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state.”Both poaching and further agricultural clearance were accordingly
banned. Another stele on “tribute rivers”designated certain areas as
“tribute foraging regions in perpetuity.”^30
As the 1910 survey that relied on red pines suggests, this prohibition
must have been enforced to some effect around the turn of the century to
arrest deforestation. As the steles make clear, this enforcement was justi-
fied in large measure to maintain dynastic prestige and authority in the
Qing home territory. This may account for the ban’s apparent efficacy.
Whatever its precise motives, the Qing state could still occasionally and
with great reservation seek an accommodation between foraging and
farming reminiscent of more rigorous eighteenth-century policies, despite
nineteenth-century imperialist pressure.
Such accommodation, however limited, was far easier to reach with
Hanspace farming, which permitted comparatively more ecological con-
nections, than with the Hanspace commerce that was Nayančeng’s pri-
mary concern. Mid–eighteenth-century Heilongjiang had already become
endangered in the view ofHubuinspector Shurungga, who successfully
urged a ban on Han-run wine and teashops in the territory in 1742.
Shurungga had understood the region’s“upright”bannermen to be self-
reliantly free from commerce. When sent to look them over, however, he
discovered“some people of no account”who actually bought food and
clothing and even wasted money in shops. Shurngga stressed that
Heilongjiang’s multiethnic population of“New Manchus, Solon, Dagur
and Bargut”required regulations unnecessary to impose on Han core
areas to safeguard these peoples’“venerable practices of working the land
and hunting.”^31
Shurungga’s report provides an explicit articulation of the more gen-
eral concerns expressed more than sixty years later by Nayančeng.
He clarifies Nayančeng’s allusions to the corrosive effects of Han con-
sumption practices on borderland Manchu environmental relations often
vaguely formulated as“Han contamination.”The Han-built environ-
ments of tea houses and wine shops were still few in Shurungga’s time.
Yet they could already transform indigenous peoples from autonomous
consumer-producers into dependent, unproductive customers by termin-
ating sustained networked interaction with plants and animals. Indigen-
ous peoples are thus shifted from more diverse relations to a comparative
monoculture of human interaction. Han contamination here is a process
of alienation rather than one of mere acculturation or assimilation. Simi-
lar dynamics are implicit in reports from Inner Mongolia in the latter
half of the 1730 s that express concern over the disruptive effects of
232 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
