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These beliefs had emerged from a long Chinese struggle with malaria
that can be traced back to at least the third century BCE. Remedies had a
similarly long history, perhaps best summarized in the Guizhou proverb
“Don’t get up early, don’t eat too much, and don’t bathe.”Limited eating
and drinking was also a general prescription for malaria and related
illness among troopsfighting Myanmar. Local officials were said to
“dwell in the mountains”to avoid the disease. Both Han and indigenous
peoples even came to consider opium smoking a prophylactic during the
nineteenth century. Indeed, by this time, malaria, opium, and indigenous
ethnicity had become conflated in the termmanyan, a two-character word
that could mean either the miasmas (yan) considered characteristic of
regions of southwestern indigenous (man) habitation, or the opium
“smoke”(yan) drifting into China from foreign (man) sources.^73 All these
measures probably reflect a general shift from palliative to preventive
treatments of malaria in initial response to the geographic and regnal
transition from the Northern to the Southern Sung dynasties. As the
empire expanded south of the Yangzi, it had to confront the new and
more virulent malarial strains present in central and south China. North-
ern Chinese were believed to be particularly “unaccustomed” to the
“malarial wildernesses of the south,” but by the Ming-Qing period,
the disease was centered in Yunnan.^74
Racist interpretations of the effects of differential resistance to trop-
ical disease between colonized peoples and Euro-American colonizers
were mainstays of imperialist discourse. These effects, which could leave
one group untouched while devastating the other, proved to colonizers
lacking in concepts of immunology that there was“a profound bio-
logical difference between them and non-Europeans.”^75 Yet its pedigree
does not necessarily render this idea exclusively western or even entirely
inaccurate. Malaria did present as differential resistance between indi-
genous peoples and newcomers to southwestern China, although along
genetic, rather than ethnic or“racial,” lines. Sickle-cell anemia and
thalassemia are examples of genetic disorders from Africa and China,
respectively, that affect globin protein chains of hemoglobin. These
conditions are characteristic ofcertain populations and are thought to
be hereditary adaptations to resist malaria. Such abnormal hemoglobins
are more common in southern than northern China. One 1987 national
study of nine hundred thousand subjects found that Yunnan’srateof
6. 06 percent was roughlyfifteen times the concentration of such dis-
orders in the next largest rate of 0. 41 percent, found in both Xinjiang
and Fujian. These hemoglobin genetic disorders are one of the human
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 195
