ann
(Ann)
#1
postwar trade embargo, which appears to have been only nominally
enforced until its 1790 termination. Major wild migration can be directly
connected with the consolidation and decline of this postwar order.^105
In 1769 , when hostilities with Myanmar had ended, the Qing state
permitted indigenous groups from beyond the nominal pale of the
Binlang River to settle around the mountainous terrain just inside Qing
territory. This reward, bestowed on“wild tribals”who had served the
dynasty’s allied native chieftainships as grain porters during the war,
was intended as protection from Konbaung reprisals. Further
unauthorized settlements soon followed. Some were probably driven
by transfrontier social ties, and others were certainly propelled by
periodic famine, especially during the Jiaqing reign. In fact, social ties
and hunger appear to have been mutually reinforcing factors, as“wild
tribals within the river [i.e., east of the Binlang] colluded with those
beyond the river [i.e. west of the Binlang] every time famine arrived.”
Social ties, if not famine, were certainly a factor in the trans-Mekong
indigenous contacts along the Pu’er-Shunning boundary that Qing
officials sought to regulate with transit certificates in the 1720 s. The
newcomers from across the Binlang had initially caused no serious
conflicts. Apparently the wild settlers “cleared hills for subsistence
and seldom came down” from them, while the old“Han and Dai”
residents tended to occupy and cultivate theflatlands, so that the two
groups“have no mutual contact.”The mounting Jiaqing era incidents
that occurred when these wild settlers“came down from the hills to
raid”may have been caused by poor swiddening that exhausted the
hillside soils.^106 Generally speaking, wild migration appears intimately
connected with shifts in food supply, and this migration, in turn,
blurred the fragile distinctions between wild and chieftainship groups
as environmental relations also broke down.
The dynastic response to this perennial problem was to continue its
predecessors’reliance on indigenous auxiliaries to maintain an inner
frontier zone as Yunnan proper’s buffer against wild incursion. However,
native chieftainships, the primary units of imperial indigenism, were
based on political forms and ethnic identities that were too unstable to
exertfirm control over southwestern Yunnan’s diversity on behalf of the
Qing. Chieftainships did not block indigenous fraternization with Myan-
mar or the proliferation of wildgumlaostockades. They did not even
reliably construct unambiguously“civilized tribal”identities that could
serve as conduits for the consistent and confident assertion of dynastic
power in the region. Indeed, chieftainships were so unsuited to these basic
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 207
