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Hubu(Board of Revenue).^61 Northeastern“tribute”as used here thus
describes general hunter-gatherer obligations, often reciprocated by
rewards, under special conditions of imperial foraging. As John E. Wills,
Jr., has advocated for maritime Sino-European relations,“tribute”is
understood here to focus on indigenous practices in the process of study-
ing an“interactive emergence”between cultures.^62
Sable, a primary material incentive for imperial incursion into the
basin’s northern reaches, was a critical resource for uniting fragmented
regional groups into a borderland order defined by foraging rather than
cultivation. Subjugation in this context was ritually and materially tied to
a unique regional resource, which indigenous peoples were especially well
situated, by nature and nurture, to acquire through hunting, not planting.
Tribute in the SAH basin required a different assemblage of elements that
included both hunters and forests.
The social significance of pelts was grounded in the necessities of basic
subsistence in a boreal environment. Although residents consumed them
for a variety of purposes, pelts for clothing were a prerequisite for human
habitation of the northern basin, especially for farming and soldiering.
Officials requested“fur coats”(Ma:jibca) as vital both for forty-seven
Cossacks taken prisoner at Yaksa in 1684 and forfive hundred Qing
troops working the land in Heilongjiang in 1688.^63 Within a few gener-
ations, however, shortages had appeared in the territory. A 1750 report
explained that Solon-Ewenki and Dagur were so numerous that fur-
bearers became too scarce to supply clothing. Their previous existence
as“hunters and foragers who ate theflesh of wild animals and wore
hides”with“little use”for cloth”had consequently become unsustain-
able. Since the climate was“too cold for cotton cultivation,”it urged that
indigenous people be taught Mongolian methods of felt production from
livestock to avoid expensive purchases from merchants.^64
Of course, furs, sable being the most prized, were also needed for
trapping fur-bearing animals during cold weather when pelts were at their
maximum thickness. There were several methods for obtaining pelts, all of
which necessitated extended periods of outdoor exposure for hunters,
whether they smoked sable out of their lairs or ran them down with dogs.^65
The local production of basic necessities such as clothing for life in the
basin meant foraging amid a semiboreal ecology.
The biodiversity of this ecology is immense for an area so far north
(roughly between 41 and 55 ). These natural endowments, many of
them regionally unique, are scattered across an area of more than
2 million, largely mountainous, square kilometers drained by the more
The Nature of Imperial Foraging in the SAH Basin 79
