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

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Shaanxi-Sichuan governor-general Yue Zhongqi urging he lead a rebel-

lion as the descendant of the famous Song general, Han ethnic hero, and

martyr Yue Fei, who had fought the Jurchen Jin. Yue Zhongqi turned

Zeng in, and he was interrogated and ultimately spared after his public

retraction, which was also published as part of theDayi juemi lu.

In the process of denouncing the intellectual heirs of thinkers such as

Lü, the Yongzheng emperor made a direct refutation of dissident Han-

space concepts. The emperor rejected the notion that there should be any

discriminatory distinction “between Han and barbarian [Hua yi]”

because the Qing has received the mandate of heaven to rule both“within

and beyond China [zhongwai].”So it was“particularly inappropriate”to

treat anyone who acquiesced and became a loyal subject differently on the

basis of ethnic identity. The emperor also objected to ideas that sought to

“erect barriers”between Manchus and Han, because they were rooted in

ignorance of the fact that “Manchuria is like one of China’s native

territories.”^44

The emperor’s father, the Kangxi emperor, had helped to set a prece-

dent for this assertion, although the Yongzheng emperor made no direct

reference to it. A 1677 expedition had been dispatched to Manchuria to

determine the precise location of the Changbai Mountain range (Chang-

baishan; Ma: GolminŠanggiyan Alin), in part to confirm its location as the

numinous center of the Manchu’s original homeland. Upon its discovery,

the Kangxi emperor decreed that“the mountain’s mystic power”should

be formally recognized through the institution of ritual sacrifices to its

officially designated spirit, so that Changbai’s“ritual codes will be like

those of the Five Marchmounts.”^45 The cardinal points of Hanspace were

in this way extended northeast in the form of a Manchurian Marchmount.

The Kangxi emperor, however, expressed a significantly different

orientation in a conversation with his senior court officials in 1709.

The emperor queried one of his Grand Secretaries, Li Guangdi, as to

the geographic origin of Shandong’s terrestrial veins that formed its

mountains. The emperor authoritatively corrected Li’s reply that these

ran from locales in Shaanxi and Henan. He asserted that all of Shan-

dong’s mountains, including the chief of the Five Marchmounts, Taishan,

were ultimately rooted in the Changbai range. Terrestrial veins ran under

the Gulf of Bohai to form a“dragon of surpassing extent.”Li accordingly

deferred to the emperor’s“wide and comprehensive”canonical know-

ledge.^46 Qing rule was literally redrawing the map of Hanspace and

impressing it on Han elites, whose reception, sincere or not, was certainly

public. Quantitative, and even locational, revision was not new to

Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 37
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