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to Mongol pastoral identity. The official deliberation of the proposal
categorically asserted that“the Chahar Mongols all require good grass-
lands and water in order to live by herding horses and livestock in a way not
comparable to Han commoners who live by cultivatingfields.”The rejec-
tion assumed that Mongol cultivation would eventually be handed over to
more efficient and enthusiastic Han farmer tenants, a common contempor-
ary practice, legal or not. This had already happened to some Tümedfields
five years earlier. Officials were certain these poor Mongols, who had no
livestock, would also“abandon their old ways of herding”as their pastures
came under pressure“because they have been ceded to Han who have been
recruited and brought in to cultivate them.”^113
In rejecting Ušiba’s proposal Beijing authorities probably had in mind
previous incidents of unauthorized introductions of Han cultivators into
Mongol farming areas by local officials. Once such incident had occurred
in 1727 among Mongols who had shifted to agriculture after their livestock
was devastated by“large-scale epidemics and depredations of tigers.”
Another had happened in 1745 among Chakhar Plain Red Banner troops
without livestock living on lands unfit for herding. They had permitted
theirfields to go to seed andfinally resorted to Han farmers.^114 General
decline in state promotion of Mongol agriculture was already visible in
1725 , when a request was made to discontinue grain levies on the Pastoral
Chakhar, who“were quite unaccustomed”to cultivation. Some of their
lands had never even been planted because of unseasonably early frosts.^115
Mid–eighteenth-century pastures were not well equipped administra-
tively to control these new environmental relations. Enforcement to
reconvert illicit plots to pastureland and return their residents to China
proper carried out in 1750 found little evidence of outright violation.
It did, however, reveal that Mongol banner records had failed to properly
register about twenty-two hundred hectares and twenty-four hundred
Han residents. Such discrepancies led one investigator to conclude that
non-Mongol replacements were needed because“Mongols would make
muddled inquiries and carelessly compile registers.”^116 Mongol identity
was administratively incompatible with Han identity.
As fundamental as it was, land was not the only resource that required
extensive interethnic administrative management as Han migration
increased. For all its problems, cultivation was an essentially sedentary
activity that was easier to control than access to more portable resources
such asfish, wood, or salt. These resources tended to create disruptively
rapid influxes of many Han from the south in search of sustenance or
profit.
The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner Mongolia 151
