ann
(Ann)
#1
livestock. The Qing adaptation, consequently, was more anthropocentric,
relying heavily on culture, generally mediated through native chieftain-
ships, to transform indigenous peoples into proper subjects. Even the
region’s basic set of relations, highland swidden agriculture, was less
adaptable to imperial arablist practices of lowland cultivation.
So southwestern Yunnan was a borderland radically different from
its northern counterparts in Manchuria and Mongolia, the home
territories of the Qing core elites. The embodiments of these latter
borderlands were quite acclimated tothem, and this facilitated the Qing
imposition of imperial pastoralism or imperial foraging. Neither
embodiment, however, was sufficiently conditioned for the extremes of
the empire’s mountainous southwestern fringes. Even a Han agrarian
identity, which had proved so adaptable to conditions across forest,
steppe, and alluvial plain, had difficultyfinding a foothold in these
precipitous highlands and diseasedlowlands. All three of the empire’s
primary ethnic identities were united by their mutual vulnerability to the
disease environment of southwestern Yunnan, which precluded stand-
ard imperial adaptations for administratively significant Manchu,
Mongol, or Han residence. Dynastic control over the region was corres-
pondingly weaker than in Mongolian or Manchurian borderlands
despite southwestern Yunnan’s much smaller size. Nevertheless, its stra-
tegic importance both as gateway to the area’s considerable mineral
wealth, which attracted large numbers of Han migrants, and as conduit
between Qing and Konbaung territory made the borderland decisive for
regional stability.^3
Differential resistance structured these critical southwestern borderland
interactions. The state’s interpretation of the effects of malaria in mono-
lithic “racial” terms reinforced ethnic identities. Distinctions between
vulnerable Han newcomers and acclimated indigenous“tribal”(yi)peoples
were spatially expressed as the ethnic administrative areas contrived for
separate control. Organizational distinction between particular ethnicities
interconnected with particular ecologies, rather than simply between
different“cultures”alone, was characteristic of Qing borderland policy
in general. The disease-attenuated Qing southwestern order took the
administrative form of an unstable“imperial indigenism”of chieftainships
as the dynasty’s compromise with southwestern Yunnan’s nexus of
malarial nature and indigenous culture.
Of course, the Qing southwestern borderland was not simply a
product of relations between humans, mosquitoes, and haematozoa,
but these were integral to the regional order of imperial indigenism.
170 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
