ann
(Ann)
#1
they would be so supplied from the confiscated animals. Each household
received three large animals and ten sheep; single men got one large
animal andfive sheep. Officials handed out 879 horses and cattle along
with 3 , 020 sheep to accompany their new owners to the grasslands of
their new lords.^68
In a sense, these 275 households were human resources that were
recycled into imperial Mongol pastoralists by a state redistribution of
livestock to ensure they would not overburden their new lords. Some were
trying to maintain an inappropriate pastoral identity by rustling from
Qing herds or residing illicitly in Qing pastures. Those led by the lama
had entirely lost this identity once their livestock had died. None of these
lifestyles was considered suitable for the maintenance of the imperial
borderland beyond the Great Wall. So officials duly converted all these
people into proper Qing pastoralists by restoring appropriate relations
between steppe humans and livestock. This 1732 relief operation seems
the type that the Qianlong emperor had in mind when he issued his edict
nine years later in 1741.
The fall of 1732 was particularly significant in the history of com-
paratively anthropogenic threats to Qing Mongol identity from the
steppe. Relief aid was a fundamentalpart of the dynastic strategy in
response. In the summer of 1731 Qing forces had suffered a major defeat
at the hands of the Zunghars at Hoton Nuur, west of Khobdo, where
they lost eight thousand of ten thousand men. The Yongzheng emperor
was so dismayed by this reverse that he considered abandoning the
dynasty’s decades-long war. As the Zunghars began to exploit their
victory by moving south and east, many Khalkha were driven from their
lands andfled to the relative safety of Qing Inner Mongolia. Although
the marauding Zunghars were in turn defeated by the dynasty’sKhalkha
allies at Erdene Juu in October 1732 , the effects of their incursion were
felt for years afterward in the pastures south of the desert as the Qing
state sought to restore proper conditions.^69
One or all of the groups found wandering just north of the Great Wall
in November 1732 were probablyfleeing the war. At least 390 Khalkha
households requiring resettlement in January 1733 certainly had been
in headlong flight since the previous year from their old pastures
that had come under Zunghar harassment. These Khalkha, whose live-
stock had also been ravaged by a snowstorm as theyfled to southern
Uliastai in 1732 , could not shift again to their new Ordos pastures
being prepared for them in Qing territory without further aid. Dynastic
authorities provided them with more than twenty-one thousand taels
138 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
