the“diligence”of the locals in the execution of their agricultural and
foraging tasks.^75 The environmental relations arising from the intersec-
tion of the Mongol“character”with sedentary agriculture appears some-
how less acceptable.
The Kangxi emperor was even more prosaically indiscriminate in his
evaluation of Mongol arablist capacities when he asserted in a 1698 edict
to“educate Mongols”that“the Mongol character is indolent. Once seed
is broadcast on thefields they go to various places to herd and, although
the grain ripens, do not attend to reaping its harvest. Nor when frost falls
do they gather in the harvest, but instead declare a bad year.”^76
In diametrical contrast the Kangxi emperor was moved to somewhat
self-congratulatory poetic effusions over the exertions of paradigmatic
Han cultivation outside its natural habitat. His“Beyond the Passes Out-
posts of Cultivation Steadily Become Settlements”(Kouwai she tun gen-
gzhi juluo jian cheng) can stand as the state’s endorsement of proper
cultivation relations under steppe conditions:
Along the border, a vast wilderness
That no policy can well forsake.
Founding settlements through the years
To concentrate civilized instruction
By laying outfields along paths running east, west, north, and south.
Diligently plowing and hoeing in spring and summer;
Stocking up livestock in fall and winter;
Harvesting glutinous millet just as the frost starts to thicken;
Reaping wheat in thefinal moments of warmth.
In soil both solidly fertile and stony
Human effort transforms a barren waste.
Having springsflow down from the mountains,
Setting up pig sheds behind cottages,
All done on time and tirelessly.
Thus, population registersfill up.
Rulers since antiquity, I fear, had no
Such means for transformation by cultivation.^77
All such characterizations, good and bad, are important manifestations of
imperial arablism in the steppe context and, as such, serve to reinforce an
imperial borderland hierarchy based on ethnically determined cereal
farming. In practice, of course, ethnic and spatial distinctions were not
so uniform. A 1743 report from Heilongjiang described some Manchu
Solon-Ewenki and Mongolian Dagur rotating in and out of Hulun Buir as
“crude”in their cultivation and“entirely ignorant of hoeing.”^78 Han
farmers in China proper itself were also criticized for their own version
of“fields that rely on heaven,”although their form of arablist malpractice
Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 47
