Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands (Studies in Environment and History)

In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), relied on the interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate the country's far-flung borderlands into the dynasty's expanding empire. The dynasty tried to manage the sustainable survival and compatibility of discrete borderland ethnic regimes in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan within a corporatist 'Han Chinese' imperial political order. This unprecedented imperial unification resulted in the great human and ecological diversity that exists today. Using natural science literature in conjunction with under-utilized and new sources in the Manchu language, Bello demonstrates how Qing expansion and consolidation of empire was dependent on a precise and intense manipulation of regional environmental relationships. Cover 1 Half-title 3 Series information 4 Title page 7 Copyright information 8 Dedication 9 Epigraph 10 Table of contents 11 List of tables 13 List of maps 15 Notes on Translation and Transliteration 17 Acknowledgments 19 Introduction 21 Environmental Relations and Empire 24 The Environmental Historical Terrain of Qing China 27 Environmental Relations in the Qing Borderlands 30 Notes 36 1 Qing Fields in Theory and Practice 41 Grounding Hanspace 43 Accommodationist Hanspace 46 Dissident Hanspace 51 The Qing Throne’s Struggle for Hanspace of Its Own 56 Arablism 60 Venery 68 Conclusion 74 Notes 75 2 The Nature of Imperial Foraging in the SAH Basin 83 Foraging and Manchu Identity 86 Imperial Foraging: The Administrative Space of Cultured Nature 89 Imperial Competition for the SAH Basin: First Stage 94 Sable-Centered Environmental Relations 98 Qing Pelt Tribute 101 Romanov Pelt Tribute 103 Imperial Competition for the SAH Basin: Second Stage 106 A Borderland Consolidated; Foraging Bureaucratized 116 Imperial Foraging: The Sustainability of Cultured Nature 120 Notes 126 3 The Nature of Imperial Pastoralism in Southern Inner Mongolia 136 Imperial Pastoralism: Consolidating Banners and Herds 138 Inner Mongolia’s Extreme Weather 148 Rain, Grass, and Relief 149 Herder-Livestock Resource Competition: Milk 160 Mongol-Han Resource Competition: Grassland and Its Produce 164 Guihua: Hanspace on the Steppe 177 Notes 179 4 The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 189 The Terrain of Native Chieftainships 191 Disease: Some Comparative Considerations 194 Cultivating Borderland 198 Malaria: An Endemic Arbiter of Borderland Space 210 Yunnan’s Unstable Compromise with Nature and Culture 226 Notes 230 5 Borderland Hanspace in the Nineteenth Century 239 The Core Virtue and Its Contradictions: Imperial Arablism 241 Virtue under Pressure at the Peripheries: Manchuria’s SAH Basin 248 Virtue under Pressure at the Peripheries: South-Central Inner Mongolia 254 Virtue under Pressure at the Peripheries: Southwestern Yunnan 261 The Locus of Virtue 272 Notes 278 6 Qing Environmentality 286 Notes 294 Works Cited 297 Abbreviations 297 Unpublished Archival Sources 297 Published Sources 298 Index 341 The multicultural Qing is reconsidered in "multi-ecological" terms of three borderland case studies from northeastern Manchuria, south-central Inner Mongolia, and southwestern Yunnan. Human pursuit of game, tending of livestock, and susceptibility to disease vectors required imperial adaptation beyond the cultural constructs of banners or chieftainships in order to maintain a "sustainable Qing periphery" based on these environmental relations between people and animals. The resulting borderland spaces are, therefore, not simply contrivances of more anthropocentric administrative fiat, but environmental interdependencies constructed through more "organic" and conditional relations of imperial foraging, imperial pastoralism, and imperial indigenism Using Manchu and Chinese sources, this book explores the environmental history of Qing China's Manchurian, Inner Mongolian, and Yunnan borderlands