ann
(Ann)
#1
banner,“gūsa,” to distinguish those formations, such as the Pastoral
Chakhar, that were under direct central state military authority. The
Mongolian term for banner,hoshuu, will be attached to less militarized
and state centralized groups such as thejasagForty-nine Banners, who
could, for example, tax their own subjects and pass on hereditary
offices.^85 So, although both banner groups are ethnically Mongolian, they
are ethnic administratively distinct as“Manchu”stategūsabanners and
Mongolian localhoshuubanners, respectively.
Perhaps the most dramatic and enduring of example of Qing venery
patronage was the imperial hunting park of Muran (Mu-lan). Located at
Chengde, the imperial summer capital beyond the Great Wall, Muran was
used for 140 years ( 1681 to 1821 ) as the center for ritualized political and
military activities as well for subsistence and elite foraging.^86 Chengde has
been viewed as“a composite landscape that reproduced the map of the
Manchu empire.”“The geographical provenance” of the complex’s
“microclimates”was contrived to be sufficiently diversified to permit
visitors to experience a select part of the complex as a“reduced version
of their own landscape.”Although this may be one of Chengde’s general
effects, the Qing rulers most responsible for its construction, the Kangxi
and Qianlong emperors, viewed the“secondary landscape”of Muran
from a nativist, rather than universalist, perspective that could also apply
to the whole Chengde complex.^87 Muran was founded on the conviction
that hunting was the primary expression of ethnic identity north of the
passes in service of imperial borderland maintenance across generations.
The Qianlong emperor bequeathed a representative statement of this
concern to his successors in 1782 , carved in the stone stele of the Yongyou
temple at Chengde.
Fearing his posterity would forget the reserve’s main purpose, as
originally articulated by its founder the Kangxi emperor, the Qianlong
emperor disclosed that Muran had been constructed mainly to preserve
military skills, as exercised by mounted bow hunting. This role further-
more distinguished Muran from its imperial Chinese hunting park prede-
cessors, which had been lavishly maintained“since the Tang”purely for
personal pleasure to the ruin of statefinances. In contrast, the Muran-
Chengde complex’s“Mountain Retreat”(Shanzhuang) had been deliber-
ately located beyond the passes to“give appropriate weight to military
practice, not to excessively esteem”literati culture. The emperor’s imme-
diate concern arose from the 1778 elevation of Chengde to a prefecture
and its attendant Confucian cultural institutions.^88 The whole Mountain
Retreat complex was explicitly and deliberately not Hanspace. Nor was
50 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
