ann
(Ann)
#1
Like milk, salt is a nutritional prerequisite for both humans and
animals because, among other functions, it regulates osmotic pressure in
cells vital to the transfer of nutrients and wastes. For livestock in particu-
lar it also may assist in the digestion of forage. Moreover, humans and
animals not only need salt, they like it. Livestock are so attracted to salt
that it can be distributed to control their movements across rangeland.^122
The imperial state was, of course, well aware of the attractions of salt,
especially for revenue purposes, and Han merchants likewise found salt
equally compelling for economic reasons.^123 Salt’s role as a general
necessity of life, along with its consequent significance for state revenue
and private profit, not only linked herders, merchants, bureaucrats, and
livestock, but it could just as easily set them at odds. Indeed, a large part
of the imperial enterprise was to mediate such potentially divisive inter-
ests. In this sense, empire was a set of environmental relations requiring
ongoing maintenance.
Humans, moreover, extracted salt from deposits existing only in cer-
tain locales. Access to salt was thus afforded by a combination of inter-
actions between humans, animals, and geologic terrain, which became the
subject of regional concern from 1741 – 56. Sun Jiagan again was chafing
under steppe resource restrictions, this time on access tofive salt lakes in
the Kododo region of the Plain Blue Banner pastures.
Access to the lakes, which local Mongol herders and some Han culti-
vators along the frontier had been using without restrictions, had been
granted to licensed salt merchants during the Kangxi reign. TheNeiwufu
banned salt extraction, apparently for everyone, by the end of the Yongz-
heng reign in response to the default of its chief Han merchant tax farmer
on his revenue quota. At this point, theNeiwufudecided that grass was
the area’s main asset and concluded that there“was no better place for
[exclusive] livestock breeding”than Kododo. By 1741 Zhili Governor-
General Sun, a former supervisor of Shanxi’s salt administration in
1734 – 35 , spoke up for salt. He had already requested Shaanxi and Shanxi
officials be ordered to locate salt sources beyond the passes, arguing that
“not a single Mongol”was commercially exploiting them. He now con-
tended that the ban“left the natural bounty of heaven and earth forsaken
in a useless place”to the detriment of resident Mongols and Han. Prob-
ably around the same time, the governor-general was also proposing to
turn over tens of thousands of arableqingright in the middle of the
imperial herding complexes. This immense tract stretched along roughly
two-thirds of Koubei San Ting’s northeast-southwest axis from Kaiping
to Xinghe. Han farmers would be recruited to convert it to agriculture for
154 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
