ann
(Ann)
#1
By the mid–nineteenth century, however, state control had completely
deteriorated into the eighteen-year Panthay Rebellion ( 1856 – 73 ), which
brought the western half of Yunnan under the state of Pingnan. Although
the precise causes of the rebellion remain in dispute, its preliminary stages
were characterized by intense interethnic strife. Large influxes of recent
Han settlers, supported by the local Qing state, clashed with more numer-
ous resident Hui, culminating in the “Kunming Massacre” of 1856.
Conflict, which ultimately drew in indigenous peoples as well, seems to
have been generally centered on access to agricultural, trading, and
mining resources.^47
Some important Chinese scholarship on the ecological effects of agri-
culture in Yunnan has suggested that the cultivation of New World crops,
especially maize and potatoes, was instrumental for increasing food pro-
duction. The ensuing hillside farming altered the province’s cropping
structure. However, deforestation and erosion grew to undercut, and even
reverse, previous gains during the nineteenth century. Signs of this rever-
sal are visible as early as the 1750 s when considerable tracts of cultivated
land began to drop out of taxation registers due to environmental prob-
lems of various sorts. Preliminary and partial statistics indicate that
eighteenth-century losses had quadrupled just between 1803 and 1827.
There are further indications that new land clearance did not make up
these losses, resulting in a provincial net decrease in total arable land.^48
Shack people cultivation of New World crops, however, was not the
only form of agriculture pursued in Yunnan during this period. In con-
trast, indigenous swidden agriculture sustainably prioritized forest preser-
vation over increasing yields or acreage. Numerous steles engraved with
protection regulations erected by Yi villages anxious to defend their
forested grounds from Han axes attest to active indigenous resistance
against Han swiddening. These steles, which primarily date from the high
tide of provincial migration from the mid–eighteenth to the mid–
nineteenth centuries, demonstrate in stone the dramatic differences and
conflicts between the two culturally and ecologically distinct swiddening
styles.^49
If indigenous cultivation is ignored, it can appear that farming in
essence, rather than as a particular form of ethnically conditioned culti-
vation, was responsible for Yunnan’s nineteenth-century agrarian crisis.
Although, as some studies assert, the American crops involved may have
contributed to erosion problems, the major factor, generally overlooked,
is that Han cultivation was largely predicated on deforestation antithet-
ical to traditional indigenous cultivation. In this case, it was neither
242 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
