ann
(Ann)
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than forty-four hundred kilometers of the world’s ninth longest river.
Manchurian mixed forests and the boreal or taiga forests, two offifteen
distinct ecological regions formed from the combined climatic effects of
monsoons, oceanic currents, and mountains, are among the most import-
ant cradles of this biodiversity. Forests in the Changbai Mountains, for
example, consist mainly of mixed stands of Korean pine and a range of
indigenous deciduous trees to produce an ecoregion that gives rise to
other rare species such as ginseng, unique to this type of forest. These
forests also distinctively contain larger stands of larch and pine conifers
that in turn provide a food-rich habitat for rare mammals such as the
Amur tiger, the leopard and, most significantly for seventeenth-century
Eurasian empire, the sable.^66
Sable are adapted for SAH forests. A recent study of sable in northern
Heilongjiang province found that the animals showed a marked prefer-
ence for stands containing both larches and birches, which facilitate
resting and feeding. Overall, sable almost exclusively favored old-growth
stands that provide substantial cover, especially in winter. They tended
to avoid unforested areas or even where saplings predominate.^67
Sable are intimately and intricately dependent on distinctive tree
species whose intermixture substantially defines boreal and Manchurian
mixed forests, which in turn helps to constitute the ecoregion. Over time,
humans have interacted with this biodiversity in ways that can augment
or reduce it, but always as to gradually integrate themselves within it,
even if just to keep warm. So foraging skills, rather than cultivation skills,
are far more important for the accumulation of the three Manchurian
treasures, which formed part of the material basis for regional control.
Control, however, was also based on hunting skills for the militarization
of human resources. The Qing had amply exploited the synergistic poten-
tial of both natural and human foraging resources in their mobilization
for the 1644 conquest of agrarian China.
Human interactions with sable and other forage were, consequently,
conditioned by a range of cultural and ecological factors that could be put
in service of imperial state ends but required appropriate orchestration
of more than just human acts. Human and natural resources could be
mutually enhancing so that a state needed to control their linkages to
obtain the means to construct a stable regional order.
Human-sable interaction was a fundamental component of this order,
with sable tribute acting as its traditional and primary expression. The
Qing inherited this system, which can be traced as far back as the Han
dynasty. Manchus both modified and expanded the system to form
80 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
