China's Borderlands Under the Qing, 1644-1912: Perspectives and Approaches in the Investigation of Imperial Boundary Regions 0367696568, 9780367696566

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China’s Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912

This book explores new directions in the study of China’s borderlands. In addition to assessing the influential perspectives of other historians, it engages innovative approaches in the author’s own research. These studies probe regional accommodations, the intersections of borderland management, martial fortification, and imperial culture, as well as the role of governmental discourse in defining and preserving restive boundary regions. As the issue of China’s management of its borderlands grows more pressing, the work presents key information and insights into how that nation’s contested fringes have been governed in the past. Daniel McMahon is a professor in the Department of History at Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan.

Asian States and Empires Edited by Peter Lorge Vanderbilt University, USA

The importance of Asia will continue to grow in the twenty-first century, but remarkably little is available in English on the history of the polities that constitute this critical area. Most current work on Asia is hindered by the extremely limited state of knowledge of the Asian past in general, and the history of Asian states and empires in particular. Asian States and Empires is a book series that will provide detailed accounts of the history of states and empires across Asia from earliest times until the present. It aims to explain and describe the formation, maintenance, and collapse of Asian states and empires, and the means by which this was accomplished, making available the history of more than half the world’s population at a level of detail comparable to the history of Western polities. In so doing, it will demonstrate that Asian peoples and civilizations had their own histories apart from the West, and provide the basis for understanding contemporary Asia in terms of its actual histories, rather than broad generalizations informed by Western categories of knowledge. 17 The Collapse of China’s Later Han Dynasty, 25–200 CE The Northwest Borderlands and the Edge of Empire Wicky W. K. Tse 18 China, Korea & Japan at War, 1592–1598 Eyewitness Accounts J. Marshall Craig 19 China’s Northern Wei Dynasty, 386–535 The Struggle for Legitimacy Puning Liu 20 China’s Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912 Perspectives and Approaches in the Investigation of Imperial Boundary Regions Daniel McMahon For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Asian-States-and-Empires/book-series/SE900

China’s Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912 Perspectives and Approaches in the Investigation of Imperial Boundary Regions Daniel McMahon

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Daniel McMahon The right of Daniel McMahon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-69656-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14273-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction

vii viii x 1

PART I

Historiographical perspectives 1

Perspectives in North American research on Qing China’s frontiers

21 23

PART II

Conceptual perspectives 2 3

47

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal?” The case of the 1795–1797 Hunan Miao revolt

49

The middle ground, “middle ground moments,” and accommodation in the study of later Qing borderland history

69

PART III

New Military History 4 5

97

Geomancy and walled fortifications on a late eighteenth century Qing borderland

99

Fortified walls and social ordering in Qing China’s early Jiaqing borderland revolts

117

vi

Contents

PART IV

Political Discourse Analysis 6 7

129

Treachery at imperial edges: criminality and bureaucratic classification as jian in middle Qing China

131

Marking “men of iniquity”: imperial purpose and imagined boundaries in the Qing processing of rebel ringleaders, 1786–1828

157

Appendix: Yan Ruyi’s “conditions and customs in the mountains” References Index

191 204 218

Illustrations

Tables 6.1

Number of references in the Qing Veritable Records (ethicalbehavioral categories) 6.2 Number of references in the Qing Veritable Records ( jian categories)

133 135

Acknowledgements

What follows is my second collection of articles examining Qing China’s boundary regions. The first centered on administrative planning for imperial peripheries in crisis, focused on questions of values, activism, and management. The current collection focuses on more submerged elements of frontier experience, particularly culture and discourse, as well as the deeper query of how such conditions might be studied. Preparing it has been a slow process, but one immeasurably enriched by the support of my colleagues in the Fu Jen Catholic University History Department, as well as that of my wife, Vicki Tzyy-Guan Yang, and daughter, Alysha Anne McMahon. My thanks also to Donald Sutton for reading and responding to essay drafts and to my research assistant, Chen Wei-ting, for guiding me to sources I should have known, but did not. In the course of research, writing, and final preparation, I have also received financial support from the R.O.C. (Taiwan) Ministry of Science and Technology. This includes research grants (MOST 108–2410-H-030–017- and MOST 103– 2410-H-030–011-), as well as travel grants to attend international conferences (MOST 106–2914-I-030–014-A1). Some of the chapters of this work were previously published as articles in journals or (in one case) another article collection. They have here been revised, in some instances substantially, and directed toward common themes. Reprinting occurs with the consent of the original publishers. Chapter 1 – Copyright. History Department of Fu Jen Catholic University. This article, “Perspectives in North American Research on China’s Qing Frontiers,” first appeared in Fu Jen Historical Journal 33 (March 2015): 1–44. Reprinted with permission by the History Department of Fu Jen Catholic University. Chapter 2 – Copyright. Brill Academic Publishers. This article, “Were the Miao Kings ‘Prophets of Renewal’? The Case of the 1795–97 Hunan Miao Revolt,” first appeared in Frontiers of History in China 12.2 (2017): 301–27. Reprinted with permission from Brill Academic Publishers. Chapter 3 – Copyright. Brill Academic Publishers. This article, “The Middle Ground, Middle Ground Moments, and Accommodation in the Study of Later Qing Borderland History,” first appeared in Frontiers of History in China 13.4 (December 2018): 473–507. Reprinted with permission from Brill Academic Publishers.

Acknowledgements ix Chapter 4 – Copyright. The Journal of Military History. This article, “Geomancy and Walled Fortifications in Late Eighteenth-Century China,” first appeared in The Journal of Military History 76.2 (April 2012): 373–93. Reprinted with permission from The Journal of Military History. Chapter 5 – Copyright. Informa UK Limited. This article, “Fortified Walls and Social Ordering in China’s Late Eighteenth-Century Revolts,” was first printed in Peter Lorge and Kaushik Roy, eds, Chinese and Indian Warfare – From the Classical Age to 1870 (New York and London: Routledge Press, 2015), 246–56. Reproduced with permission of Informa UK Limited through PLSclear. Chapter 7 – Copyright. Brill Academic Publishers. This article, “Marking ‘Men of Iniquity’: Imperial Purpose and Imagined Boundaries in the Qing Processing of Rebel Ringleaders, 1786–1828,” first appeared in The Journal of Chinese Military History 7.2 (2018): 141–83. Reprinted with permission from Brill Academic Publishers. Appendix – Copyright. Taylor & Francis. This translation and introduction, “The Essentials of a Qing Frontier: Yan Ruyi’s ‘Conditions and Customs in the Mountains,’” first appeared in Momumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies 51 (2003): 309–34. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis. Also meriting acknowledgement are preliminary publications whose topics were again discussed as reworked and focused cases studies in the larger comparative case format of Chapter 3 and Chapter 7. The return to these subjects occurred with the generous consent of the journals in which the original (and more extensive) studies appeared: “The Daoguang Response to the Afaqi Khoja Jahangir during the 1826–1828 Jahangir Uprising.” Momumenta Serica 65.2 (December 2017): 342–61. “The Qing Response to the Miao Kings of China’s 1795–7 Miao Revolt.” Hmong Studies Journal 17 (2017): 1–37. “Cooperation at Empire’s Edge: British Observers and Kashgar’s Early TwentiethCentury Middle Ground.” Journal of Ching Yun University 30.1 (January 2010): 183–207.

Abbreviations

DQHD DQHDZL DQRRHS

DQXZ

GGB

HCJSWB IHP

LYWC MFBL

Qianlong Da Qing huidian 乾隆大清會典 [Collected statutes of the Qing in the Qianlong Reign]. http://cspis.digital.ntu.edu.tw (accessed October 2016 – August 2017). Da Qing Huidian zeli 大清會典則列 [Collected statues and regulations of the Great Qing]. http://cspis.digital.ntu.edu.tw (accessed October 2016 – August 2017). Da Qing Renzong (Jiaqing) huangdi shilu 大清仁宗睿 (嘉慶) 皇 帝實錄 [Veritable records of the Great Qing Jiaqing emperor]. Compiled by Ledehong 勒德洪. Taibei: Huawen shuju reprint, 1964. Da Qing Xuanzong cheng (Daoguang) huangdi shilu 大清宣宗 成(道光)皇帝錄 [Veritable records of the Great Qing during the Daoguang reign]. Compiled by Wenqing 文慶. Reprint, Taipei: Taiwan huawen, 1969. Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Qingdai gongzhong dang zouzhe ji Junji chu dang zhejian ziliaoku 國立故宮博物院，清代宮中檔奏 摺及軍機處檔摺件資料庫 [National Palace Museum Qing court memorial and Grand Council report database]. http://npmhost. npm.gov.tw/tts/npmmeta/GC/purchase01.html (accessed October – December 2018). Huangchao jingshi wenbian皇朝經世文編 [Statecraft writings of the reigning dynasty]. Edited by He Changling賀長齡and Wei Yuan魏源. N.p. 1826–1827. QSZ Ming shilu, Chaoxian wangchao shili, Qing shilu ziliaoku 明 實錄、 朝鮮王朝錄、清實錄資料庫 [Ming, Korean, and Qing Veritable Records database], www2.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/resource3 (accessed September 2018 – July 2019). Leyuan wenchao 樂園文鈔 [Writings of Yan Ruyi]. Yan Ruyi 嚴如熤, 1844. Miaofang beilan 苗防備覽 [Guide to defense against the Miao]. Compiled by Yan Ruyi, 1820.

Abbreviations xi QJSXF

Qinding jiaoping sansheng xiefei fanglüe 欽定剿平三省邪匪方略 [Imperial record of the pacification of the heretical bandits of the three provinces]. Compiled by Qinggui 慶桂. Reprint, Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970. QPJJ Qinding pingding jiaofei jilüe 欽定平定教匪紀略 [Imperial record of the pacification of the sectarian bandits]. Compiled by Tuojin. Reprint, Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1971. QPTJ Qinding pingding Taiwan jilüe欽定平定台灣紀略 [Imperial record of the pacification of Taiwan]. Compiled by Qing Gaozong 清高宗. Taipei: Taiwan xinhang yinshuasuo, 1961. QQMQDS Qingdai qianqi Miaomin qiyi dang’an shiliao 清代前期苗民起義 檔案史料 [Archival documents on the Miao uprising of the early Qing period]. Compiled by the Guizhou provincial archive. 3 vols. Guizhou: Guangming chubanshe, 1993. QSTSLZ Qing shilu, Taiwan shi ziliao zhuanji 清實錄台灣史資料專輯 [Qing Veritable Records, collection of historical documents on Taiwan]. Edited by Zhang Benzheng 張本政. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1993. QTDSQ Qingdai Taiwan dang’an shiliao quanbian 清代台灣檔案史料全編 [A collection of archival documents on Taiwan in the Qing era]. Edited by the Beijing Tianlong Great Wall Culture and Art Co. Beijing: Xuefan chubanshe, 1999. QZWBQZ Qing zhongqi wusheng Bailian jiao qiyi ziliao 清中期五省白蓮教 起義資料 [Documents on the five-province White Lotus uprising of the Qing period]. Edited by the Chinese Academy of Social Science, Qing History Room. 5 vols. Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1981. TLQZX Taiwan Lin Shuangwen qiyi ziliao xianbian 台灣林爽文起義資 料選編 [A collection of documents on Taiwan’s Lin Shuangwen uprising]. Edited by Liu Ruzhong 劉如仲and Miao Xuemeng 苗學孟. Nanjing: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1984.

Introduction

Over the past half century, the study of China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1911) boundary regions has developed into a flourishing and dynamic subfield of Qing studies. Addressed in it are the far reaches of that historical territory, from the “blue frontier” osculating the eastern and southern coast, to the restive ethnic retreats of the southwestern highlands, to the sweeping deserts and steppes of Inner Asia, to forested “internal frontiers” recessed in the mountainous hinterlands linking interior provinces and macroregions. Earlier generations of frontier research, shaped by models of colonial settlement and administration, have in recent decades been joined by “New Qing History” discussions from an imperial and Inner Asiancentered perspective. Sufficient work has now been done to raise questions: How have Qing border areas been examined? What directions exist for future study? And how might frontier research push beyond the shadow of New Qing History to develop a more distinctive outlook? What follows are exploratory essays that strive to stretch the boundaries of study on Qing borderlands. The drafting has arisen in response to reading done over the past two decades, as well as in recognition of elements of Chinese frontier experience that seem significant but insufficiently acknowledged. The result in this collection is attention to frontier historiography and the viability of historical models, as well as studies adapting a range of vantages, including that of accommodation, military culture, political discourse, and regional comparison. Together, the articles are intended to suggest not only the value of new conceptual approaches and fecundity of Qing border regions generally as a subject of inquiry, but also to illustrate the significance of concerns of imperial boundary maintenance to the discourse and policy of the Qing empire in its last century. The work’s title, “perspectives and approaches,” reflects the themes of this project. “Perspectives” is in reference to the outlook of other historians of Qing borderlands. Part I is an overview of frames used over the past half century, such as region-centricism, environmental systems, and colonialism. Part II is a critique of the content and applicability of the models of two influential scholars: James Scott’s “prophets of renewal” and Richard White’s “middle ground.” “Approaches” refers to my own exploration of different conceptual stances. Part III adopts a New Military History focus to trace the connection of cultural elements (geomancy and medicine) in wartime highland fortification. And Part IV

2

Introduction

engages Political Discourse Analysis to assess both the bureaucratic category jian 奸 (treacherous) and imperial processing of rebel ringleaders in the management of restive peripheral regions.

Foundations Before turning to the essays, a few words should be said concerning the concept of historical “boundary regions.” Also referred to as “frontiers,” “borders,” “borderlands,” “peripheries,” “hinterlands,” “margins,” or “edges,” such areas (and the terminology addressing them) is linked by the underlying assumption that the phenomenon existed relative to a “center,” often of a country or civilization, being sited at the extremes of that center’s territory, settlement, culture, or contact.1 Much scholarly attention has been paid to the interaction between these imputed poles, often with supposition of the transformative impact of the center upon its edges, albeit with some recognition that border regions could be distinct or even independent in their processes.2 The nuances of the lexicon referencing borders, however, are not entirely uniform. A “frontier,” for instance, has been posed as the area between nations or where a population fades to two or fewer people per square mile.3 The frontier historian Fredrick Jackson Turner identified it as the edge of civilization, a receding line of specific iterating social and economic circumstances, or even an essentially unique cauldron for the creation of American citizens, values, and institutions.4 Later historians have more neutrally defined the frontier as a zone of contact or contestation between distinctly different cultures.5 A “borderland,” as an alternate term, is similarly designated as an overlapping or contested zone between two or more states or societies, if often territory already formally incorporated by states, and with less sharply drawn assumption of metropole governments or settlers as dominant agents in the shaping of regional change.6 A “periphery” or “margin” even more neutrally suggests a region at the edge of a nation or empire’s administration, military control, resource extraction capacity, or cultural influence, if perhaps harboring local reserves or populations of significance. In Qing studies, as elsewhere, there has been no universally accepted definition or nomenclature of such outer regions. Most common reference has, however, been to “frontiers,” in which a dynastic heartland was linked to external territories such as Xinjiang, Manchuria, Taiwan, and Yunnan (or regions within them), or else an array of central and southwestern highland “internal frontiers” such as the Hunan Miao Frontier or Han River Highlands. More recently, New Qing History research has favored the category “borderlands.” In that instance, the imperial center designated is a northern capital and the Manchu monarchs presiding over it, harboring particular connection to Inner Asian peripheries still at least partially under the influence of non-Chinese Eurasian societies. This collection adopts the term “boundary region” as an encompassing category, although it also uses “frontier,” “border,” or “borderland” as synonyms. As framed here, the Sinitic centers indicated were variously the Beijing capital, the imperial government, macroregional cores, or the “heartland” (neidi 內地) of Han

Introduction 3 Chinese populations and orthodox Confucian-based culture. The Sinitic edges in tension with those centers, as places, were regions where the vitality of the Qing system – be it in administration, settlement, or commerce – faltered or faded due to physical distance, inimical ecology, local resistance, rival state influences, or imperial debilitation. Multiethnic, multicultural, and politically fragmented, such regions stood on the outer fringes of the empire, as well as in inaccessible pockets of territory within it. As processes, these boundaries sited the interventions of the Qing centers, such as settlement, land reclamation, administration, resource extraction, commerce, and education, as well as local action or exchanges such as rebellion, identity-formation, or crime, some of which were not significantly linked to the Qing interior. And as ideas, the peripheries, and peripheral peoples, were cyphers depicted by the metropole in specific simplified ways. The imperial gaze included an “Orientalist” casting of frontier land and folk as savage, insubordinate, substandard, but simple or untainted, as well as a bureaucratic “discourse” of rule, encompassing virtually all boundary regions, inscribed in a template of state descriptions, assessment, and procedure. In viewing the transformation of boundaries over the Qing period, I follow scholars such as Joseph Fletcher, Peter Perdue, James Millward, and others who emphasize the dynasty’s eighteenth-century expansion. There was at this time a dramatic growth in territory linked to both Inner Asian conquest and firmer incorporation of internal and southern frontiers. Complementing it was a doubling or more in Qing population that sent (and, into the nineteenth century, continued to send) floods of lowland Chinese into peripheries empire-wide. Multiple border regions thereby experienced analogous, and often concurrent, challenges of population growth, land opening, commercialization, administrative incorporation, native immiseration, ethnic conflict, regional accommodation, and military intervention.7 By the century’s end, as much as half of Qing space constituted a non-heartland zone of some sort, the security of which was, and remained, of intense concern to the imperial administration.8 The scope addressed in this collection of essays is, however, generally more modest. Recent generations of study have concentrated on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, be it in terms of Manchu identity or rule, military conquest, diplomacy, administration, or “militarization” of culture.9 My concern is mainly with what came after, from the late eighteenth into the early nineteenth centuries – that is, not so much with how the Qing consolidated an outsized empire when it was strong, as how connections to boundaries were sustained when imperial rule wavered. It is a truism that states do not give up land willingly and the latter Qing emperors, keepers of the legacy of their Olympian forebearers, were no exception. To them was bequeathed the task of maintaining territorial integrity, even as resistance and interruptions broke out along the edges of the imperium. I seek clarity concerning how this happened, how responses were linked across borderlands, as well as how we should assess the impact. In conceiving boundary regions in this manner, the following articles show the influence of New Qing History scholarship. The New Qing History perspective suggests that the Qing was distinct from the previous Ming dynasty, that the Manchu rule

4

Introduction

(particularly in its relationship to Inner Asia) contributed to this distinctiveness and the Qing’s overall success, as well as that, as a vast multiethnic realm, the Qing functioned in many ways like other early modern world empires.10 Such a vantage has in many respects been beneficial to research on China’s margins. Asserting that the connection of a Manchu-ruled northern capital to northern boundaries was essential to the Qing’s formation, being “of special significance for Qing studies” due to the “transformative effect of borderland encounters on Chinese society,” dignifies the study of frontiers.11 Further, modeling the dynasty as an empire, built of imperial phenomena, has allowed related study to be addressed with greater conceptual rigor, opening attention to possibilities of “Manchu colonialism,” colonial representation, empire-building, comparative empires, and environmental history, among other approaches.12 This has yielded an unprecedented outpouring of scholarly attention and publication. It should be recognized, however, that New Qing History is not coterminous with Qing frontier history, and to an extent has even had a distorting effect upon it. The perspective disproportionately favors not just Inner Asian boundaries, and imperial relations with Inner Asian peoples, but the assumption that “conceptions of frontier territories had ‘been given a truly different meaning under Manchu rule.’ ”13 While valuable to the study of northern borderlands, this view marginalizes the circumstances, role, and significance of southern and internal frontiers. Largely left unexplained is the variation exhibited in those latter regions’ populations, governance, and interacting “center,” suggestive of qualitative differences in frontier experience.14 As concerning are assumptions made in framing the Qing as an empire, and expansion of its frontiers as “part of the global history of empire building,” that potentially gloss the distinctiveness of Chinese conditions.15 Colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism are powerful models – in certain cases, arguably apt in a Qing context – but their use may excessively structure understanding. Certainly, it has transformed a recent generation of borderland-related research into something more akin to the study of Inner Asian empire building, or comparative empires, than that of clearly defined frontier regions.16 Most broadly, the approaches to boundary studies in this collection, as the topic of the first three chapters, center on the “Western” (more precisely, North American) school of study. The discussion gives correspondingly less attention to the field of “Chinese nationalist” frontier historiography.17 That area of research, led by scholars such as Ma Dazheng 馬大正, is highly significant and embraces several contrasting views, being positioned in particular opposition to New Qing History scholarship.18 Dissimilar is its understanding of an ancient (and inalienable) connection of Chinese boundaries to a Chinese metropole, as well as a “naturally amicable relationship between Han and non-Han” that structured acceptance of, and unity with, the culture and authority of that metropole. Different as well is a more unified field of academic endeavor grounded in a legacy of frontier study for the national interest. From that perspective, models of colonialism or conquest are inaccurate, even dangerous, as are views that the Manchu acculturated but did not assimilate, the Qing was a Manchu empire with lands that were not “Chinese,” or that the heart of Qing development beat on non-Sinitic Inner Asian borderlands.19

Introduction 5 I would stress, however, that Chinese scholarly views, even if based in inimical assumptions, do not preclude the possibility of shared approaches to studying Qing boundaries. Chapter 3 asserts this point in connection to accommodation (if not middle ground) perspectives, but the same point might be made in consideration of approaches of New Military History, Political Discourse Analysis, or regional comparison. Indeed, one of the underlying motivations for this volume is to help to bridge the recalcitrant “China-West” divide in Qing frontier studies.

Perspectives The essays of this volume are divided into two general groupings. The first is a review of the “perspectives” previous historians have applied to the study of dynastic boundaries. Chapter 1, “Perspectives in North American research on Qing China’s frontiers,” provides a brief overview of Qing frontier study within North American academic circles over the past half century, tracing common approaches to how border regions have been conceived and explained. The essay suggests that such study has been shaped, on a basic level, by an American model of frontier colonial settlement, as well as by subsequent scholarly reactions to, and innovations upon, that model. That framework has been adapted to better accord with Qing China’s early modern conditions, particularly those of physiographic boundaries, territorial expansion, population growth, population movement, ecological resources, and Manchu rule. In this context, a range of often overlapping interpretative views have been developed and deployed to explain Qing frontiers, including region-centricism, environmental systems, colonialism, regional comparison, and, currently as an abiding influence, New Qing History. Included also in attention to “perspectives” is a look at interpretative models that have been developed to explain areas beyond China, but possess potential application to the study of Qing boundary studies. Conceptual borrowing is a common practice in historical research, often following patterns of “academic fashion,” with results that can be both provocative and rewarding. The question asked here is to what extent do such models, in fact, fit or explain Qing borderland conditions when considered more rigorously in the context of historical circumstances and extant sources. This is both due diligence and a relevant query in light of the vehement objection of some scholars of Chinese history. Only when new approaches are vetted can we gage their value as explanatory tools. Two articles attempt this task. Chapter 2, “Were the Miao Kings ‘prophets of renewal?’ The case of the 1795–1797 Hunan Miao revolt,” examines the concept of “prophets of renewal” introduced by James Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and referenced by Scott in connection to the Miao Revolt along China’s highland Hunan – Guizhou border. The appearance on the “Miao Frontier” of a “Miao King” and four “Wu kings” at the center of anti-Qing defiance – utilizing native legends, spirit possession, investment of officials, and multiethnic recruitment – suggests an instance of prophets in action. Closer consideration, however, reveals a more complex and uncertain picture, characterized by division between rival lords and an overall

6

Introduction

dearth of institutional or cosmological elaboration, all further obscured by a potent paucity of historical sources. That is, the Miao kings might be seen as prophets of renewal in a general sense, but the fit is inexact. It might be argued, however, that Scott’s model has explanatory value. It enables sharper conceptualization of the agency of the Miao people, while offering a case for comparison with analogous instances of religiously based native resistance on other Qing boundaries. Chapter 3, “The middle ground, ‘middle ground moments,’ and accommodation in the study of later Qing borderland history,” assesses Richard White’s concept of the “middle ground” presented in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Centered on “accommodation” in intergroup interaction, wherein “one group [became] more like another by borrowing discrete cultural traits,” the perspective has been referenced in connection to Chinese borderlands. Such usage, however, has generally been loose, denoting a dynamic of political, social, or economic sharing rather than the more specific North American model observed in White’s study.20 When defined more precisely, and compared to the conditions of China’s Qing boundaries, intractable differences become conspicuous. In contrast to the seventeenth century Great Lakes, imperial lands lay at the end of millennia of Chinese interaction with territorial peripheries. First contact and similar “open” frontiers were rare. Over the eighteenth century, the empire had also successfully infiltrated and incorporated many of its borderlands, eroding basic middle ground conditions. A third perspective is offered in the appendix, in a translation of the Shaanxi official Yan Ruyi’s 嚴如熤 (1759–1826) essay “Shannei fengtu” 山內風土 (Conditions and customs in the mountains). Drawn from the 1814 Hanzhong xuxiu fuzhi 漢中續修府志 (Revised Hanzhong prefectural gazetteer), this is a description of the southern Han River Highlands in the years following the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion. A short text, it provides an encompassing introduction to what one experienced borderland administrator (writing for other Qing administrators) believed mattered the most. Beyond observations on ecology, settlement, society, administration, crime, and war lays recognition of how complications of rugged terrain, miasmic climate, and unchecked migration had threatened subsistence and civilization, but yet might be mitigated with Confucian education, firmer (and bolder) administrative commitment, and governance flexibly adjusted to regional conditions.

