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encouraged convergence between hoshuu and state herds. Banner
livestock was also often purchased out of advances of annual herder
provision funds in the form of“loans”(Ma:juwen) to make good these
state herd deficits, as well as enable herders to purchase their own
animals, or“personal property livestock”(Ma:hethe ulha). Herders
of theNeiwufu’s Plain Yellow Banner who were held responsible for
losses from a 1750 epidemic among state cattle droves resorted to both
types of loans to effect stable repayment over more thanfive years.
Herders were held similarly responsible for restitution of losses from
the snowstorms of 1749 – 50 , which presiding officials considered the
result of carelessness.^60
Qing officials clearly recognized the excesses of their uncompromisingly
anthropogenic stance. When Taipusi Right Wing herders were “held
responsible for restitution of horses ravaged by wolves”in 1744 , central
officials acknowledged that“wolf ravages are unavoidable.”They believed,
however, requiring repayment would prevent laxity and so minimize inevit-
able losses, even if full restitution extracted from their state provisions
might incite“all sorts of malpractices”by disgruntled state herders. Some
quarters, moreover, believed that herders falsely invoked wolf attacks
to cover their own negligence.^61 The state’s insistence on the ultimately
anthropogenic origins of resource losses, a mentality also visible in imperial
foraging, reveals an institutional tendency to reduce complicated environ-
mental connections, rarely fully transparent, to an overly simplified problem
of personnel management. This tendency regularly surfaced as policies of
monetization that narrowed diverse environmental relations to more
anthropocentric ones. In the Inner Mongolian case, provision and repay-
ment practices comprising a bureaucratically manageable state pastoralism
attenuated herders’relations with their traditional embodiments of wealth,
personal property livestock. As in its management of relations with
Manchurian indigenous peoples, Qing state attempts to maintain a Mongol
herding identity compatible with the administrative requirements of an
imperial borderland simultaneously strained that same identity.
Herder agency, however latent, also played a role in these dynamics,
which the state tried to control through enhanced surveillance. It ended
the three-year tours of Manchu wing superintendents rotated in from
the capital who were“totally ignorant of herding methods and [the]
Mongolian”language. Local matters would be supervised by a Pastoral
Chakhar Mongol who could not be deceived through his“ignorance of
both herding horses and methods for sustaining Mongols.”^62 Whatever
the truth of an incident, both herders and the state used steppe ecology,
The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner Mongolia 135
