ann
(Ann)
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another one thousandjin, mainly for theNeiwufu. Butha Ula foraging,
the last major form of banner ginseng gathering, would formally end in
1750. The three hundred remaining foragers, whose annual ginseng
duties had been resumed in 1746 , included one hundred troops, who
could not find their way to the fields without forager guides. In
1749 , exclusive reliance on these troops resulted in a 72 percent shortfall
of the three thousandjinquota. A year later that the emperor decided that
Butha Ula ginseng digging was going on“in name”only and sent the
three hundred foragers to gather pearls exclusively.^122
Despite administrative differences between foraging regimes, there was
a common bureaucratic principle at work reconstituting relations between
foragers and their forage. Under this system it was possible to deliberate
whether gathering pine nuts and pine cones were distinct activities or to be
merged with others. Hunting dogs were assigned state rations.^123 Pearls
and stork pinions could be equated in terms of sable pelts, or storks
themselves in terms of sea eagles. Some animals could be dropped from
these equations entirely as“useless”or be rarefied into accounting abstrac-
tions when their real numbers declined. Such“unnatural”relations indi-
cate that the state tried to make northeastern forage more exploitable, or
legible, even as it sought to preserve a Manchu cultured nature within a
wider, largely uncontrolled ecological context.
imperial foraging: the sustainability of cultured
nature
Nevertheless, various administrative regimes imposed on foragers do not
seem unambiguously intended to preserve a borderland “Manchu”
identity. At least some forager groups, like some banner units, were
multiethnic. Ratios between the two basic ethnic categories of Han and
Manchu are often unclear.^124 Some units give the impression of ethnic
uniformity, as among a group of Han fox, goose, and eagle hunters newly
settled in Mukden in 1663 , or as among a number of Manchu banner
units looking for pearls in Jilin in 1686.^125 Qing authorities themselves
were sufficiently uncertain about the Butha Ula ranks to order a detailed
inquiry in 1662. One group of 114 was almost equally divided between
Han and Manchu troopers, intermixed with a few Koreans.^126
Whatever their actual ethnic composition, forager groups generally oper-
ated within the sphere of the Manchu banner system in lands exclusively
set aside for the livelihoods of banner members and technically barred to
Han commoners. The Kangxi emperor bluntly expressed this principle
100 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