Approaches The second grouping of essays in this collection reflects my own efforts to engage conceptual approaches in the study of Qing boundary regions. The following discussions – attentive to accommodation studies, New Military History, Political Discourse Analysis, and regional comparison – address, respectively, intergroup interaction in the creation of local culture, the role of culture in military pacification, as well as discourse in imperial management. These essays were drafted, and

Introduction 7 are positioned here, as sets of two, one more specific and detailed, and the other broader and more general. As the approaches they use are not all widely known, particularly in the subfield of Qing frontier studies, a brief introduction to them is warranted. Accommodation Accommodation, broadly conceived, fits between concepts of assimilation and resistance, if receiving scanter scholarly attention than either. That is to say, rather than seeing interactions between peripheral people and intruding societies as yielding either a full embrace of external power, on the one hand, or utter rejection of that power, on the other, accommodation indicates degrees of compromise and acceptance. This encompasses peripheral peoples’ passive reception of imposed political authority, real or feigned, as well as calculated measures promoting active cooperation or loyalty. As anthropological arguments indicate, social accommodation also profoundly interconnects with the formation of ethnic and cultural identity, as groups adopt “external cultural norms, including language, religion, ideology, social practices” but retain, strengthen, or even create anew a distinct sense of self.21 The understanding of accommodation addressed in this collection, however, is more precise, returning us to Richard White’s formulation of the middle ground. White traces intergroup Indian-White interactions accounted key to the formation of Great Lakes society in a period of initial contact. In this instance, representatives of European nations were new arrivals, living largely beyond their empires, as but one of many groups positioned in an unsteady balance of mutual vulnerability and need. Surviving and thriving required exchanges based on “creative misunderstanding” that induced cultural sharing, “new meaning and through them new practices.”22 Acceptance of these jointly created practices, as the shared significance invested in them, contributed to the formation of an essentially native-centered regional culture: a foundation for further exchange between those that worked within it. Rooted in a specific American time, place, and process, White’s defined middle ground is distinctive. The model’s attention to intergroup accommodation in the creation of local culture, however, presents an intriguing way to consider at least some Qing boundaries at some points in time. Chapter 3 explores the White-inspired adaptation of “middle ground moments.” This refers, physically, to “persistent” environmental frontiers long inaccessible (and often resistant) to Chinese centers; socially, to the presence of multiple groups of largely balanced political power; as well as, historically, to a brief time of crisis in which imperial authority had faded or disappeared. In such circumstances, it is posited, there arose intensified intergroup accommodation and, with it, creation of regional cultural circumstances analogous to those described in The Middle Ground. Three cases are considered: the formation of an unruly settler society in the course of a “population boom” in Shaanxi’s Han River highlands; interethnic cooperation and affiliation in the “fog of war” of Miao Revolt on Hunan’s Miao

8

Introduction

Frontier; and the creation of a transnational elite society as the “fall of empires” isolated Xinjiang’s Kashgar crossroads. Attention to intergroup exchange, adaptation, and hybridization based on this framework not just offers insight into Qing boundaries as regional history, but challenges received narratives of breakdown, pacification, resistance, and Great Game struggle. New Military History New Military History is based on the premise that social and cultural conditions shaped wars quite as much as wars shaped societies and, accordingly, new perspectives should be adopted to better “encompass the entire experience of societies in conflict.”23 The approach thus focuses relatively less on traditional military topics of strategies and tactics, weapons, logistics, commanding generals, or specific battles, and conspicuously more on the “intersections” that linked military institutions and action to the worlds in which they were immersed. This has led to “bottoms up” studies of soldier recruitment, socialization, and demobilization; attention to the experience of ordinary people in military conflicts; as well as cultural (and interdisciplinary) studies of gender and masculinity, memory, symbology, and representation.24 New Military History perspectives have enriched Chinese studies. Related work has turned to “the experience of war, the role of war in state-building, and war’s social impact,” branching into topics as wide-ranging as patronage and personal relations in the Green Standard Army, late Qing remembrance of the Taiping Rebellion, New Army military training, Republican era martial masculinity, and human suffering during the Chinese Civil War.25 A shared interest in “strategic debates and military systems in their overall social and political context” now forms the basis of what Charles Hayford calls the “New Chinese Military History.”26 The approach has had a particularly strong impact on Qing studies. It has fueled new attention to the dynasty’s conquest and consolidation, revealing that early and middle period warfare set the scope of a multiethnic realm, created a context for an expanding society, as well as shaped a government “increasingly run like a military operation by men whose chief claim to fame was their success in war.”27 It has also illuminated the importance of dynastic “military culture” as both a phenomenon and distinct topic of study.28 To apprehend such culture, Nicola di Cosmo argues, scholars should seek clarity not just regarding behavior, belief, values, and ceremony, but concerning “the relationship between war, society, and thought beyond the empirical level,” including the impact of non-military developments on martial investigation, theory, and action.29 Pioneering work by Joanna Waley-Cohen, for example, has identified an imperial trend “deploying wen in the service of wu,” a process that militarized the “cultural context of public life” by fostering greater attention to and celebration of military action, as well as injecting the use of martial images, themes, and “referents” into literary affairs.30 Returning to Qing frontier studies, the connection to observe is that significant military action occurred along contested imperial boundaries. The major wars

Introduction 9 of the High Qing, as many of its minor skirmishes, were borderland conflicts involving populations whose worldview, religious beliefs, and regional identities were at variance with that of the Chinese heartland, but whose political allegiance (or acquiesce) was deemed imperative to the imperial order.31 Early and middle Qing military history, that is, was inextricably interwoven with Qing borderland history. Examination from a New Military History perspective accordingly offers enhanced means to explore those regional societies and their wartime relationship to imperial centers, the manner in which core culture framed frontier action or events, as well as how boundary culture in turn shaped the Sinitic core. This possibility has, in fact, been already illustrated, as seen in Peter Perdue’s discussion of commemoration of the Qing conquest of Central Eurasia, Joanna WaleyCohen’s inspection of views on, and use of, “battle magic” in the second Jinchuan campaign, and Donald Sutton’s attention to ethnicity, political legitimacy, and ritualized violence during the Miao Revolt.32 The present collection adopts a New Military History stance to explore the intersection of borderland management, military defense, and imperial culture. Chapter 4, “Geomancy and walled fortifications on a late eighteenth-century Qing borderland,” observes a 1790s recommendation to build bao 堡forts on the war-torn Miao Frontier, along the highland Hunan-Guizhou border, in part to improve the local fengshui 風水. Why, it asks, was geomancy discussed in a martial report? Were its practices linked to military arts or plans for regional protection? It is argued that reference to fengshui – as its association with enhanced defense, social order, public health, and improvement of public morale – was not, in fact, odd in that context. Attention to geomancy was pervasive in heartland Qing culture. Traditional fengshui and military arts also share an environmental focus and key concepts (qi 氣and shi 勢), as well as a long history of use in sabotage and walled defenses. The compatibility made geomantic considerations relevant to imperial military planning. As important, promotion of fengshui in a martial context reassured unsettled borderland residents, contributing to a larger governmental project to reinforce, or even further establish, imperial patterns on a disrupted provincial borderland. Chapter 5, “Fortified walls and social ordering in Qing China’s early Jiaqing borderland revolts,” continues the focus on imperial fortification in the pacification of mountain rebellions, specifically that of the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt on the Hunan Miao Frontier and 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion in the Han River Highlands. It contends that secured walls were envisioned as a vital tool for defense, ordering, and social wellbeing by simultaneously isolating rebels and regimenting imperial subjects. Modeled according to principles of traditional Chinese medicine, if adapted to dissimilar environments, bao forts functioned much like instruments for disease control. The common objective was quarantine – to shut the deviant “ill” out (or in) while shielding, constraining, strengthening, and shaping “healthy” “good subjects” (liangmin 良民). This usage occurred in tandem with, and as a component of, new local defense strategies that broadly mobilized borderland populations, serving as a precedent for subsequent nineteenth-century imperial projects.

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Introduction

Political Discourse Analysis Political Discourse Analysis examines the nature and function of political discourse in “producing, maintaining, abusing, and resisting power” in society.33 “Political discourse” refers to the “text and talk” of people and institutions involved in political action, if encompassing a larger context of conditions, systems, organizations, actors, ideas, activities, and practices linked to, or resulting from, that text and talk.34 Its “analysis” rests on two assumptions. First, embracing the linguistic turn in political science, Political Discourse Analysis sees language as part of political processes: a force integral to politics, culture, and thought that describes, categorizes, and evaluates in ways rendering a meaningful vision of the world. This language intertwines with action to shape specific meaning as well as disseminate a broad acceptance of it, thereby maintaining and regulating communities and systems.35 Second, embracing the political turn in linguistics, Political Discourse Analysis asserts that since discourse involves both text and context, words and action, its study must move beyond attention solely to language. The approach should also embrace methods, frameworks, and knowledge drawn from other scholarly disciplines that illuminate the relationship between “discourse structures and political context structures.”36 In effect, “language must be seen (and analyzed) as a political phenomenon and . . . politics must be conceived and studied as a discursive phenomenon.”37 In Political Discourse Analysis, the official language of state leaders and administrations is accounted of particular (if not exclusive) relevance in the manner that it can “effectively emphasize or de-emphasize political attitudes and opinions, garner support, manipulate public opinion, manufacture political consent, or legitimate political power.”38 Apprehending those processes requires scrutiny of language, including statements of generalization and specification, contrast and examples, lexicons of specific terminology, syntax, as well as rhetorical forms and patterns of speech.39 It concurrently necessitates attention to how governmental operations shape, and are shaped by, political systems, ideologies, institutions, processes, actors, and events.40 Doing so, incorporating both text and context, promises insight into social conditions, such as that of race, ethnicity, or gender, as well as larger governmental patterns of perception and policy. It can also reveal political circumstances “which may be taken for granted, hidden, denied, or otherwise not explicitly know or formulated.”41 The Political Discourse Analysis approach has thus far been applied predominately to the study of contemporary Europe and America, albeit with calls for greater embrace of an interdisciplinary method, movement beyond texts, and study of the discourse of the non-Western world.42 Relatively little has yet been done in either Chinese or historical studies, not to speak of Qing frontier studies, but the potential exists. Historians of China have long been sensitive to the language of imperial governments and elites, often identifying the distinct ideologically determined manner in which populations were categorized, problems of territories and governance defined, as well solutions of state articulated. The Qing administration is notable for its striking means of bureaucratic

Introduction 11 communication, as well as the established procedure intertwined with that communication. And whereas Qing rule faced a truly vast range of imperial concerns, not the least among them was the enduring task of expanding, consolidating, and maintaining the empire at its boundaries. The official discourse connected to that enterprise may have been finite, malleable, simplifying, selfinterested, and self-affirming, but its framework largely embraced “the frontier as a whole, as a unit of policymaking,” with an impact that structured social thought, altered lives, shaped borderlands, and precipitated historical change.43 The study of it offers an avenue for assessment that spans multiple boundaries if focused on the articulated perspective of the imperial state more than the residents of those boundaries. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 of this collection explore governmental discourse in relation to the management of troubled and contested Qing boundaries. Chapter 6, “Treachery at imperial edges: criminality and bureaucratic classification as jian in middle Qing China,” focuses on the lexicon classifying imperial populations from the early eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Considered specifically is the category jian (treacherous) in terms of definition, scope of activity encompassed, and usage in frontier rule. It is argued that the term served as a referent to greed-based, organized behavior deemed corrosive to imperial order. Posed in opposition to the liang 良 (good) and yi 義 (righteous), use of the category simplified complex conditions, legitimized imperial intervention, and enabled administration. Jian identified on frontiers were often also cast as straying subjects linked to yi 夷 (outsiders, barbarians), posed as perilously potent in their capabilities, border crossing, and manipulation of non-Chinese. Such depiction homogenized the assessment of, and response to, an array of imperial boundaries while concurrently creating distinct, and in some instances destructive, limitations of perspective. As state writing on the 1839–1842 Opium War illustrates, conventional (if intensified) narratives of jian-yi collusion served to both mask the compelling British threat and reshape the popular and ethnic meaning of the Hanjian 漢奸 (“treacherous Han”) classification. Chapter 7, “Marking ‘men of iniquity’: imperial purpose and imagined boundaries in the Qing processing of rebel ringleaders, 1786–1828,” continues the examination of borderland challengers through attention to the imperial bureaucracy’s response to apex rebel commanders. Presented are five cases of imperial discourse (official description and physical management) related to Lin Shuangwen 林爽文 (1786–1788 Lin Shuangwen Revolt), Shi Sanbao 石三保 (1795–1797 Miao Revolt), Liu Zhixie 劉之協 (1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion), Lin Qing 林清 (1813 Eight Trigrams Revolt), and Khoja Jahāngīr 張格爾 (1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising). Considered comparatively, we find common imperial procedures of identification, deposition, sentencing, and execution that established the ringleaders as “men of iniquity” (yuan e元惡) while reinforcing imperially preferred understandings of rebel organization, culpability, Qing legitimacy, and martial success. Less conspicuous were specific approaches adjusted to fit differing conditions and state goals. As the empire entered its final century, there was indication of a shift toward more fully distinguishing rebel lords from restive

12

Introduction

war-zone populations, suggestive of enhanced efforts to both exploit social divisions and expand embrace of peripheral peoples as border-defending imperial subjects. Regional comparison Three of the articles of this collection (Chapter 3, Chapter 5, and Chapter 7) also adopt explicit case comparisons. As Leonard Thomson and Howard Lamar observe, “the dominant tradition in historical scholarship is one that deals in single cases,” a method grounded in assumption that historical phenomena was unique and that historians should eschew overgeneralization.44 As historians reaching back to Fredrick Jackson Turner have recognized, however, similar circumstances have arisen on different frontiers, and there is potential value in comparing them. Although with visions of the frontier as disparate as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” “intergroup situations” between previously distinct societies, “zones of constant conflict and negotiation over power,” or “a finite [and individually specific] set of causal processes,” there remains debate over precisely how such comparisons might rightly be done.45 Historical comparison has been championed in Chinese studies, inspired in part by Owen Lattimore’s early work on Inner Asian borderlands.46 Advocacy has continued in a range of subfields, such as Chinese military history, on the premise that fixation on single cases invites myopia and “only through comparison can we begin to know how patterns in various societies over various time periods relate to one another.”47 New Qing History perspectives framing the Qing as one of multiple empires emerging in the early modern world and (as the “Eurasian Similarity Thesis” suggests) constituted of equivalent imperial circumstances have also invigorated attention.48 This has been pursued in the form of comparison of fellow states, including the Ottoman and Tsarist Russia, aligning aspects of nation-building such as cartography and logistics, but in particular patterns of frontier administration.49 There has, in addition, been a significant focus on comparative regional studies. Notable is James Millward’s call to heed parallels and interconnections emerging in the course of Qing growth, as related to government policy, relations with frontier elite, settlement, land development, commerce, and resistance. Linking multiple regions in transition permits, as John Herman puts it, “a fresh perspective on the historical process of Qing imperial expansion.”50 Taking the lead, Peter Perdue has traced similarities between zones of the northwest and southeast in terms of mobile rivals, insecure agrarian settlers, commercialization, and urbanization.51 Loretta Kim, Matthew Mosca, and Victor Zatsepine, focusing on the Qing administration, also posit that this regime envisioned the frontier as a single unit but “customized its treatment of different regions and peoples.” Accordingly, there is grounding for “judicious comparative research that contextualizes each component [of imperial policy] within a common framework.”52 A recent study in this direction has focused on the ecologies of Inner Asian borderlands, such as Manchuria and Mongolia, in relation to imperial administration, burgeoning settlement, resource extraction, and identity formation.53

Introduction 13 Two approaches of regional comparison are pursued in the current collection. The first focuses on frontier history as regional history in which “each frontier was also a homeland.”54 Examined in Chapter 3 are intergroup “middle ground” dynamics emerging in three fringe regions wracked by crisis. The factors compared are the physically secluded borderland environments, socially heterogenous boundary societies, enervating “moments” of isolation and unrest, as well as instances of intensified accommodation that seemingly resulted in the creation of distinctive regional transgroup cultures. In this comparison, regional differences were clearly vast and often irreconcilable. What is traced are similarities of analogous circumstances. The second approach addresses frontier history as imperial bureaucratic discourse, bundled as Qing governmental policy, procedure, and description. In this instance, the similarities were usually prominent, and comparison serves to highlight underlying or hidden differences. This is seen in the discussion in Chapter 5 of fortification planning during the Miao and White Lotus revolts in which, it is argued, the technology applied, metaphors advanced, and goals envisioned were similar, but specific application in social ordering differed. In Chapter 7, the examination of the processing of five rebel ringleaders on five boundary regions also reveals a common bureaucratic template, homogenizing a picture of radically different areas and peoples, but also flexibly adjusted in the manner that regional populations were defined and managed.

Insights As the articles of the collection are primarily individual studies related to developments on Qing borderlands, it is appropriate, in conclusion, to review some of the “insights” into imperial history offered by these projects using the methodology discussed and by considering the following four points. First, moving beyond the New Qing History focus on eighteenth-century frontier expansion, it is clear that boundary preservation was of paramount concern to the imperial government, as to the regions themselves, into the early nineteenth century. Attention to this concern evidenced significant continuity with the eighteenth century in terms of governmental language, control methods, administrative procedure, and indeed an entire “discourse” of borderland rule centered on a vision of the frontier largely as of a common type. This legacy of state-sponsored simplifications engendered “blind spots” in assessment, as indicated by the positioning of the British threat within a firm jian-yi framework at the time of the first Opium War. More broadly, however, the system of governmental address provided an enduring bureaucratic foundation – in how conditions were assessed, policies adjusted, and personnel and methods transferred between multiple regions – that underlay the late Qing transition toward the more unified system of foreign policy observed by Matthew Mosca.55 Second, early nineteenth-century Qing administration of borderlands also evinced significant adjustments in the face of continued immigration from the imperial heartland, fading centralized authority, intensified local interactions and resource extractions, and disruptions of foreign powers. One aspect of this shift,

14

Introduction

connected to sustained concern with boundary maintenance, was recalibrated depiction, classification, and mobilization of peripheral peoples. This is indicated by changing nuances in the category jian, in which an imputed jian-yi dynamic transitioned from that of unscrupulous subjects exploiting borderland outsiders and destabilizing frontiers, to that of borderland outsiders enlisting unscrupulous subjects and destabilizing the imperial interior. In the context of limited state capability, it was also indicated by a widening of the parameters of the category liang. Border people were more flexibly designated as liangmin with its implications of subjecthood, essential goodness, and capacity for state-supporting action. This was reflected in pacification policy during the White Lotus Revolt, as when bao fortification served to shape and deploy “good subjects,” although Kenneth Pomeranz observes similar approaches adopted as late as World War II.56 Third, as adjustments were advanced in the course of borderland conflict, culture was not incidental, but rather integral, to how the Qing administration conceived problems and solutions. It conditioned a range of responses, from how populations were assessed, to the logic of military and social policy, to basic principles guiding the construction and operation of defenses. In this connection, imperial action during the highland Miao and White Lotus revolts suggest continuity with the eighteenth-century “militarization of culture” observed by Joanna Waley-Cohen. Complementing it in these boundary regions was seemingly also a culturalization of military affairs. Regional pacification was not just infused with elements of traditional and orthodox culture. As seen in the promotion of geomancy, use of medical methods to cure societal “illness,” discourse of “treacherous subjects,” or execution of rebel ringleaders by “slow slicing,” cultural ideas also linked military action to plans for the stabilization, mobilization, restoration, and even “civilizing” of restive boundary populations. Finally, the significance of Qing imperial interaction with territorial boundaries clearly extended beyond that seen in connection to Inner Asian borderlands. Into the early nineteenth century, imperial “edges” both further to the south and in the interior of the realm shared important (and potentially comparable) commonalities with northern boundaries, such as in-migration, resource extraction, local intergroup accommodation, and the “gaze” of an overarching discourse of state management. These non-northern regions, however, also displayed dissimilar conditions, including state designs of firmer incorporation and “civilizing,” empowerment of regional communities, and development of a sharper identity as Han in settler populations. The manner in which such circumstances were defined, regional actors struggled, boundary societies were transformed, and links to the Qing “heartland” interior were sustained was also critical to the development of the empire, equally “making the Qing ‘Qing’” and establishing a foundation for the modern Chinese nation.

Notes 1 The historian Owen Lattimore described them as regions “formed at the margins of socioeconomic systems defined by their ‘optimal limits of growth.’” Quoted in Alfred

Introduction 15

2

3

4 5

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J. Reiber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empire to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 33. For examples of this perspective, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, et al., eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). John Robert Victor Prescott, Boundaries and Frontiers (Totowa: Roman and Littlefield, 1978), 33; David H. Miller and Jerome O. Steffen, “Introduction,” in David H. Miller and Jerome O. Steffen, eds., The Frontier: Comparative Studies (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 12–13. Fredrick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Martin Ridge, ed., Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin’s Historian of the Frontier (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986), 26–47. See, for example, Leonard Thomson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Thompson and Lamar, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 3–5; James A. Millward, “New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier,” in Gail Hershatter, et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 114–16. See also Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 3–10. Guy and Sheridan defined the frontier as “shifting membranes of contact between different peoples where power was constantly being contested and negotiated and where empires or nation-states did indeed exercise a monopoly on violence” (p. 15). Concerning outright rejection of the term “frontier,” see Elizabeth Furniss, “Imagining the Frontier: Comparative Perspectives from Canada and Australia,” in Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, eds., Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006), Ch. 2. Reiber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands, 59. Reiber suggests a borderland can also be an “inner cultural frontier” incorporated into a multicultural state characterized by struggles between “the subjected population and the center of imperial power” (59–64). Millward, “New Perspectives,” esp. 124. As he notes, “such phenomena as land grabs in Taiwan, rebellions among the Miao, moneylending in Altishahr, deforestation in Hunan, or game depletion in Mongolia were not localized occurrences of mere regional interest, but belong rather to an empire-wide pattern, the process of Han demographic expansion and the extension of Qing control on a subcontinental scale.” As James A. Millward and Laura J. Newby emphasize: “It is often a forgotten point that at its height in the eighteenth century, half of the Qing territories were incorporated politically within the empire under administrative systems different from those of China, with no plans whatsoever for cultural assimilation of natives.” See “The Qing and Islam on the Western Frontier,” in Pamela Kyle Crossley, et al, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 115. Some examples of this literature include Nicola Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration in Inner Asia,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 287–309; James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Mark C. Elliot, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2005); and Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

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10 For a discussion of the New Qing History perspective, see Waley-Cohen, ibid., 5–13. For a stimulating examination that places this perspective in the context of a nationalist Chinese rejection, see Guo Wu, “New Qing History: Dispute, Dialog, and Influence,” The Chinese Historical Review 23.1 (May 2016): 47–69. 11 As Mark Elliot put it: “Indeed one can say that the frontier story is one the things that makes the Qing ‘Qing.’” See “Frontier Stories: Periphery as Center in Qing History,” Frontiers of History in China 9.3 (2014): 336–60, esp. 333, 336. For a related discussion, see Loretta Kim, Matthew W. Mosca, and Victor Zatsepine, “Introduction: Interfaces in Qing Frontier History,” Frontiers of History in China 9.3 (2014): 329–35. 12 Examples include Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 371–88; Perdue, China Marches West; Millward, Beyond the Pass; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); David A. Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China’s Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Norman Smith, ed., Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2017). 13 Kim et al., “Introduction,” 333. 14 For Nicola di Cosmo’s very brief comparison of northern and southern forms of frontier colonialism, see “Qing Colonial Administration,” 308. 15 Guo Wu, “New Qing History,” 66. 16 In the past five years, however, there has been more attention to focused regional studies. See, for example, Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain; Smith, Empire and Environment; and Tsai Wei-chieh, “Mongolization of Han Chinese and Manchu Settlers in Qing Mongolia, 1700–1911,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2017. For a study employing an explicit frontier perspective, see Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850–1930 (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2017). 17 For this term, I draw from Guo Wu, “New Qing History,” 50. 18 A keyword search of the Chinese Knowledge Index (CNKI) 中國知識資源總庫(www. cnki.net), a database of recent scholarship in the People’s Republic of China, shows publication in the past decade of over a hundred articles, conference papers, and book reviews related to New Qing History, dozens of which are direct critiques. Extensively questioned is the NQH focus on Inner Asia, modeling of the Qing as an empire, modeling of “Manchu colonialism,” as well as concepts such as “non-Han.” Proportionately defended is the concept of Sinicization, as well as the political, administrative, social, and ideological reality of the Qing as a “unified multiethnic nation.” Some articles are sympathetic, to an extent, but none seem to actually support the New Qing History perspective, suggestive of an established focus and parameters in national research. 19 Guo Wu, “New Qing History,” 50–5; Millward, “New Perspectives,” 116–21 (quote p. 121). Concerning arguments for the distinctiveness Chinese circumstances, see Cheng Chongda, “Qingdai qianqi bianjiang tonglun (xia),” Qingshi yanjiu 98.1 (1998), esp. 18, 24; Ma Ruheng and Cheng Chongde, eds., Qingdai bianjiang kaifa (Taiyuan: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1998), 42–65; Ma Dazheng, “Zhongguo jiangyude xingcheng yu fazhan,” in Ma Dazheng wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2005), 503, 511. For a critique of the concepts of “Manchu colonialism” and the Qing as a colonial empire, see Liu Wenpeng, “Huidao guojia jianshe: dui Qingdai lishi yanjiuzhong diguo zhuyi lujingde zai fenxi,” Shixue lilun yanjiu 2 (2017): 95–105. Concerning the essential link of frontiers to the interior, see Ma, ibid.; Ma Dazheng, “ ‘Zhongguo bianjiang tongshi’ congshu zongxu,” in Ma Dazheng, ed., Zhongguo bianjiang jinglüe shi (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 2000), 1–22. 20 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991), ix.

