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support of Manchu garrisons of ten thousand men. Sun envisioned a
“paradise”(letu) that would permit Han cultivators and banner herders
to live in harmonious, prosperous proximity while providing the basis for
further agrarian expansion. Although it seems Sun’s scheme was not
realized, he did succeed in restoring local access to salt for personal use
and even commercial sale south of the passes. The ban on certified
commercial extraction, however, remained in putative force.^124
In 1741 two views of the Kododo lakes had been articulated, split
along ethnic lines. From the Inner Asian perspective, Kododo was a
pastoral idyll that precluded commercial salt extraction associated
mainly, but not exclusively, with Han merchants. From the Han per-
spective it was an undeveloped backwater salvageable only through salt
extraction. Such Han views could be expressed in stark nativist terms,
such as those employed by Sun Jiagan, in the initial draft of his 1741 pro-
posal to legalizefishing. Sun’s casual reference to the Juu Uda League’s
Kheshigten banner Mongols as“barbarians”(yiren) drew a reprimand
from the Qianlong emperor, who castigated Sun for his“grave error.”
The emperor asserted that the term“barbarian”was reserved for the
Zunghars, not for dynastic servants, and wondered“if the innerjasag
are called barbarians, by what term will the Zunghars be called!”Sun
Jiagan’s “careless” words equating the inner jasag with Zunghars
“would chill their hearts.”Sun had to rewrite his memorial for public
promulgation, and the officially published version,with its references to
“bannermen”and“Kheshigten,”now appears as a model of dynastic
multiculturalism.^125
Two years later, Inner Asian and Han perspectives were put to the test
in Kododo, as in Kheshigten, to demonstrate the practical incompatibility
of the terms“limit”and“access”under transfrontier multiethnic condi-
tions. Both local Mongols, mostly state herders, and Han were extracting
salt as frozen bricks of alkali soil in winter and as boiled lake water in
summer and fall. The Mongols also rented out carts and extraction
services at great profit. Operations continued, without regard for Sun’s
nuanced prohibition, until“several hundred”diggers were active in the
area in 1742 , months after the governor-general had left his post. These
extractors were mainly Han from Zhili, which had forsaken any prohib-
ition however nominally qualified.^126
Giohoto, superintendant ofthe cattle herds and sheepflocks of the
three upper banners, was the most vocal among officials who wanted a
total ban on salt in favor of grass. In 1742 he asserted that Han had
come in unsustainable droves, settingoff interethnic incidents. They also
The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner Mongolia 155
