My dissertation examines how individuals and polities understood the body, the weather, and senses of place in late Qing China and its aftermath. I study the production of environmental knowledge through the body, bodily knowledge through the environment, and the situatedness of these knowledges at the fringes of multiple empires. In particular, I focus on southern frontier spaces, such as the island of Taiwan, which saw these polities engaged in nested layers of colonial control. By examining how place and weather were conceptualized by physicians and patients in such places, I explore how medicine was rooted – physically, discursively, and ideologically – in ways that entangled political notions of nation, colony, empire, air, mountain, and frontier, which were themselves in the process of being (re)defined. I plan to visit collections containing missionary and aid organization archives, which will show how European and American actors participated in this story of climactic colonialism.