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on an imperial progress through Henan that some places had not
yet sown their fall wheat crop, but he could not decide if this was due
to“lazy farmers’lack of diligence”or the unsuitability of the soil. Henan
Governor Oyonggo’s response confirmed the existence of both prob-
lems.^60 Scarcity of arable land in China proper made it vital to arrest
anthropogenic problems, which, if allowed to persist, would ruin
good soil.
Cultural concepts centered on values such as“diligence”were basic
components ofliangminidentity that not only related people to the soil,
but enabled them to relate appropriately to a wider variety of soils and
climate conditions not well suited to cultivation. Administrators could
easily, if not reasonably, come to feel that culture of a sufficient intensity
could overcome a nature of inadequate fertility. Thus, Oyonggo’s prede-
cessorŠose insisted in 1744 that although sandy, alkaline soil would not
support“cultivation of thefive grains,” the “stupid” residents, who
“indolently feared difficulty,”and their local officials, who had“made
no effort to exhort them,”had not tried to plant trees. Theirflaws were
the main reason for“an increase in wasteland.”^61 Such imperial arablism
did not always prevail but did inform cultivation culturally and
ecologically.
Diligence was, of course, considerably augmented by enormous and
pervasive state administrative structures. Water control was probably the
most general form, but there were also regional variant structures. Con-
flicts between north China cultivators and locusts, for example, received
considerable attention, which included formal systems for reporting and
managing outbreaks, semiofficial“locust cult”shrines, and even local
financial incentives. Shandong residents, for example, were offered two
hundred coppers by provincial authorities for everysheng(roughly one
liter or 0. 03 bushels) of locust larvae peasants could dig out from snowy
fields. Zhili officials offered rice and copper, which, according to one
1742 report, caused“the people to pursue profit like ducks [taking to
water] and all energetically searched”for the larvae.^62 The metaphor was
quite appropriate because ducks were employed to consume locust larvae
and nymphs in watery areas too difficult for humans to reach. For
example, more than four thousand ducks, augmented by freelance frogs
and swallows, were“hired”and marched in two ranks over some infested
northern Anhui districts in 1824.^63
Even the highest dynastic authorities nevertheless came to recognize
that diligence had its natural limits, although they did so while remaining
firmly within an imperial arablist discourse. One of the Kangxi emperor’s
42 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
