ann
(Ann)
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grassland resources, albeit in fundamentally different ways. Interethnic
competition ensued and lasted over the next 130 years.
This competition was one historically visible sign that Inner Mongo-
lia’s administrative and ecological boundaries were incongruent. It was
relations between humans and resources, rather than those between
humans and state administrations, that mainly resulted in Han migration
north of the Great Wall, even in the late nineteenth century under the
exigency of Russian colonialism.^99 The material, rather than political,
concerns of the Han masses ensured that the region of Inner Mongolia
that would experience the greatest influx of Han migrants in the eight-
eenth century was the ecotone along the Hu Line.
This ecotone had long drawn migrants. The Chinese red pine, for
example, is indigenous to northern China centered on the Yellow River
basin. Red pine nevertheless did actually“migrate”into southeastern
Mongolia, an area technically beyond the limits of the northern
monsoon climate that conditions the distribution of this tree species.
The pines appeared with the onset of the monsoon’s northward shift,
and commensurate increases in temperature and precipitation, nearly
eight thousand years ago, and then declined about forty-two hundred
years ago. This is also the approximate time frame for the general
replacement of woodlands by grasslands. In microclimates created by
valleys, however, higher water tables and related conditions permitted
isolated pine stands to persist“along the current ecotone and into
the steppe.” These stands now inhibit soil erosion associated with
widespread desertification.^100
Southeastern Inner Mongolia is an ecotone in part because it is peri-
odically capable of changing just enough to make limited accommodation
to species such as the red pine, with an enhancement in diversity that
further distinguishes the region. Such patchy diversity is what sustained
Mongol herders and what drew Han farmers in the process of their own
much more expeditious northern migration in the early eighteenth
century.
Of course, agriculture and pastoralism were not monolithic practices,
ethnically or spatially. There were pastures south of the Great Wall and
cultivation among Mongols, especially the Tümed, although thirteen
of their semiurbanized sixty-two “agrarian” banner companies were
actually pastoral.^101 Differences north and south among all these prac-
tices, however, abounded and were conditioned by both cultural and
ecological factors. Han cultivation, as noted inChapter 1 , for example,
was distinct from Mongol cultivation, particularly in terms of scale.
The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner Mongolia 147
