dynastic policy in thefirst half of the nineteenth century to maintain
certain environmental relations critical to Inner Asian venery identity
under increasing market pressures.^23 In a very direct sense, here rather
belatedly realized by Nayančeng, game had been producing people. This
production process had been going on long before the transformative rise
of a global market, which nevertheless did dramatically deplete Inner
Asian forage and Inner Asian“purity.”
As the century progressed, Russian imperialism exerted a more direct
pressure that, like Han commerce, also threatened the stability of foraging
relations, but through yet another mobilization of indigenous peoples.
Senior Heilongjiang officials and the throne deliberated the temporary
suspension of pelt tribute in 1855 – 56 , for example, to make preparations
to organize indigenous foraging peoples and the hunting banners against
anticipated Russian incursions into the SAH basin. Widely dispersed Oro-
chen and Birar sable tributaries were singled out in particular for enhanced
control through“division into households”once they had been“brought
in”from areas adjoining the Russian frontier. This was part of a deliberate
and traditional strategy to“clear the wilds”(qing ye) to both deny an
incursion resources and remove fragile subjects“as a defense against”
Russian “inducements and incitements.” Ultimately rejected partly
because of mobilization’s effects on hunting livelihoods, the proposal’s
deliberation briefly recapitulates many of the concerns and rationales of
thefirst Qing-Romanov conflict of the late seventeenth century.^24
Over the intervening span of two hundred years, imperial forager
identity was plainly still in the uneven process of being formed in critical
regions of the empire’s northeastern borderlands. Pelt tribute itself would
be decreed out of existence across the empire in 1887. By the latter half of
the nineteenth century, however, local conditions were no longer as
amenable to drastic intervention as they had been in the latter half of
the seventeenth century, and indigenous peoples could not be so casually
relocated.^25 Without alerting the Russians, the Qing could not effect
immediate, large-scale adaptation to these new conditions, produced in
part by its own constructions.
The ecology of imperial foraging itself, particularly its patchy quality,
further complicated dynastic adaptation. As a 1910 proposal to convert
some resource enclave space in Butha Ula to banner cultivation explained,
the raw materials of tribute such as
pine nuts and cones...are not produced on every tree of every mountain. Wind
and insects harm theirflowers; rain and drought blight their fruits, all making for
a scant harvest. Honey naturally cannot be made in places other than those near