Introduction 17 21 Reiber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands, 65–6. For a discussion in connection to groups on China’s “ethnic frontiers,” see Stevan Harrall, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and Reaction to Them,” in Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995), 27–36. 22 White, The Middle Ground, 9–10, 52. 23 See, Michael S. Neiburg, “War and Society,” in Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott, eds., Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History (Houndsmill: Palgrave MacMillian, 2006), 42–60 (quote p. 54). In this context, Neiburg notes the need of more transnational, comparative and non-Western studies (p. 57). See also Joanna Bourke, “New Military History,” Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History, 275; Peter C. Perdue, “Fate and Fortune in Central Eurasian Warfare: Three Qing Emperors and Their Mongol Rivals,” in Nicola di Cosmo, ed., Warfare in Inner Asian History (500– 1800) (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 370. 24 For more in-depth discussion, see Bourke, ibid., 258–80; Robert M. Cinto, “Military Histories New and Old: A Reintroduction,” American Historical Review 112.4 (October 2007): 1070–90. As Charles Heyford puts it, New Military History is concerned with how war remade states, “shaped national identities, transformed organizational and managerial practices, and propelled important social, demographic, economic, and cultural developments.” Quoted in Kenneth Pomeranz, “Rethinking the Histories of War in Modern China,” Frontiers of History in China 13.1 (March 2018): 21. 25 Diana Lary is a pioneer of the social history of Chinese war. See, for example, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and China’s Civil War; A Social History, 1945–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her work has inspired studies such as James Flath and Norman Smith, eds., Beyond Suffering: Recounting War in Modern China (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011). Related work includes Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Nicolas Schillinger, The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China: The Art of Governing Soldiers (Landham: Lexington Books, 2006); James Bonk, “Patronage and Personal Bonds in the Early Nineteenth Century Green Standards: Yang Yuchun and His Protégés (1795–1840),” Journal of Chinese Military History 4.1 (June 2015): 5–43, as well as much of the work published in the Journal of Chinese Military History. For the quote, see Charles W. Hayford, “New Chinese Military History, 1839–1951: What’s the Story?,” Frontiers of History in China 13.1 (March 2018): 92. 26 Hayford, ibid., 91–2. 27 Perdue, China Marches West; Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War in China, 14. 28 For a study of the deeply flawed policies and finances guiding the pacification of the White Lotus Rebellion, see Yingcong Dai, The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). For two works directly focused on Qing military culture, see Waley-Cohen, ibid.; and Nicola Di Cosmo, ed., Military Culture in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009). 29 Nicola Di Cosmo, “Introduction,” in Military Culture in Imperial China, 3–4. 30 Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Militarization of Culture in Eighteenth-Century China,” in Military Culture in Imperial China, 278–9, 291. 31 Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War, 50. 32 Ibid., Ch. 3; Perdue, China Marches West, chs 12–13; Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795–1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major, Third Series, 16.2 (2003): 105–53. Perdue’s monograph, in particular, shows the potential a New Military History cum borderlands approach. 33 Patricia L. Dunmire, “Political Discourse Analysis: Exploring the Language of Politics and Politics of Language,” Language and Linguistic Compass 6.11 (November 2012):

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49

50

Introduction 736. Teun A. van Dijk defines it as “the reproduction of political power, power abuse or domination through political discourse.” See, “What is Political Discourse Analysis?” Belgian Journal of Linguistics 11 (1997): 11, 13. As Sally Hewitt explains it: “Social science traditions define discourse as being derived from and dependent on social practices – the complex mix of cultural norms, disciplines, and rituals – which govern discursive formations.” See, “Discourse Analysis and Public Policy Research,” Center for Rural Economy Discussion Paper Series, No. 24 (October 2009), 2. See also van Dijk, ibid., 13–14, 19, 40. Dunmire, “Political Discourse Analysis,” 736–7. As she concludes, “political language is political reality.” See also Van Dijk, ibid., 40. As Van Dijk observes, “it is not so much directly the social and political economy, but rather the symbolic economy of language and discourse, that controls the minds of political actors and hence their actions” (p. 44). Van Dijk, ibid., 24; Dunmire, ibid., 737. Dunmire, ibid., 735; Van Dijk, ibid., 20. Van Dijk, ibid., 25. Ibid., 32–4. Ibid., 25; Dunmire, “Political Discourse Analysis,” 738. Van Dijk, ibid., 41. Dunmire, “Political Discourse Analysis,” 739. Kim, et al., “Introduction,” 330. Leonard Thomson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in The Frontier in History, 3, 6–7. See also Miller and Steffen, “Introduction,” 3–4, 6, 8. For Fredrick Jackson Turner’s classic discussion, see “The Significance of the Frontier,” 26–47. For an overview of approaches in the comparative study of frontiers around the world, centered on a global process of European expansion or “world systems,” see Nathan J. Cinto, “The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier-Borderlands Approach in American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 25.4 (Fall 2001): 677–93. Lamar and Thomson, ibid., 6–8; Miller and Steffen, ibid., 6, 8; Cinto, ibid., 4, 10–11; John C. Hudson, “Theory and Methodology in Comparative Frontier Studies,” in The Frontier, 11; Lars Rodseth and Bradley J. Parker, “Introduction: Theoretical Considerations in the Study of Frontiers,” in Rodseth and Parker, eds., Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), esp. 8–9. Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 475–7. See also Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: National Geographic Society, 1940), 206. See J. Megan Greene, “Wars as Dividing Lines? Rethinking the Significance of the Sino-Japanese War in Twentieth-Century China,” Frontiers of History in China 13.1 (2010): 84–5; Neibury, “War and Society,” 57 (quote). Perdue, China Marches West, 8–11. This thesis “argues that Chinese empires were just as economically dynamic as European ones up to the end of the eighteenth century. Giving China an internal dynamic of its own, comparable to but separable from that of the early modern West, these analyses point toward the true incorporation of China into world history” (p. 8). Peter C. Perdue, “The Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth Century China,” Journal of Modern History 5.4 (2001): 282–7 (quote p. 87). Specific comparative topics observed in this context include the fixing of boundaries, classification of peoples, and designation of reliable local leadership. For a comparative study of the struggle of Qing China, Tsarist Russia, and the Zunghar Mongols for control of the Central Eurasian borderlands, see Perdue, China Marches West. John Herman, “Collaboration and Resistance on the Southwest Frontier: Early Eighteenth-Century Qing Expansion on Two Fronts,” Late Imperial China 35.1 (June 2014): 79.

Introduction 19 51 See Peter C. Perdue, “Coercion and Commerce on Two Chinese Frontiers,” in Military Culture in Imperial China, 317–37; and “From Turfan to Taiwan: Trade and War on Two Chinese Frontiers,” in Untaming the Frontier, 27–51. 52 Kim, et al., “Introduction,” 330. 53 See, for example, Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain; and Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing, 1760–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). Concerning problems in comparative regional research, see Lamar and Thomson, “Comparative Frontier History,” 6–7; and Guy and Sheridan, Contested Ground, 15. 54 Schlesinger, ibid., 7. 55 Matthew W. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 56 See Pomeranz, “Rethinking the Histories of War,” 17–18.

Part I

Historiographical perspectives

1

Perspectives in North American research on Qing China’s frontiers

What is the larger context of scholarly studies of Qing (1644–1911) dynasty boundary regions, at least in “North American” academic circles?1 What perspectives have been brought to bear to explain regional conditions and change? The following literature review traces scholarly work over the past half century, focusing on the manner that China’s peripheral regions have been conceived and studied as “frontiers” or “borderlands.” As an overview, the discussion will consider commonly encountered approaches and their recent development, rather than endeavor a comprehensive discussion of (what is by now) a vast and largely unintegrated subfield of Qing studies. It is suggested here that North American study has been deeply influenced by an American model of frontier settlement, as well as by assumptions drawn from, reactions to, and innovations upon, that model. This outlook has been adapted to fit Qing China’s specific conditions, particularly that of physiographic boundaries, territorial expansion, population growth, population movement, ecological resources, and Manchu rule. In this context, a range of often overlapping interpretative perspectives were developed and deployed, including region-centricism, environmental systems, colonialism, regional comparison, and, as a broad context, “New Qing History.” Over the past two decades, engagement of these perspectives has led to a blossoming of research, with studies more rigorously focused on the analytical concept of the frontier.

Turner’s “frontier thesis” Let us begin with a general definition of the “frontier.” In American and European historiography, the term has often been understood to refer to a boundary between states or nations, as defined by geography (such as a river or mountain range) or political imagination (such as a line on a map separating populations). A frontier has also commonly been seen as, in John Prescott’s words, “the division between the settled and uninhabited parts of one state,” denoting the sparsely populated zones lying along national peripheries.2 In these – and, indeed, most all – formulations, “frontiers” are implicitly relational regions: defined vis-à-vis an external center or “core” (often a national heartland) of which they constitute an edge.

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Historiographical perspectives

Historical discussion of frontier areas, however, has necessitated not just identification of a location, but also means to explain its land and people, including the cause, consequence, and significance of developments occurring in these places. The most influential model in the American tradition of frontier study, addressing this need, is generally acknowledged to be Fredrick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”3 In this work, Turner presents a defining narrative of western frontier settlement, suggestions for comparison, as well as an argument for the role of frontier opening in the shaping of American institutions and norms. Turner’s “frontier thesis” begins by defining a frontier not as a “fortified boundary running through dense populations,” but as “the hither edge of free land” – that is, as the “outer edge of the wave” of US settlement and the “meeting point between savagery and civilization.”4 As Turner narrates, white settlers had moved from America’s eastern heartland into the open forests, mountains, and plains of the United States’ western fringe. Ensuing there was a profound struggle with the natural environment in which successive surges of pioneers arrived and prevailed – learning the wilderness, taming it, but also being themselves transformed by it. In due course, the colonized frontiers were occupied, settled, dominated, restructured, and incorporated. Having undergone such “evolution,” the settlement line moved steadily westward, from the Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes to the Great Plains, such that by the late nineteenth century all of the West had been transformed and America’s frontier “closed” forever. It should be noted that what Turner identified in this celebrated conquest of nature was a transformation not just of the western borderlands, but in fact all of the United States. “The true point of view of the history of this nation,” he argued, “is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.”5 That is, the settlers may have started as Europeans, but the frontier experience annealed them. To survive, colonists adopted the methods, technologies, and mores of the Native Americans, “strip[ping] off the garment of civilization.” But, as they mastered the wilderness, Indian trails turned into roads and rail lines, forests turned into fields, and outposts into towns. In the process of breaking down and remaking the land, the settlers were themselves also broken down and remade. And that which grew anew was distinctly American in character. Such repeated adaptation and opening, Turner asserted, shaped the nation’s values, practices, and institutions, yielding individuality, self-reliance, “antipathy to control,” identification as United States citizens, as well as a hard-nosed attachment to self-rule, legal rights, and democratic processes.6

Reactions to Turner’s frontier thesis Although profoundly influential in the United States, Frederick Jackson Turner’s model has also been extensively criticized, particularly in recent decades. One objection is that Turner’s frontier thesis – rooted in nineteenth-century ideas of Social Darwinism, nationalism, and Manifest Destiny – adamantly dignifies the agency of white settlers over all others then residing in the West. These lands

Perspectives in North American research 25 in fact had several peoples, including a range of Native American groups, who clearly contributed to historical change but are not always recognized for that contribution. Also censured is Turner’s depiction of frontier opening as “social evolution,” in which a “savage” West was transformed by virtue of its contact with “civilizing” forces from the East. Again, regional change was neither uniformly laudable nor heroic, marred as it had been by substantial measures of violence, failure, destruction, and despair.7 These and related critiques were systematized in the 1970s and 1980s “New Western History” (and “New Indian History’) movement. That perspective, rooted in emerging ideas of social history, strove to illuminate the role of race, class, gender, and environment, as well as circumvent over-simplifying nationalist narratives. Concerned scholars questioned if the American West should even be conceived, or addressed, as a “frontier” at all. It might be better, they argued, to regard the American West as its own place, with its own range of historical actors, seen on its own terms, with its own significance.8 One noted example of this approach is Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, wherein White “places Indians at the center of the scene and seeks to understand the reasons for their actions.”9 This is done not just by stressing the agency of Native American groups of the Great Lakes region, but also by focusing upon their “accommodation” with Europeans at a particular time when “the colonial world whites could neither dictate to the Indians nor ignore them.” The resulting picture reveals neither external domination and white settler-driven social evolution, nor Europeans forcibly stripped of their civilization. What White finds, rather, is the construction of a sphere of shared cultural meaning that encompassed both indigenous people and Europeans as more or less equal actors. Together they build a distinct locally focused world, a “middle ground,” centered by its own processes and peoples. Richard White, that is, examines a place that Turner identified as an American frontier, but explains it in ways that eschews assumptions that it was merely a passive periphery to a transformative European or United States center.10 Scholars have continued to disagree with aspects of the Turnerian perspective. One example is Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson’s The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared. As these editors observe, “Turner and most of his successors have almost completely disregarded the fact that two societies were involved in the frontier process in North America: an indigenous Indian society as well an intrusive European one.”11 This they correct in a modified framing of the frontier “not as a boundary or line, but as a territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies.”12 In such a sphere, usually between indigenous people and “intrusive” outside groups, “interpenetration” led to a range of (often unequal) political, social, and economic relationships. A frontier thus “opened” with first contact between the societies, initiating an “intergroup situation,” and “closed” when the indigenous people had been killed, exiled, or incorporated.13 A challenge is also offered in Bradley Parker and Lars Rodseth’s Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History. Here, the volume

26

Historiographical perspectives

contributors eschew any single framework. Rather, they stress that “through history, societies have been formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier pattern.”14 They instead consider specific “mechanisms” – “a finite set of causal processes contributing to frontier dynamics” – arising in different national and cultural circumstances, albeit offering a basis for comparative study.15 Retaining the concept of the “frontier,” they now define it as both an area of “contact between previously distinct populations” and as a boundary zone connected to one or more external cores. Historical frontier processes such as “creolization,” exploitation of frontier resources, or discourse defining territory are in this way identified as either local or linked with the outside.16

A settlement model of Qing frontiers Researchers studying Qing peripheries have not worked in isolation from their counterparts examining world frontiers. Rather, many assumptions from the study of United States history, as well as reactions to established perspectives, have been accepted, incorporated, and continue to have an impact on scholarly discussion. Notably, in Qing studies a “frontier” has been (and is still) consistently understood as an national edge, encompassing political borders, environmental boundaries, and settlement zones opened to migration from imperial core regions. Earlier works have, however, tended to use the term as a descriptive rather than theorized category, resulting in regions as diverse as Manchuria, Xinjiang, Taiwan, Han River highlands, and Hunan Miao Frontier – that is, disparate territories of varying sizes, both inner and outer to the realm – being unproblematically identified as frontiers.17 Application of the category in a Chinese context has, however, also been shaped by recognition of specific conditions. In contrast to the American experience of first contacts and “virgin” lands, for instance, Qing frontiers came at the end of nearly two millennia of imperial growth. Generally, they were not open in the manner of the American Great Plains, allowing unfettered movement outward, but were rather intractable physiographic barriers – deserts and steppes to the north, ocean to the south and east, mountains to the west and in the interior.18 Qing borderland expansion, settlement, and management was thus less a “straight-line advance” through new boundary regions than renewed extension into long-enduring geographic borders.19 As the historian Joseph Fletcher stressed in 1978, two historical processes also fundamentally shaped imperial peripheries (and the dynasty as a whole) during the Qing period. One “was a doubling of the territorial size of the Chinese empire; the other was a doubling of the imperial population.”20 Warfare and diplomacy over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to the extension of Qing influence in bordering Inner Asia, including much of present day Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet – a sweeping northern buffer of grasslands, deserts, oases, and mountains.21 With northern expansion came concurrent consolidation of the Qing’s southern territories, as non-Han tribal units were

Perspectives in North American research 27 dismantled and their lands were more firmly linked to the Qing system of direct provincial administration.22 In the Chinese interior, a combination of social order, commercial development, improved agriculture, and use of New World crops also led to an explosion in population – from 150 million in 1650 to over 400 million by 1850. This growth, in turn, yielded large-scale and sustained migration into previously uncultivated Qing hinterlands, albeit at first more extensively impacting internal and southwestern peripheries than the more firmly (if incompletely) sheltered Inner Asian borderlands.23 Recognition of these circumstances has evoked a Turnerian image of an expansionist state afloat a restless and surging population.24 Seemingly as a result, North American studies have predominately focused on center-frontier interactions and topics resonant with American models. This includes attention to frontier policy, such as military conquest, pacification, administration, education, and law.25 It also encompasses the study of settlement from core regions, including migration patterns, land reclamation, agricultural development, regional trade, native-settler relations, and frontier conflict.26 Related research examines the consequences of frontier incorporation, such as erosion of native institutions, social dislocation, alienation, ethnic violence, and identity formation.27 Thus, if one might generalize across a disparate range of studies over five decades, the typical story in North American examination of Qing frontiers has been one of progressive exchange between a Chinese center (in the form of a Manchu ruling elite and/or centralized imperial bureaucracy and/or Han settlers from Qing core regions) and outlying border regions (in the form of peripheral lands and non-Han groups). This exchange has been framed by the pressures of Qing growth and imperial ambitions, as well as defined by a fundamental inequality in relationships of power. Although the periphery often resisted or was sheltered, the center is generally depicted as dominating and transforming by virtue of military strength, technological advantage, and numerical superiority – albeit with declining potency, and rising external challenges, as the Qing moved into its final century.

Region-centered The manner that Qing boundary regions have been studied by scholars in North American academic circles has, however, often moved beyond “submerged” models of colonial settlement and rule to more direct conceptual outlooks. Indeed, the past three decades have seen dramatic development in the use of “borderlands” and “frontiers” as structured categories to explain regional, imperial, and even global history. What follows, then, is an overview of some of these perspectives, as well as their connection to evolving North American views of both boundary regions and the Qing generally. Perhaps nowhere has the impact of social history and New Western History been more evident than in a shift in analytical reference from the frontier as a national edge, shaped by the peoples and powers of the nation’s center, to a focus on frontier regions as their own center, if yet connected to the imperial

28

Historiographical perspectives

state and its “heartland” forces. This includes regional studies of land that have been traditionally framed as Chinese frontiers. One example is Hodong Kim’s Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877, tracing the rise and fall of the Kasgharian Emirate in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin – a short-lived Muslim state, carved from a Qing borderland, that maintained an independent army, administration, law, and diplomacy.28 A second example is James Millward’s Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, a study “devoted to examining that region’s ‘betweenness’ over a long chronological perspective.”29 In this context, Xinjiang is discussed as a periphery, if one linked to worlds of Islam, Central and Inner Asia, and China. More accurately, however, the region is framed as its own place: a classic “crossroads” that encountered, fought, embraced, and transformed an array of rich multivector influences. The region-centered approach also includes studies of local people as more than just border populations. In essays on the eighteenth-century Hunan Miao Frontier, for example, Donald Sutton poses local history as Miao history, exploring native clan structure, affinal family ties, leadership selection, ecstatic spirit possession, religious practices, “Miao King” tradition, and relations with the Qing state in ways that underscore Miao agency at both regional and national levels.30 A related example is C. Patterson Giersch’s Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier. Giersch draws from Richard White’s middle ground perspective to define a frontier as “a territory or zone in which multiple peoples meet” and create change “within a historical context influenced by local actors and not just by imperial statesmen and colonial officers in remote capitals.” Accordingly, the Yunnan borderland was, as Giersch argues, a product of “indigenous leaders, soldiers, farmers, merchants, miners, and petty officials – intrusive and indigenous, male and female.”31 Local life was born of their interaction, as seen in the creation of common temples, dual bureaucracies, inter-marriage, inter-personal trading networks, as well as a distinct local culture, language, and identity.32 A similar approach, on a larger scale, is seen in James C. Scott’s The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.33 Scott examines the millennia-long history of the “Zomia” periphery – a “mainland massif” of dense mountains that extends from southwest China (Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan) into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma. In a reversal of conventional frontier colonial studies, he considers not how lowland states (such as the Qing) incorporated highland boundaries, but rather how highland peoples in the Zomia periphery systematically evaded such incorporation for centuries or millennia. At work, he argues, were ostensibly “uncivilized” customs and practices that enabled resistance, such as swidden agriculture, diffuse political and demographic organization, mobility, oral traditions, malleable ethnic identity, and traditions of prophetic religious leaders. In ways “reactive and deliberate,” that is, upland folk actively struggled to remain stateless and thus largely on or beyond national frontiers. Recent studies of Qing boundaries have also adopted a “borderlands” perspective in which, akin to the study of James Millward, the region examined is

Perspectives in North American research 29 framed as “in-between,” and in dynamic tension with, external forces. Here local denizens – caught in webs of military occupation, imperial administration, migration, commercial development, and intellectual diffusion – developed accommodations that shaped distinctive forms of regional rule, religion, identity, culture, production, and trade. Related works centered on culture and identity include Xiaofei Kang and Donald S. Sutton’s Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion, and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland. Examined is Songpan, a garrison town and center of Tibetan Buddhism populated by a mix of Tibetans, Han Chinese, Hui Muslims, and Qiang people: “locals [who] resisted or negotiated with the [Chinese] center to protect their own interests and established even shifted their identities.”34 A second example is Megan Bryon’s Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China, a study of the deity Bajie on the Dali borderland connecting Yunnan with the cultures of “Southeast Asia, India, and Tibetan regions.” Also “a case study of how people craft local identities out of multiple possibilities and how these local identities transform over time,” Bryon argues that the personality ascribed to Bajie “mirrored the dynamism of local identity” even as it “developed through encounters between local and translocal forces.”35 A borderlands study focused on economic development and imperial administration is also posed in Kuangmin Kim’s Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market. A “view from the periphery,” Kim argues that Xinjiang’s Turkic Beg elites asserted loyalty to the Qing Empire in order to gain access to Chinese markets. This connection – combined with a dominant grasp of regional agriculture, commerce, and manpower – allowed powerful beg families to establish trading networks that linked the Qing to Central Asia. The consequence was a kind of “capitalism” comparable to that found in other early modern world empires.36 A similar vantage is offered in Victor Zatsepine’s Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850– 1930. Here, Zatsepine’s study considers a Manchurian periphery “as a place, a local experience, and an imperial policy.”37 Discussion begins with Amur’s dense forests, inhospitable mountains, and natural riches of fur, gold, and ginseng – an environmental zone that framed a distinct “hybrid society” linking Chinese, Russian, Manchu, Mongol, and Korean settlers. Over decades, these locals then faced, shaped, impeded (and, at times, outright ignored) expansionist economic and administrative policies directed from the capitals of both Qing China and Tsarist Russia.38

Environmental systems An intensified focus on region in the context of evolving Qing frontier research has also begat a corresponding focus on the environment of such regions. Although influenced by New Western History perspectives, this trend has more clearly been shaped by better-known and more immediate developments in Chinese studies. Among the most notable of the latter, exhibiting a significant impact in the

30

Historiographical perspectives

final decades of the twentieth century, is G. William Skinner’s “regional systems analysis.” Skinner developed a historical model that divides China into nine physiographic “macroregions,” each internally differentiated within a clearly defined coreperiphery structure. The macroregional cores were (mostly) huge river drainage basins, whereas far peripheries were (mostly) outlying highlands, with the spaces in-between gradually leveling down toward the basins. In this context, Skinner argues, variation in physiographic conditions structured a systematic variation in virtual every area of imperial life. Riverine cores provided water and arable land, supporting extensive irrigation, intensive agriculture, and effective transportation, yielding higher population densities, capital accumulation, concentrated marketing networks, urbanization, and sophisticated expressions of elite and orthodox culture. Resources, however, “thinned out” toward the peripheries as mountainous conditions impeded transportation, communication, and agriculture, engendering proportionately lower population densities, fewer marketing networks, and less concentration of wealth. The far peripheries were thus vast, laborious to traverse, diffusely settled, unevenly cultured, loosely ruled, and poor.39 Regional systems analysis is not explicitly about “frontiers.” Rather, it identifies physiographic edges and their relationship to a hierarchy of local systems of urbanization, markets, and administration that extended to macroregional centers. The connection for our purposes is that areas that scholars have identified as Qing frontiers have, almost invariably, also been macroregional peripheries.40 Attention to regional systems thus provides an integrated framework for their examination. The Skinnerian model indicates the existence of these hinterlands both bordering and within Qing imperial territory, where they exhibited similar and seemingly comparable patterns. For instance, “along regional frontiers local government was preoccupied with defense and security to the virtual exclusion of fiscal affairs.”41 The rugged conditions, a scant resource base, and concern over “the mobilization of heterodox elements” further led to implementation of special zhou 州 and ting 廳 administrative units with arrangements that gave local officials broader powers and “minimal competition for channels of communications” while providing provincial government greater oversight and capacity to respond militarily.42 Richard Von Glahn’s The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times provides an example of the use of regional systems analysis in frontier study. Examining the incorporation of Song era (960–1279) Sichuan in terms of “the functional differentiation between core and periphery,” Von Glahn traces “settlement and livelihood patterns . . . the emergence of centers of production and consumption, and the evolving relationship between metropolitan political and economic centers and peripheral areas.”43 In this context, Skinner’s model reveals “the underlying importance of the center as the ultimate determining factor of much change that may, on the surface, appear local or random.”44 Von Glahn, however, argues that the model also disregards “the unique functions a frontier serves within a regional system, as the boundary between competing societies, as an arena for

Perspectives in North American research 31 the reproduction of social institutions, and as a source of scarce goods.”45 A second example, connected to Qing history, is Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and the Their Neighbors, an examination of Hakka and Pengmin migration on China’s peripheries. Here Sow-Theng Leong traces patterns of population movement, ethnic mobilization, and revolt emerging in the context of regional economic cycles, as when eighteenth-century economic and population growth led to a “rough-and-tumble frontier society” on the border of the Northwest and Upper Yangzi macroregions.46 Over the past decade, Qing borderland research has also been inspired by the growing field of environmental history. Victory Zatsepine’s Beyond the Amur, for example, studies the Amur river basin not just as a settlement zone in the Manchurian hinterland, but as a “unified natural economy caught between two empires.” Ecology lies at the heart of his story, referencing a fertile land that invited habitation and imperial interest, linked to the outside world via the Amur River, but isolated due to a harsh climate and imposing mountains.47 Norman Smith’s Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria shares a similar perspective, wherein the authors of this collection strive to illuminate the “intersections of Manchuria’s environmental and colonial history.”48 Together, they trace how the riches of the Manchurian “wilderness,” combined with hot summers and bitter winters, enticed neighboring empires, attracted new settlement, structured extractions, shaped identities, and contextualized broader regional and inter-imperial conflicts. An environmental vantage has, in addition, been used to move beyond individual regions to consider connections, influences, and exchanges linking multiple Qing boundaries. Notable is David Bello’s Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China’s Borderlands. Bello offers regional cases studies of Manchurian, Mongolian, and Yunnan peripheries to argue that ecology shaped distinct zones, accommodative cultures, and, in the exchanges of culture and environment, ethnic identities. The Qing imperial government was not just cognizant of these ecological zones, but created plans for the management of their resources and peoples – interactions of land, locals, and state that yielded differences in borderland space and senses of self (such as that of “borderland Manchu” or “banner Mongol”).49 A related “environmental history of things” is Jonathan Schlesinger’s A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, 1760–1830.50 The “things” in question were the riches of Mongolia and Manchuria (sable fur, ginseng, wild mushrooms, river pearls) valued as status items in the course of the Qing’s dramatic commercial growth. Demand for such goods yielded settlers, poachers, and opportunistic locals, aggressively combatted by overarching (anxious) imperial policies intended to halt illicit infiltration, alleviate ecological degradation, and restore the regions’ natural purity, while maintaining dominate state access to key resources. The result, Schlesinger argues, was that “the empire did not preserved nature in its borderlands; it invented it,” with implications for how the Qing administration “institutionalized ethnic and territorial distinctions.”51

