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(Ann)
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Han merchant sales of alcohol on traditional Mongol practices.^32 As in
instances discussed inChapters 2 and 3 , Han“pollution”of Inner Asia
was primarily agro-urban.
The ultimate source of this pollution was the Qing unification of
Inner Asia and China proper, which gave Han migrants unprecedented
access tofields north of the passes. The general Qing response in Man-
churia was to actively culture the nature of imperial foraging, which
nevertheless, as Shurungga’s report demonstrates, could not be contrived
by humans alone. Foraging enclaves and their microclimates functioned
as preserves for the interdependency of unique northeastern biodiversity,
such as ginseng, and unique borderland Manchu identities that included
New Manchus, Solon-Ewenki, Dargur, and Bargut. Some Warka refused
to lose their quarry along with their old identities. Sable pelts still
counted even when they were discarded as actual forage. The evaluation
of stalkers of stork and pheasant was tied directly to their prey’s elusive-
ness. Banner groups were compelled to choose between maintaining ties
with cultivated crops or wild foxes, with distinct hybridizing implications
for each alternative.
Such implications, however, are often obscured, within rather blithe
and idealized formulations such as Nayančeng’s, and even Shurunnga’s,
that hide the complex and contradictory processes by which Qing bor-
derland orders were achieved and maintained. In the seventeenth century,
the northerly reaches of the SAH basin were inhabited by peoples whose
lifestyle Manchu officers could denigrate as that of“wild beasts and
birds,”whose loyaltyŠarhūda could question and whose character the
Kangxi emperor could impugn as“actually savage.”
By the nineteenth century, a distinct spatial hierarchy had emerged,
whose ethnic apex was occupied by the descendants of these very same
dubious, itinerant savages. Manchuria became commensurately subdiv-
ided under varying degrees of preservation, with rank determined by
physical proximity to the agro-urban Han of China proper. In short
and ironically, the more northern the more Manchu. It is difficult to
imagine Hong Taiji could have anticipated the results of the spatial and
ethnic shifts Qing consolidation of boreal power had engendered. People
who needed to be“taken prisoner withfine words” explaining their
ethnic affinities with the Qing in 1634 would constitute the empire’s most
exemplary, and rarest, Manchus 170 years later.
Human resource scarcity was a direct consequence of the dynasty’s
effective borderland construction in response to seventeenth-century Rus-
sian incursion. Borderland was subsequently consolidated through the
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 233
