ann
(Ann)
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system as provisioners for troops in Longling in the 1770 s. A Han
observer in the 1600 s could already note that“during the past 300 years
of steady steeping in Han customs those native chieftains resident in and
around [Yunnan] towns are indistinguishable from Han.”^15 Gao Qi-
zhuo’s “civilized” Zhaotong “Miao” affirms the continuity of this
process into the eighteenth century. Conversion to a comparatively
monolithic form of empire-wide environmental relations was becoming
an imperative, despite recent accounts of some sort of“agro-pastoral
integration.”^16
Indeed, given its real ecological limitations, imperial arablism was
expanding to the point of dysfunctional disharmony. This is particularly
visible in the work done on a key strategy for the production and main-
tenance of arable land, water control. The most dramatic, and indeed
paradigmatic, nineteenth-century example is, of course, the crisis of the
Yellow River–Grand Canal hydraulic control system. The crisis culmin-
ated in the monumental shift of the river’s course in the mid- 1850 s that
would terminate the network. An important study of the Yellow River
administration concluded that this shift“signaled neither dynastic decline
nor an irresistible natural cycle, but the administrative, technological, and
economic limits of the late imperial state.”This state had maintained a
huge infrastructure to confine the river’s course for the preceding two
hundred years.^17
The conventional emphasis, however, on the corruption or efficiency
of hydraulic statecraft fails to consider the possibility that the“success-
ful” control of the river over this period was a main reason for the
system’s mid–nineteenth-century collapse. A study on the role of water
control in the transformation of Yunnan borderland to more“interior-
ized” (neidihua) agrarian practices suggests just such a dynamic. It
effectively argues that subsequent problems with silting and related envir-
onmental problems are symptomatic of such“successful”development
and incorporation.^18 The Yellow River’s increasing siltation, abrupt
floods, and randomflows were all products of sustained human interven-
tion to concentrate water in an unsustainable fashion, manifested
administratively as escalating and corruptingfinancial costs. Effects of
corruption or efficiency must be qualified by critical consideration of the
questionable equilibrium assumption that humans could always control
the river to cope with its response to the effective imposition of that
control. These dynamics, in and beyond Hanspace, are signature charac-
teristics of systematic imperial arablist overdevelopment, not simply of
corruption or dynastic decline.
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 225
