ann
(Ann)
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Moreover, swiddening of New World hillside crops such as potatoes as
well as Old World cultivars such as taro is quite compatible with Zomia’s
forested conditions. Yunnan abounded in obstacles to wet rice cultiva-
tion, the preferred ground of the Chinese imperial dynastic order. Even
when rice was regionally cultivated throughout the Yun-Gui plateau,
it was overwhelmingly of the glutinous variety rather than those long-
grained types preferentially grown and consumed in China proper.
Glutinous rice was more suited to the widefluctuations in temperature
and rainfall characteristic of this region, part of what has been called
the “glutinous rice zone” of continental Southeast Asia. The simple
techniques required to cultivate glutinous rice also were more suitable
for the preservation of the forests that constituted the most critical
resource for long-term indigenous subsistence. Politically, glutinous rice,
because of the greater difficulties in processing, transportation, and stor-
age, made the staple a“potato-like”medium of taxation. Qing authorities
repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to force indigenous farmers to switch
to more accessible standard Chinese varieties. Moreover, imperial troops,
as the main regional beneficiaries of state taxation in kind, preferred
nonglutinous varieties.^41
The importance of forest for general subsistence throughout the region
was a main motivation for even lowland rice cultivators such as the Shan
to engage in reforestation. A single village stand, properly managed, could
sustainably provide for inhabitants for around a century without recourse
to clear-cutting.^42 In locales such as southwestern Yunnan, rice cultiva-
tion in general remained viable largely because it was glutinous; that is,
riziculture was not intensively practiced at the imperial Chinese scale.
Deforestation was thereby minimized and catastrophic erosion avoided.
One recent study has correlated an upsurge in provincial ecological
problems with land clearance and related resource exploitation, arising
from Han migration, especially in the nineteenth century.^43 It is likely that
the combination of sustainable swidden and glutinous cultivation, along
with limitations of the regional disease environment, constrained indigen-
ous population growth. So migration alleviated the primary pressure
existing in densely populated China proper for more intensive forms of
cultivation and the space in which to conduct them.
Shack people practiced perhaps the least sustainable form of Han
intensive cultivation in Yunnan, an activity that even affected more
conventional Han agriculture. Anne Osborne has described how the
land-hungry migrants of her study brought“new techniques and crops
which would exploit” agriculturally marginal slopes “through a
184 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
