ann
(Ann)
#1
agricultural products purchased nearly forty times over.^16 It is hardly
surprising, then, that a 1635 Qing official diplomatic protest about
poaching to King Injo (Renzu;r. 1623 – 49 ) of Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty
expressed the fear that“subjects of the Great Ming are also moving into
our territory to dig ginseng.”^17 Regional poaching of ginseng by Han
subjects of the Ming had actually been going on for nearly a century
earlier at the expense of the Qing’s Jurchen forebears. Han, circa 1538 ,
were already poaching marten pelts andfish in“their search for profit”
north of the Ming’s Liaodong border. Ming Chinese were still engaged in
illicit foraging activities in 1616 , the year the Jin was founded.^18
Conflicts generated by unique northeastern natural resources between
Han, Koreans, and Jurchen were thus endemic, almost traditional, by the
mid–seventeenth century, and poaching was mutual.^19 The Jin attempt to
restrict access to strategic resources, both economically profitable and
politically critical, was compatible with regional historical trends extant
for at least a century or so by the mid- 1630 s.
Banner lands, and their subdivisions of specialized foraging preserves
such as ginseng mountains, pearl rivers, and imperial hunting grounds,
developed within this milieu. Korean officials had already commented
on the Jurchen forager construction of northeastern space in 1536 :“the
barbarian [i.e., Jurchen] custom is to defend separate mountains and
derive benefit from their produce. Should any fail to hold their traditional
mountain, they have no dwelling place.”^20 Under such conditions Jurchen
identity and mountain microecosystems were existentially related.
Of course, mountains teeming with forage would not remain an exist-
ential prerequisite for Jurchen, particularly once they began to expand
beyond their immediate home territory. The Jurchen-Manchu relation to
their foraging spaces certainly changed over time, particularly as Jin
power expanded into Qing. Nevertheless, foraging space continued to
contain an inevitably idealized Manchu identity even as large numbers
of indigenous peoples moved physically and culturally farther from the
northeast.^21
The pristine nature of the region and its peoples is easily exaggerated,
perhaps most famously in the Qianlong emperor’s 1754 poem“The
Willow Palisade.” The dynasty’s northeastern “quarantine policy”
(fengjin zhengce) was rooted in the palisade’s dense thickets, planted to
delineate the boundary between Han-inflected southern Manchuria and
the“Manchu”north. This policy has been interpreted in terms ranging
from absolute to superficial depending on the sources and periodization
employed.^22
68 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
