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“perfect storm”of drought anddzudoccurred, in 1999 – 2001 , it killed off
30 percent (about 8 – 10 million head) of Mongolia’s total herd population,
the worst natural disaster in its recorded history.^34
A recent 2009 study, based in part on the 1999 – 2001 event, concluded
there was no empirical connection between drought and dzud. The
region’s extreme weather is likely connected somehow to dynamics
between its aridity, highly seasonal summer precipitation, enormous
annual temperature range, sparse vegetation, and unusual geographical
position. The Mongolian plateau lies at an elevated northern latitude far
from any ocean, indirectly affected by the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau’s rain
shadow, and exposed to Siberian high-pressure fronts. Some of these
conditions date back to the last major glacial period, the Pleistocene era
( 13 , 000 years BP). The resulting dynamics, however, do not necessarily
produce cyclic disturbances such as drought anddzudin what is other-
wise a steady state of ecological balance that inevitably reasserts itself.
In terms of regional precipitation, the 2009 study concluded that the
precipitation index in Mongolia’s South Gobi province defined the area
as a nonequilibrium zone that failed to meet the minimum requirement
for stable plant and animal ecosystem interactions.^35
Preindustrial pastoral practices, especially high mobility, that create
interdependencies between people and animals have been the primary
human response to the steppe’sdefinitive extreme, and often nonequili-
brium, weather events. Disaster relief has, consequently, been critical, but
reactive. So expedience has tended to prevail over pastorally appropriate
measures. In attempting to adapt to substantially ungovernable steppe
conditions the Qing state naturally inclined toward those most amenable
to human intervention. With its economic and political heartland located
well to the south in the agrarian and marketized alluvial plains of China
proper, eighteenth-century imperial Chinese human intervention arrived
as grain and silver, not livestock. It was not so much Mongol subjection
to banners, but Mongol dependency on livestock, that was the prerequis-
ite relation for the stability of imperial pastoralism. This connection
subsisted most immediately on grass and water, which, in turn, were most
imperilled by nonequilibrium drought anddzud.
rain, grass, and relief
The steppe’s already harsh environment probably became even less hos-
pitable during the Ming-Qing period (mid–fourteenth through nineteenth
centuries). Inner Mongolia’s general spell of dry cold air at this time could
The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner Mongolia 129
