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while sweltering rainy periods promoted them.^100 Mosquito lifecycles
were similarly influenced, and it is possible that the broods of 1717 and
1778 were minimized by cooler conditions that, therefore, radically
reduced malaria cases in those years. Furthermore, seasonalfluctuation
in outbreaks and disease-free zones, both well attested to in the record,
problematize current explanations that attribute outbreaks to“miasmas”
produced by the“inherently toxic”nature of regionalflora and fauna.^101
Whatever the reason for periodic anomalies, provincial administrators
were quite conscious that in fringe areas, such as Longling and Mianning,
they depended on a number of ecological and ethnic factors to maintain
an orderly division between chieftainships and the provincial zone of
sovereignty. This does not mean that nominal conversion tojunxian
administration was obstructed throughout the southwest by ethnic diver-
sity or disease. Malaria did not stop the conversion of chieftainships in
Guizhou, where it was also rife in southwestern prefectures amid the
valleys of the Pan River. Many such conversions, as in Xingyi’s
Zhenfeng department, however, seem to have been superficial. Even after
its 1727 reorganization, Zhenfeng was regarded as afiercely Miao and
malarial area into the nineteenth century.^102
The environmental complexity of southwestern Qing empire in prac-
tice is perhaps most legible in a lengthy 1768 lament from the Grand
Minister Consultant for the Myanmar campaign,Šuhede, and Yun-Gui
Governor-General Oning. Their list of woes that beset Qing operations
midway between the dynasty’s second and third forays into the disputed
frontier began with the sobering calculation that the ten thousand
Manchu and thirty thousand Han troops involved required more than
one hundred thousand horses. Thesefigures alone posed insuperable
logistic obstacles in a province where“mountains are numerous and
roads long”andsonarrowthat“two people could not walk abreast”in
many places. It would take mounted troops months to cross this terrain,
only to arrive“unfit”forcombat.Horses,aswellasmen,alsohadto
subsist on the same expensive rations because Yongchang, the main
Qing base,“lacked fodder”and so“used rice instead.”Ayear’sworth
of rice for the horses alone would have exhausted the entirety of the
provincial stocks, then estimated at 350 , 000 to 360 , 000 shi. The add-
itional food for the troops, about 144 , 000 shimore, could not be
efficiently transported in over precipitous roads that were said to be
even worse outside the inner frontier. In any case, there were no porters
available beyond the Lujiang River and south of Nandian, which were
all under chieftainships whose people had been driven out or into hiding
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 205
