ann
(Ann)
#1
Bargut hunter recruits deployed to Hulun Buir, used to“living in the
wild,”“had trouble understanding”orders if they were“too detailed.”
Other poor Solon-Ewenki and Dagur, even when seeminglyfit for duties
such as manningfive new postal relay stations in Heilongjiang, still had
problems adjusting to a more regimented way of life. These“ignorant
new people”nearly starved in 1688 because they“did not know how to
reckon the time”needed to apportion their rations. Just locating forager
recruits proved time-consuming. That same year mobilization of 332
Solon-Ewenki and 86 Dagur, all“willing”and“poor,”required three
months’delay until these hunters returned.^113
Foraging, poverty, and military enlistment seem to have combined to
provide the Qing with voluntary, but unusually raw, recruits. They would
undergo a traumatic seasoning when stationed in relatively sedentarized
places where“poor people, because theyfish and hunt for a living, would
not be able to sustain a livelihood.”^114
Incompatibilities between forager recruits and the Qing imperial infra-
structure are a sign that the SAH basin was in a state of environmental
transformation in the latter half of the seventeenth century. At this time,
Qing-Romanov competition was drastically altering, and at times even
severing, relations between humans and basin biodiversity.
a borderland consolidated; foraging
bureaucratized
These alterations are most visible throughout Manchuria in the wake
of thefinal Qing victory over the Romanovs. The onset of the eight-
eenth century witnessed the systematization of imperial foraging as the
dynasty consolidated its borderland order. Administrative structures
built up throughout Manchuria within thefirstfifty or so years after
the conquest and mainly in response to Russian incursion afforded the
Qing state greater access to human and natural resources via a for-
aging bureaucracy that spanned the northeast. Han settlers also inad-
vertently gained easier entry into what had been a violently contested
zone. The peacetime activities of both the Qing state and its Han
subjects put further, and sometimes contradictory, pressures on indi-
genous peoples and natural resources that continued to transform
foraging relations.
Dynastic policy continued to regiment traditional interaction with the
ecology through the formation of specialized hunter-gatherer detachments.
In addition to twenty-five ten-man detachments gathering mainly pearls,
96 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
