ann
(Ann)
#1
Just two lakes in the Kheshigten Banner area of the Juu Uda League,
for example, annually drew more than one thousand itinerant Han ped-
dlers and merchants, who arrived driving carts to haul thefish away for
sale on both sides of the Great Wall. These activities were inadvertently
discovered by an antirustling patrol in 1742. Althoughfishing was tech-
nically prohibited, local officials had not actively enforced the regulations.
Moreover, Zhili Governor General Sun Jiagan, serving from 1738 to
1741 , had effectively legalized thefishing under questionable circum-
stances during his last year in office. Sun painted a picture of destitute
Han in search of food who would nevertheless somehow be able to pay
local“bannermen”rent forfishing access, which he claimed could be
seasonally controlled by special troop patrols. Within a year resident
Mongols were complaining about“disruptive”commercialfishing by
“over one thousand” Han. Many were hard drinking gamblers who
illegally stayed the winter to icefish, when no Zhili troops were on patrol.
The state duly restored prohibition, with regular patrols empowered to
arrestfish peddlers and their accomplices, both Han and Mongol, and
confiscate anyfish.^117
Fish could be a critical resource for Mongols in times of dearth, as they
were in 1716 in the Ordos region, which had endured a not unusual
combination of several years of drought, seasoned with a devastating
dzud-like snowstorm. These natural disasters synergistically eliminated
the major sources of food on the Qing steppe, leaving“no harvest in the
fields,”livestock“devastated,”and local Mongols“without means of
subsistence.”Fortunately, the discovery of eight lakesfilled with thou-
sands of carp and catfish provided more than seventy-seven hundredfish
to two thousand distressed locals.^118
Extensive timber tracts in the mountains running north and west from
Guihua to the Urad banner in the Ulaanchab league were attracting at
least ten times the number of Han involved infishing. More than ten
thousand from Shanxi and Shaanxi were belatedly discovered cutting in
the Muna range in 1734. Investigators estimated the delegation of
enforcing timber prohibitions to unreliable elements had resulted in
more than twenty-five years of neglect. Reenforcement captured more
than thirty thousand logs.^119 A chronology of Muna timber prohibition
may have begun around 1708 – 09 , but other mountain forests, such as
those north of Shahukou and in the Daqing range, had never been off
limits and were being legally cut as early as 1699. This suggests no
express prohibition on timbering beyond the passes before the turn of
the century. Evidence from the Juu Uda League far to the east shows
152 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
