in places that had become geographically and, therefore, culturally isol-
ated. It also allows this habitat to spread beyond traditional boundaries to
approach an eradication of destabilizing diversity beyond it. Moreover,
this view converges with accommodationists such as Hu Wei, and even
the Yongzheng emperor himself, when they assert the civilizing effects
over time on originally“barbarian”places such as Zhejiang, Hunan,
Hubei, and Shanxi. A notable nineteenth-century accommodationist,
Wei Yuan, validated these views. Wei asserted that Qing expansion into
Khalkha territory spreadshengjiao, mediated by tribute supervised under
theLifanyuan, beyond this forbidding“sea of sand”(hanhai), an obstacle
that had even blocked the influence of Yu the Great. He also relied on a
consequently more detailed (meta)spatial geography of the region to effect
an expansion of Hanspace, arguing that the empire’s northern dragon
trunk actually lay beyond the Gobi in Uliastai.^101 Unfortunately in all its
versions, monocultural Hanspace was materially limited. Failure to make
the appropriate adaptations, such as a shift to sustainable swiddening,
reconversion to pastureland, or reforestation, would indeed trigger“nat-
ural defenses”against any unsustainable monoculture.
The interdependencies of such networks exemplify the conditional
relevance of the mainstay explanation of Han population growth to
account for nineteenth-century declines. Problems of Qing demography
further impair this explanation. Problems, nevertheless, remain difficult to
address, because, as Li Bozhong has frankly acknowledged, although
populationfigures may be too high,“it is not possible to obtain better
ones, and so they are used here.”^102 Much the same epitaph could be read
over Qing acreage, but the more diverse environmental approaches of Li
and Marks offer the possibility to transcend at least some of the real
limitations of demographic and land statistics. So it may be said that the
onset of nineteenth-century environmental crises reveals to anyone seek-
ing the mandate that the locus of virtue had always lain in fertile ground
bounded by neither core nor periphery, but by ecology.
Notes1 Shanghai shudian chubanshe, ed.,‘Dayi juemi lu’tan, 134. I have translated
qishuas“qicirculating in the cosmos,”more conventionally rendered as
“fate.”TheLiji: provides some context:“The celestialqiascends and the
mundaneqidescends so that there is no circulation between the cosmic poles
of heaven and earth. Winter develops in full from this blockage,” Liji
zhuyi, 210.
2 See, for example, Zhang Yanli,Jia Dao shiqi de zaihuang, 6 – 8.