Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

twenty years”through natural attrition from illness or punishment for

revolt. Nevertheless, Ni made an exception to this otherwise absolute

eradication program for chieftainships “bordering on Myanmar,”

namely, those that formed the inner frontiers of Yongchang, Shunning,

and Pu’er prefectures. He acknowledged that“in particularly isolated

areas where malaria is especially intense, it would be difficult to estab-

lish a regular officialdom unfamiliar with the lay of the land. Malaria

would also be unavoidable when deploying garrison troops.” This

statement may have included some malarial zones in southeastern pre-

fectures such as Kaihua, where the disease had also afflicted regular

troops.^86

Unambiguous examples of malaria’s deleterious effects on Qing per-

sonnel are abundant in the record of the dynasty’s transfrontier military

operations, making it possible to sketch malarial boundaries that subdivided

prefectures. Rivers, which included rich breeding grounds for Yunnan’s

primary malarial vector, An. minimus, generally constituted the main

geographic divisions between Hanjunxianand indigenous chieftainship

jurisdictions. Three of southwestern Yunnan’s rivers, the Salween, the

Mekong, and the Binlang, formed such divisions as theyflowed through

Tengyue, Yongchang, Shunning, and Pu’er. The Binlang River marked the

area’s western boundary, which roughly conformed to the“eight passes”

(ba guan) established in 1594 in the wake of a prior Ming-Myanmar

conflict.^87 The Qing suspended its operations in the river’s lower reaches

against“wild tribals”and Han bandits, under the renegade Zhang Fuguo,

“beyond the [junxian]border”in chieftainship territory because of the

oncoming malarial season. Little more than a decade later, points along

the Binlang delineated the outer limits of Tengyue’s defenses, manned by

indigenous militia resistant to the disease.^88

Commensurate restrictions on administrative operational space can be

seen in the rest of Yongchang, as well as in Shunning and, to a lesser

extent, in Pu’er. Prefectural boundary rivers to the south and east func-

tioned like the Binlang. Malaria existed“all along the upper and lower”

reaches of the Salween River west of Yongchang’s provincial seat. The

Wandian native chieftainship, on the Salween about sixty kilometers

south of Yongchang’s prefectural seat, had“many malarial areas that

could not be approached.”Farther to the southeast in central Shunning,

malarial conditions and Zhang Fuguo’s 1812 raids into Gengma and

Mengmeng necessitated the deployment of indigenous auxiliaries in

Mianning subprefecture, which lay on a tributary of the Salween around

thirty kilometers west of the Mekong.^89

The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 201