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made further production impossible, including indigenous swiddening
and foraging activities. Christian Daniels has argued such processes had
the ethnohistoric consequences of either assimilating indigenous peoples
to Han practices or forcing them to migrate over considerable distances.^47
Statements from Qing officials themselves occasionally confirm their
entertainment of notions of a deliberate assimilationist agenda teleologic-
ally realized through arablist and related mechanisms. These ideals would
not have normally included the Han-style swiddening of shack people,
considered a pernicious nuisance by some officials in China proper. Local
Yunnan officials, however, seemed enthusiastic about any agrarian con-
version of their ground by Han of any sort at the expense of what they
saw as inferior indigenous agriculture. This sort of arablist opportunism
would rebound against state-sponsoredfields in the nineteenth century.
Many attitudes of the Qing and other states in the southwest were, and
are, rooted in a conviction that it is effectively a space with a negligible
degree of order, that it has had virtually no significance as a distinct cultural
or natural region before the arrival of the state, and that it is essentially
primordial. This impression was probably reinforced in Yunnan during
the late dynastic period by periodic incursions“wild people”(yeren). They
occasionally appear in Ming and Qing chronicles mainly as undesirable
intruders from theYerenshan(Wild People Mountains) in northwestern
Tengyue. These groups have been identified as the Kachin branch of the
official PRC ethnic minority of the Jingpo. So they were not synonymous
with multiethnic successor groups of“wild tribals,”who may have begun
the introduction of Kachingumlaopractices that later periodically appear
among these successors. Records indicate that this“race”(zhongren), clad
in tree bark, fur, and bone circlets, had originally lived beyond Yunnan
“unrestrained by headmen.”They began no later than the Ming Wanli
period ( 1573 – 1620 ) to gradually intermix with inner frontier groups.^48
Resulting conglomerations of Kachin and Shan decentralized and central-
ized political cultures persisted into the twentieth century.^49 “Civilized”
elements were not absorbing“wild”elements, and the ensuing expression
of anygumlaoethnic identity caused only further administrative confusion
because it was not“racially”restricted. Instead it became the characteristic
political culture of various contemporary indigenous peoples such as the
Lahu, Lisu, and Mang.
During the Qianlong reign,“wild tribals”was a term attached to the Lisu
during their incursions from the interstices of southwestern chieftainships
into Lijiang, Dali, and Yongchang as well as to the Mang during their
eastward incursions into Pu’er and Shunning. In the succeeding Jiaqing
186 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
