Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

large and interdependent group from the even larger masses to the south.

From an administrative perspective, there was an irresistible imperative

to maximize bureaucratic efficiency under existing technological and

material constraints by making the empire’s environmental diversity as

monoculturally legible as possible.

The effects of these dual pressures of Han migration and imperial

administration may be most visible in eighteenth-century Inner Mon-

golia’s most urbanized space, the regional administrative hub of Gui-

hua. A report from 1734 estimated forty to fifty thousand Han

residents cultivatingfields and running pawnshops and bordellos“in

every village and hamlet” in the vicinity. These activities included

“daily occurrences” of banditry, quarrels, and gambling among the

Han commoners. These Han, many of them former camp followers

from the Zunghar campaigns, became intermixed with Mongols from

various banners“so that when an incident occurs, both Mongol and

Han are involved.”^135

A 1750 report by Jungfoboo deplored the degraded state of the local

Tümed Mongols. The arrival of Han commoners had set off“a struggle

for commercial profit and the cultivation offields over a long period,

so that Han customs infiltrated among our people that could not be

overcome.”“Wasteful competition”had“deceived”these Tümed, who

were totally dependent on grain,“into striving in all matters to emulate

the ways of the Han of the interior”to their ruin. He advocated a set of

Tümed social reforms prefaced by an exhortation to“follow the old

ways...living frugally”and separately from Han who“bring their

dependents here and build houses, open stores, trade, and cultivate

fields.”For once“Han customs of the interior...become afixed way

of life for Mongols,...poverty inevitably results...to the detriment of

all state affairs.”^136

These reports display steppe environmental relations in the midst of an

unprecedented transformation that Qing imperial pastoralism had simul-

taneously resisted, abetted, and ultimately could not control. Even the

1734 imposition of China proper’sbaojiahousehold registration system

on both Tümed and Han residents of Guihua proved ineffective^137 The

Tümed were clearly adapting in a manner corrosive for imperial pastor-

alism, and the core of the problem, at least in Jungfoboo’s view, was that

Mongols were becoming Han. Similar concerns over Han commercial

“contamination”(Ma:icembi) were also expressed in 1748 about an

unauthorized influx of thousands more Shandong peasantsfleeing from

drought into areas of mixed Han-Mongol residence in Bagou. Bagou

158 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain