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promotion of imperial arablism in borderland areas when temperatures
were at a low point.^4 A striking statistical example of this emerges
from the spread of cultivated area in Fengtian, in comparison to the
provinces of China proper, from the benchmark year of 1724 to 1887.
During the succeedingfive comparison years of 1753 , 1812 , 1851 ,
1873 ,and 1887 ,Fengtian’s expansion rate was the highest by far at
434 , 3 , 688 , 1 , 984 ,and 4 , 907 percent, respectively, of the 1724 baseline
figure. Even in the relatively“restrained”year of 1753 , the province
with the next highest expansion rate, Sichuan, managed only 213 per-
cent, and twelve out of eighteen provinces ranged from 94 to 112
percent. In Fengtian’speakyearof 1887 ,its 4 , 907 percent growth rate
was almost forty times that of the empire’s average growth rate of 126
percent.^5
The following chapter will examine comparatively some of the
nineteenth-century developments in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century adaptations of imperial foraging, imperial pastoralism, and
imperial indignenism within this burgeoning imperial arablist context.
Although by no means comprehensive, this examination will attempt to
locate where“virtue,”or sustainable adaptation to new conditions, lay
within the vast Qing mandate.
the core virtue and its contradictions:
imperial arablism
Han numbers, estimated to have doubled from a rough minimum of
150 million around 1700 to more than 300 million by the 1780 sto
1790 s, were not the empire’s only population increases. Others also
benefiting in terms of reproductive sprawl include various New World
plants,Anopheles minimus, andPlasmodium falciparum. Some of these
species were intended, some accidental, beneficiaries of their connections
with Han humanity, with cultivated cereals in general being the prerequisite
copartner in arablist radiation. Some research on preindustrial agrarian
populations in both China and Europe actually indicates broadly inter-
connected seasonal patterns in human and crop reproductive cycles.
These plants grew beyond merely forming“part of the natural environ-
ment for human beings,”as Han“humans and their activities [became]...
part of the environment for plants.”It was not simply an increase in the
Han population that created various environmental pressures, but an
intensification of connections between Han and, especially, their primary
cultivars (traditionally acknowledged as thewuguor the“five grains”).
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 221