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Historiographical perspectives

New Qing History It is necessary at this juncture to turn our attention to the overarching influence of the “New Qing History.”52 This revisionist, even paradigmatic, viewpoint in North American research has not only transformed the study of the Qing over the past three decades; it has also shaped a kind of “new Qing frontier history.” To understand the modeling involved, particularly related – but not exclusive – to Manchu rule and Qing management of Inner Asian borderlands, some basic premises need to be reviewed. It should be first noted that New Qing History is not a clearly defined intellectual school and the scope of its ideas, as the people associated with them, remains somewhat hazy. The perspective does, however, embrace at least three concepts that have led to both new directions of research and a widened divergence between Western and Chinese scholars. The first is that the Qing Manchu rulers’ “intimate understanding of the politics and culture of the steppe” not just aided enormous expansion into Inner Asia, but shaped a regime that was both more successful and less sinicized than the previous Ming state. The outcome was not (or not entirely) a Chinese dynasty, but rather a political entity that was multiethnic, administratively varied, and significantly Inner Asian-centered. The second view is that the Qing regime was organized and functioned as essentially an early modern empire in the course of its expansion, consolidation, and rule of a vast and complex multiethnic territory. It is thus implicitly and often explicitly comparable to other contemporary world empires. The third view is that to best grasp Manchu imperial dynamics, non-Chinese (notably Manchu and Mongol) language documents must be used. Doing so circumvents the cultural bias of Chinese sources while also illuminating the policies, views, rituals, and exchanges that made the Qing persistently Inner Asian.53 The New Qing History perspective has directly impacted how North American scholars have framed and explained Qing boundary regions, including both internal hinterlands (such as the Hunan Miao Frontier) and external borders (such as Taiwan, the China-Burma border, or the China-Vietnam border). Much of this can be traced back to the assumption that the “center” in question was not just the Qing dynasty, but the “Qing Empire.” Working from this assumption, scholars have perceived seemingly analogous imperial circumstances, as well as explained them using familiar conceptual models also applied to the study of other early modern empires, such as colonialism, imperialism, or even capitalism. This Qing-as-empire vantage has arguably allowed borderland study to become more theoretical and analytically rigorous, positioning the Qing within contemporary world history. It has, however, proven less welcome in Chinese academic circles, which reject the application of Western-based frameworks that challenge the implicit unity and centrality of China as a historical unit.54 The boundaries most studied, and seemingly most pertinent, in this New Qing History context have been those of Inner Asia. It is in this relation, after all, that we find the full scope of the adjusted historical view, incorporating notions of the distinctive identity of the Manchu rulers, their special connection with Inner Asian people, their unprecedented success in incorporating territory, their innovated

Perspectives in North American research 33 system of administration, as well as new insight gleaned from use of Manchu and Mongol sources.55 This shift has effectively co-opted and redefined a longer tradition of northern frontier study, such that virtually all recent North American work on Qing Inner Asia – of which there has been a flourishing – has been from a New Qing History perspective. This said, the fact that Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet were Qing borderlands remains pertinent, and their study has framed fertile interaction between frontier and New Qing History outlooks. The historian Mark Elliot, for example, has argued for positioning the “periphery as center in Qing history.” He states that the Manchu had unprecedented success in making Inner Asia into a “frontier of inclusion” via nuanced engagement with regional peoples, practices, and norms. This realized “a far greater measure of control, and a much more ambitious program of sovereignty, resulting in the successful incorporation of the territories of Inner Asia into the empire.” Accordingly, in an echo of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Elliot emphasizes that “the frontier story is essential to any account of China during the last three and a half centuries; not only is it one of the things that makes the Qing ‘Qing,’ it is one of the things that has made China what it is today.”56 Frontier perspectives have also shaped the so-called “New Qing History 2.0,” a recent generation of study more firmly focused on local language sources, agency of local peoples, and regional interactions.57 Here the Inner Asian fringe is examined not just as a special periphery, but locally evolving “contact zones” exhibiting multiple direction of acculturation and influence.58 Consider Wei-chieh Tsai’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Mongolization of Han Chinese and Manchu Settlers in Qing Mongolia, 1700–1911.”59 In this work, Tsai examines settlers who purposively strengthened their socio-legal status as Mongols, as well as integrated themselves into that society by means of inter-marriage with Mongol women, embrace of Tibetan Buddhism, use of Mongol language, and the donation of children and property to the religious “Great Shabi” estate. He further discusses how intermarriage between Manchu and Mongol members of aristocratic families also resulted in the complex, if partial, assimilation of Manchu princesses and ingji bondservant guards and workers.

Colonialism Potentially more significant and far-reaching, perhaps, are the ways in which New Qing History perspectives have girded the conceptual framing of imperial boundaries even beyond Inner Asia. Here we will consider two examples reflective if this influence. The first is the concept of Qing colonialism. As previously discussed, North American scholars of China’s historical boundaries have seemed traditionally (if not always consciously) drawn to a Turnerian settlement model of frontier development. Implicit in that model are colonial dynamics of migration, settlement, administration, and transformation as a consequence of the action of forces from a national core. Clearer definition of the Qing as an early modern empire, however, allows a “submerged” narrative to be more directly modeled.

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In general terms, “colonialism” refers to aggressive intrusion into an external region populated by a different people and leading to the occupation, rule, and exploitation of that region. The “colonial situation” that emerges incorporates several distinct, if interrelated, elements: acquisition of knowledge of colonial people and place; creation of laws and institutions that categorize, divide, and inculcate; recruitment and acculturation of indigenous elite; extraction of desirable natural resources; mitigation of local resistance; and elaboration of the colonizers’ sense of cultural superiority.60 This dynamic, where an external people imposed transformative institutions and controls upon peripheral people in the context of a system sustaining unequal relations of power, could result in the transformation of the communities and cultures of the colonized. The phenomenon is most famously exemplified by European colonialism since the sixteenth century, although the colonial model is often taken as more general and generalizable. The concept has been applied in Qing studies. One example intersecting with the emerging New Qing History is the forum on “Manchu Colonialism” published in the 1998 International History Review. As the contributor Peter Perdue argues, “the Qing Empire of China was a colonial empire that ruled over a diverse collection of peoples with separate identities and deserves comparison with other empires.”61 That is to say, Qing rule in Inner Asia followed familiar global patterns, beginning with initial conquest, followed by Manchu rulers’ manipulation of political, ethnic, religious, and clan divisions to “divide and rule” borderland peoples. This continued with a system of territorial governance distinct from that of China’s interior that adapted local procedures, co-opted regional elite to serve in middle and lower level bureaucratic posts, permitted extensive self-rule in routine matters, and dominated control of important affairs of state.62 Explicitly depicting this situation as “colonial,” Perdue argues, is both apt and challenges questionable nationalist Chinese assumptions that the Qing’s historical conditions were unique.63 Indeed, as Micheal Adas further asserts, the Manchu colonial process was not just familiar, but had much in common with both European and American experience.64 Nicola Di Cosmo elaborates on this insight. As he explains, imperial governance of boundary lands of the north (such as Mongolia and Xinjiang) and the south (such as Taiwan and the Yun-Gui Plateau) presents contrasting cases of frontier colonialism. Southern rule involved military domination, Han settlement, administrative incorporation, and acculturation of native peoples, being “broadly comparable to the United States’ conquest and colonization of its western territories.”65 Northern (Inner Asian) borderland rule, in contrast, involved a separation of territory and administration, controls on Han settlement, reliance on native elites, and accommodation of native customs and institutions. It was, he suggests, more like “the acquisition of overseas colonies than the conquest of adjacent territory,” with people that “stood in relation to China in a position similar to that of most of the dependencies of the European colonial states.”66 This attention to Chinese colonialism has led not just to new studies of policy, but also of “representation” – that is, the manner in which the Qing colonizing center (the state bureaucracy and Confucian elites) categorized, depicted, and

Perspectives in North American research 35 defined frontiers to the ends of extending imperial control and making this extension appear natural or necessary. Such a study, Laura Hostetler argues, allows a means “to highlight the similarities between the methods, technologies, and ideologies that the Qing employed in extending its geographical reach, and those used by European colonial powers in the same period,” thereby illuminating “the process of empire building worldwide.”67 This has been approached in various ways. In Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, for example, Stevan Harrell discusses the role of representation in Chinese “civilizing projects.” Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism,” Harrell posits that the Sinitic “civilizing center” had to “develop formal knowledge of the other and itself” in the course of imposing change on its “ethnic frontiers.” This “ideological discourse of the center” emphasized a hierarchical (and hegemonic) vision of the world in which the core was superior and the periphery inferior. “Peripheral people” were accordingly described, scaled, and classified in “othering” terms that framed and justified efforts to establish orthodox Chinese values, institutions, and practices.68 Peter Perdue and Laura Hostetler also examine the link between colonial representation and early modern technology. As the Qing developed new “scientific” methods of cartography, resulting in maps such as the Kangxi Atlas, “vaguely defined frontier zones gave way to clearly marked lines,” imperial lands were identified and subject to standardized examination, border populations were fixed in place and made amenable to classification and coercion, and national identity was sharpened.69 In addition, “the quest for knowledge about non-Chinese people on the empire’s internal frontiers, carried out by official representatives of the Qing state, was increasingly characterized by the rigor of direct observation and empirical method.”70 As Hostetler indicates in a study of the Guizhou “Miao Albums,” Qing ethnographers, “in their manner of collecting, organizing, and conveying information . . . suggest a degree of familiarity with political technologies that harness the acquisition of ‘scientific’ knowledge to the goals of the state” – thereby contributing a foundation to “Qing colonial enterprise.”71

Regional comparison A second example of research on imperial boundaries framed by perspectives of Qing-as-empire and New Qing History is the movement from single case studies to multi-regional and comparative approaches. The idea of comparative frontiers is, of course, not new. It had been advocated not just by Fredrick Jackson Turner, but also Owen Lattimore, the pioneering historian of Inner Asia. Lattimore had advanced a sweeping environment-based comparison between China’s northern and southern frontiers. As he argued, early China’s southern boundary of basins and valleys had considerable capacity for agriculture and had been open to progressive settlement – as occurred in waves from the end of the Han dynasty. The northern frontier of steppes and deserts, in contrast, had limited capacity for agriculture and proved resistant to both sustained settlement and imperial

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administration. Accordingly, the southern frontier was “dynamic” and a “frontier of inclusion,” whereas the northern frontier was “static” and a “frontier of exclusion.”72 In a 1996 return to the possibility of regional comparison, James Millward asserted that the category of the “Qing frontier could be profitably expanded to include such internal frontiers as the southwestern highlands where Qing military power, Han population pressure, and opportunities offered by New World crops encouraged Han farmers to develop or encroach upon lands in macroregional peripheries.”73 Those regions, in their connection to Qing trends, had evinced significant similarities in terms of settlement, ethnic contact, local elites, and managing state policy.74 A comparative approach cognizant of larger conditions would thus “demonstrate that such phenomena as land grabs in Taiwan, rebellions among the Miao, moneylending in Altishahr, deforestation in Hunan, or game depletion in Mongolia were not localized occurrences of mere regional interest, but belong rather to an empire-wide pattern.”75 1990s efforts in this direction included John Shepherd’s Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800. Regionally, he compared Taiwan to China’s south and northeast, finding the southern highlands similar insofar as state concerns of revenue and defense led to regional quarantine then – as the empire’s population grew – occupation and administrative incorporation. Taiwan was also accounted akin to Manchuria as both areas had been pacified prior to Han settlement; accordingly, the Qing state required less revenue to open lands and could tax pre-existing farming peoples. The result was an indigenous population with relatively greater power and status, upon whom the government relied for revenue and security, as well as whose land rights were better protected.76 Nationally, Shepherd compared Taiwan and North America on the issue of indigene land rights. He saw similarities in woodland production, contact with settlers, loss of land, and relations with states, but overall relatively less Native American influence upon, or protections from, an encroaching government, particularly in honoring protective permanent leaseholds or split ownership arrangements.77 In the 2000s, Peter Perdue further published two essays in which he compares China’s northwestern and southeastern frontiers on issues of imperial governance and response to the regions’ “mobile rivals” (Inner Asian raiders and South Seas pirates). In these studies, Perdue identifies common imperial strategies of war, trade, and segregation, although the template for defensive evacuation of northwestern populations yielded “even more devastating results” when applied to the early Qing southeast coast. In addition, he observes that “policies, skills, even personnel were transferred from one frontier to another,” allowing experience on one region to shape planning for other regions. This situation, however, was complicated by the differing views of court and regional strategists, the latter of whom tended to be more pragmatic and oriented toward the use of trade.78 The impact of New Qing History and environmental history became even more pronounced in the 2010s, leading to entire monographs intent on regional comparison. These works, committed to “recognizing the plurality of Qing rule, and taking the Qing empire seriously as an empire,” examine the manner that state

Perspectives in North American research 37 policies were adapted to peripheries, particularly those holding a “special place in the empire” such as Manchuria and Mongolia.79 David Bello’s Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain traces the ecological conditions of northern Manchuria, southern Inner Mongolia, and southwestern Yunnan. Studied here is not just how Qing planning sought “a precise and intense manipulation of regional environmental relations,” but also how aggressive nineteenth century in-migration disrupted intended imperial balances and shaped “borderland Hanspace.” Similarly, Jonathan Schlesinger’s A World Trimmed with Fur identifies the ecological conditions of Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Russian borderland to underscore environmental change stemming from commercial demand, intensified settlement, depleted natural resources, and the Qing goal to do “everything in [the state’s] power to revive the land and return it to its original form.”80 In this way, the comparisons illuminate not just the fate of individual peripheries, but their common character as Qing borderlands inextricably shaped by larger imperial trends and overarching governmental policy.

Conclusion This overview of North American research perspectives on Qing boundaries thus reveals a broad understanding of “frontiers” as physiographic peripheries, and peripheral populations, situated at the edges of an imperial Chinese (or ruling Manchu elite) center. Narratives over the past five decades have been consonant with – if not always precisely reflective of – evolving American models of Western frontier history, in which Qing expansion has been considered in relation to place (ecological barriers, imperial borders, contact zones, protected regions), process (territorial extension, population growth, migration, governance, resource extraction, discursive representation, identity formation), and interaction (colonial domination, ethnic resistance, intergroup accommodation). In past decades, correlated with the impact of New Qing History, conceptualization of Qing borderlands has also grown more theoretically informed, based on assumption that the Qing operated as an early modern empire, as well as drawing on generalized models. Related work in this direction has included, but is not limited to, approaches of local-centricism, environmental systems, colonialism, and regional or national comparison. Looking to the future of Qing borderland studies, some issues and objectives arise. One is the need to move beyond the current convention of single case studies to more broadly discuss the Qing frontier as an integrated unit. Thoughts related to this goal are presented in Pamela K. Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton’s introduction to Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, in which they discuss Qing “margins” as both distinct units shaped by key local processes and peripheries defined by dynamic interactions with an imperial center.81 Important work has also been advanced by David Bello and Jonathan Schlesinger in regard to Qing environment and environmental policy. Similarly promising is Matthew Mosca’s From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics

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in Qing China. Focused on the Qing administration, Mosca traces how flexible approaches to frontier intelligence-gathering and emerging Western military and diplomatic pressure led to the nineteenth-century centralization of imperial strategy in the form of a unified foreign policy comprehensively managing Qing borders.82 A second, related, goal is the formulation of ways to better differentiate the character, conditions, and significance of the Qing’s regional boundaries, particularly those of Inner Asia, southern borderlands, and internal highlands. It is clear that distinctions existed – say, in the manner that sinicization was a central goal for the interior and the south, but far less for the north, or in how the “center” to Inner Asian boundaries was largely also Inner Asian, but other boundaries worked in greater relation to the Han Chinese heartland. There were also important differences between external boundaries, which were often borderlands concurrently linked to non-Chinese metropoles, and internal margins, which existed as largely isolated islands within imperial Chinese territory. Failing to recognize underlying dissimilarities and their impact on interregional interactions threatens a disruptive degree of overgeneralization. To be avoided is simply echoing the homogenizing discourse of the Qing regime or assuming that the connections, goals, and policies of the Qing in relation to Inner Asia were unproblematically mirrored in relation to other boundaries. A third issue, at the heart of the continuing trend of frontier conceptualization, concerns how to define the Qing as an empire. In recent decades, this has proved a fundamental framework for envisioning center and edges, as well as the exchanges between them – widely accepted in “Western,” albeit not Chinese, schools of borderland study. The Qing-as-empire formulation offers impressive explanatory potential and has yielded stimulating results. The assumptions replete in the category “empire,” however, arguably need to be framed more directly as well as considered carefully in light of their applicability in a Sinitic context. Critical examination as an analytical, rather than descriptive, category will enable more rigorous definition of borderlands as part of a larger system of interacting people, ideas, and goods. This, in turn, promises to enhance our understanding of single cases, comparative cases, as well as both the regional or integrated nature of Qing imperial boundaries. A final goal is, arguably, greater communication between the two dominant schools of Qing frontier research: that centered in the “West” (the topic of this chapter and context for this collection) and the more integrated, detailed, and nation-focused (if politically structured) endeavor centered in the People’s Republic of China. The problem in this regard is not simply that scholars in these groups tend to talk past one another (although this is common), but that they are, and seem increasingly to be, in an adversarial relationship to one another. Much of this connects to New Qing History research and its stress on the Qing’s distinctiveness from “China,” the unequal or ambiguous power relations between Qing authorities and borderland peoples, and the historical tendency for some boundary populations to have acted, and seen themselves, quite independently. Review of discussion of New Qing History in the Chinese Knowledge Index (CNKI) 中國

Perspectives in North American research 39 知識資源總庫, a database of Chinese scholarship, reveals what appears to be a systematic rejection of that view, even to the point of suggesting a foreign plot to “split China,” buttressed by alterative interpretations centered on historical connection and “unification.”83 The divide is rooted in politics and nationalism, and is not easily bridged. It is yet clear, however, that significant overlap exists in these side’s topics and approaches of study (say, in attention to local, comparative, or environmental history), not to mention in the use of largely identical source material. There is a basis for expanded and beneficial dialogue, as well as a potential loss in disregarding what might be learned from it.

Notes 1 In this discussion, the term “North American” refers loosely to scholars who have either worked or published in North American academic circles and have written in English. 2 John Robert Victor Prescott, Boundaries and Frontiers (Totowa: Roman and Littlefield, 1978), 33. 3 Fredrick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Martin Ridge, ed., Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin’s Historian of the Frontier (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986), 26–47. 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 6–8. 7 See Elizabeth Furniss, “Imagining the Frontier: Comparative Perspectives from Canada and Australia,” in Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, eds., Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006), Ch. 2. 8 Ibid. See also Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991). 9 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xi. 10 Ibid., x–xv. 11 Leonard Thomson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Thompson and Lamar, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 3–5 (quote on p. 4). 12 Ibid., 7. 13 Ibid., 8–11. 14 Lars Rodseth and Bradley J. Parker, “Introduction: Theoretical Considerations in the Study of Frontiers,” in Rodseth and Parker, eds., Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 3–4. 15 Ibid., 8–9. 16 Ibid., 9–15. 17 Robert Lee’s, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) provides one example. A pioneering study of the incorporation of China’s northeastern borderland, the work rigorously defines Manchurian land and people, as well as a progression of transformative settlement and state policy. Why this region is termed a “frontier,” and what that signifies, however, is not explained. 18 For a discussion of these differences, seen Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1929–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 135–6; Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: National Geographic Society, 1940).

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19 Lattimore, Studies, 135–7. Piper Rae Gaubatz refers to this kind of physiographic barrier, precipitating cycles of state expansion and retraction, as a “persistent frontier.” See Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformation on the Chinese Frontiers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). It has also been applied to the study of the Yunnan frontier. See C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9–10. 20 Joseph Fletcher, “Ch’ing Inner Asia c. 1800,” in Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, vol. 10, pt. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 35. 21 Concerning the Qing’s northern expansion, see Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005). 22 See, for example, Lawrence D. Kessler, K’ang-hsi and the Consolidation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661–1685 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Herold J. Wiens, China’s March to the Tropics (Hamden: The Shoe String Press, 1954); and John Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 23 See Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 24 For related discussion, see James Millward. See “New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier,” in Gail Hershatter, et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 113–14. 25 Concerning war in Inner Asia, see Perdue, China Marches West. Concerning the administrative incorporation and development of frontier regions, see for instance Lee, The Manchurian Frontier; Wiens, China’s March to the Tropics; Richard Von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); John E. Herman, “The Cant of Conquest: Tusi Offices and China’s Political Incorporation of the Southwest Frontier” and Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” both in Pamela Kyle Crossley, et al., eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 135–70 and 190–225; Nicola Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration in Inner Asia,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 287–309; Herman, Amid the Clouds; Yingcong Dai, The Sichuan Frontier: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009); Xiuyu Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier: Late Qing Expansion in Sichuan’s Tibetan Borderland (Lanhan: Lexington Books, 2011). Concerning frontier security and defense, see for example, Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); and William T. Rowe, “Education and Empire in the Southwest: Ch’en Hung-mou in Yunnan, 1733–38,” in Bejamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 417–57. For related frontier studies, see Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolia Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 263–6; Donald S. Sutton, “Violence and Ethnicity on a Qing Colonial Frontier: Customary and Statutory Law in the Eighteenth-Century Miao Pale,” Modern Asian Studies 37.1 (2003): 41–80; L.J. Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand c. 1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Peter C. Perdue, “Coercion and Commerce on Two Chinese Frontiers,” in Nicola Di Cosmo, ed., Military Culture in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Seonmin Kim, Ginseng and Borderland: Territorial Boundaries and Political Relations Between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea, 1636–1912

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(Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). For an overview of this literature to the 1990s, see Millward, The Qing Frontier.” See, for example, Johanna Meskill, A Chinese Pioneer Family: The Lins of Wu-feng, Taiwan, 1729–1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Ronald G. Knapp, ed., China’s Island Frontier: Studies in the Historical Geography of Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1980); Eduard B. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier in Late Imperial China: Economic and Social Developments in the Bashan,” T’oung Pao 77.4–5 (1991): 300–29; Shepherd, ibid.; James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Judd Kinzley, “Turning Prospectors into Settlers: Gold, Immigrant Miners and the Settlement of the Frontier in Late Qing Xinjiang,” in Sherman Cochran and Paul C. Pickowicz, eds., China on the Margins (Ithaca: East Asia Series, 2010), 2–42. Somewhat related is David A. Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China’s Borderlands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See, for example, Robert Jenks, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854–1873 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994); Shepherd, ibid.; Daniel McMahon, “Identity and Conflict on a Chinese Borderland: Yan Ruyi and the Recruitment of the Gelao During the 1795–97 Miao Revolt,” Late Imperial China 23.2 (2002): 53–86; Sutton, “Violence and Ethnicity”; Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier”; Perdue, China Marches West; Loretta E. Kim, Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University East Asia Center, 2019). Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), esp. ix–xv, 1 (quote). See also James A. Millward, “The Advent of Modern Education on the Sino-Central Asian Frontier,” in Untaming the Frontier, 263–4, 278. See Donald S. Sutton, “Myth Making on an Ethnic Frontier: The Culture of the Heavenly Kings of West Hunan, 1715–1996,” Modern China 26.4 (October 2000): 448–500; Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795–1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major Third Series, 16.2 (2003): 105–52; and Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier.” John Herman provides a similar perspective in a study of the 1621–1629 She-An Rebellion, in which he examines “the place of the native Nasu people in the history of China’s southwest frontier.” This is done by attention to their background, migration, indigenous Mu’ege kingdom, relations with Chinese imperial states, and loss of political autonomy – factors that altered their “indigenous political economy,” escalated Chinese settlement and Ming bureaucratic infiltration, and culminated in revolt. See John E. Herman, “The Mu’ege Kingdom: A Brief History of a Frontier Empire in Southwest China,” in Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt, eds., Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries, and Human Geographies in Chinese History (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 245–85 (quote on p. 246). Giersch, Asian Borderlands, 3. These groups were, as he puts it, both “agents and objects of transformation.” See C. Patterson Giersch, “ ‘A Motley Throng’: Social Change on Southwest China’s Early Modern Frontier, 1700–1880,” The Journal of Asian Studies 60.1 (February 2001): 72. Giersch, “A Motley Throng,” 67–8. James C. Scott, The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Xiaofei Kang and Donald S. Sutton, Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion, and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 10 (quote). For a similar approach focused on the Qinghai borderland, see Max Oidtmann,

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Historiographical perspectives “Overlapping Empires: Religion, Politics, and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Qinghai,” Late Imperial China 37.2 (December 2016): 41–91. Megan Bryson, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 2–3 (quotes). These are not the only examples, even for the years 2016–2017. A related work considering multi-national influences on identity, “from a local perspective,” is David Brophy’s, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). This “bottom-up perspective on national-building” considers how the ties of Xinjiang Uyghur activists to China, Soviet Russia, and the Islamic world shaped the conception of Uyghur nationhood in the early twentieth century. Also notable are studies on the culture of borderland violence, developing locally but in interaction with larger surrounding lowland states. See Joseph Lawson’s study of Sichuan’s Liangshan highands, A Frontier Made Lawless: Violence in Upland Southwest China, 1800–1956 (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2017). See also Bradley Camp Davis on the Black Flags bandit network, and enduring “plasticity of borderlines,” in the boundary between China and Vietnam, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (Seattle and Washington: University of Washington Press, 2017). Kwangmin Kim, Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market (Stanford: Stanford Univesity Press, 2016), esp. 1–15. Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850–1930 (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2017), 4. Ibid., 3–9. Pages 7–9 directly links Zatsepine’s perspective to both Frederick Jackson Turner and Harold Innis, the seminal historian of Canada’s frontiers. G. William Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 211–20. See also Skinner’s introduction in Sow-Theng Leong’s, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2–3. G. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems,” in The City in Late Imperial China, 319. These regions included, for example, the Yunnan-Burma frontier (Yun-Gui macroregion), west Hunan Miao Frontier (Middle Yangzi macroregion), and Sichuan-Tibet frontier (Upper Yangzi macroregion). Ibid., 308. Ibid., 307–22. This is another example of Skinner observing the use of post designations to indicate both the strategic nature of the regions and the special resources allocated to govern them. This encompassed rules for the stationing of seasoned administrators, as well as for “repression, containment, and divide-and-rule strategies.” Von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes, xx. Ibid., xx–xxi. Ibid., 215–20. See Migration and Ethnicity, 20–6, 163–77. Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur, 5. Norman Smith, ed., Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2017), esp. 4–15 (quote p. 14). Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, 1–16. Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, 1760–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). See ibid., 1–15 (quotes on pp. 4 and 9). For a general introduction to New Qing History, see Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review 88 (2004): 193–206; James Millward, et al., eds., The New Qing History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); L.J. Newby, “China: Pax Manjurica,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.4 (2011): 557–63; Guo Wu, “New Qing History: Dispute, Dialog, and Influence,” The Chinese Historical Review 23.1 (2016): 47–69.

