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(Ann)
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administrative center for two of Shanxi’s six conglomerated subprefectures
known collectively as Gui(hua)-Sui(yuan) Liu Ting in the northwestern
corner of the province. The town and subprefecture of Suiyuan was
founded in 1739 , and Guihua, founded in the Ming, became a subprefec-
ture in 1741. These two, along with both Shuoping prefecture, established
in 1725 , and part of Datong prefecture, administered Shanxi north of
the Great Wall. The corresponding space in Zhili was, in its western half,
under the administration of the three subprefectures of Zhangjiakou,
Dolon Nuur, and Dushikou, together making up Koubei San Ting and
established in 1724 , 1732 ,and 1734 , respectively. To the east sprawled
Chengde prefecture, initially set up in 1723 as Rehe subprefecture and
including some of the present-day IMAR and Liaoning province. It was
also the site of the imperial hunting complex of Chengde-Muran.^95
Junxian formation served as poetic inspiration to the Qianlong
emperor, who lauded the consequent environmental relations in a poem
entitled “Country Inns” (“Ye dian”). “Country inns and mountain
villages”were sited amid what had been“Mongol pastures”that had
now become“fields where the Han multitudes [qimin]“plowed land and
dug wells.”An interlinear gloss notes that this alludes to a former hunting
area in the Khorchin banner lands convertedfirst intofields and then, in
1729 , into the subprefecture of Bagou ting. The subprefecture managed
Han-banner interaction and “now nourished the people” (xiuyang
shengxi) with“millet-filledfields no different from that of China proper.”
It goes on to praise the“junandxian, newly established,”a reference to
the elevation of Rehe subprefecture to Chengde prefecture in 1778 ,that
“are nearly rich enough for commerce.”^96
Thus, from about 1723 to 1741 the state’s establishment of these
subprefectures was an administrative concession to a major demographic
transformation of steppe areas immediately north of the Great Wall. The
Han migrant populace clearing land in Chakhar territory just north of
main passes such as Zhangjiakou has been estimated at aroundfifty
thousand people. This was a dramatic manifestation of what Zhang
Yongjiang has called the“interiorization”(neidihua) of the Mongolian
“vassal tribes”(fanbu). In this process distinct borderland ethnic adminis-
trative structures steadily come under a ubiquitous, uniformjunxian
administration that is agriculturally rather than pastorally predisposed.^97
Steppe subprefectural conversion over this roughly twenty-year span
probably, as Zhang has argued, created a“dual”system of Han-Mongol
administration that ethnically influenced relations at all levels.^98 This dual
system, however, emerged because both Han and Mongols could utilize
146 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
