foraging and manchu identity
Qing authorities sought to preserve ecological ties to their northeastern
homeland among the Manchu diaspora despite the physical separation
entailed by the conquest of China proper. Foraging was integral to the
ongoing formation of a distinct, unified, and imperial Manchu identity
across the Great Wall that dynastic authorities considered the apex of
their state’s ethnic hierarchy.
In the view of Qing rulers such as the Yongzheng emperor, Manchus
were of the“greatest concern”because they were the“root of the state”
and, as such,“comparable to no others.”^6 The formation of Manchu
identity was, moreover, not a passive process for the participants. The
dynasty’s ethnic exemplars, bannermen, were thus commanded“to do
their utmost to become studied in Manchu frugality, the Qing [i.e.
Manchu] language, mounted archery, labor service [and] the arts of drill
and ritual usage.”^7 Many of these practices, including foraging skills like
archery, could be pursued only under certain social and ecological condi-
tions that required maintenance of amenable spaces sufficiently isolated
from the empire’s Han Chinese majority.
Manchuria’s eastern and northern expanses inevitably became
the empire’s main reserve for Manchus to be insulated from“contam-
ination,”by“Han customs,”including the drinking, gambling, cock-
fighting, and profligate expenditures, so decried by Qing rulers.^8
Hybridization into a new composite identity through proximity to
Han culture distinguished diasporic from borderland Manchus.^9 Unlike
Fengtian (modern Liaoning province)and its capital Shengjing to the
south, Jilin and Heilongjiang hadnot been subjected to large-scale
Han migration and were considered relatively pristine, if endangered
from the mid–eighteenth century.^10
Even before the Qing conquest of China proper dynastic authorities
sought control over the forage resources of the Jurchen/Manchu home
territory, roughly centered in southeastern Jilin around the Korean
border. Nurhaci formulated one of the earliest dynastic rationales for
such control on March 3 , 1623 :
Formerly, all sorts of pelts, eastern pearls, and sable were foraged by one
hundred men sent out by the eightBeilePrinces’households, each of which
retained its own respective catches. So for fear of internal disorder, all sorts
of forage from the year 1622 like eastern pearls, sable, lynx pelts, tiger pelts,
wolf pelts, otter pelts, and squirrel pelts were all equally divided into eight
portions.^11