mountains and close to rivers where people seldom tread. Rivers that producehua
fish lie in shady spots deep in the mountains. Hence the broad spaces allotted to
tribute mountains.
Experience over time had demonstrated that even authorized land clear-
ance for cultivation under such conditions seriously degraded a region’s
foraging capacity. Every“liof waste”cleared made it “necessary to
abandon tenliof mountains”to accommodate the humans and domesti-
cates whose residence generally resulted in deforestation. There had been
“ongoing”shifting cultivation of“abandoning this patch and clearing
that patch.” A decree three years before this proposal had already
affirmed that“steady”land clearance in the vicinity of the Butha Ula
and Mergen settlements was eliminating the region’s wildlife, including
sable. This unintentional 1910 experiment to determine the compatibility
of arablism and foraging within a resource enclave had made it“more
difficult to obtain forage now than in former days.”The proposal con-
cluded that without prompt state intervention,“barren hills will appear
and difficulties of later days will be even more unimaginable.”^26 Signifi-
cantly, dynastically sanctioned Han agrarian practices, rather than dyn-
astically prohibited Han bodies, destroyed this foraging space.
A century earlier in 1810 Jilin authorities were asserting the necessity
of restricting Han migrants into Bedune on the Inner Mongolian border.
They wanted to protect both the Manchu“root occupation”of cultiva-
tion, and nearby foraging enclaves whose mountain produce contributed
to the honey and pine nut quotas. Supernumerary urban Manchus had
been dispatched from Beijing several times during the Qianlong reign
between 1744 and 1769 to work fields in Bedune and several other
nearby regions to ensure the preservation of“pure and honest”Manchu
customs. Manchu agricultural roots were actually shallow. A 1763 pro-
posal to transfer East Turkestani Muslims adept in irrigation to educate
drought-beleaguered Solon-Ewenki foragers in the Hulun Buir steppe hit
a rock bottom rejection by the emperor’s own senior advisors. The Grand
Council asserted that if the hunters devoted themselves exclusively to
agriculture,“their basic skills will be lost over time to the detriment of
the frontier...[Therefore,] order them to practice hunting as before.”For
some, hacking such a frontier out of Xinjiang, Myanmar, and Tibet
“depended solely on the nimble, robust”Solon-Ewenki troops.^27
Such concerns were subsiding by 1810. Several thousand Han agrarian
households from Zhili, Shandong, and neighboring Inner Mongolia
swamped Bedune. This raised fears of deforestation and foraging habitat
degradation as well as displacement of Manchu cultivators. Among state
