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

The emergence of these posts was probably linked to another massive wave

of more than one hundred thousand Han migrants moving through the

region in 1808 on their way to clearfields in the Juu Uda League. Declining

trends continued with the termination of imperial hunts in 1821 .An

epitaph on the hunt bothfitting and revealing may be found in an 1823

regulation. Soldiers are ordered to expel any“Han commoners”trying to

establish“shops and market places”or“Mongol nobles seeking recruits

for unauthorized land reclamation”within thirtyliof the preserve’s perim-

eter. Official requests for the reserve’s agricultural conversion were being

granted by the 1860 s in belated acknowledgement of the ongoing agrarian

infiltration during the intervening decades. One observer in 1940 ,scratch-

ing the surface of deeper twenty-first-century concerns over mineral extrac-

tion, summarized the unsustainable effects of Han agrarian resource

concentration since the late Qing:“Wherever Han go, the forests arefirst

cut down, then the land plowed and sown. In the process the stone of the

mountains is exposed, soil is washed away, and the surface of the land

becomes more dried out each year untilfinally there is the desolation like

that today.”^13 By the mid–eighteenth century, Han masses, abetted by

Mongols, had begun excluding Inner Asian elites from Muran through

excess accumulation of local resources for arablist purposes at the expense

of venery ones. By the nineteenth century the ground had been cut from

under both arablism and venery.

The environmental link between Inner Asian venery elites and Han

arablist masses was brittlely forged from a limited resource, arable land,

neither inexhaustible nor even easily renewable. Mark Elvin has charac-

terized Han core agricultural practices as“the reduction of biomass in

order to be able to control the use of what remains.”^14 This remainder,

however problematic its production, could be manipulated for the imme-

diate benefit of varied constituencies. The group best positioned to take

advantage of the fruits of this remnant was not, over time, the multiethnic

dynastic elite or its Inner Asian subjects, but the Han masses.

Under such conditions, the almost centripetal pull that agro-

urbanized assimilation exerted against the other embodiments of dynas-

tic borderland space, so apparent even by the seventeenth century and so

imposing in the nineteenth, is unsurprising. Jungfoboo’s 1750 observa-

tions about the dangerous alacrity with which Guihua’s Tümed Mongols

embraced Han urban and agrarian culture is one example. The dynasty’s

imposition of an agrarian identity on the SAH Warka in the 1670 sis

another. In the hostile disease environment of southwestern Yunnan,

indigenous peoples in Mangshi were incorporated into the Qing garrison

224 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain