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(Ann)
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advantages under frigid northeastern conditions are apparent in the
1736 – 43 deliberations over Hulun Buir troop dispositions. On this
ground Solon-Ewenki and Bargut hunters proved better able to keep
themselves fed in extreme winter conditions than their agrarian Dagur
comrades.
Adequate cultivation in more temperate woodlands, of course, was not
impossible, as indigenous swiddening in the southwest demonstrates.
However, cultivation that minimized deforestation had to work harder
and, in an imperial arablist view, less efficiently, as Yun-Gui governors-
general Cai Yurong and Gao Qizhuo both asserted. Some of this work is
engraved on the forest protection steles erected during the period of
growing Han agricultural pressure centering on the first half of the
nineteenth century and scattered across areas of Yi settlement in Yunnan.
Other parts of it are inked mainly on paper prescriptions, such as Bao
Shichen’s. Swiddening practiced by the Yi and other indigenous peoples
appears to have been the most sustainable form of cultivation possible
under sylvan conditions. Devastating extractions spawned by arablists
such as the 1845 Han mushroom entrepreneurs in Yongbei and Dayao
were taboo in Zomi-culture.
Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century, even imperial foraging had
overconcentrated resources, symbolized by the barren pine stumps that so
vexed the Jiaqing emperor. Zones of indigenous cultivation in the south-
west had come under palpable pressure as well. Stress was legible in the
fear expressed on an 1808 stele from what is now the Yi autonomous
county of Jingdong in Pu’er prefecture: the“bitter toil of years gone by
would be lost”to“shameless”timbering, burning off hillsides, fuel cut-
ting, construction, and even herding.^15 Much of Yunnan, already under
some form of cultivation, proved eminently convertible to Han-style
agriculture in a way similar to that of the southern Inner Mongolian
ecotone, and southern Manchuria’s as well.
However, southwestern Yunnan’s mosquitoes and blood parasites
preferred fresh Han farmers to the livestock favored by Mongolian
wolves, probably driven into putting further pressure on herders by
arablist habitat destruction circa 1747. Settler susceptibility to the
southwestern disease environment precluded a Han takeover of indigen-
ousfields along the lines feared by northern officials deliberating in the
same year over whether or not to provide seed grain and steppe plots
for Mongol relief. Such differences were critical for the vulnerability
of wide-open Mongolian pastures in comparison with Yunnan’scoarse-
grained highlands isolated by sweltering lowlands. On the contrary,
272 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
