ann
(Ann)
#1
was so constrained in consequence that“a year’s harvest can only just
provide for the necessities of that year.”There was no surplus left to set
aside for military emergency or natural disaster, nor were there any viable
water or land routes along which supplies from neighboring provinces
could be easily brought in.^27 Yunnan was just not natural Hanspace.
The province was also hostile terrain for the usual sort of terraforming
to which Han cultivators would normally resort to turn wilderness into
paddy. Cai summarized the dynamic relations between disease, popula-
tion, terrain, and riziculture when he reported that Yunnan’s malarial
conditions caused high mortality rates to make“wastelands difficult to
develop.”So“not much rice is produced among its myriad mountains.”^28
Provincial authorities would spend the eighteenth century trying to
domesticate these relations in service of an imperial indigenism.
One of Cai’s immediate and influential solutions was literally to dig
beneath the surface of the problem to tap Yunnan’s mineral wealth.
Reiterating that there was“not much tax revenue”to be found in the
province’s“mountain clusters and bamboo thickets,”Cai proposed a
number of mining incentives. So, although Yunnan was“distant and
isolated,”it did have the advantage of producing“thefive metals,”
especially copper and lead for coinage, which were“not as difficult to
appropriate as in other provinces.”^29 In this way, underground produce
would be used to substitute for provincial revenues unobtainable on the
surface.
Unfortunately, mining again exhumed the food problem. At the most
basic production level, mining inhibited any agriculture in its immediate
vicinity due to the toxic materials produced through mineral extraction
and processing. However, mining’s stimulation of commercial activity
also both increased population and demand for food.^30 By the mid–
seventeenth century Cai Yurong’s successors were complaining about
the high cost of rice directly linked to large populations that were not
only concentrated around provincial urban centers, but around mines as
well. Yun-Gui governor-general Zhang Yunsui made an indirect reference
to the problem in 1748 when he reported that provincial rice prices
had been highest in Zhaotong and Dongchuan prefectures, centers of
the mining industry, before the opening of the Jinsha River route to the
Sichuan traffic. In 1765 , Yun-Gui governor-general Liu Zao was overtly
seeking to alleviate the high cost of rice in the province’s towns and
“places where many people congregate at copper and lead mines.”Both
provincial officials were deeply engaged in an ongoing search for rice
sources in and beyond the province. Significantly, Zhang briefly alluded
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 179
