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that“civilized”chieftainship subjects shave their heads to resemble Han
subjects, to distinguish them from their wild counterparts.^7
Another Yun-Gui governor-general, Belin, summarized dynastic
administrators’more conventional views more than a generation later
in his discussion of a 1770 “wild people”incursion of Kawa and their
collusion with resident“Luohei.”Belin said that“wild”stockade settle-
ments“appointed their own chiefs”and were so“widely scattered and
loosely tied”that they“could not keep order among...the violent.”
Groups, such as the Luohei raiding southern Shunning in 1800 , who“had
no chiefs and, moreover, were not subjects of Myanmar”were also wild
in Qing eyes.^8 Imperial indigenism was a domesticating response to these
wild conditions.
Qing descriptions support arguments by E. R. Leach in his classic study
of the peoples of the“highland Burma”border region. Leach held that
centralizedgumsaand“anarchic”gumlaoforms of indigenous political
organization among Kachin hill peoples alternated in unstable fashion.
Yunnan officials wished to deal exclusively with chieftainship“polities,”
locally calledmuong(meng), run either bygumsaKachin or by valley-
dwelling, paddy-cultivating Shan or“Tai.”^9 Leach unveiled a bewildering
degree offluidity between these various political and ethnic distinctions,
particularly among the Kachin. He concluded that a given group’sgumsa
orgumlao(in Qing terms, civilized or wild) affiliations were“not neces-
sarily ascertainable in the realm of empirical facts.”^10 The Qing state’s
political mechanism to eliminate this uncertainty was official confirm-
ation of a Shansaohpa(Burmese:sawbwa) chieftain’s succession. Ethnic-
ally ambiguous chieftainships nevertheless remained susceptible to
internecine strife or external infiltration by“wild”elements that actually
confirmed convictions such as Liu Bin’s.^11
Gumsaand Shan chieftainships were to operate as the spatial fulcrum
of an ethnic administrative middle ground. They would balance Han-
dominated areas of Yunnan proper and the exclusive abodes of wholly
autonomous, or“wild,”groups beyond the farthest claims of Qing territory.
As in Thongchai Winichakul’s conceptualization of Siam’s prenational
space, chieftainships in southwestern Yunnan constituted an intermediary
“inner frontier”of attenuated state authority between a direct state presence
on one side and a vacuum of state authority on the other.^12 At various times
during the Qing, the southwestern borderjunxianprefectures of Shunning,
Pu’er, and Yongchang, along with the latter’s important subprefecture of
Tengyue (only established in 1820 ), fluctuated between these three
conditions.^13
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 173
