ann
(Ann)
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In 1747 the Qianlong emperor himself concluded from pelts whose“color
was not like it had been”that his pelt foragers were“concealing the good
ones”because past poaching by“Russian Orochen”peoples had been
stopped.^136
The emperor’s suspicions regarding his foragers are certainly plausible
and doubtless often accurate. They are not, however, always the only
possible, or even the most plausible, environmental explanations, which
must include considerations of anthropogenic resource depletion caused
by the normative operations of imperial foraging. Such considerations
seem to have exceeded the capacity of the bureaucratic imagination,
which was limited even in anthropocentric terms.
A general intensification of human labor was the standard bureaucratic
response to hunter-gatherer shortfalls despite strong evidence of eco-
logical dearth. The failure of Shengjing’s thirty pheasant hunters to fulfill
their annual quota of three thousand by nineteen hundred fowl in
1668 brought a reprimand and an order to go out and try again. The
fact that captured birds were considered too skinny did not affect the
Duyusi’sdeliberations, and it simply issued a standard order that sur-
pluses would be rewarded and shortfalls punished.^137
A more pronounced decline occurred in the stork (guan;Ma:weijun)
quota, which was supposed to be fulfilled by ten men bringing in 150 birds
each year. In 1673 , the men brought in 116 ,in1674 44,andin 1675 a
mere 23.^138 TheDuyusi’ssolution was to press the hunters to overfulfill
the normal quota to make up for previous shortfalls, despite a report explain-
ing that the previous shortfalls arose from there being too few male storks
and too many females. Males were probably most sought after because of the
size of their pinions. TheDuyusi’sresponse was an exhortation to overcome
these conditions of what was probably overhunting.^139
Storks were among the ten“useless”animals whose capture would be
suspended in 1682 , four years after this exhortation was issued. Given the
precipitously steady decline in the stork quota from 1673 , in addition to
considerable shortfalls for 1669 and 1670 , it may be that storks became
useless only after they became scarce.^140 The Kangxi emperor made a
relatively unambiguous demonstration of this type of rationale in 1695 in
response to a shortfall in the Butha Ula sable tribute. The emperor noted
that“for the past several years sable have decreased because of frequent
hunting...yet [pelts] are not a necessity, and We have no pressing need
for them.”^141
An even more explicit acknowledgment of the excesses of imperial
foraging came a century later in 1796 when the newly enthroned Jiaqing
The Nature of Imperial Foraging in the SAH Basin 103
