ann
(Ann)
#1
Examples include the eight-year“temporary”accommodation of Torgut
Beile Lubsang Darja’s two hundred refugee households in 1733 that
permitted them access to winter fodder stores south of the passes; the
establishment ofjunxiansubprefectures just beyond the Great Wall from
1723 to 1741 intended to control Han agriculture and mediate interethnic
disputes; and, perhaps most problematically, the general disaster relief aid
in the form of grain and silver about which the Qianlong emperor
expressed such conflicting concerns in his 1741 edict.
The eighteenth-century Qing state could actively retard or even roll
back imperial arablism for the express purpose of preserving herding
areas. One such example occurred in 1732 in the Chakar Bordered Blue
Banner areas when authorities repatriated large numbers of industrious
Han cultivators working thousands of mu of glutinous millet and
buckwheat. The state’s limitation of arablism is also exemplified that
same year in its express concern to maintain border ramparts to bar illicit
cultivators from infiltrating Mongolian grasslands. In the same spirit,
Chakhar Plain Yellow Banner Superintendant Ušiba’s 1747 request to
permit his impoverished households to cultivate unused pastures was
rejected for fear that they would ultimately be replaced by Han farmers.
Of course, the overall efficacy of these measures was limited, and
ongoing accommodation to a series of arablist faits accomplis was often
necessary. State accommodation is visible in belated attempts to register
the more than one hundred thousand Shandong migrants cultivating
beyond the passes who suddenly came to the attention of central author-
ities in 1720. The inadequacy of such accommodation is equally apparent
in revelations from surveys of legitimate Han fields in 1732 – 33 and
1750 revealing the local state’s inability to keep accurate population or
cultivation records, overlooking thousands of people and hectares in the
process.
Nevertheless, the clearly discernible tension between imperial pastoral-
ism and imperial arablism, arising from a substantial state commitment to
both, remains distinctive of eighteenth-century borderland relations. By
Zhang Zhidong’s time, however, the state’s ability and incentive to con-
duct them separately had shifted to a relatively unambiguous and active
promotion of imperial arablism regardless of other considerations. The
origins of this shift are discernible in state regulatory practices from at
least the 1720 s. Unauthorized Han settlement for clearance could be
provisionally legitimated if it was of longstanding, generated rent for
Mongol proprietors, and did not continue. State acquiescence became
precedent through a case of Han cultivation in the forward Gorlos Banner
238 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
