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distinctive adaptation to the highland environment.”Unfortunately, this
adaptation relied on ephemeral forms of shifting cultivation, causing
deforestation and erosion that“threatened the stability of the [existing]
agricultural ecosystem”. Moreover, shack people’s maintenance of their
constituent environmental relations led to“a downward spiral of reclam-
ation, abandonment and new reclamation which threatened agricultural
and social stability”both in the marginal hills and in the lowland cores.^44
This Han-style swiddening, far less sophisticated and sustainable than the
“slash and burn”practices of hill peoples in the southwest, was a product
of new relations between cultivators and new world crops that created a
new identity, shack people, that the state found difficult to incorporate.
The ecological effects of the development of shack people identity
threatened to erode the agrarian basis of the more established Han
identity in parts of China proper. Liu Min’s study argues that this threat
to the empire’s main grain production areas was the primary reason for
state control of shack people in the lower Yangzi.^45 Much of Yunnan,
however, had not yet made the transition into fully developed arablism,
and its attendant Han peasant embodiment was in commensurateflux.
Although major cultivation had begun with the first wave of Han
migrants in the preceding Yuan-Ming period,fields were largely restricted
to valleys. It was only with the second wave during the Qing, surging
roughly between 1775 and 1825 , that hillsides came under widespread
cultivation.^46 Consequently, shack people’s activities, focused on“virgin”
hillsides, were initially more disruptive to indigenous swiddening in the
mountains than to conventional Han settlers working the lands
well below.
A starkly instructive contrast between Han and indigenous land use in
Yunnan comes from an 1845 account of Han settlers’intensive cultiva-
tion of mushrooms on hillsides they occupied in Yongbei and Dayao. The
traditional approach of indigenous Lisu and others was simply to gather
mushrooms produced from natural timber falls. The Han way was to“fell
large trees an armful in diameter...pare off their top branches and chisel
twenty to thirty holes in their trunks.”Then the holes would be stuffed
with“fine ash...and a small quantity of a mixture containing the
powder of the ground stipes of old mushrooms...and cold rice gruel.”
After covering the logs with foliage to provide sufficient shade, a small
crop of a few dozen mushrooms would spring up in one to two years,
with a large crop of thousands in four tofive years, to form a“red
mountain”(hongshan). The trunks, however, rotted within a decade or
so, leaving the mountains entirely denuded. The consequent soil erosion
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 185
