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qualifies analyses emphasizing“external”security and market factors
driving migration over those related to the unsustainable agrarian prac-
tices of migrants themselves that trigger human shifts.^58
Yunnan was no exception to the interdependency of security and
ecological stability that so influenced“shack-hostile”policies in Liang-
jiang. The contraction of arablist space in Yunnan that had emerged long
before these 1836 deliberations did little to enhance overall state control
and probably was a major factor in undermining it as interethnic resource
competition intensified. These dynamics suggest that Yunnan officials,
unlike their more cautious Liangguang colleagues, may have been impru-
dent in their unrestrained encouragement of Han swiddening.
Prudence was advisable for the region because crisis often revealed that
Qing state presence was limited in many areas of Yunnan, and, as
provincial officials generally recognized, effectively absent for many pur-
poses. The limits of Qing regional administration were particularly obvi-
ous in times of crisis such as the Panthay Rebellion. Limits were also
manifest in more explicitly environmental terms in events such as the
anti–poppy cultivation operations pursued as part of the state’s larger
crackdown on the opium traffic in the 1830 s.
The opium traffic was an exemplary case of the critical necessity for
state control of environmental, and not simply commercial, relations.
Humans and poppies, from which opium was extracted, were particu-
larly interdependent not only because of the drug’s effects on human
physiology, but also because of the poppy’s inability to exist in a fully
wild state independent of human cultivation.^59 The Qing state’s limited
supervision of southwestern Yunnan was exposed by senior provincial
official admissions during the 1820 sand 1830 s. State prohibition pres-
sure forced officials to admit that illicit poppy cultivation in isolated
mountainous and chieftainship areas was effectively beyond their con-
trol. Yunnan Governor Ilibu flatly stated in 1828 that he could not
directly oversee the eradication of poppy stands in the Gengma native
chieftainship because the locale was too far from “Yunnan proper”
(neidi) for provincial personnel to supervise directly. The operation
was duly left to Gengma’s indigenous authorities.^60 The delegation of
such grave state responsibilities governing resource access to chieftain-
ship proxies is indicative both of the limits of Qing state control and of
the corresponding authority of local structures of indirect rule in the
region.
More centralized native chieftainships of thegumsaand Shan types
further undermined dynastic control by maintaining similar political ties
246 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
