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projects of ethnic categorization to abet a Qing local colonialism.^69
No single condition of contraction, stasis, or expansion was the norm.
So Qing imperial space periodically advanced, paused, or withdrew in
response to shifts in local environmental relations often expressed
in purely ethnic terms.
Persistentfluctuations or oscillations, viewed from the dynastic per-
spective as chronic instabilities, may nevertheless account for the eager-
ness of many Qing officials to replace their“system”with Han settlement.
Even when it occurred under dubious or disruptive circumstances, a Han
presence was seen as the best medium for local surveillance of the major-
ity indigenous populace, which tended to collude with“wild [indigenous]
bandits.”This attitude may also help account for the active support of
Han swiddening with little concern for its ecological implications visible
in Ilibu’s 1836 deliberations over how to adapt thebaojiaregime to shack
people identity.
Just such a preference for settler over indigene was made in support
of an 1831 decision to uphold Han claims in the Nandian native
chieftainship. Officials hoped that by legitimating a Han presence, the
Qing borderland would be solidified through a decreased dependency
on indigenous peoples, whose nature onejunxianmemorialist held to
be as inconstant as that“of dogs and sheep.”This decision, however,
was made in the context of infiltration of Nandian by elements of
“wild tribals” and Han settlers who united to challenge indigenous
authority.^70 An even more explicit process of immigrant Han accultur-
ation to Yi identity was occurring in southern Sichuan around roughly
the same time. Other evidence of Hanethnic instability is visible later
in the century, when garrison troops sent to Pu’er from Guangdong
and Guangxi began to mix with indigenous populations. They had
become tribalGuangrenby the twentieth century. Of course, there
were also borderland inhabitants who defied any consistent ethnic
characterization.^71
As the Nandian example demonstrates, Han residence was not abso-
lutely precluded in chieftainship territory by southwestern Yunnan’s dis-
ease environment. Yet such residence remained conditional, limited, and
even destabilizing for the ordering of a southwestern imperial borderland
in the nineteenth century. The“natural”limits on this ordering not only
include malaria, but also involve relativelyfine distinctions between glu-
tinous and nonglutinous riziculture as well as the sensitivity of forest
slopes to different forms of swidden agriculture. Such constraints com-
bined to obstruct the full realization of an arablist order of the sort
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 249
