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contemplated by dynastic officials such as Gao Qizhuo. Indeed, just as it
had in Cai Yurong’s time, this mountainous disease environment’s
dynamics continued synergistically to impede, and even roll back, devel-
opment of such a borderland-structured space to the end of the nineteenth
century.
Events such as the Panthay Rebellion, and subsequent regional frag-
mentation that emerged in the early twentieth century, significantly dis-
rupt the trajectory of regional integration informing some important
modern historical analyses of the area.^72 It is really only in the light of
post- 1949 history that pre-Liberation Yunnan’s rocky progress into a
larger Han centralized polity can be continuously visualized. The impedi-
ments of human cultural diversity interacting with the province’s disease
environment formed a fundamental obstacle along this ostensible path,
which Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were bumping up against as late as the
mid- 1930 s in Yunnan and Guizhou.
In southwestern Yunnan, the nineteenth-century Qing state seems to
have reached an impasse. The ethnic composition of the Qing frontier
zone had so changed that by 1799 parts of the Shunning native
chieftainships of Menglian and Mengmeng had been taken over by wild
Luohei and Kawa. Sometime later, officials believed Nandian, Tengyue’s
primary native chieftainship, to be abetting wild plunder operations. Even
the forces of dynastic local administration were intimidated. To the
throne’s incredulous consternation, there were rumors of indigenous
defiance, like the report of a“wild tribal”who might have cut the nose
off a Qing squad leader without reprisal in 1817. Destabilizing incursions
into provincial peripheries persisted into the 1820 s.^73 Indirect rule
through thegumsaunification appeared to be no great obstacle to the
expansion of gumlao-style decentralization, a form of socioeconomic
organization possibly better suited to dealing with intermittent famine
conditions.
The deterioration of the inner frontier chieftainships of southwestern
Yunnan’s three prefectures continued unabated until 1825 .Atthat
time, Hu Qirong, in the penultimate year of his seven-year stint as
Tengyue subprefectural magistrate, had resolved to take action. Hu
memorialized that his subprefectural seat was“surrounded on all four
sides by the stockades of wild tribals, which run straight through to the
limits of the frontier in uncountable numbers.” Only a single road,
which still remained free of nearby wild stockades, connected the seat
with Yunnan proper in Yongchang prefecture to the northeast.
Lamenting such conditions, Hu revealed that there was no longer an
250 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
