ann
(Ann)
#1
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The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern
Yunnan
In 1769 , Zhou Yu ended his diary account of the disastrous 1766 – 69
Qing Myanmar campaigns with a revealing gripe: “I have seen
Myanmar, and it is nothing more thana southwestern tribe. Its people
are neither brave nor vigorous, their weapons dull. They fall far short of
Chinese troops and preserved themselves only because of rugged terrain
and virulent malaria.”^1 The Qianlong emperor, who presided over
the Myanmar campaigns, concurred, admitting in a 1780 audience
with another military chronicler that“Myanmar has awful conditions.
Human beings cannot compete with Nature. It is very pitiful to see
that our crack soldiers and elite generals died of deadly diseases for
nothing. So [I am] determined never to have a war again [with
Myanmar].”^2
The borderland that Qing China had beenfighting to maintain in
southwestern Yunnan against its regional imperial rival, Myanmar’s
Konbaung Dynasty ( 1752 – 1885 ), was indeed constrained by a combin-
ation of cultural and ecological factors so unmalleable that state elites
viewed them almost as a conspiracy against Qing rule. The diversity along
the Qing empire’s southwestern fringes was resistant to centralized dom-
ination by virtue of nature and culture, forcing state power to resort
to less sustainable adaptations. Culture-nature interconnections were
complicated by ties between human bodies, mosquitoes, and haematozoa
(blood parasites). Their precise relations were not simply obscured, but
were to a critical extent invisible, except as a pervasive regional disease
environment of“miasma”(zhangqi).
Southwestern interweaving of culture and ecology was much less
subject to state manipulation than those tying people to forage or to
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