Perspectives in North American research 43 53 For an overview, see Wu, ibid., 47–50; Millward, ibid., 3–4. For a more nuanced and detailed discussion, itself a literature review of nine monographs working from a New Qing History perspective, see Waley-Cohen, ibid. 54 Concerning Chinese scholars’ dissatifaction, see the conclusion of Chapter 3 of this volume. 55 Influential examples include Pamela K. Crossley, Orphan Wariors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Millward, Beyond the Pass; Mark C. Elliot, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity In Late Imperial History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Perdue, China Marches West. 56 Mark Elliot, “Frontier Stories: Periphery as Center in Qing History,” Frontiers of History in China 9.3 (2014): 338, 347–51. 57 For an overview of the term, see ibid., 349–51. 58 Consider, for example, Smith, Empire and Environment, esp. 6–7; Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain; Kim, Borderland Capitalism; Kim, Ginseng and Borderland; Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur; Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur; Kim, Ethnic Chrysalis. 59 Wei-chieh Tsai, “Mongolization of Han Chinese and Manchu Settlers in Qing Mongolia, 1700–1911,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2017. 60 For related definitions, see Guido Bolaffi, et al., eds., Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (London: Sage, 2003), 39–40, and Nicolas B. Dirk’s foreword in Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix–xvii. 61 Peter C. Perdue, “Comparing Empires: Manchu Colonialism,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 255. 62 See Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration.” For a critical comparison of the Manchu and European colonial systems, see Micheal Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 371–88, esp. 374–5. For a study of Guizhou and Chinese imperial rule using a colonial perspective, see Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist. Scholars have advanced similar perspectives concerning the concept of imperialism. Emma Jinhua Teng defines “Qing imperialism” as “the Qing conquest of vast tracts of non-Chinese lands through military force, their rule of distant lands from an imperial center, and their incorporation of significant numbers of ethnically distinct, non-Chinese people as subjects of the empire.” Xiuyu Wang elaborates that Qing “frontier imperialism,” in comparison to Europe imperialism, was more focused on cultural assimilation and better grounded in a history of frontier relations, albeit showing similar “cosmopolitanism and creativity” as well as use of early modern technologies. See Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 9–10; Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier, 1–7. 63 Perdue, “Comparing Empires,” 255. 64 Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism,” 371. Chinese historians of Chinese frontiers tend to reject models of domination and colonialism in favor of an emphasis on positive cultural influences and multiethnic “unity” (tongyi 統一). See Millward, “The Qing Frontier,” 120–1. This perspective, however, is less uniformly shared by scholars from Taiwan, who generally employ a colonial framework to explain Taiwan’s historical relationship to Qing China and imperial Japan. See, for example, Lin Yuru, Zhimindide bianqu: Dong Taiwan de zhengzhi jingji fazhan (Taipei: Yuanliu, 2007). 65 Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration,” 308. 66 Ibid., 287–309 (quotations on pp. 308 and 309). 67 Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), xvii, 1–2, 29–30. 68 See Stevan Harrall, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” in Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle and

44

69

70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81

Historiographical perspectives London: University of Washington Press, 1995), 3–36. In a related study, Emma Jinhua Teng uses travel writing and pictures to delineate the manner that the Qing depicted Taiwan’s land and people (as savage, womanly, and ancient) in the course of colonial settlement and rule. Such representations, she argues, “played a vital role in expressing and producing Chinese ideologies of imperial expansion and race” while concurrently establishing an understanding of Taiwan as a part of Chinese territory. Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography. Also see Donald Sutton’s discussion of the “frontier discourse” of West Hunan peoples, in “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier.” Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement.” Similar arguments have been advanced for the impact of the early modern cartographical representation of Qing frontiers such as Xinjiang, Guizhou, and Taiwan. See, Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Teng, ibid.; and James A. Millward, “ ‘Coming onto the Map’: ‘Western Regions’ Geography and Cartographic Nomenclature in the Making of the Chinese Empire in Xinjiang,” Late Imperial China 20.2 (December 1999): 61–98. Hostetler, ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History, 475–7. See also Inner Asian Frontiers, 206. It was to this formulation that Mark Elliot was likely referring when he argued that Qing Inner Asia was actually a “frontier of inclusion.” There have also been other influential, implicitly comparative, side-by-side regional overviews offered by Inner Asian scholars, such as Joseph Fletcher’s discussions of Qing Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. See Joseph Fletcher, “Ch’ing Inner Asia c. 1800,” and “The Heyday of the Ch’ing Order in Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet,” both in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pt. 1, 35–106, 351–408. Millward, “The Qing Frontier,” 115–16. This point is reiterated by Loretta Kim, Matthew W. Mosca, and Victor Zatsepine. See “Introduction,” 329. Millward, “The Qing Frontier,” 123–4. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, 398–410. Ibid., 443–5. Concerning cross-national regional comparisons, see also Richard Louis Edmonds’s study of Qing China’s northeastern region of Manchuria and Tokugawa Japan’s northern Oshima Peninsula in Hokkaido. Edmond focuses on state administration and land use, particularly in light of environment and national reform. He traces a mirroring “transition to modernity” in the course of settlement and incorporation that “presaged national policies pertaining to imperialism and Westernization in the late nineteenth century.” See Richard Louis Edmonds, Northern Frontiers of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan: A Comparative Study of Frontier Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper 213, 1985), esp. 1–5. See Perdue,“Coercion and Commerce,” 317–38; and Perdue, “From Turfan to Taiwan: Trade and War on Two Chinese Frontiers,” in Untaming the Frontier, 27–51. For a related study of the transfer of administrative personnel and ideas between Qing peripheries, see Daniel McMahon, “Qing Highland Precedent, Yan Ruyi, and the Defense of the Guangdong Coast, 1804–1805,” Asia Major Third Series 23.2 (Fall 2010): 1–32. Schleslinger, A World Trimmed with Fur, 6–8 (quotes on p. 7). Ibid., 3. Specifically, these scholars argue that frontiers are not only external political borders, but also regions “located at social, economic, or cultural fissures internal to a political order.” Accordingly, the study of Qing frontiers requires attention not just to political interactions framed by a Chinese center, but also to an elite discourse that posed frontiers as “objects of empire” and to native voices that defined divergent frontier identities. It was such complex dynamics, they maintain, that shaped Qing borderlands into distinct entities – the product of “constant reconfiguration” in the relationship between imperial center and margins. See “Introduction,” Empire at the Margins, 1–24 (longer quote p. 3).

Perspectives in North American research 45 82 Matthew W. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 83 For a recent example of this point of view, see the statement by the noted historian Wang Rongzu, “Haiwai Zhonguo yanjiu zhide jingtide liu da wenti” (Six Major Problems Meriting Attention in Overseas Research on China), published in Guoji Hanxue (International Sinology) (June 2020), https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PGdoYeB522eJBk vQA0T3pw?fbclid=IwAR3kEW-diHCXu1-iuHYqqaKnsawURWUoey41vyCtKusF kvyLYTX031_p9UA (accessed July 7, 2020). This piece criticizes foreign scholars for not being able to read Chinese sources accurately, as well as for ridiculous mistranslation or mis-interpretation of what they do read. Targeted specifically are New Qing History scholars such as Peter Perdue and Mark Elliot for work that, as described, is both “ignorant” and lays a conceptual foundation for the wrongful division of China’s territory.

Part II

Conceptual perspectives

2

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal?” The case of the 1795–1797 Hunan Miao revolt

The previous chapter outlined a general range of perspectives utilized by scholars in North American academic circles to apprehend conditions and change in Qing boundary regions. Those perspectives, however, are generally not, and have not been, insular to Chinese studies. As in most fields of historical research, on-going work has been influenced by, and often directly incorporates, viewpoints offered by exemplary study done beyond that field. In this and the following chapter, two such possibilities – already referenced, if uncritically, by Qing historians – are assessed in their potential for application to the study of imperial borderlands. In this chapter, we will consider one facet of the scholar James Scott’s provocative The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia: the pivotal role attributed to “prophets of renewal” in a larger and long-term dynamic of highland resistance to the intrusions of neighboring lowland states. As broadly evidenced by hill people such as the Hmong and Karen, that study asserts, a particular type of charismatic native leader emerged at key moments prior to the twentieth century. Advancing magnetic political and spiritual claims, these “prophets” linked mountain peoples, galvanizing their identity, organization, and opposition to external powers.1 This, Scott indicates, occurred with (and was exemplified by) the appearance of a “Miao King” in the 1795–1797 Miao uprising against Qing Chinese rule. But how well, in fact, does a “prophet’s” perspective fit those specific historical circumstances and illuminate the larger dynamics of Miao action? A closer look, it is hoped, will help us to better evaluate the utility of Scott’s modeling, both in this case and in analogous circumstances in Chinese borderland history. The following discussion proposes that the Miao kings – ethnic insurgents including, in fact, one “Miao King” (Miao wang 苗王) and four “Wu kings” (Wu wang 吳王) – were “prophets of renewal” of a sort. The environmental, social, and historical conditions of the Miao territory generally fit the larger setting described by Scott. Furthermore, the native resistance drew upon these leaders’ charismatic image, restorationist claims, appeals to divine support, and capacity for popular organization. This perspective thus allows us greater clarity in defining the role of the men as historical actors. The Miao kings, however, lacked both the potency and crisp definition that Scott’s prophets model suggests. Their status and authority were fragmented and diluted by rival leaders. Further, their appropriation of

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imperial symbols, inter-ethnic recruitment, and institution-building remained strictly limited – as far as incomplete historical records allow us to determine.

Prophets of renewal Let us begin with a basic definition of “prophets of renewal.” As James Scott explains in The Art of Not Being Governed, such a leader was regarded as, or presented himself as being, a long-awaited savior, a hero of prophecy or legend appearing to rescue a downtrodden people. The contender, that is, was a purported king returned, charged with a divine mission and possessed of mystical powers that would allow the figure to sweep away an enemy oppressor, overturn a tyrannical order, and thereby restore a languishing people to utopian peace. Such a notion has long-reaching and ancient antecedents. Examples range as widely as Welsh stories of the Mab Darogan (Son of Prophecy) and the northeast Thai belief in a messianic Maitreya Buddha, among many others both within and beyond China.2 The concept of a “Miao King” playing such a restorationist role is an important component of Hmong culture, evidenced (if in varying form and persuasiveness) in widely disparate Southeast Asian Hmong and Chinese Miao communities.3 As the historian Siu-woo Cheung observes, Hmong resistance from the fifteenth to twentieth century embraced “myths that tell of the Miao as a deprived people who lost their kingdom and await their savior.” The Miao King was to be that catalyst of change, a “counterforce” to an oppressive external authority-centered organization that mirrored lowland systems of kingship or bureaucracy.4 The renewal pursued typically incorporated spirit possession, elaborate rituals, and a “religious fantasy of an ideal power order.”5 James Scott identifies these messianic leaders (including the Miao King) as self-styled liberators who utilized native dissatisfaction, intertwined with radical strains of religious and ceremonial tradition, to push back increasingly intrusive external regimes. Even as they claimed an autonomous divine mandate, however, they “mimicked” lowland state rituals, institutions, titles, and images. Appropriation and refashioning of their rivals’ “symbolic technology” thereby strengthened community solidarity and the ideational foundation of their order as it “neutralized” the encroaching states’ legitimacy.6 Prophets of renewal were able to achieve these results, galvanizing pan-ethnic unity, as a consequence of their personal capacity to move fluidly between cultures (acting as “culturally amphibious translators”), as well as bridge-burning willingness to engage in “desperate social experiments” (such as millenarian revolt) in times of larger social crisis. As Scott explains, however, such changes occurred in a larger ecological, social, and political context. The stage on which such patterns played out was “Zomia,” a 2.5 million square mile patch of highlands that extended through Southeast Asia into Southwest China. This upland region, the world’s largest “nonstate space,” has been traditionally viewed as the various peripheries of multiple “valley states.” Here it is positioned as its own analytical center. Historical action perpetrated by the many hill peoples who dwelled upon it is framed as both

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 51 deliberate and the “dark twin of state-making projects in the valleys.” That is to say, lowland governments endeavored to appropriate highlands and – the topic of Scott’s study – highland people endeavored to avoid that appropriation.7 It is a provocative focus that both questions the assumptions of national studies and stresses the agency of peripheral “primitive” peoples: the inverse of conventional frontier and colonial perspectives. The resistance of prophetic hill leaders is identified as one aspect of this larger process of avoidance, arising at critical junctures when the pressures of external intrusion became near-inescapable.8 As James Scott writes, “when ‘cornered,’ with their normal modes of escape closed to them, they have appropriated enough cosmological architecture to serve as the necessary glue for pan-ethnic rebellions.”9 That is to say, Zomia societies produced prophets of renewal (and multiethnic revolt) when traditional hill strategies were stymied, but the insurgent leaders had accrued sufficient familiarity with the encroaching state(s) to draw upon lowland ideological models to assert at least the appearance of a rival order.

The Miao Frontier to the late eighteenth century In order to ascertain the similarity of the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt to the generalized conditions sketched by James Scott, it is necessary to first review the environmental, social, and historical circumstances of this region of rebellion. The land in question is known as the “Hunan Miao Frontier” (Hunan Miaojiang 湖南苗疆). It lay along the western border of the Qing Empire’s Hunan province, reaching to the west into Guizhou and to the north into Sichuan. Covering approximately 5,000 square miles of steep mountains and scattered valleys, it connected to the larger Yun-Gui plateau of southwest China and, by extension, to the highlands of Southeast Asia.10 The area constituted, accordingly, the far northeastern reaches of “Zomia,” as defined by Scott. The Hunan Miao Frontier was, in addition, conspicuously Zomia-like. It evinced a “friction of terrain,” with steep gradients, slopes reaching 3,700 feet, and successive layers of rugged peaks reaching into an inaccessible “extreme” periphery populated by “raw” indigenous folk.11 The region likewise harbored similar patterns of life. Its larger rivers valleys afforded stable agriculture, wet rice cultivation, and denser population concentrations. Areas at higher elevations showed differing subsistence patterns. Impeded irrigation, poor soil, and persistent erosion only permitted dry crops such as maize, wheat, barley, millet, and sweet potatoes. In the forested peaks beyond, a hardscrabble life was eked out through hunting, swine herding, and cultivation of forest products such as pine, fir, and tree fungus.12 The region was, at least to the eighteenth century, a classic “nonstate space” and “internal frontier.” The impediment was more than simply the Miao Frontier’s “rugged cliffs, coiled mountain rivers, and ubiquitous narrow passes.”13 As the Hunan scholar Yan Ruyi 嚴如熤 (1759–1826) observed, it also possessed a perilous climate, with altitudes that left lowlanders “gasping for air,” pestilential springs that brought “yellow swelling,” as well as “black, slowing billowing mists,” flash floods, and bitter winter chills.14 Taken together, these conditions

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constituted an environment in which imperial troops were easily lost or exhausted, native people could scatter and hide, and imperial administration tended to be isolated and hungry.15 That is, the Miao Frontier matched Scott’s definition of such territory as a place “where, owing largely to geographical obstacles, the state had particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority.”16 These highlands were home to a range of indigenous groups – the Gelao, Turen, and Red Miao – who, like the inhabitants of Zomia, followed life patterns that James Scott sees as “deliberate and reactive statelessness.” As corroborated by Yan Ruyi, hill people employed slash-and-burn farming, as well as alternated between different plots depending on the season.17 The Red Miao (and their Guizhou cousins, the Black Miao) were also notorious for their diffuse and poorly defined political organization. As Yan put it, “every man manages his own affairs. One village may have one chief or one village may have several chiefs,” with the determination of leadership resting more on the natives’ personal ability than fixed custom.18 In addition, the Miao Frontier “served as havens of refuge for peoples resisting or fleeing the state.”19 Chinese imperial territory extended into the Hunan basin by the Song dynasty (960–1279). Cycles of unregulated in-migration and intermarriage with the native population date to this time, if not earlier, as indeed also occurred more widely in China’s southwestern region. This is suggested by one story of the origin of the Gelao as descendants of Han Chinese colonists who came to “adopt the customs of barbarians” (xi man su 習蠻俗).20 It is not clear if the linked system of fortifications established along the edges of the Miao Frontier by the seventeenth century was, again in Scott’s words, designed “just as surely to hold taxpaying sedentary cultivating populations within the ambit of state power.”21 Nevertheless, the general logic of these borderland defenses – and related control measures such as prohibitions on crossethnic marriage, trade, and land sales – was intended to ensure clear divisions that kept the people of the Chinese “interior” (neidi 內地) from penetrating the periphery.22 The aim was not just defense, but creation of a line of physical and cultural demarcation. Circumstances changed in the early eighteenth century when “the ambit of state power” was extended beyond this fortified line into Miao Frontier territory. Beginning in the late Kangxi (r.1661–1722) period, and expanding with the incorporation initiative of the Yongzheng reign (r. 1722–1735), the existing native chieftain (tusi 土司) system was gradually abolished, “border wall” fortifications were dismantled, and civil administrative units were established. This reorganization included the creation of a network of 36 “hundred household” heads (baihu 百戶) – Han and Miao men charged with maintaining order at the village level. Concurrently, the Miao Frontier was opened to settlement by land-hungry “guest people” (kemin 客民) from the Qing interior.23 The result, as the historian Donald Sutton states, was “political stability, Miao subjection, and the end of a freewheeling internal periphery.”24 There is a consensus that complications stemming from this imperial opening precipitated the native uprising at the end of the eighteenth century. The

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 53 most frequently identified cause is the large-scale transfer of Miao lands into the hands of settlers, beginning with the fertile territory of the large river valleys.25 A second cause, clearly connected to the first, was deteriorating relations between Miao and Han. Qing administrators, and the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1795) in particular, castigated miscreant “treacherous Han” (Hanjian 漢奸) for variously misleading the natives, bilking them of their wealth, and/or colluding with them to commit criminal acts.26 This ethnically perpetrated debasement was held to have been performed even by the baihu leaders, whose duty it was to ameliorate such dangers.27 The dual difficulties of external settlement and Miao impoverishment yielded substantial social erosion. This was evinced not just by “accumulated hatred and harbored fury” with nostalgic dreams of the past, but also in a breakdown of traditional life patterns. Fewer Miao had the freedom of ranging subsistence farming or indeed stable farming in the limited areas that afforded it. Increasingly more of them lived mixed together with Han settlers, bound to fixed locations by ties of tenancy and desperation. At the same time, Miao folk had learned from their burgeoning contact with the Chinese the ways of markets, language, writing, and values, as gleaned from trade, labor, marriage, violence, and a handful of Confucian schools.28 This was particularly true of hamlet headmen and Hundred Household supervisors, who tended to be wealthier and more conversant in imperial language and culture. These complications together contributed to a sense of crisis, signaled by the brief appearance of a self-proclaimed “Miao King” in the 1780s.29

Spiritual appeals The environmental and historical conditions of the eighteenth-century Hunan Miao Frontier thus generally corresponds with James Scott’s model, suggesting that social and subsistence challenges laid a foundation for discontent, insurrection, and even messianic-inspired organization. Evaluation of the utility of Scott’s explanation, however, requires more focused examination of circumstances. Accordingly, we now turn to the specific strategies of the Miao kings in the course of the uprising, beginning with spiritual appeals. Were there, as Scott suggests, returned “prophets” who made effective claims of supernatural support? According to the depositions of captured Miao insurgents, the revolt was precipitated by a spontaneous outburst of spirit possession in several native villages. Notably, in Cucumber (huanggua 黃瓜) Hamlet, the nephew of the headman Shi Sanbao went into convulsions alongside a number of fellow villagers. They called out that “the Miao should establish officials” and “kill the guest families.” As Shi Sanbao stated, “subsequently the Miao of all the hamlets were possessed (fadian 發癲, lit: “went insane”) and . . . cried out that the Miao King would appear in our village; everyone said that it was me.” Shi claimed that he, too, was seized and “without being aware of it spoke out that Heaven above was descending, calling on the Miao to assist me in being the Miao King.”30 Natives heeded this summons. Shi Sanbao formed an alliance with other regional Miao leaders such as Wu Bayue 吳八月 and Shi Liudeng 石柳鄧 (a Guizhou baihu kinsmen) and, in

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his imputed role as divinely chosen chief, led strikes on Han settlements, as well as a siege of the Yongsui sub-prefectural seat.31 As Donald Sutton observes, spirit possession among the highland Red and Black Miao (which he refers to as “shaking”) connected to the cult of the White Emperor Heavenly Kings, Miao traditions of communication with supernatural beings, as well as a broader belief in a Miao King savior.32 It was, in this case, a regional practice that seemingly required neither training nor pedigree, but rather could come to virtually anyone at any time. Qing depositions indicate that episodes of such behavior occurred widely: in multiple villages, seeded among the rank and file, and evidenced by least four of the top Miao commanders.33 Mass spirit possession aided the native cause in ways consistent with the strategies and goals of the Zomia people noted by Scott. Such spontaneous expression, lacking clear institutional structure or guidelines, was not easily anticipated and lay largely beyond the Qing government’s ability to influence through noncoercive means. As Robert Weller observes, it “is almost impossible to control.”34 In addition, “shaking” centered on claims of an emergent Miao King that had a powerful popular appeal among the Miao and perhaps even other regional groups.35 In the absence of larger unifying political organization, the divinely inspired proclamation of a fabled returned lord lent greater legitimacy and cohesion to the resistance movement. It allowed Shi Sanbao to solicit aid and draw warriors from scattered and largely autonomous hamlets throughout the Miao Frontier.36 Shi was the only “Miao King.” There were, however, a succession of “Wu kings” either self-proclaimed or identified by Qing authorities. Their appearance followed a similar pattern, as fervor spread through the hills and Miao “became possessed, brandishing knives and spears and wanting to kill the guest people.” This began with a youth named Wu Tianban 吳天半, acknowledged as both the Wu King and a transmigration of the famed Chinese general and Qing challenger Wu Sangui 吳三桂 (1612–1678). Wu Tianban stated in the course of his interrogation that he, too, was possessed and “burned and pillaged” together with his followers. “When I was shaking, I said I was the Wu King; the other Miao also said I was the Wu King.”37 With the capture of both Wu Tianban and Shi Sanbao, the mantle of Wu King (and claims of connection to Wu Sangui) passed by spiritual proclamation to Shi Sanbao’s cousin, Wu Bayue. This leader, however, was also captured and the title was transferred to Wu Bayue’s sons, Wu Tingli 吳廷禮 and Wu Tingyi 吳廷義.38 Like the Miao King, the Wu kings were able to utilize their divinely conferred (and self-proclaimed) status, as well as their purported link to a past leader remembered for autonomy and resistance, to draw followers to their banners. The Miao kings, posed as returned lords, were symbolically and organizationally significant, linked to legend and established belief. Their recognized existence, however, implies a character and solidity that is easily exaggerated.39 As Donald Sutton points out, “the notion of a savior king was undeveloped,” as its use as a means to unite the Miao was “inconsistent and discontinuous.”40 The natives lacked an established genealogy that traced a line of kings or identified legitimate

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 55 heirs. Indeed, beyond the calls of the possessed and charisma of well-placed individuals, there were seemingly no prerequisites that marked a man as a lord. In addition, there were no formal or commonly accepted rituals that enthroned a king. And even when a man was recognized as having the mantle, the position lacked clearly delineated powers, spiritual or temporal, and an accepted means of transmission. The kings, furthermore, had only limited means to persuade natives to accept their legitimacy and authority.

