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by“years” of military action. These chieftainships were, moreover,
“all” located in malarial areas, whose noninfectious season was
“extremely brief.”The authors admitted that they had as yet no viable
plan to deal with these conditions.^103
Šuhede and Oning approached despair because there was no fully
developed imperial arablist infrastructure for the production and trans-
port of the right kind of staple to feed the dynasty’s oryzivorous
vanguard of elite“Manchu”cavalry and their Han cobelligerents, all
saddled with a huge herd of horses laboriously bred in distant steppe
pastures that would have to munch pricey rice while clopping over
precipitous and malarial terrainonly remotely accessible through the
cooperation of differentially resistant chieftainship“tribals”restive in
their imperially prefabricated identities. I have found no better example
of the environmentally networked convolutions required of a Qing fence
that could ensconce such awesomely radiant borderland forests, steppe,
and mountains.
yunnan’s unstable compromise with nature
and culture
Malaria was a major constituent of the fundamental structure through
which Qing imperial agency operated in frontier Yunnan. The ecological
conditions created by the disease functioned to keep Han and indigenous
peoples physically separate. This separation in turn made the native
chieftainship system of imperial indigenism an integral component of
dynastic control of the province–even though the presence of consider-
able numbers of largely unsupervised“tribals”certainly limited and could
undermine dynastic control as well. Chieftainship identity in southwes-
tern Yunnan can be understood as a product of the dynastic order’s
political compromise with malaria. It was the instability of this comprom-
ise, embodied in the often merely nominal distinction between wild and
chieftainship“tribal,”that constantly threatened to disrupt the relations
of imperial indigenism.
After the conclusion of the Myanmar campaigns, the erosion of the
inner frontier began in the form of wild migration, which grew more
destabilizing during thefirst decades of the nineteenth century. One major
migration of“wild tribals”during the Qing occurred in 1770 , when they
“began to gradually move inside the passes and so increased in number
that they could not be expelled.”Another wave also may have occurred
in 1789.^104 These two dates, furthermore, mark the full span of the
206 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
