ann
(Ann)
#1
demonstrated that southwestern swiddening is a viable adaptation to
ecologies rich in sylvan resources and low in population. Yin explains
that indigenous farmers did not indiscriminately slash and burn. Instead,
they made provisions for sustained use of their resources, conserving
forests to maintain shade around villages and conserving water. Land
use was collectively regulated, and rotation was practiced. Even stumps
were carefully kept alive, and some groups practiced reforestation to
deliberately facilitate soil regeneration. These techniques synergistically
combined to prevent serious soil erosion that is a common effect of both
intensive, Han sedentary agriculture and the comparatively casual swid-
dening used by shack people to clear mountainous regions in China
proper.^36
Strictly speaking,“shack people”were actually made up of diverse
itinerant groups, which could include Hakka, for example. Depending on
time and location, the ethnic composition of a given wave of shack people
was not necessarily all“Han.”Yet in Yunnan’s case the cultural, and
agricultural, practices of the migrant flood inundating southwestern
China from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century were generally
characterized in ethnic Chinese terms of various sorts from Jiangxi,
Hunan, and Sichuan. Intermixed with them, however, were also
“Miao”from Guizhou and Liangguang.^37
Although the precise proportions of ethnicities remain invisible, the
erosive effects of the hillside cultivation pursued by the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Yunnan migrants as a whole are apparent, as in the
lower Yangzi delta highlands, the paradigmatic ground of largely Han
shack people activity. Anne Osborne cites some pertinent examples from
this region:“In the west of Huzhou, the various mountains extend far
into inaccessible gullies and lonely precipices...[The soil] is not suitable
for millet or rice. In the past there were none who farmed it.”Sometime
around the mid- 1790 s a group of peoplefinally appeared who wanted to
sow the area. These“shack people”came from Wenzhou in Zhejiang to
“plant sweet potatoes and peanuts.”By the 1830 sofficials were decrying
their ecological effects.“The shack people’s reclamation of mountains
and planting of crops”was“harmful to agriculture”because it caused
hillside erosion that eventually“silted up waterways”downstream.^38 In
environmental terms, the sort of unsustainable cultivation that went on at
both ends of the empire was“Han-style,”regardless of the actual ethni-
city or nominal designations of its practitioners.
There appear in some cases, nevertheless, to have been critical ethnic
distinctions. Southeastern Yunnan’s“Miao”migrants may have taken up
182 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
