ann
(Ann)
#1
Qingspace was certainly not hermetically compartmentalized, as
shown in deliberations as late as those in 1910 to arablize Butha Ula
foraging zones, but it was integrated. The degree of this integration can
serve as a measure of dynastic adaptation to the diversity of its domin-
ions. By 1910 , however, adaptation had long been eroding into impos-
itions ofzhongbangcore uniformity. Han practices, rather than Han
bodies, were being used in the Late Qing to mandate the same sort of
“environmentality,”orzhengjiaoapparatus, throughout the empire.
Foraging could not perform the same service for a number of
reasons, exposed in another exemplary 1910 incident from Manchuria.
A local outbreak of plague had been triggered by a stampede of Han
trappers who indiscriminately caught healthy and diseased marmots
(Marmota sibirica) to meet market demands for imitation sable, which
tripled the price of marmot pelts. These casual commercial foragers,
unlike their more experienced and measured indigenous counterparts,
had been unable to recognize and avoid infected animal vectors.^14
Proper foraging not only required a complex range of skills not readily
acquired, but was also less responsive to mass market forces and
relatively impervious to human intervention to increase supply in
response to demand. Moreover, it could not simply be shifted to areas
such as those throughout most of China proper that had been hunted
out and deforested.
Foraging was much more conditioned by interconnections to the
surrounding ecology than either herding or farming. It was far quicker
and easier to cut down forests, foraging’s limiting factor, than to grow
them. Of course, as the Jiaqing emperor’s pine nut and honey gatherers
knew, it was possible in the short term to forage with an axe, but
unsustainable beyond a brief span, as the emperor himself realized. In
this representative case, the“logic”of imperial foraging had developed
to an extreme that contradicted the ecological facts to the point where its
own“enhanced”practice undermined it. Such logic almost certainly
helped to create other shortfallsin foraging quotas of pheasants and
storks.
Imperial foraging seems to be both the mostflexible borderland envir-
onmental network because of its wider scope of possible action and also
the most dependent on uncontrollable ecological shifts. The material
results seem to have been a much lower surplus necessitating concen-
tration over a much longer period of time. These limitations also imply
foraging was the most sustainable, if the least predictable, set of imperial
environmental relations under consideration. Foraging’s comparative
Qing Environmentality 271
