A World Trimmed with Fur : Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources. In __A World Trimmed with Fur__, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century―pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Transcription Conventions 14 Introduction 18 1. The View from Beijing 34 2. Pearl Thieves and Perfect Order 72 3. The Mushroom Crisis 110 4. Nature in the Land of Fur 146 Conclusion 184 Appendix: Fur Tribute Submissions, 1771–1910 196 Notes 200 List of Chinese Terms 246 Works Cited 250 Index 276