ann
(Ann)
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to an important provincial element missing from Cai Yurong’s previous
summary of Yunnan’s natural predicament. He noted that Yunnan was
“quite different from other provinces” in that local“tribal peoples”
engaged in“slash and burn agriculture”that mostly produced buckwheat
at a reasonable price, but“not in great quantities.”^31 From an imperial
arablist position under pressure, this sort of indigenous cultivation was an
unacceptable waste of space.
Mining and food production were intimately related through the eight-
eenth century in Yunnan, which experienced a large influx of Han immi-
grants, estimated to have quadrupled the province’s population from 5 to
20 million between 1700 and 1850. They were attracted mainly by the
region’s mineral wealth, which included gems, silver, and other precious
metals. However, more mundane metals, primarily copper but also lead,
zinc, and tin, were the real basis of provincial urban and commercial
development during this period. Copper mining was geographically
centered in northeastern Yunnan, particularly in the prefecture of
Dongchuan, which by 1746 was producing two-thirds of the province’s
copper. This wealth kept Qing Yunnan’s population expansion and urban-
ization centered in the east.^32 Western, and especially southwestern,
Yunnan remained on the sidelines of the province’s mineral-based eco-
nomic leap forward during the eighteenth century.
The ground gained, however, was far from solid as copper extraction
was undermined in the nineteenth century by rising production costs.
Food and fuel were especially expensive and in short supply in Yunnan’s
core development regions. Food was already a critical factor in the mid–
eighteenth century. The province’s copper mines were generally located in
the mountains far from urban commercial areas, so it was necessary to
import large amounts of food at great expense to feed the many laborers
on site. As food prices began to rise and ore veins petered out or ran too
deeply, mining became prohibitively expensive and production dropped
off as people abandoned it for other livelihoods.^33
The insupportably high food and fuel costs linked to the province’s
major commercial activity and source of revenue foreshadowed the eco-
nomic and ecological crisis that Yunnan would fall into by the nineteenth
century. The formula for this dual crisis, however, went well beyond the
apparently straightforward linkage between input costs of food and fuel
that exceeded output profits from copper in some official calculations.^34
As originally adumbrated by Cai Yurong, the process of dynastic border-
land construction that the Qing pursued in Yunnan was actually a com-
plex coordination of many environmental elements to work plots
180 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
