty 

To those who did not read Mark Elvin's seminal book "The Retreat of the Elephants", the title seems to promise a comprehensive history of pachiderm use in China. However, just a few pages into the work, he states,

Chinese farmers and elephants to not mix. (Elvin, p. 10)

continuing with the caveat,

It is necessary to say 'Chinese' here as some non-Han cultures in the Far
South seem to have had a less confrontational relationship. One writer in Tang
times observed of the Manshi 'barbarians', who are of Tai stock, that "peacocks
nest in the trees by people’s houses, and the elephants are the size of water
buffalo, the local custom being to rear them to plow the fields, and, even now,
to burn their dung as fuel."

Here he quotes one historic quote that confirms the use of elephants in agriculture in southwestern China, a passage from the 《云南志》, a text better known in the west at the 《蛮书》, the "Book of the Barbarians", a ninth-century Chinese work about everything then known about the region that later became Yunnan province. The original text reads as follows: 

孔雀巢人家树上。象大如水牛。土俗养象以耕田，仍烧其粪。Peacocks nest in trees near the people, and elephants are as large as water buffalos. They customarily raise elephants to till the fields and burn their excrement. 

But this seems actually the only historic quote confirming the use of elephants in agriculture in the far south of Yunnan, a region that the author of the text almost certainly never visited. The same texts has a few other mentions of elephants, but notably as ceremonial animals at the Nanzhao court. Had the use of elephants been more widespread, it would have surely been noted. 

Indeed as elephants are very difficult to train and expensive to keep, it is difficult to see what benefit they brought over the far less dangerous and more docile water buffaloes even a thousand years ago.

Elvin continues,

The 'war' was fought on three fronts. The first front was the destruction of
the elephants’ forest habitat by clearing land for farming. One reason we hear
of their intrusions, from time to time even into walled cities, is probably that
they were under pressure from the shrinking of the resources available to
them. The second front was the farmers' defense of their crops against
elephant trampling and plundering, based on their belief that the security of
the fields demanded the extermination or capture of the thieves. The third
front was the hunting of elephants for their ivory and their trunks, which were
a gourmet’s delicacy, or their trapping to be trained for war, transport, or
ceremonial. These three fronts can be looked at separately, but in all cases
habitat destruction was the key. (Elvin, p.11)

While fossil records confirm the presence of elephants as far north as Beijing and copious amounts of ivory have been found in the pits of Sanxingdui 三星堆 in Sichuan, the realms of elephants hat shrunk to southern China by the Song dynasty and are now confined to small areas of Yunnan, where a number of wild herds have successfully been reestablished. 

While ivory and also occasionally live elephants served as trophies and tribute, their role in agriculture has always been limited.