Promises of a new order As proposed by James Scott, a second key aspect of the prophet of renewal phenomenon was their promise to create (or restore) a larger political order – one for a chosen people that yet mirrored the institutions, practices, and symbols of the lowland regime being challenged.41 In his model, creation of an autonomous regime served as a basis for attracting broader multiethnic support, as well as for effectively organizing disparate supporters into more unified political and martial units. To what extent, then, is there evidence of this with the native kings of western Hunan? As the statements of captured rebels indicate, at least rudimentary efforts to develop rival political and administrative organization arose with the first outburst of the Miao “shakers” in their calls not just to kill settlers and reclaim lost lands, but also to “establish officials” (zuoguan 做官). It was an appeal reported in the villages of Shi Liudeng and Shi Sanbao, as well as in the Yongsui region of Wu Tianban.42 The notion of rebels asserting a rival imperial institution alarmed the Qing government, and captured leaders were sharply questioned on the matter. In Shi Sanbao’s deposition, for example, he was asked: “You had rebel chiefs, treacherous Han, and possessed Miao under your command – how many of them did you invest as officials? We think not a few.”43 Shi replied that he did appoint some generals, although he claimed that they “did not count as officials.” He was, however, quick to suggest that rivals such as Wu Tingyi may have done so.44 Other top commanders admitted to having established their own chief officers. Notably, Wu Bayue assigned Wu Liudeng 吳隴登 as a “country-founding general” (kaiguo jiangjun 開國將軍) and Shi Sanbao as a “country-protecting general” (huguo jiangjun 護國將軍) – a move that conspicuously positioned Shi Sanbao as Wu Bayue’s subordinate.”45 It is here that the trail runs cold. Despite the imperial administration’s intense interest in the possibility of Miao state-building, the captured kings were reticent concerning their appointments, and there is little to indicate that any extensive organization was achieved.46 The insurgency was sufficiently structured to occupy the Qianzhou sub-prefectural seat, as well as to lay siege to other Miao Frontier towns. Beyond these efforts, however, there is scant evidence to show that the Miao King Shi Sanbao was ever acknowledged as the paramount leader, or that his chosen subordinates had substantive influence as appointed officials, or what precise hierarchy – if any – was accepted between the various native lords. Shi himself noted the segmented nature of the rebel organization, as well as that

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“in previous affairs, generally speaking I was the chief and Wu [Tianban] heeded me, but later Wu Tingyi had the most Miao and called himself the Wu King; he did not listen to my orders.”47 As a result, as Donald Sutton suggests, the title of Miao King seems to have been largely expedient, “extemporaneous,” and likely “ratified rather than created political influence,” which Shi Sanbao already possessed as an established elite figure.48 There is even less evidence of larger-scale or more radical efforts. The Miao had binding rituals (such as blood covenants), inter-village alliances, recognized chieftains, and the Miao and Wu kings, but beyond this very little approaching an imperial bureaucracy sustained by established functions, titles, symbols, or ritualized behavior.49 Nor was there much discussion (as seen in the available state sources) concerning either the creation of a Miao kingdom or a coherent vision of an impending millenarian order.50 Military reports, however, do note fascinating religious activity linked to resistance. This included not just spirit possession, but use of banners, wearing of “ghost faces,” and chanted charms.51 These practices, oriented toward success in battle and enhanced regional autonomy, hint at the transformative perspective of a “demonological messianic paradigm,” a phenomenon documented in connection to “secret societies” in other parts of the Qing Empire.52 In our case, however, the cursory references in imperial sources make it difficult to substantiate how, or how much, the Miao asserted any comparable vision of fundamental change. These circumstances are perhaps unsurprising given the conditions and chronology of the Miao initiative to “appoint officials.” As the uprising began, the natives lacked an infrastructure for political organization, regional administration, or imperial literacy. Nor did they have an opportunity to develop one. The attentions of the Qing regime led, in less than two years, to attacks on rebel military concentrations, splintering of the Miao coalition (notably the defection of Wu Longdeng, a Hunan baihu), diffusion of native resistance to isolated settlements, and gradual fortified segregation of the most restive Miao Frontier regions.53 The Miao kings themselves also claimed that it was never their intention to build a rival institution.54 The historical record, however, is somewhat stronger in its suggestion that the ideological and institutional efforts advanced by the natives were linked, in Scott’s phrasing, to a “desperate social experiment in times of crisis.” There are numerous contemporary references to the accumulated misery of the Miao, born of the duplicity of Han traders and predation of officials and soldiers. Qing observers, drawing on the Mencian tenets of Qing imperial ideology, generally deemed these complications sufficient to explain why the Miao “went insane” (fa dian), although not why a Miao or Wu king was proclaimed. Wu Tianban, Shi Sanbao, and Wu Bayue also consistently asserted that their decision to rise up stemmed from a fear that both the possessed proclamations and attacks on Han settlements had gone too far, making Qing retribution inevitable. With little to lose, they had pushed forward designs to unite the Miao in resistance, as seen when Shi Sanbao had Wu Bayue write a handbill calling for the natives to accept Shi as the Miao King and flock to his aid.55

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 57 Even if the Miao leaders had had greater opportunity and resources, it is uncertain if they could have fashioned an institutional challenge to Qing sovereignty. At the onset of the revolt, Shi Sanbao and Wu Bayue were established Miao leaders, with Shi being a hamlet headman and Wu having charge over several hamlets. Wu Bayue was also perhaps the wealthiest of the regional Miao, as well as (like his sons) functionally literate in Chinese.56 Their local prestige, personal charisma, and knowledge of writing, however, was not tantamount to being, in Scott’s phrase, “culturally amphibious translators,” capable of interpreting and designing a rival order based on the Qing imperial model. This is especially true of the young Wu Tianban who, impoverished and orphaned, appears to have had only the barest understanding of the world beyond the Hunan Miao Frontier.57 On this point, however, greater ambiguity exists in connection to Shi Liudeng and Wu Longdeng. Both of these men were formerly baihu officials, with a connection to the Qing administrative structure that required nuanced understanding of both imperial and native cultures.58 It is likely that Shi and Wu had a better sense of the workings of the Qing order and how it might be replicated. It should be observed, however, that neither of them claimed the mantle of kingship. Shi Liudeng was driven from his Guizhou home early in the conflict, limiting his reach of resources – although he had an influence on the proclamation of both the Miao and Wu kings. Wu Longdeng, in contrast, used his cultural knowledge to defect to the imperial side.59

Mobilization across ethnic lines A third aspect of James Scott’s concept of the prophet of renewal – intertwined with efforts toward “continuous revaluation of cosmology and ethnic identity, aimed at creating order and overcoming crisis” – was mobilization of hill peoples across ethnic lines.60 Did the Miao kings in revolt likewise endeavor to unify and deploy different border groups to defy Han encroachment, resist Qing authority, and build an autonomous order? If so, how effective was this effort? To be sure, there were other peoples aiding the Miao in the uprising. Most alarming to imperial administrators were Chinese collaborators: the “treacherous Han” (Hanjian 漢奸). As depositions of captured Hanjian indicate, the outbreak of the revolt led to their recruitment, in which they “ate blood” (chi xue 吃血), swearing loyalty to the Miao before the Heavenly Kings (gods shared by local Miao and Han). Most of these men joined roving bands raiding settler villages. Others played more clandestine roles, indicative of the nuance of the term jian奸to indicate secret and unlawful support of imperial enemies. In addition, in providing intelligence and supplies, the collaborators served as spies and saboteurs – infiltrating camps, setting fires, and destroying Qing weapons.61 Han Chinese support of the rebels, however, did not take place on a large scale, numbering perhaps in the hundreds rather than the thousands. There is no indication of entire villages or clans supporting the insurgent cause. Enlistment, rather, tended to occur at limited points of pre-existing inter-ethnic contact. This included dispossessed men involved with the Miao through gambling and criminal activity,

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traders or laborers with Miao spouses, fellow villagers of mixed Guest Folk-Miao hamlets, people in dire wartime straits, or those offered the simple terms of “join or die.” As the sources suggest, such involvement was, by and large, also a temporary phenomenon. Depositions of, and references to, Hanjian supporters taper off sharply after the first year of the uprising, as Qing victory became more assured.62 There is yet disagreement concerning the significance of insurgent Han cooperation. The Qing authorities clearly considered it to be important. At the outbreak of the conflict, the Qianlong emperor stated that the core of “the present resistance and widespread plunder” stemmed from “the plotting of Hanjian.”63 An on-site general, Funing 福寧, similarly wrote that he had “heard news of treacherous activity everywhere and feared that the Hanjian were the chief culprits.”64 Some modern scholars also assert the role of Han collaborators as agents involved in a larger struggle against feudal forces, to which end they colluded with the rebellious Miao and even offered models of resistance.65 Others, however, minimize the impact of cooperating guest folk. Interrogated natives generally depicted them as irrelevant, although they did acknowledge that at least a few were committed leaders.66 As Shi Sanbao stated, “the Miao never trusted them and would not follow them into battle and . . . most had fled.”67 Similarly, the historian Donald Sutton argues that Hanjian were marginal to what was essentially an ethnic Miao conflict. The relative number of such supporters was small; they tended to be unsteady in their loyalties; few achieved any true position of authority; and the natives made little effort to embrace them.68 The importance often attributed to Han collaborators, he suggests, is largely a distortion of Qing governmental sources, in particular the impact of Qianlong’s near-obsessive concern with Hanjian treachery.69 If we return to Scott’s assumption of significant inter-ethnic cooperation during the 1795–1797 west Hunan Miao revolt, we find that the issue is obfuscated by his apparent conflation of this uprising with the larger 1854–1873 Miao Rebellion in Guizhou – disturbances that were distinct and largely unrelated.70 The Guizhou case, Robert Jenks tells us, was broadly multiethnic, so much so that it was not really a “Miao” rebellion at all. However, in that event, “the animistic and magico-religious beliefs that had long been a part of Miao culture did little to spur them to revolt.”71 That is to say, in contrast to the Hunan case, it was not a conflict in which the Miao King, or similar prophetic native leaders, played an influential role. What, then, of the ideological elements that may have strengthened the unity of Miao and Han settlers against the Qing? Despite the minority of Han involved did they, as Scott suggests, share in a common cosmological vision that spanned the ethnic divide? As contemporary records suggest, there was a distinct measure of mutual self-interest centered on promises of security and wealth, as well as core connections activated through family, village, and market ties.72 Such bonds were further strengthened by common gods and trans-ethnic rituals such as the blood-eating oath – a promise that emphasized divine retribution as the penalty for betrayal.73

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 59 These connections strengthened inter-ethnic solidarity, certainly in ways temporary and expedient. The most tantalizing evidence that there may have been something more, uniting multiple groups in a common identity and cause, is found in the proclamations of the Wu King. Recall that the Miao shakers claimed that this was not merely a native lord, but the return of the Chinese general Wu Sangui – a famed opponent to Qing rule. Wu’s family had briefly ruled western Hunan (1676–1682) and the name lingered on as a symbol of resistance.74 Certainly, Qing authorities were horrified by these assertions and their potential for centering mass defiance to imperial authority. Grand Councilor Heshen 和 珅 (1750–1799), for instance, stated that Wu Sangui had exhibited “the greatest crimes and most egregious evil.” He asked Shi Sanbao how the Miao could possibly “have said that Wu [Tianban] was Wu Sangui transmigrated and titled him ‘Wu King?!’”75 Such claims, in which a symbolic presence capable of embracing both Miao and Han settlers was affirmed by spirit possession, appear to fit with Scott’s model of universal communities shaped by prophets of renewal. I have also suggested elsewhere, including in the next chapter, that the Miao’s Wu King association with Wu Sangui may have contributed to a sense of regional identification or accommodation that encompassed – or was seen by imperial authorities as encompassing – multiple borderland groups.76 As Donald Sutton points out, in part in response to that assertion, the problem is a lack of evidence. There is little to substantiate that a new “pan-ethnic prophetic movement” was forming, or that it saw itself as distinct or exceptional, or that it was grounded in a “continuous revaluation of cosmology and ethnic identity.” Shi Sanbao’s answer to Heshen’s question was that “the Miao only knew from their ancestors that there was a Wu Sangui who was the Wu King,” as well as that Wu Tianban had only taken the title because “he was young and feared the Miao would not trust and obey him.”77 Shi posed it, if under duress, as a matter of expediency rather than calculated planning. There is, in addition, little obvert indication in the imperial sources that the Miao used the Wu King title to recruit and redefine Han supporters, cosmologically or otherwise, or that participating settlers were attracted to – or felt any particular affinity with – these leaders as Wu Sangui’s purported heirs.78

Deviations from the model Application of James Scott’s prophets of renewal model to the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt along the Hunan-Guizhou border has potential to illuminate the role and significance of native leaders, as well as the agency of the Miao generally. It supports, if imperfectly, the possibility of local action as not just reactive to land encroachment or colonial abuse, but also proactive in connection to larger strategies pursued by hill folk to achieve autonomy from Qing imperial rule. In viewing this episode as a historical case, however, it is necessary to move beyond an abstract framework to consider the detailed, messy, and incomplete picture provided by the extant sources. If Scott’s model sharpens our focus in some ways,

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in other ways it obscures it, obfuscating elements that shaped the unfolding of events. Let us consider a few examples. Perhaps the most relevant was the manner that the establishment of the Miao kings divided the natives as much as it united them. When Scott speaks of a prophet of renewal, the implication is a single figure that unified a regional population through a combination of nostalgic, political, and spiritual appeals. At the beginning of the revolt, Shi Sanbao, the proclaimed Miao King, showed signs of playing this role, aided in his charismatic expression by the singular device of spirit possession. The calls of Miao shakers allowed him to activate traditional beliefs of a return and spread word of its realization throughout the Miao Frontier, thereby establishing his status without need for genealogy or institutional affirmation. The problem, in relation to the unifying potential of the Miao King, was that Shi Sanbao exploited, but ultimately did not control, the scope and content of native “shaking.” If he could wield this weapon, then other native commanders could as well – and did. This is evidenced by the appearance of not one Miao king but in time five, and whereas one lord united, multiple lords divided. Throughout the Miao resistance, there was never a clear command structure, but rather contested division among regional leaders, each of whom asserted authority based (at least in part) on their spirit-supported status as a king. It is, thus, not surprising that Wu Bayue cast Shi Sanbao as a subordinate general, or that Wu Tingli entirely refused to obey Shi’s commands, or that Wu Tianban claimed that none of the other leaders heeded him.79 There is suggestion as well that the progression of the kings – from Shi Sanbao and Wu Tianban to Wu Bayue to Wu Bayue’s sons – weakened the legitimacy and potency of the title. This began with the capture of Shi Sanbao and Wu Tianban, circumstances that countered claims of divine support and a liberator returned. As Wu Bayue stated: “Shi Sanbao and his villagers were broken by the imperial troops, he could not have been the Miao King; Wu [Tianban] was repeatedly defeated by the imperial troops and fled everywhere, when people said that he was the Wu King transmigrated, the Miao did not believe it.”80 Failure and arrest was, ipso facto, proof of false claims. Repeated disappointment, one must assume, contributed to the dwindling power of Wu Tingli and Wu Tingyi, the former of whom soon died and the latter of whom was also captured.81 A focus on the proclaimed Miao kings, in addition, obscures the role of the rebellion’s other top leaders. At the onset of the revolt, two of the five chief Miao commanders, Shi Liudeng and Wu Longdeng, never claimed to be kings, but nonetheless wielded significant influence as regional commanders. Wu Longdeng was an influential and persuasive early organizer working in support of Wu Tianban. In his later defection to the Qing state, he contributed more than any other to the shattering of pan-frontier Miao unity, commencing when he employed his sons to apprehend Wu Bayue and several members of Bayue’s immediate family.82 As significant was Shi Liudeng as both a chieftain and kingmaker. The Miao uprising was first sparked in his village, as his people proclaimed a returning Miao King. Soon afterwards, Qing forces raided the hamlet. Facing this setback,

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 61 “he only planned to flee for his life, how could he dare call himself a king?”83 Circumstances did, however, bring Liudeng to Shi Sanbao to assist in the planning of the rebel campaign and proclamation of Sanbao as the Miao King.84 In later months, he grew close to Wu Bayue. When Bayue was captured, Shi Liudeng conspired to pass on the title of Wu King to Wu Tingli. Then, with Tingli’s death, he arranged for Wu Tingyi to inherit the mantle. “All of this,” Tingyi swore, “was Shi Liudeng’s idea.”85 Thus we see that Miao authority – even that of the Wu King – was not entirely centered on those who claimed kingship. Rather it was shared by supporting leaders who manipulated the mantle rather than assumed it directly. Here one might ask how much control the Miao kings, in fact, really had? They were broadly recognized as significant. Nevertheless, the record also indicates that the overall resistance was scattered, segmented, and diffused – a circumstance broadly typical of Qing-era revolts. In this context, the imperial bureaucratic description fa dian often seems to reference something more, or other, than spirit possession, as the insurgent Miao, in a “crazed” state, “went everywhere to burn and loot.” For us to focus on the Miao kings, conceptually posed as prophets of renewal, is to assume that such widespread disruption proceeded according to the lords’ personal designs, thereby glossing the extent to which they may have been marginal or irrelevant to it.86 That such significant limitations on their individual influence existed might also explain why the arrest of these leaders failed to fully quell the resistance, which smoldered on over a decade after the official end of the war.87 Indeed, we should consider to what extent the imperial sources themselves shape distortions in our historical understanding. As previously noted, Donald Sutton argues that Qing attention to “treacherous Han” reflected a bureaucratic agenda quite as much as an objective threat. Might this also be said of the Miao kings? In the course of pacification, authorities sought leaders whose neutralization might halt the conflict – no easy task given its diffuse nature. The form this effort took, identifying the Miao kings as centralizing chiefs who “confused” naïve followers, was conventional Qing procedure. It served a vital purpose in the manner it stressed (or even created) a vision of Miao hierarchy, while preparing those at the hierarchy’s apex for punitive and ritualized correction. The process, arguably, established a narrative needed for the Qing’s 1797 declaration of victory. If true, this discursive focus suggests the significance of the Miao kings as a tool for enhancing imperial “legibility” in the context of pacification. It does not, however, support an argument for them as effective, or even coherent, prophets of renewal. Finally, Scott’s picture of prophets of renewal as military organizers, creators of multiethnic coalitions, and shapers of rival regimes does little to illuminate the way that the Miao kings may have strengthened regional Miao identity. As Frederick Barth argues, the self-identification of an ethnic group may persist over time. The crucial elements that define that identity, however, generally do not endure unchanged, but rather are selective and malleable, arising (or altering) in response to new circumstances and the efforts of interested actors. Most significant from this “interactionist” perspective is the contact between groups. It is on

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group boundaries, and in the manner that these boundaries are redefined, negotiated, and maintained, that a group undergoes both self-ascription and ascription by others.88 In the context of the 1795–1797 revolt, the Miao kings seemingly constituted a defining element in the evolving identity of local Miao. This was not merely in how the natives saw themselves anew (and perhaps more inclusively) in connection to the symbolic presence of unifying leaders and in opposition to the guest people. Miao distinctiveness was concurrently shaped by Qing imperial interventions that by words and deeds underscored the centrality of these leaders as definitively of the Miao. This interaction helped link the disparate native hamlets, (re)define the overarching group, as well as invigorate the Miao kings as markers of self and tools of resistance.89

Conclusion: the prophets perspective So, then, were the Miao kings of the 1795–1797 Miao revolt “prophets of renewal” such as are defined in the work of James Scott? And is this prophets’ perspective useful for examining the Hunan Miao Frontier as a multiethnic Qing boundary region? Perhaps not surprising when a historical case is reviewed in connection to a generalized model, the answer is complex. The historical record indicates, to an extent, both positive and negative answers, albeit there is much that these sources simply do not tell us. Looking at the west Hunan Miao Frontier from a larger environmental and historical perspective, the region was arguably Zomia-like, with a hostile highland ecology, recalcitrant and scattered hill people, and patterns of in-migration from the lowlands. With the Qing incorporation policies of the eighteenth century, leading to an influx of Han settlers and enhanced imperial oversight, the land (and its Miao people) edged toward crisis, culminating in native unrest to reclaim lost land and wealth. The nature of that resistance followed familiar patterns. Popular spirit possession led to the proclamation of a “Miao King” who inspired (and, to an extent, directed) the Miao with a combination of personal charisma, spiritual appeals, and promises of political autonomy. With the Wu kings, this appeal may have extended more broadly in a multiethnic bid to establish an encompassing regime. Further scrutiny, however, reveals irregularities and gaps. Neither the Miao King nor Wu kings evinced detailed understanding of the Qing imperial system sufficiently to assert a viable rival order. Perhaps for this reason, merging with a dearth of Miao infrastructure, resources, or time to act, both the religious and political content of Miao efforts toward this end appear rudimentary. The Qing record indicates that the position of the Miao (or Wu) King was poorly defined, and although there were appeals to supernatural assistance these practices were not elaborated into anything resembling an imperial cosmology. Similarly, although Miao officials were appointed, this seems to have occurred on a largely ad hoc basis, free of an institutional foundation. There is, finally, only ambiguous evidence in connection to pan-ethnic support for the revolt. There were Han collaborators, and the asserted connection of the Wu King with Wu Sangui is

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 63 suggestive, but these links failed to grow into either a broad-based movement or an encompassing political ideology. There are, in addition, elements of this historical case that do not fit well with Scott’s notion of a transformative prophet leader. This includes complications concurrent with the rise of several competing Miao kings, the seeming declining status of the kings from Shi Sanbao to Wu Tingyi, and the importance of other Miao leaders (particularly Shi Liudeng) who did not claim to be kings, but asserted influence over those who did. Indeed, we might ask if a focus on the Miao kings as central to the conflict is fully justified. It implies an influence that they may not, in fact, have had, as well as echoes potential distortions in the Qing imperial record. We might also question if it might be more profitable to look to the Miao kings as markers of renegotiated ethnicity rather than as forces for military or multiethnic mobilization. Thus, as far as can be seen from limited sources, this case is an approximate fit for James Scott’s model, but far from an exact one. So, does the “prophets’” perspective then still have value? My answer is that it does, if approached with caution. As a heuristic device, it challenges an enduring historiographical picture of the Miao rebellion as essentially a reactive conflict, emerging in response to (variously) moral degradation, impoverishment, feudal abuse, or colonial exploitation: stories of the Miao in which the Miao themselves are attributed surprisingly little agency.90 Attention to “Zomia” enables consideration of this event from the vantage of the natives themselves, as historical actors striving proactively and potently within specific conditions. A focus on “prophets of renewal” specifically sharpens attention to the natives’ flexible deployment of material and cultural resources. If it does not yield complete and fully satisfying answers, it yet allows us to ask questions concerning local motives and methods, giving clues to both envision beyond available evidence and interrogate that evidence in fresh ways. The approach, accordingly, works in harmony with trends of scholarly study (such as advanced by Donald Sutton and Xie Xiaohui) that strive to place the Miao, and native religious culture, at the center of local history.91 The Miao kings case, considered from Scott’s prophets’ perspective, additionally illuminates similar episodes of religiously inspired resistance on Qing borderlands. In the 1790s, for instance, “White Lotus” sects proclaimed a Niuba牛八 (descendant of the Ming ruling house) and Maitreya Buddha who, together, were destined to overthrow the Qing and transform the world. These millenarian claims constituted one foundation of the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion in the central China highlands. With the rise of rival Niuba of different sects, and the role of supporting sectarian leaders who guided or manipulated them, however, events mirrored the Miao kings’ internal division as much as Scott’s model of a unifying charismatic leader.92 Consider also the Afaqi khoja Jahāngīr, scion of a venerated Islamic order, in the 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising arising in southwest Xinjiang. In terms of pedigree, religious sophistication, asserted political order, and multiethnic appeal, this leader surpassed the Miao kings. Being of a lineage of spiritual and political leaders driven into exile, his return to the Tarim Basin in a time of crisis to declare jihad, expel the Qing, and restore the old Turkic order more closely mirrored a

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prophet of renewal. But in this case as well, we see echoes of complex circumstances, such as the role of kingmakers (the Khoqand Khanate), the flexible transfer of the kingship mantle (to kin, such as his brother Yusuf), and the tendency of Qing imperial records to emphasize Jahangir’s centrality and significance for their own political purposes.93 James Scott’s typology of Zomia prophets of renewal, then, not only helps underscore the agency of peripheral (especially highland) people, it also provides a potential basis for comparative consideration. Scholars of China’s Qing borderlands, observing parallel circumstances on multiple imperial peripheries, have suggested the possible profit of regional assessment.94 Structured comparison, however, requires clearly delineated viewpoints and developed historical cases. Scott’s model, for all its abstraction, offers one such picture of common circumstances from which to begin making queries, tracing circumstances, and discerning analogous conditions. It is a valid approach to reference as we seek to better understand the role of borderland people in both their own history and the larger development of the Qing Empire.

