Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain_ Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China\'s Borderlands

human and ecological diversities to maintain the vast unity of Inner

Asia and China proper. In this sense,“from many, one”was the main

Qing environmental historical contradiction and challenge. Imperial

identities had to be centrally the same for purposes of unity but had

to be appropriately different locally to maintain the incorporation of

multiple regions. The necessary tension between central uniformity and

local diversity drove Qing environmental history.

The ethnic manifestation of this tension between Inner Asian conquest

dynasties and their majority Han subjects isfirst and foremost defined in

arablist terms as“Hanspace,”then in venery ones, in the discussion that

follows. The longer, dominant theory and practice of Hanspace arablism

developed under threat of less articulate venery practice, which was,

nevertheless, periodically triumphant.

Although pre-Qing imperial arablism grew the same plants, it did

not raise the same people in the process. Previous Chinese empires had

been much more monocultural both ethnically and ecologically,

making Ciriktai’s operations unthinkable in the Ming, for example.

This monoculture had been formed from the“ruling elite’s”reductive

ordering of the complex diversity of its mainly Han world, which

“throughout history...viewed the people of the northern steppes with

an almost traumatic apprehension.”“Hanspace,”became the reductive

and apprehensive ethnic-ecological expression of imperial China

proper’s arablism in comparative isolation from other environmental

relations as a type of (super)natural habitat for agrarian Han Chinese.^3

The Qing empire was an unprecedented integration of arablist Han-

space into a more“multi-environmental”associationwithInnerAsian

venery.

grounding hanspace

In his manuscriptHuangshu, Wang Fuzhi described China proper as an

ideal Han ecosystem. He envisioned “lofty peaks” flowing together

around China like“a surrounding wall”and“mountain torrents”that

spill from steep precipices that protect China“like moats.”These formed

a tight belt of“veins”surrounding a region where“cold and heat regulate

one another, language is mutually intelligible, appearances are similar,

the‘hundred grains’the source of common nourishment, the‘six domesti-

cated beasts’beget each their kind, [and] commerce mutually prolifer-

ates.”Mountain ranges all merged to form the“natural unification”of

the“central region” (zhongqu) of China proper. Wang’s description

Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 23