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blocked the advance of Hanjunxianjurisdictions to perpetuate native
chieftainship rule.
Qing authorities grudgingly admitted the indispensability of chief-
tainships, usually with the justification that“these chieftains are not just
a source of distress, but are actually our fence without which there
would be no stability.” Ortai himself did not seek the eradication
of all chieftainship officers, especially low-ranking ones, under all cir-
cumstances. He even acknowledged in 1727 “that in pacifiying the Yi,
one must use Sinified (hanhua) Yi to govern them in their own fashion.”
A critical reason for this limited conversion from local to central rule
was the conviction that environmental conditions in key locales made
long-term residence impossible for Han Chinese, or indeed for any
nonindigenous personnel. Officials used equally conventional terms to
describe conditions in Tengyue’s chieftainship territory:“Regular offi-
cials cannot be put there because it is a land of malaria.”Ortai even
confirmed that“the Ming’s former division of the area into native-
and central government-controlledzones originally arose from the new
frontier’s malarial (yanzhang) climate, to which Chinese officials were
not accustomed.^63
Zhang, a southern Chinese term, andnüe, its northern Chinese coun-
terpart, can both refer to a variety of febrile diseases, with the specific
illnesses determined by context.Yanzhangwas doubtless used in such a
general sense in formulating the highest degree of military life exile under
Qing law: sentence“to an insalubrious”(yanzhang) region of Yunnan,
Guizhou, Guangxi, or Guangdong. By 1772 penal officials had decided
that imposing such a sentence on serious offenders was excessively
unwieldy, in part because of the patchy fact that“not every department
and district”within these four provinces“was insalubrious.”But earlier
applications of this statute make clear that before 1772 , exile to an
insalubrious region was intended to be literally a“near-death”sentence,
carried out by the febrile diseases present. In 1770 , for example, a Qing
deserter from the Myanmar campaigns was explicitly exiled to Yunnan’s
Pu’er prefecture, where“yanzhangwas most severe.”^64
Before 1936 , it was impossible to confirm that the termyanzhangand
its variants such aszhangqi, appearing in many southwestern accounts
(including Ortai’s), generally referred to malaria. An epidemiology of
malaria did not emerge until 1880 , when it was demonstrated that the
hematozoanPlasmodium, a parasite found in blood, caused the disease. It
took another twenty years before researchers understood that the para-
sites were being transmitted to humans via the female mosquito of the
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 191
