ann
(Ann)
#1
sustainable form of relations between people and their ecology is grad-
ually eroded, mainly to produce substantial quantities in a relatively short
time to supply both tribute and commerce.
This sort of intricate environmental interdependency was also opera-
tive in connections between marten species and honey foraging. Deforest-
ation triggering a decline in these species could undermine the search for
honey because foragers found many wild honey hives by following the
tracks of hungry yellow throated martens (mishu, lit.,“honey rat”;Ma:
harsa). This tracking skill, in turn, depended on an adequate snowfall to
see the prints. A more than 50 percent shortfall in the 1668 honey quota
was actually attributed to inadequate snowfall forharsatracking. Lack of
snowfall, as well as too much, was also periodically invoked to explain
sable tribute shortfalls.^147
Interconnections in such instances were vulnerable to vagaries of nat-
ural conditions and to the larger program to culture Manchurian nature
for the dynasty’s exclusive use. The Kangxi reign was a critical period for
the onset of pressures and contradictions arising from these factors,
driven in substantial measure by Qing attempts to maintain privileged
access to the northeast’s human and natural resources. Although by no
means permanently exhausting even the most valuable resources, such as
ginseng and sable, which persist in an endangered condition today, the
scale of the dynasty’s northeastern extractions proved insupportable by
the early nineteenth century.^148
This unsustainable consumption, in addition to Han migration pro-
pelled less by culture than by agriculture, reconfigured northeastern space
to hybridize a putatively pristine borderland Manchu identity. Effects are
especially visible in Fengtian’s farmland to populationfigures, which
indicate that the ratio between registered land cultivated by banner people
and Han commoners decreased rapidly between 1644 and 1734 from
almost 44 : 1 to a little under 8 : 1. Such a drop likely helped to push nearly
30 percent (just over 734 , 000 ) of the whole of Manchuria’s population
of just under an estimated 2. 5 million people into Jilin and Heilongjiang
by 1820.^149
The significance of scarcity goes beyond a shortage of forage such as
pine nuts or even ginseng for imperial kitchens or coffers. The cultured
nature that the regime maintained in Manchuria formed a network of
imperial foragers who relied on snow to track marten to acquire wild
honey to be taken from intact trees back for ritual presentation and
royal consumption in Beijing. The range of interconnections between
species, climate, and culture represented in this single streamlined
The Nature of Imperial Foraging in the SAH Basin 105