Notes 1 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), ix, Ch. 8. For discussion of the Hunan Miao, the case examined in this chapter, see p. 285. 2 David Rees, The Son of Prophecy: Henry Tudor’s Road to Bosworth (Rhuthin: Black Raven Press, 1985), 12; Siu-Woo Cheung, “Millenarianism, Christian Movements, and Ethnic Change Among the Miao in Southwest China,” in Steven Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995), 219–20. See also James F. Rinehart, Apocalyptic Faith and Political Terror: Prophets of Terror (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2006). 3 For discussion of this phenomenon for Miao/Hmong groups, see Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 136–40. 4 Cheung, “Millenarianism,” 220–1. 5 Ibid. 222–5 (quote 223–4). 6 Scott, The Art, 307–12. 7 Ibid., 326 (quote). 8 Ibid., 319. 9 Ibid. James Rinehart similarly argues that social crisis leads to millenarian belief and violence, circumstances that in turn shape the identity of dissenters as both distinct and destined for renewal. See “Apocalyptic Faith,” 144 (and Ch. 5 generally). Micheal Barkum places this phenomenon is a colonial context, in which millenarianism is seen as a response to powerful external intervention or invasion. See Disaster and the Millennium (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 10 Scott, The Art, ix. In recent years, significant new materials on the history of West Hunan have been published in China. For an overview of scholars, writers, and artists focused on the region, see Tian Renli, ed., Xiangxi dangdai minzu wenhua zhuanren lu (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue chubanshe, 2009). For an introduction to the range of historical sources available for this study, see Zhang Yinghe and Tian Renli, eds., Miaozu guji zongmu tiyao (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue chubanshe, 2009). 11 See Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795– 1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major Third Series, 16.2 (2003): 108–9; Daniel McMahon,

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Rethinking the Decline of China’s Qing Dynasty: Imperial Activism and Borderland Management at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 87. Daniel McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontiers, 1795–1805,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1999, 36–7. Yan Ruyi, ed., Miao fangbei lan (1820) (hereafter MFBL), 8:2a – 2b; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 37. Yan Ruyi, Leyuan wenchao (preface 1844) (hereafter LYWC), 5:16b – 17a; MFBL, 8:17a – 17b, McMahon, ibid., 38. LYWC, 5:16b – 17a. Scott, The Art, 13. MFBL, 8:8a – 8b. LYWC, 5:17a. See also MFBL, 8:2a – 2b. Scott, The Art, 13. See LYWC, 8:1a – 2b; MFBL, 17:29b. Scott, The Art, 173. Concerning this fortification system and its development, see Wu Xinfu, “Qingdai XiangQian bian ‘Miao fang’ kaolüe,” Guizhou minzu yanjiu 21.88, no. 4 (2001): 110–17. For related discussion, see McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 72–6 and Rethinking the Decline, 87–8; Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” in Pamela K. Crossley, et al., eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 197–203. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 109. See also Wu Xinfu, “Shilun Xiangxi Miaoqu ‘gaitu guiliu’ – jianxi Qian – Jia qiyi de yuanyin,” Minzu yanjiu 1 (1986). McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 62–3. One source estimates about 400,000 mu of Miao land was transferred between 1676 and 1795. See Miaozu jianzhi (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1985), 126. For discussion of the Hanjian, see Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 127–32. Concerning the debasement of the Miao, see MBFL, 8:8b – 9a and LYWC, 5:12b. Concerning contemporary criticism of the baihu leaders, see LYWC, 5:6b – 7a. For a discussion of the baihu, painting a more complex picture of their actions and transcultural methods, see Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier,” 211–17. See MFBL, 8:1b – 2a, 8b – 9a; LYWC, 5:2b, 6b – 7a, 12a – 12b; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 57, 61–7, 75–9. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 215. For these quotations, see Qingdai qianqi Miaomin qiyi dang’an shiliao (Guizhou: Guangming chubanshe, 1993) (hereafter, QQMQDS), vol. 3, 230–1. Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi, vol. 1 (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1999), 382–5. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 117–18, 120–1; Donald S. Sutton, “Myth Making on an Ethnic Frontier: The Cult of the Heavenly Kings of West Hunan, 1715–1996,” Modern China 26.4 (2000): 448–500; Wu, ibid., 382. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 118–19, 123. For references to fa dian/ “shaking”/spirit possession, see for example QQMQDS, vol. 2, 171, 190, 371; vol. 3, 121, 122, 198–200, 232. Robert P. Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tian’anmen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 76. Robert Weller observes that “possession cults often cross ethnic boundaries and form new kinds of coalitions, facilitating recruitment and leading to the possible development of a large-scale movement,” as occurred during the nineteenth century Taiping Rebellion. See, ibid., 79. See Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 118–19, 122. Sutton calls this possession a “mobilization device.”

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37 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 66, 120–5. 38 Concerning Wu Bayue’s confession and decision to transfer the title to his sons, see ibid., 141. For Wu Tingyi’s confession, see Hu Qiwang, “Qian – Jia Miaomin qiyi canjia ren gongdan jianshu,” in Hu Qiwang and Li Tinggui, eds., Miaozu yanjiu luncong (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1988), 199–200, 207. 39 Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 123. 40 Ibid. 41 Scott, The Art, 307–12. 42 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 121. 43 Ibid., 233. 44 Ibid.; Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 119. 45 Concerning Wu Bayue’s investitures, see QQMQDS, vol. 3, 361; Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 123 (his translation of the titles); Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi, 393. 46 See QQMQDS, vol. 3, 125, 233. 47 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 255, 256 (quote). 48 Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 124. 49 The blood covenants, in which people drank cat’s blood or smeared it on their mouths as a ritual to cement bonds of loyalty, were not unique to the Miao, but seen more broadly in Chinese society, including among triad organizations. See B.J. ter Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads: Creating an Identity (Leiden: Brill, 1998), chs 4–5. See also Paul R. Katz, Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), Ch. 3, esp. 63–71. The 1739 Qianzhou zhi (Qianzhou gazetteer) writes that the Miao “fear their ghosts more than they fear the law,” so that whenever they had grievances, no matter how slight, they would go to the temple and swear a blood oath before their gods. Their knees trembled as they entered the temple and the guilty would not dare to drink the blood. For a translation of this passage, and related discussion, see Xie Xiaohui, “From Women’s Fertility to Masculine Authority: The Story of the White Emperor Heavenly Kings in West Hunan,” in David Faure and Ho Ts’ui-p’ing, eds., Chieftains into Ancestors: Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 187. 50 Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 124. 51 QQMQDS, vol. 2, 405–6. 52 Concerning the demonological messianic paradigm, see ter Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads, chs. 6–7. It refers to a doctrine that the world would soon be overrun by demons or barbarians, but the disaster could be averted by the arrival of an ideal ruler (esp. the heir of the Tang or Ming ruling house) who would bring salvation. The leader would have supernatural powers and be capable of deploying charms and mobilizing divine armies. This messianic perspective, like Scott’s prophets perspective, resonates with the case of the Miao revolt. The intrusion of the guest people was seen by natives as world-shaking. The appearance of the Wu King potentially served to legitimate a challenge to Qing authority, mirroring the triad general Wu Chengyun, who had claimed to be Wu Sangui’s grandson (see p. 254). In addition, the rebels’ use of charms and masks suggests similar ritual efforts to mobilize “spirit soldiers.” Such circumstance could, in addition, have shaped a cohesive group from previously disparate peoples. A central problem, as with the prophets of renewal model discussed here, lies in clearly documenting that this did, in fact, occur. 53 See, for example, Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi, 379–404; McMahon, Rethinking the Decline, 88–94. 54 See for example, QQMQDS, vol. 3, 124 (Wu Tianban), 234 (Shi Sanbao). 55 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 123, 258, 413. 56 See Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 114–15, 119. Concerning Wu Bayue’s wealth, see QQMQDS, vol. 3, 141. Concerning his writing, see 231. Concerning the literacy of Wu Tingyi, taught to read by his father, see Hu, “Qian-Jia,” 199–200, 207. 57 See QQMQDS, vol. 2, 405–6; vol. 3, 120–5.

Were the Miao Kings “prophets of renewal”? 67 58 On this point, see Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier,” 211–17. 59 For reference to Wu Longdeng as a baihu, see QQMQDS, vol. 3, 122. For related discussion of Shi Liudeng, see Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi, 382. An additional example is the baihu Yang Guoan who, as Wu Xinfu writes, “was forced by circumstance to join the uprising.” This leader, however, was soon captured and claimed unswerving loyalty to the Qing. Although exceptionally familiar with both Han and Miao cultures, it is not clear what, if any, contribution, he made to Miao ideological or organization efforts. See Wu, ibid. Regarding Yang’s capture and deposition, see QQMQDS, vol. 2, 276–82. 60 Scott, The Art, 312. 61 See, for example, QQMQDS, vol. 2, 280, 330, 338, 362, 437, 444, 484, 485–7, 507, 549–51; vol. 3, 148–9, 394. See also Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 127–32 for an overview of their activities. 62 One might also note the native groups that showed sympathy (but only ambiguous support) for the Miao cause, such as the Gelao and Turen. See, for example, QQMQDS, vol. 3, 225 (Shi’s comments); MFBL, 9:5, 16; 17:29–34; McMahon, Rethinking the Decline, Ch. 3; Sutton, ibid., 132–44. 63 Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 128 (quote); Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier,” 204–6. 64 QQMQDS, vol. 2, 227. 65 See, for example, Yang Wanquan, “Qian-Jia Miaomin qiyi yingxiong Shi Liudeng,” in Xinan shaoshu minzu renwu zhi, vol. 1 (Chengdu: Sichuan minzu chubanshe, 1987), 4; Wang Huiqin, “Qingdai Qianlong Jiaqing nianjian Miaozu nongmin de qiyi,” in Miaozu yanjiu luncong, 183–4. 66 For instance, Wang Daliu changed his surname to “Shi,” and Li Denong was given the rank of captain and command of Miao troops. See QQMQDS, vol. 2, 336, 338, 405–7, 437 (Wang Daliu); vol. 3, 181, 394 (Wu Tianban noted 50 Han from his village aiding the rebels). 67 QQMQDS, vol. 2, 256–7. 68 Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 127–32. 69 Sutton, ibid.; “Ethnicity,” esp. 199, 209–11. 70 Scott, ibid., 316–18. Concerning the Miao Rebellion in Guizhou, see Robert R. Jenks, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854–1873 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994); and “The Miao Rebellion: 1854–1873: Insurgence and Social Disorder in Kweichow During the Taiping Era,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1985. 71 Jenks, “The Miao Rebellion,” 75. 72 QQMQDS, vol. 2, 280, 330, 338, 362, 437, 444, 484, 485–57, 507, 549–51; vol. 3, 148–9, 394. 73 Concerning Wu Longdeng’s use of this ceremony when inducting a group of 20 men, see QQMQDS, vol. 2, 550. 74 For a biographical sketch of Wu Sangui, see Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943–1944), 877–80. Concerning Triad identification with Wu Sangui to strengthen their legitimacy, see ter Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads, 254. 75 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 252. For similar formal queries, see QQMQDS, vol. 3, 123 and 258; Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 124–5. 76 McMahon, Rethinking, Ch. 3, esp. 71–3. 77 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 234 (latter quote), 258 (former quote). 78 There is, however, some suggestion that this might have happened as for example, a statement by Miao to Han recruits that “we are Wu Sangui’s descendants.” See QQMQDS, vol. 2, 339. 79 QQMQDS, vol. 3, 121. Similar developments occurred five decades later in the development of the Taiping movement in the Guangxi hinterland. The God Worshippers had retreated to an area of religious ferment and traditions of spirit possession. In

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Conceptual perspectives this context, as Hong Xiuquan asserted communications from God, the medium Yang Xiuqing did as well, whereas Xiao Chaogui claimed possession by Jesus. These claims undercut Hong Xiuquan’s authority and threatened the formation of competing centers of power. The difference, in this case, was that the Taipings were able to curb mass possession, which they banned as heresy, thereby building a stronger organizational structure. See Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China, chs 5–6. QQMQDS, vol. 3, 142. See the confession of Wu Tingyi, QQMQDS, vol. 3, 370–5. Concerning Wu Longdeng’s surrender and capture of Wu Bayue, see Dan Xiangliang, Hunan Miaofang tunzheng kao (1884) 3:16b – 17a; Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi, 397. QQMQDS, vol. 3, 256. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 370–1. As Wu Tianban stated of his own experience, he joined the uprising because he encountered a roving band and “if you did not follow them, they would burn your village first.” See QQMQDS, vol. 3, 121–2. McMahon, Rethinking the Decline, 91–4. Frederick Barth, “Introduction,” in Frederick Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 9–37. Local belief in the Miao and Wu kings endured after the revolt and new claims arose again in the 1940s, at another moment of ethnic conflict and transformation. See Paul R. Katz, “Dances of the Doomed: Ritual and Resistance among China’s West Hunan Miao in the 1940s,” Asia Major Third Series, 32.2 (2017): 133–86. For related discussion, see McMahon, Rethinking the Decline, 86–9. In connection to the 1795–1797 revolt, see Donald Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt.” More broadly for the Qing period, see Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier” and Xie Xiaohui, Yanxu de bianyuan: Song zhi Qing Xiangxi kaifa zhong de zhidu, zulei gefen yu liyi (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013). In regard to the Miao and the cult of the Heavenly Kings in regional history, see Sutton, “Myth Making on an Ethnic Frontier,” and Xie Xiaohui, “From Woman’s Fertility to Masculine Authority.” See Blaine Gaustad, “Prophets and Pretenders: Inter-Sect Competition in Qianlong China,” Late Imperial China 21.1 (2000): 1–40; and Kwang-Ching Liu, “Religion and Politics in the White Lotus Rebellion in 1796 in Hubei,” in Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, eds., Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 281–320. For discussion of Jahangir in this revolt, see L.J. Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand, c.1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 86–123; Pan Zhiping, Zhongya Haohanguo yu Qingdai Xinjiang (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2009), 90–100; Daniel McMahon, “The Daoguang Response to the Afaqi Khoja Jahangir during the 1826–28 Jahangir Uprising,” Momumenta Serica 65.2 (December 2018): 343–62. See, for example, James Millward, “New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier,” in Gail Hershatter, et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 115–16, 123–5; Pamela K. Crossley, et al., “Introduction,” in Pamela K. Crossley, et al., eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1–24; Loretta Kim, et al., “Introductions: Interfaces in New Qing History,” Frontiers of History in China 9.3 (2014): 329–35.

3

The middle ground, “middle ground moments,” and accommodation in the study of later Qing borderland history

This chapter turns to a second “conceptional perspective” drawn from outside the field of Chinese (and Qing borderland) studies but periodically referenced within it: that of Richard White’s concept of the “middle ground.” Introduced in his seminal work, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, White’s modeling has had an enduring impact on the study of early American and native American history. In past decades, it has also been applied more broadly to explicate a range of historical circumstances, many lying beyond North America. But does it have value in the study of imperial China, particularly in connection to the Qing Empire’s numerous and varied fringe regions? In addressing this question, the discussion will focus on periods from the mideighteenth century, mainly in reference to three secluded physiographic boundaries. In that connection, I suggest that White’s middle ground perspective, in its specific formulation, defies facile application due to the dissimilarity of Qing conditions. This said, there is much of value in White’s approach to the study of regional agency and the perspective can be adapted to better fit Chinese circumstances. One such possibility is presented here in the notion of “middle ground moments” (approximate conditions of intensified borderland accommodation in times of isolated crisis). That modified vantage will be explored in relation to the Shaanxi Dabashan (大巴山) highlands in a “population boom,” Hunan Miao Frontier (Miaojiang 苗疆) in the “fog of war,” and Xinjiang’s Kashgar crossroads during the “fall of empires.” More broadly, however, this exercise grounds an argument for further (and shared) attention to the “accommodation” viewpoint in Qing borderland studies. The idea that Chinese peripheries experienced not just domination and resistance, but new cultural production born of interaction, adaptation, and hybridization is neither new nor particularly controversial. It not just frames fruitful inquiry but, I believe, marks a point where dissenting New Qing History and “Chinese nationalist” approaches overlap, potentially opening space for enhanced dialogue between them. In this context, I pose White’s middle ground, and the outlined “middle ground moments” adaptation, as specific configurations within that larger accommodation focus.

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The middle ground What is a “middle ground”? Richard White states that the concept is a “perspective” on regional contact, interaction, cultural production, and change. In contrast with more conventional (and traditional) topics of early American studies – white colonial settlement, national conquest, or Native American defiance – White’s central frame is accommodation: intertwined economic, political, and social exchange between indigenous groups and Europeans in which “one group [became] more like another by borrowing discrete cultural traits.”1 The middle ground concept, however, addresses more than just general conditions of intergroup exchange. It is more specifically rooted in (indeed, defined by) a particular place, set of conditions, and participatory process. The place was the North American Great Lakes region, or pays d’en haut, from the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth century. Here were the world’s largest freshwater lakes and the marshy forests that bordered them, reaching into what is now the United States regions of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York, as well as northward into Ontario, Canada. Its people were Algonquianspeaking Native Americans, as well as scattered European (mostly French) traders, missionaries, and soldiers. As White narrates, local Indian bands had been shattered in the Fur Trade War, turned into refugees in the face of ravaging disease and external Iroquois attacks, but later reconstituted into a (continually violent) “world made of fragments.” From the mid-seventeenth century, France had asserted its presence in this world, involving both individuals and an “infrastructure of empire” spanning missions, trading posts, alliances networks, and mutually accepted rituals.2 The “middle ground” is the place where groups met, at a point “in between cultures, people, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages.”3 It is, in addition, the way that they met and shaped distinct local dynamics. In the pays d’en haut, White asserts, resident groups faced “a rough balance of power, mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability by either side to commandeer enough force to compel the other to change.”4 No one faction dominated and all lived with an eye to the others, as that existence was ultimately contingent upon “the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force.”5 More cooperative means were thus required, pursued, and created. This was also a time of first contacts between natives and Europeans, in which individuals and groups embraced “what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient, misunderstanding . . . and from these misunderstandings [arose] new meaning and through them new practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.”6 Flexible exchange, that is, often stemmed from a mutual lack of comprehension, wherein one would guess what the other wanted (and how they wanted it) then acted accordingly, whereas the other would accept the gesture as normal and incorporate it into the parameters of their relationship. This yielded a practice that could “take on a life of its own if it is accepted by both sides.”7 The ensuing “joint Indian-White creation” encompassed, and was expressed in, the fullness of local life, be it language, trade, production, politics, religion, learning, sex, or war. And it remained in place until the rapid expansion

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of the United States rendered Indian views largely impotent, eliminating the basis for a middle ground. White’s work thus gives us a discussion that centers regional history on Native Americans, but grounds it in multiple long-term interactions wherein Native Americans negotiated with Europeans under general conditions of parity and mutual (if not always friendly) regard, yielding a necessary and distinct local culture. Accordingly, as Susan Sleeper-Smith observes, “The Middle Ground produced a complex model for understanding encounter as both an event and cultural process.”8 It concurrently re-conceives the American past in ways that “destabilize and transform the older and often foundational narratives of early American history, Native American history, and ethnohistory.”9 That is, in accord with the revisionist perspectives of New Western History and New Indian History scholarship, White’s work more firmly poses Native Americans as dynamic agents in their own past, and that of regional whites, rather than simply as unchanging or reactive to external forces.10 The Middle Ground, however, has faced criticism. Some scholars dispute White’s representation of historical conditions, such as the fallout precipitating the formation of a middle ground situation.11 Others argue that it excessively dignifies the impact of cooperation in regional interaction, especially when extended to explain centuries of complex exchange. Brett Rushford, for example, sees mediation as having little bearing on the Fox Wars and the accounts of other historians give greater attention to confrontation and imbalance.12 The concept, in addition, possesses an abstraction and malleability that promises broad applicability, but has resulted in over-simplification in popular reference. As Philip Deloria observes, the concept has often become “a kind of all-purpose tool for thinking about White-Indian interactions on the terrain of culture,” serving, in effect, to depict situations of general compromise rather than the more strictly defined conditions presented in The Middle Ground.13

The middle ground perspective in Qing historical study Accommodation is a recognized frame of frontier studies reflected in discussions of borderland hybridization, adaptation, and cross-ethnic exchange.14 Historians of China also know, and have engaged, White’s middle ground configuration. The best example is C. Patterson Giersch’s Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier, examining the manner that Han migrants, Burmese Tai, indigenes, and Qing representatives developed a mixed society of common temples, dual bureaucracies, inter-marriage, trading networks, and regional identity. White’s perspective has, in addition, provided a context for discussion of accommodation and change in the eighteenth-century Hunan Miao Frontier, as well as in the “making of Yunnan.”15 China historians’ application, however, has generally not been rigorous. That is, taking Giersch’s work as the best exception, relatively little effort has been made to either model the specific conditions and processes of the middle ground or to systematically trace approximating conditions in a Qing frontier context. Generalizations abound. Efforts to push beyond them, I would argue, face obstacles.

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The circumstances traced in White’s middle ground model are not always clearly reflected in Qing history. That is, China exhibited general forms of intergroup accommodation on peripheries and beyond. In addition, seventeenth-century frontiers – of which many had mixed populations, tribal alliances with the Qing state, and considerable autonomy – also suggest parallels, but conditions on imperial peripheries more broadly were distinct, particularly from the late eighteenth century. When considering the middle ground as a place, we find Qing boundaries to be typically unlike the seventeenth-century Great Lakes as a French imperial borderland. The pays d’en haut was an open “frontier of inclusion,” lacking infrastructure or external occupation rather than ecological obstacles that might impede further state expansion. By China’s late imperial period, such areas had largely already been filled. The closed “frontiers of exclusion” that endured were persistent, often resource poor, environmental boundaries – mountains, steppes, deserts, and oceans.16 When we consider the middle ground as a process, we see that Chinese borderlands were also framed by different patterns of interaction. By the eighteenth century, first contact situations were rare. Rather, many fringes had experienced and internalized waves of infiltration, occupation, and settlement over centuries. If we consider, for example, the northern steppe borderland, site of millennia of interaction, we see not that those involved did not know each other, but rather that they (such as Manchu and Mongols) knew each other all too well. The exchange still yielded new and vital forms of cultural creation, but with a dynamic less rooted in Whitean “creative misunderstanding.” From the eighteenth century in particular, Qing China’s prodigious population growth, gaitu guiliu (改土歸流) incorporation policies, and doubling of territory also had a profound impact on peripheral societies. As the interior population doubled to over 300 million by 1800, land-hungry Han settlers streamed into virtually every accessible boundary region.17 There, these settlers acquired land and resources, mobilized militia, built farms and communities, established trade networks, and generally labored in tandem with state projects of integration and defense. As Donald Sutton observes of the West Hunan borderland, the results eroded middle ground conditions.18 James Reardon-Anderson, looking at continuing trends of nineteenth-century Han movement into Manchuria, similarly observes that settler communities had little interest in middle grounds, focusing rather on “transplantation of institutions and practices previously established in China proper.”19 Given the complexity of Qing borderland change, it is also important to question the precision of any perspective (in this case, of Whitean accommodation) applied to define long stretches of time. A focus on enduring middle ground interaction threatens to obscure the ways in which balances of regional power could suddenly shift, leading to new configurations of incorporation, colonialism, or even indigene-dominated “native grounds.” Conversely, White’s description of the sudden collapse of the Great Lakes middle ground in the face of the sharp shock of white settlement and United States technology is also not entirely apt as a model. Into China’s Republican era (1911–1949), many Sinitic boundaries were neither fully incorporated nor comprehensively transformed. Restrictions on

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governmental authority, taxed in the task of simply maintaining order, necessitated continued trends of regional intergroup accommodation, albeit not necessarily “middle grounds.”

Defining “middle ground moments” in later Qing history I accordingly approach Richard White’s middle ground perspective cautiously when considering its application to the divergent conditions of Qing peripheries, particularly from the mid-eighteenth century. Late imperial China had few, if any, circumstances that truly matched the historical pays d’en haut case on which the middle ground model is based and from which White provides its elaboration. As a specific formulation, it cannot simply be transplanted to explain China’s borders. But how far are we to take deference to difference? If we assume that historical episodes (or cultures) are of unique composition and cannot be meaningfully compared, then it seems that China did not have “middle grounds.” White, however, clearly intends the perspective to be “portable,” affirming that analogous circumstances, processes, and consequences of intergroup cultural creation did occur elsewhere and can be explained in terms of the middle ground.20 The challenge, as Philip Deloria suggests, lies in fashioning approaches that “recognize middle ground processes even when power relations cannot be considered equivalent.”21 That is, it is still possible to apply the perspective, in some useful and rigorous form, provided we effectively clarify the nature of alternate circumstances and how they correspond to the dynamics White identified. What follows is an effort to do so, presented as the adaptation of “middle ground moments.” In this formulation, I begin with a general understanding of accommodation as individuals or groups adapting flexibly to one another and, in so doing, developing common understandings and practices that define their mutual interaction: elements of a shared culture. However, a more precise sense of this accommodation is needed – one which parallels what is presented in The Middle Ground, accords with later Qing conditions, and, in its specificity, is not generally applicable to virtually every social situation where groups are together and need to get along. Accordingly, I locate middle ground moments at distinct spaces “at the margins” of empire: peripheral areas both along external frontiers (such as western Xinjiang) and interior to the realm, positioned at the juncture of physiographic macroregions and multiple provinces (such as the Hubei-Shaanxi-Sichuan border region). These were “persistent” boundaries, fringes precisely because their environmental conditions made them inimical to intensive agriculture, concentrated settlement, and sustained imperial state administration. Typically, such areas were also “regions of refuges” with traditions of resistance to external control, such as indigene political diffusion, mobility, and oral traditions (James Scott’s upland “art of not being governed”), and/or heterodox Han Chinese religions, secret societies, and messianic beliefs.22 Such peripheries were, to a significant extent, defined by their seclusion. In times of peace, they were loosely controlled, with the state focused on security

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and reliant on the assistance of local elites.23 In times of crisis, government authority faded, and the regions might revert to “nonstate spaces.” Geographic conditions thus grounded a need for, and long-term practices of, political, economic, and cultural exchange that made intergroup accommodation common in local life. From the eighteenth century, however, expansion of commercial networks, strengthened administrative incorporation, and an unprecedented spike in population movement had also strengthened the linkages of such boundaries to the Qing imperial interior, while simultaneously disrupting pre-existing social and cultural conditions. Being a physical periphery was not, however, tantamount to either being a middle ground or shaping a “middle ground moment.” This required, more specifically, the presence of multiple groups and circumstances of intensified isolated turmoil in which none of these groups (including imperial representatives) were in a stable position of dominance and most or all found it necessary, even to their very survival, to be open and adjust to others. This certainly was not the situation of all Qing borderlands at all times, but it was the situation of some regions at some junctures of rapid change, regional crisis, or administrative breakdown – spanning years or decades rather than centuries. In these “moments,” I posit, we find conditions in which encounter was more clearly both event and creation. The adapted processes of exchange that ensued worked toward shaping a common, mutually comprehensible, and mutually effacing local culture pragmatically addressed to the needs of that moment, if not always welcomed by the larger Chinese regime. How did this occur in specific later Qing borderlands? The following discussion will briefly examine troubled fringe regions in southern Shaanxi, western Hunan, and southwestern Xinjiang. These cases are chosen based on my past research and limitation of knowledge, being areas with which I have some familiarity, and are neither the only nor perhaps even best instances available. This said, I would argue that they are indicative as examples of how middle ground moments – and, more broadly, accommodation dynamics – were relevant to both the development of Qing peripheries and our understanding of them.

