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reign, the Luohei’s activities in gaps between chieftainships andjunxian
jurisdictions in southern Shunning and Pu’er triggered three major upris-
ings between 1796 and 1814.^50 Belin’s encounters with the Luohei and
Kawa during his 1804 – 14 governor-generalship informed his observation
that the malarial conditions of their zones made assault with anything but
chieftainship auxiliaries impossible. The Luohei“lairs”he mapped out on
both sides of the Lancang stretch of the Mekong River boundary between
Shunning and Pu’er,however,werewellwithintheinnerfrontierchief-
tainships supposed to keep the wild at bay.^51 Imperial indigenist space
was also hosting wild infestations that would leave Yunnan proper
exposed.
Consequently, the Qing had to cultivate a particular type of polit-
ical ground within this disease environment, in the more centralized
forms of Kachingumsaand Shan organizations, but state efforts did
not blossom into a stable borderland. Even the centralized chieftain-
ships were unacceptably disruptive, in the view of some officials,
precisely because they had hereditary or“feudal” (fengjian)rulers.
Hereditary succession made bloody, divisive succession struggles inev-
itable and obstructed the removal of established chiefs by any means
shortofwar.^52
Chronic conflict was a main rationale for campaigns, peaking in the
Yongzheng reign, to replace native chieftainships with central state
administrations (gaitu guiliu). Perhaps the most radical Qing attempt to
expand Yunnan proper, along with similar expansions in Guizhou and
Sichuan, this conversion effort was led by the famous Qing official and
imperial confidant Ortai as governor-general of Yun-Gui. His deployment
of more than one hundred thousand troops in a series of bloody and
controversial conversion operations against what he called“the frontier’s
great scourge”can easily give the impression that Ortai wanted to eradi-
cate indigenous rule throughout southwestern China.^53
In practice, Yunnan’s disease environment helped to preclude such
extremes, as some limited statistics suggest. Out of an estimated 220 native
chieftainships abolished during the Yongzheng reign, only seventeen were
located in Yunnan and only four in southwestern prefectures, which were
otherwise untouched by Yongzheng conversion operations. Ortai himself
had explicitly put chieftainships west of the Mekong (“Lancang”)River,
namely, those in Shunning and probably southern Yongchang, effectively
out of conversion bounds before operations started in 1726. The south-
westernmost two of the four converted chieftainships, located in what
would become Tengyue, were even restored in 1771. Conversion operations
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 187
