When ready in autumn, they return to reap it.
Their departure was not without reason;
Some for hunting, others to mind herds.
Yet now it is like this no longer and
All are accustomed to the tasks of the plow.
They consider rain and assess fair weather,
Having worries no different from common farmers,
And so actually abandon herding and hunting,
Thus forgetting their origins.^72
One reason for this departure was because hunting and pasture areas
were being converted into agriculturalfields. A number of the Qianlong
emperor’s poems make this point and, in contrast to the sentiment
expressed in“Wild Fields,”seem to lament it. In“What I Saw”(“Suo
jian;” 1759 ), for example, the emperor begins by observing“Virgin land
everywhere reclaimed/ Fields in the mountains/ No forests left.”He then
comments aside that thirty years before“all mountains beyond the passes
were forested and could be hunted in,”but now land was“everywhere
cleared so that there are no forests to be seen.” So battue hunting
“cannot be practiced outside of restricted areas like Mu-lan.” In
“Tigershoot River”(Shehu Chuan), he observes that“the three-sided
drive with bow and arrow has ceased in the wilds.”The emperor then
appends the comment that during the long Qing peace there has been“no
piece of land that has not been cleared for farming.”This is a decline from
the early years of the Kangxi period when this territory [around
Wutaishan] still had wild animals that could be hunted battue style.”
The poem then resumes with the line that“everywhere hugefields are
plowed and lined with mulberry by ten thousand households.”Poetic
license aside, pastures and hunting grounds persisted through the Qian-
long emperor’s reign but were contracting under stress, including official
pressure for cultivation such as a 1749 request to convert some Ordos
pastures.^73
It is probably unnecessary to enumerate each of the Qianlong
emperor’s considerable number of essentializations of Mongol identity
appearing in an imperial arablist idiom. Interpretation, however, must be
qualified by the historical context that renders this body of poetry a
progressive expression of interethnic affinity unimaginable during the
preceding Ming.^74 It is also important to note that practices similar to
Mongol cultivation were not always reprehensible, as in Gao Shiqi’s
favorable account of like neglect of fertilizing and weeding among
Manchus in Butha Ula (Da-sheng Wu-la) in Jilin. Gao concluded this
was practicable due to the great fertility of the soil, although he also noted
46 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
