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China proper, including robes, hats, boots, saddle cloths, belts, sashes,
and fans. Quota shortfalls were sometimes punished by withholding gifts,
other times simply carried over to be repaid the following year. A feast
was also a regular part of the proceedings. Once the ritual was concluded,
the tributary delegation was permitted to trade the remainder of their
various pelts, which could amount to thousands, and other goods with
resident private merchants.^72
Qing pelt tribute ritual, as the preceding Ming exchanges before it, was
primarily intended to subjugate SAH basin peoples. Profit was, technic-
ally, secondary. Regular commerce in pelts nevertheless reached immense
proportions during the Ming. 47 , 243 sable pelts were traded in just six
months between 1583 and 1584 despite the dynasty’s limited degree of
control restricted to the basin’s southern fringes. This scale ensured the
Ming tribute system suffered from local profiteering that cheated indigen-
ous peoples. This undermined what one contemporary critic called the
pelt tribute system’s fundamental principle of“sending [tributaries] back
with more than they came with.”^73
A more direct Qing presence permitted a more ambitious agenda for the
transformation of tributary identities into New Manchu bannermen. The
role of pelt tribute in the construction plan for embodiments of an imperial
borderland was especially visible when ritual norms were violated, as they
were by the Hejen and Fiyaka tributary missions in 1675. These groups were
inhabitants mainly of the lower reaches of the SAH and nearby Sakhalin
Island, which were the extreme and tentative northeastern edges of dynastic
authority in the basin. The Kangxi emperor had himself bluntly recognized
the vacuum of Qing norms among these two groups three years earlier in
1672. As part of a contemporary mobilization against resurgent Russian
incursion, he charged Jilin’sfirst military governor, Bahai,“to spread a
civilizing influence and employ all means to enlighten them” because
“although they are submissive, they are actually savage and it would be best
to guard against them.”This order was similar to one the emperor also sent
to Bahai around the same time to civilize the equally“savage”and“crafty”
Warka and Hūrha.^74 The“savage”identities of all three peoples were to
become“cultured”through more supervised interaction with their sur-
roundings. Bahai duly employed pelt tribute to effect this change, but a
misunderstanding, possibly deliberate, exposed the limits of tribute as an
instrument of ethnic transformation. A mid- 1676 report complained that
Fiyaka and Hejen representatives had unilaterally violated tribute etiquette
by presenting their sable pelts not at Ningguta, but at an outpost much
farther north. Because of their ritual impropriety, these“ignorant people”
82 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
