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unpropitious for riziculture but full of buried treasure crammed amid
crowded peaks laced with disease.
Dynastic authorities would have to respond by cultivating plants and
people suitable to the province’s environmental conditions that could
also be subjected to sufficient administrative control. The tension between
Yunnan’s diversity and the state’s standardizing imperatives narrowed
Qing options and required concessions. Reduced to its most basic essen-
tials, the Qing cultivation of the Yunnan borderland was rooted in
mining, swidden agriculture, and native chieftainships. As Cai Yurong
and other administrators realized, while mining was the best way to
incorporate Yunnan into the empire, it remained critically dependent on
food and fuel that were locally scarce. Although this deficiency was
fitfully offset by expensive imports from other provinces, a more stable
solution appeared to be an increase in Yunnan’s arable land, which
required securing mountainous and malarial areas for arablism. Ideally,
security would be provided by chieftainships, swiddening by“shack”
people. The deliberations of governors-general Cai, Zhang, and Liu con-
tain references to many of these crucial elements. Their interrelations
require further clarification in order to delineate more precisely the
boundaries of dynastic borderland cultivation as an adaptation to
Yunnan’s disease environment.
Swiddening and indigenous settlement, as chieftainships or otherwise,
were in many respects interdependent. Writing around 1680 Liu Kun,
who had served as a provincial official, described agriculture in Yunnan’s
chieftainships as“slash and burn. Barley, wheat, oats, buckwheat, and
beans were obtained by the plow from high mountains and lofty ranges of
narrow paths and dangerous slopes.”He distinguished these conditions
from the“arableflats and wetfields”where paddy rice was grown by
“Yi and Han”lowlanders in the province’s center and southeast.^35 There
was certainly more than one way to plant afield in Yunnan, and each
was often ethnically distinctive in varying degrees, but there were also
differences within a single planting regimen that had profound environ-
mental consequences.
Despite the connotations of its more common denomination as“slash
and burn,”swidden agriculture can be quite sustainable when properly
practiced. It is much less ecologically debilitating than the arablist
extremes pursued by Han farmers. Recent research has shown that
“the swidden cultivator’s goal is not to destroy forest, but to obtain a
continuous harvest of cultigens while managing the succession toward a
new forest of high diversity.”The work of Yin Shaoting in particular has
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 181
