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(Ann)
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effective inner frontier zone:“Even the native chieftainships within the
frontier cannot be defended. How can the inhabitants of Yunnan
proper be protected?”^74
Hu obtained permission to establish a western line of seventy-seven
“strongpoints”(diaobao) manned by 624 chieftainship militia, backed up
in a few strategic places by Han relief forces that could be stationed on
nonmalarial high ground. The strongpoints were supposed to be self-
supporting military agricultural colonies similar to those employed
against the Miao in Hunan and against White Lotus sectarians in
Sichuan and elsewhere. At least nine of Hu’s blockhouses were con-
structed along the reaches of the Binlang River, some in explicitly malarial
areas, which would now form the province’s western extremity.^75
Contrary to some statements in local gazetteers, this system did not
function very effectively.^76 He Zikai, a contemporary of Hu, had opposed
the strongpoints because they could not possibly cover the numerous
passes connecting Yunnan proper with the border zones. During his
operations against wild tribals as governor-general of Yun-Gui, Lin
Zexu confirmed that invaders, who had taken twenty-six Han men and
women, could simply bypass the strongpoints. In 1849 these raiders,
“neither foreign subjects nor controlled by native chieftainships,”were
living“mixed together in mountain valleys in individual stockades that
appoint their own headmen.”There were still moving freely into Yunnan
from the Yerenshan.^77
The unrestricted movement of people through rugged, malarial ter-
rain hindered Qing ability to secure Yunnan’s southwestern frontier
zones in 1849 as it had done in 1769 .By 1899 disease environment
dynamics were reasserting themselves to undermine imperial indigen-
ism. A western observer at this time noted that“malaria is so prevalent”
infive of ten chieftainships in southern Pu’er prefecture’s Sipsongpanna
region“that the Chinese will not dwell in them.”Consequently, Chinese
officials could“exercise no more than a nominal control over those
districts. The actualmilitaryjurisdiction of the Chinese does not extend
more than a few miles to the west or south of Sumao [Simao].”
A Chinese official and some of his military escort had just died of the
disease a few years before in 1897 while mediating a succession dispute
in the Mengzhe chieftainship.^78
Routine patrol reports from the early 1790 s portray a much more
harmonious society in the Simao and Jiulong stretch of the Mekong River
region, with high-yield highland and lowland cultivation as well as mutu-
ally profitable commerce between Han settlers and indigenous peoples.^79
Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 251