The Dabashan highlands and the Qing population boom The first case discussed is the Dabashan highlands of southern Shaanxi in a time of rapid population growth over the 1770s and 1780s. This region, a section of both China’s Central Mountain Belt and the southern Han River highlands, was a tract of dense forests and steep peaks spanning the southern edges of Shaanxi province’s Hanzhong (漢中) and Xing’an (興安) prefectures, reaching over provincial borders south into Sichuan and east into Hubei. An external frontier in ancient times, over two millennia it endured as an obdurate internal physiographic boundary linking the Upper Yangzi, Middle Yangzi, Northwest, and North China macroregions: a land repeatedly settled and lost, with a storied history of heresy, violence, and rebellion.24 The region was resettled under imperial auspices at the turn of the eighteenth century, but even in peaceful

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times the Qing administrative presence remained light to non-existent, with vast highland departments or counties covering 1000–2000 li (里) of territory.25 Wensheng Wang calls it a “nonstate space” and “one of the largest administrative black holes” of late imperial China, being perhaps best known during the Qing period as a home for bandit brotherhoods and heterodox sects in the late eighteenth century, as well as a haven for intransigent insurgent resistance during the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion.26 Although a physically secluded space, the Dabashan environment permitted cultivation of New World crops, such as corn and sweet potato, augmented by the processing of local timber, bamboo, iron, and coal – products that could be transported into Sichuan, Shaanxi, or down the Han River to other lowland markets.27 The promise of its resources, combined with Qing population pressure and natural disasters, triggered a “transient phase of unchecked colonization.”28 By the 1770s, there was an exodus of “shed people” (pengmin 棚民) from Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, Anhui, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Henan.29 “In dire straits,” the Hanzhong official Yan Ruyi (嚴如熤) (1759–1826) observed, they “move[d] through the region, one after the other, in an unending succession,” mixing together indiscriminately in virtually every region of the mountains. Yan estimated that new residents formed some 80% of the area’s population.30 The historian Eduard Vermeer corroborates that “the registered population for around 1700 and 1823 show a six-fold increase in older counties . . . and a 30- to 100-fold increase in mountain counties.” Indeed, “in 1778–9 alone, over 100,000 refugees arrived in Hanzhong Prefecture,” many as “wanderers” (liumin 流民) who passed fluidly across provincial lines.31 These changes had a dramatic local impact. The rapidity, volume, and peripatetic nature of the influx – flowing into a territory of enormous size, scattered settlement, and limited taxable revenue – quickly outstripped the Qing imperial capacity from providing either sustained security or effective oversight.32 Local populations were also destabilized. The original inhabitants were quickly (and, in some areas, vastly) outnumbered by new residents. In addition, incoming migrants were divided by multiple provenance, and their social cohesion was further deteriorated by environmental conditions that provided bare subsistence and required continued and desperate movement within the borderland.33 The Dabashan periphery had become, to use Richard White’s term, a “world made of fragments.” Under these conditions, Wensheng Wang argues, the region developed into not merely “a dividing zone between China’s lowland cores, but a ‘middle ground’ bringing people, commodities, and ideas together.”34 Its seclusion and instability, furthermore, enhanced both “opportunities and needs for alternative forms of social organization, some of which may have become lasting characteristics of this mountain culture.”35 At this point, the reader might pause. The Dabashan was isolated with state representatives and an infrastructure of empire, albeit of limited influence. Its population was also divided and in turmoil, with no one group in a position of dominance, in conditions where mutual awareness was a prerequisite for survival. The composition of that populace, however, was virtually all Han Chinese. Is it,

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then, possible to speak of a middle ground when those involved were of the same ethnic grouping, defined by neither native-imperial encounter nor first contact? In this case and others, I would argue that it is possible, as contemporary “subethnic” and regional distinctions were also of marked importance. Recent work in the field of critical Han studies indicates that the category of “Han” (Han minzu漢民族) – commonly used in the twentieth century, as well as a frame for how we look back on past Chinese societies – developed its modern scope, coherence, and power as a category in the course of transitions from the late nineteenth century. In earlier times, particularly in peripheral regions, not only did dramatic differences exist between Han groups, but identity and culture were more firmly tied to native place association than ascription as “Han.” One was defined by the region from which one hailed, with its language, traditions, and customs.36 Such distinctions in the late eighteenth-century Dabashan were likely as significant as those that had existed between Algonquin tribal bands, such as the Huron and Ottawa, if not between, say, French traders and Native Americans of the pays d’en haut. To assume their sameness as fellow Han is to obscure pertinent differences, as well as the manner that interaction between members of these groupings could yield new adaptations. And adaptations did occur, arguably indicative of hybridization, flexible exchange and cultural sharing, albeit often dismissed in Qing governmental sources as ignorance or degeneration. Yamada Masaru asserts that land conflicts had sharpened divisions between locals and immigrants.37 These distinctions, however, were balanced by heretical sects replacing blood ties with fictive kinship bonds, as well as wanderers and bandits forming shared practices, such as “flipping coins and rolling dice, but not playing majiang or cards,” in the “enormous amount of gambling” of “wilderness markets.”38 At home, cultivators adopted the newly introduced crop of maize, emulating the “Sichuanese and Hunanese people [who] occupied the mountains and invaded the valleys.”39 Leaving home, virtually everyone in this borderland, “officials, gentry, and common people . . . carry weapons [such as “Yellow Eel Tail” daggers] so they can defend themselves without worry.”40 The need to survive in the mountains, a scant stake in the imperial system, and freedom to act led (typically poor, single, and male) migrants toward elastic contact configurations.41 Among wanderers, “they call together friends and those of a common ilk, declaring themselves ‘sworn brothers.’”42 Of the unemployed: “if they run into the Guo bandits (Guofei 嘓匪), they will join them to rob and pillage; but if they run into the government soldiers, they will assist in apprehension and arrests.”43 And within families, they adopted or claimed new kin, advancing practices such as women remarrying after the death of a husband (at the women’s choice, even to the first husband’s brother), husbands living with their spouse’s relatives, multiple surnames occupying common households, marriage of men and women of common surnames, and men and women cohabitating without regard to proper segregation. Such unorthodox action not only provided personal comfort and security in a troubled time, but also enabled access to available

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highland occupations, such as farming, mining, trading, banditry, smuggling, or soldiering.44 There was also elasticity in the formation and maintenance of other highland associations, such as native place groups, bandit bands, or heterodox sects. Blaine Gaustad, for example, argues that the success of the “White Lotus” religious groups in proselytizing occurred “precisely because they were based on the activities of independent preachers . . . who felt no need to legitimate themselves by appealing to a centralized and venerated leadership.” In this, “an inspired sectarian leader was free to follow his or her inclinations, drawing upon China’s other religions and ethical traditions, as well as popular culture, as he or she saw fit.”45 Doctrine was not transmitted so much as adapted in light of who local people were, what they knew, and what they wanted. Cheng-yun Liu observes similar flexibility in the Guolu bands, where hierarchy and ritual were shaped by rapidly shifting circumstances, as well as continually changing membership combining both locals and migrants. The nature of these adjustments produced ties that, in some instances, linked Guolu bandits, landowners, merchants, and yamen clerks – a source of alarm to Qing authorities.46 The middle ground perspective is thus intriguing for the insight it gives into regional history in the late eighteenth century. Qing sources often depict this period as one of moral deterioration. As Yan Ruyi put it, the migrant folk “lack the bonds of a common lineage or surname and do not adhere to proper rituals and ethics . . . their nature has been transformed.”47 Later historians such as Suzuki Chūsei, in contrast, emphasize social and economic breakdown leading in 1796 to the White Lotus Uprising.48 Disorder, criminality, and subversion were clearly in evidence at that time, but attention to accommodation leads us to look for something more: encounter and exchange as creation rather than simply degeneration.49 New, shared practices had emerged. As Kobyashi Kazumi (and, in a different context, Wensheng Wang) suggest, in this interaction regional people may have even constructed a distinctive multigroup “vision of community,” if one largely in opposition to the Qing state.50 This late eighteenth-century “middle ground moment” may have faded. Eduard Vermeer describes the pengmin migrants as “best understood as a transient phase of settlers on the (shifting) frontier, rather than as a permanent social class.”51 From the 1790s, moreover, the Qing government intervened to quell spreading rebellion, as well as assert a stronger orthodoxy and imperial controls.52 Regional transition, however, bore the stamp of earlier accommodations in the form of a highland society that constituted of bewildering collaborations, linking guolu bandits, salt smugglers, coin counterfeiters, factory workers, and upland wanderers, with social webs that spread heterodox sects to virtually every corner of that recessed world.53 As Philip Kuhn argues, the goal of Qing wartime civilian mobilization strategy was as much to retrace social lines, severing such links, as to isolate rebels.54 It is questionable, however, if it was ever fully successful, particularly as migration to the region resumed in force after the war. Local patterns of exchange – such as gambling, “mixed residence of wanderers and natives,” and

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unorthodox familial relations – continued largely beyond the reach of the imperial state.55

The Hunan Miao Frontier in the fog of war A second example of a “middle ground moment” on a Qing highland periphery, intensifying regional patterns of accommodation, occurred on the West Hunan Miao Frontier in the course of the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt. Richard White observes that, “in crisis the relations among peoples emerged most clearly.”56 Regional conflict – in which social order broke down, the imperial state intervened aggressively, and relations between Miao and Han peoples were called into question – was arguably one such crisis. In the “fog of war,” social connections changed in flexible and often unforeseen ways, leading not just to violence and support or opposition to the Qing regime, but also to cultural adaptation, new social linkages, and innovative exchange among those seeking survival and self-interest.57 The location and environment of the Hunan Miao Frontier paralleled that of the Dabashan. It, too, lay at the intersection of physiographic macroregions (the YunGui, Upper Yangzi, and Middle Yangzi) and along provincial borders, reaching west into Guizhou and north into Sichuan. This was a stretch of rugged mountains, cut by rivers, filled with distant valleys, and linked by a labyrinthine network of tracks and paths.58 The population had new settlers from Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Guangdong, as well as indigenous groups including the Gelao, Yao, and Miao.59 Up to the nineteenth century, the original inhabitants continued to exhibit strategies of resistance to external state intrusion (such as slash-and-burn farming and diffusion of political authority) that echoed those James Scott attributes to natives of the “Zomia” highlands. In fact, Scott includes the contemporary Miao, and the Hunan Miao Frontier, as a representative part of that enormous territorial unit.60 As historians have observed, the circumstances of earlier centuries, such as the physical isolation of this multiethnic region, state policies restricting entry into it, relative weakness of Han Chinese colonists, and tribal alliances with the Ming regime, suggest parallels with White’s middle ground model. By the late eighteenth century, however, conditions had changed. This was the result of imperial trends already observed in relation to the Dabashan. By 1731, the region had been more directly incorporated into the Qing system as a set of subprefectures (ting 廳). This, in turn, opened the door to six decades of intensive settlement that led not only to an unprecedently enlarged local population and intensified commercial links with the interior, but also an annexation of native lands, domination of trade networks, and marginalization of the Miao peoples; incorporation, as it was, came at a heavy price. The impact of this ascendancy, closing a nonstate space, is commonly understood to have triggered the uprising, as the Miao rebels themselves indicated.61 This said, the Miao Frontier in the eighteenth century was not the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, with its speedy muting of Native American voices. Western Hunan remained a remote region, and Qing administration

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retained modified (and shifting) policies focused on selective quarantine and aspects of indirect rule, especially in connection to the largely autonomous Miao villages in the far highland periphery.62 Under these conditions, significant longterm accommodations developed between natives and Han. This was seen in the expansion of marketing relationships, intermarriage, gambling, smuggling and criminal enterprise, devotion to common local gods (notably, the “White Emperor Heavenly Kings”), practices in connection to those deities such as the blood oath, and a growing numbers of hamlets with intermingled Han and Miao residents.63 Social lines may have divided the groups, but these lines were superimposed over decades, if not centuries, of mutual contact and interaction. In 1795, Miao clans of the five surnames organized an alliance galvanized by a mass outbreak of spirit possession, proclaiming a savior “Miao King” and “Wu King” sworn to regain lands lost to Han “guest people” (kemin 客民). What ensued were months of raids on highland villages, bringing fire and the sword, as well as (mostly unsuccessful) sieges on sub-prefectural- towns. The highland world was in flux and those that lived within it, Han and Miao alike, were forced to reconsider both who they were and who they were to each other. In the absences of an overarching system capable of compelling guidelines, churning with powerful forces in violent opposition, a temporary middle ground manifested itself. This shift was defined by an intensification of existing patterns of intergroup accommodation refashioned in light of the exigencies of the moment. Although the Miao Rebellion involved mostly Miao people, it is important to recognize that both sides of the conflict were multiethnic. There was a minority of Han who served with the Miao as soldiers, spies, saboteurs, and traders; and there were Miao loyalists who assisted the Qing army as mercenaries, soldiers, scouts, spies, and police. As indicated in imperial sources, including the “confessions” (gongci 供詞) of captured natives and “treacherous Han” (Hanjian 漢奸) collaborators, efforts at flexible exchange occurred on both sides, as indeed between these lines.64 In the Miao insurgence, recruitment often relied on existing social ties, as when the Miao leader Wu Longdeng (吳隴鄧) enlisted 20 Han from his village – men who apparently felt a greater connection with their neighbor than with a distant imperial regime.65 This relationship was then shaped through an appeal to the culture and beliefs known to both groups. One example was the use of the ceremony of “drinking blood” (chi xue 吃血).66 In this ritual, recruits were taken to a temple of the Heavenly Kings, where they smeared their mouths and swore loyalty, proclaiming that any betrayal would incur divine wrath. This blood oath more closely aligned disparate people who worshiped common gods, even if they had historically interpreted these deities in different ways.67 “Creative miscommunication” lay in effacing – or, as may have been the case, reinterpreting – existing differences to stress a common vision of spiritual intervention that encompassed both groups. A second example was the Miao leaders’ promises to appoint officials, including select Han supporters, as occurred with the collaborator Han Zhonglian (韓仲連).68 This offer, extended to him and Fenghuang subprefecture confederates with close ties to Miao villages, was not tantamount to giving actual

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bureaucratic posts, although it did directly reference the prevailing Chinese concept of an imperial system. Rather, it suggests the way that Miao leaders, guessing at the perspective of local Han, posed their own formulation, which was in turn accepted by cooperating Chinese as the basis for exchange. Perhaps the most intriguing example, however, was the Miao assertion that the “Wu King” was a transmigration of the early Qing general Wu Sangui (吳三桂) (1612–1678). During the revolt, four succeeding Miao leaders took on the Wu King mantle, in doing so claiming a connection to, and symbolic authority over, a famed Han Chinese challenger to Manchu rule, one who had briefly controlled the Hunan borderland in the previous century. Qing sources do not show if, or how, this claim appealed to Chinese supporters, although clearly such association with an ethnically Han regional ruler had the potential to both strengthen an aura of legitimacy and create a sense of belonging linking a range of borderland peoples.69 What the sources do indicate, however, is that at least some Han supporters, such as the Miao-appointed captain Liu Denong (劉得農), were aware of it and accepted statements by Miao leaders that “we are Wu Sangui’s descendants.”70 The shifting circumstances of the Miao revolt also created a sphere for people caught between Qing and Miao forces, necessitating reassessment of conditions and forms of contact, even as this contact might be presented as traditional. One example was a Han Chinese soldier named Lin Shengzhong (林生仲) who, upon deserting his post went home to find his village burned and family gone, later learning that his wife and mother had been sheltered by a neighboring Miao family of their acquaintance. The assisting natives, professedly guided by respect for shared regional ties, as well as obligations as “good Miao” (liang Miao 良苗), had taken in the refugees. They even lent money to the soldier, begging him for his intervention to protect them from the imperial armies.71 As in the Dabashan case, this suggests a social world unfolding beyond the imperial state, albeit responding to the challenges that the Qing regime created. If only temporarily, mutual survival shaped a defining context for encounter, reaching across groups to compensate for an eroded social order. It is clear, however, that attempts to extend such local ties to the imperial military were fraught with peril. Lin Shengzhong himself was later captured, investigated, and presumably punished as a “treacherous Han.” Similar consequences came to the Miao baihu (百戶hundred household head) Yang Guoan 楊國安. The baihu were multi-village level leaders whose task was to mediate between regional populations, as well as between those peoples and the larger Qing state. The practices of Yang’s local accommodation were evident when his entourage was stopped by soldiers in March 1796. Dressed in Han-style clothing, he travelled with his Miao wife, two Han Chinese secondary wives, and a train of conspicuously Miao carriers. Non-local Qing troops, bewildered at the sight, demanded that Yang slay a Miao servant to show his loyalty, and his son complied. The family, however, was still charged with collusion with the enemy. As Donald Sutton observes, this baihu was caught in the middle, between Miao insurgents (whom he had been fleeing) and the Qing representatives (who found him still too much like a rebel).72

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There were, however, natives who found common cause with the imperial state. This included the acculturated “cooked Miao” (shu Miao 孰苗) who lived together with the Han Chinese, largely adopted their ways, and even tonsured their hair as Qing subjects. It also included Miao rebels who surrendered and were redirected to assist the military pacification, most famously the baihu Wu Longdeng.73 This relationship was of vital importance. The Qianlong emperor had advanced a strategy of “using Miao to strike Miao” (yi Miao gong Miao 以 苗攻苗). And tens of thousands of rebels were convinced to turn coat, composing a force that broke the rebel alliance. In the aftermath, as the Qing redeployed its armies elsewhere, 30,000 Miao troops were retained for local policing. In later years, these troops guarded rural fortifications, and the “native officers” oversaw Miao state farms (tuntian 屯田) and communities.74 Despite the significant interaction between Qing representatives and loyalist natives, the subject has received almost no scholarly attention. An example of the accommodation dynamic at play, however, is found in the efforts of the Hunan scholar (later Shaanxi official) Yan Ruyi to recruit Gelao and Miao on behalf of the Hunan governor.75 With the outbreak of the revolt, Gelao tribes had briefly allied with the insurgents. Yan, hailing from west Hunan, approached them to change their allegiance, in doing so acting much like a local chieftain – sleeping together with Gelao chiefs, formally taking their heirs as his bodyguards, and guiding them to “smear their mouths with blood and vow never to rebel again.” With their aid, he further recruited two Miao bands linked to the Gelao, with whom he presumably repeated the process. Here again was local cultural action charged by conditions of uncertainty and need. It encompassed several groups, flexibly engaged aspects of shared regional practice, and initiated behavior in which the participants guessed at what others expected and acted accordingly, having the innovation serve as a basis for further cooperation. That is, the Gelao likely did not fully understand how the Hunan governor expected imperial subjects to act. Likewise, Yan did not fully comprehend the culture and etiquette of the Gelao. They merely pretended that they did, taking the steps that seemed to work, thereby building a specific dynamic of local accommodation – one that strengthened their bond, but was (at least at first) distrusted, criticized, and attacked by the regional Qing military. These indications of a temporary middle ground – or, at least, intensified accommodation – on the Hunan Miao Frontier allow us to see the Miao Rebellion as not just imperial pacification or ethnic resistance, but more profoundly as local experience. Relationships between ethnic groups, among martial contenders, and across the rebel-imperial divide were engaged and adapted in innovative ways. Understanding this prompts questions concerning the scope of the experience, such as that of the native loyalists who, to a significant extent, quelled the rebellion and implemented regional restoration. It also offers clues as to the tumultuous state of postwar life. The impact of intensified wartime accommodations appear to have shaped continued Miao resistance over the next decade, while also underlying the longer-term development of an acculturated Miao landed elite with strengthened political ties to the Qing Empire.76 It likely also sustained shared

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local relationships that continued to exist beyond the state (if dampened by the ethnic segregation policies), such as interethnic marriage and market exchange, Miao ties across the Hunan-Guizhou border, and religious practices of cattle sacrifice and ghost worship.77

Kashgar and the fall of empires A third, contrasting, example of a middle ground moment on a Chinese fringe was evidenced among the elite of the oasis town of Kashgar in the early twentieth century. Whereas the previous cases consider internal highland peripheries, and temporary intensified intergroup accommodation in the context of rapid population growth and local conflict, this case was dissimilar. Kashgar lay along a distant external frontier bordering Central Asia and was far less touched by Han immigration. I would contend, however, that it exhibited middle ground conditions, particularly in the years surrounding the collapse of the Qing and Russian empires, as the oasis – and its unsteady mix of Turkic, Russian, British, and Chinese residents – faced isolation, uncertainty, and crisis. Here, too, was intensified accommodation, drawing from existing interactions but fashioned into distinctive, local, and mutually accepted patterns. C. Patterson Giersch, examining the Qing Yunnan frontier, wrote of “the destructively creative formulation of ‘something new’ in lands where alien cultural and political institutions meet.”78 A similar dynamic was seemingly at play in the efforts of Kashgar leaders to keep the region from degenerating into turmoil.79 Southwest Xinjiang’s early twentieth-century Kashgar borderland was, like the Dabashan and Miao Frontier, a region remote from the imperial Qing interior. The nature of this inaccessibility was a consequence of its distance at the furthest edges of the empire, being over two thousand miles from Beijing, separated by rough roads, high mountains, and the foreboding Taklamakan Desert. Located in foothills, with the Pamir Mountains to the west, the Tianshan Range to the north, and desert to the east, this was one of the largest oasis of a vast arid region, a “lustrous green gem” producing rice, wheat, cotton, and assorted fruits.80 However, to refer to it simply as a periphery, ruled loosely by the Qing since 1759 (if with longer historical connections), is problematic. The region also had traditional links to Central Asian, Islamic, and Inner Asian civilizations, being an important stop along Silk Road trading routes. By the late nineteenth century, Kashgar’s strategic location had also brought it into direct contact with the Tsarist Empire, British India, and the Ottoman Empire – serving, in fact, as a locus of the “Great Game” struggle between Britain, Russia, and China. Accordingly, recent scholars such as James Millward and David Brophy have chosen to study it as a “crossroads” of multiple linkages rather than as an isolated boundary.81 Kashgar’s distance from the Qing metropole, regional significance, and proximity to worlds beyond China had an impact on local society. In the early twentieth century, the population was predominately Turkic Muslims. As Lady Macartney, wife of the British consul-general George Macartney, observed, there was in addition an array of other inhabitants, including Kyrgyz, Tajik, Afghans,

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Mongol, Tungan (Chinese Muslims), Manchu, and Han, as well as communities of British, Swedish, and Russian nationals.82 This group was connected by long-term patterns of political, economic, and social interaction, as indicated by the political cooperation between local Muslim beg officials and Qing amban government representatives, senior begs’ adoption of imperial cultural practices (such as growing a queue or appearance at Confucian temples), and Tungan Chinese Muslims acceptance of Turkic Muslim dress, food, and religious practices. It was also seen in Turkic Muslim traders’ embrace of Qing “protection” (himāyat), as a hybridized cultural conception, to secure local communities and extend trade networks into Central Asia, as well as regional Muslim thinkers’ engagement with conceptions of Turkic nationalism and Islamic modernism drawn from the Ottoman Empire and Russia’s neighboring Central Asian colony.83 By the turn of the twentieth century, the Kashgar region was also politically multi-polar. In 1884, Xinjiang had been established as a province, formally recalibrating most of its regions as civil administrative units. The effectiveness of new governance quickly deteriorated, however, and the area continued to be a distant territory whose officials relied heavily on the cooperation or local leadership of native elite.84 The assessment of one visiting British army captain in 1910 was that “Chinese rule was still carried out by bluff and had no strength behind it.”85 Governmental authority was balanced by Turkic Muslim merchant, educational, and religious notables, as well as a potent European presence. From 1882, this included the Russian consulate under M. Nicolas Feodorovitch Petrovsky, the “virtual ruler of Kashgar.” From 1890, it also included the British consulate under George Macartney.86 Although scholarly discussions of the political history of Kashgar in the early twentieth century tend to focus on political leaders, men such as the fierce military commander (titai 提台) Ma Fuxing (馬福興) (1864–1924), a broader view of local leadership is warranted.87 There were limits to the authority of official administrators and, as George Macartney observed of one circuit attendant (daotai 道臺) in 1895, local rule entailed a struggle “to keep up a semblance of friendship with everyone.88 The local modus operandi, that is, engaged calculated diplomacy, communication, and cooperation with regional elite. Such circumstances, moreover, appear to have intensified from the 1900s into the early 1920s, as the Qing and Tsarist Russian empires collapsed, leaving the Kashgar crossroads in relative isolation. As the research of David Brophy and others indicate, this region was never entirely severed from the outside world, politically or intellectually, but the shock of larger shifts was yet profound. The aftermath of the 1911 Revolution saw the collapse of the Qing’s Xinjiang provincial administration, 1912 attacks on the remnants of this administration by the Revolutionary Party (Gemingdang 革命黨) and Elder Brother Society (Gelao hui 哥老會), as well as subsequent assertion of nominal control under the warlord governor Yang Zengxin 楊增新 (1864–1928).89 Kashgar’s accessibility was impeded in the following years due to widespread violence, Yang’s need to consolidate his power base at Urumqi, and the strain of operating largely

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without a national government. Yang Zengxin also pursued a policy of isolating the region to secure it from the divisive influence of ethnonationalist ideas and Russian designs.90 To the west, further disruptions came with World War I in 1914, Kazak revolt in 1915, and the Russian revolutions in 1917. The Soviet regime that emerged required years before it could effectively reassert its interests in Xinjiang. As Justin Jacobs observes, “by 1921 . . . Yang [Zengxin] stood among the ashes of Russian and Chinese imperial authority in Central Asia.”91 And as late as 1923, Michael Dillon states, “Kashgar was isolated from Urumqi as overland travel routes and postal communications were poor; to a great extent the city functioned as an independent kingdom.”92 If Xinjiang was left largely to its own devices to manage its survival, so, too, was the Kashgar oasis. And here we return to the concept of the middle ground. In the region’s multiethnic climate of seclusion, multiple powers, and need to avert chaos, local affairs were the concern of those with the wherewithal to address them, even representatives of foreign nations. Claremont Shrine and Pamela Nightingale note that “it suited both the Chinese and leading members of the Turki community to work together to maintain the status quo.”93 As Shrine, the British consul-general 1922–1924, also observed: “How strange the workings of fate, by which a Christian diplomat collaborated almost unconsciously with a Confucian Mandarin in saving his province from the alternatives of foreign domination or chaos.”94 Keeping order, however, required not just cooperation as encounter, but also contact and creative adaptation. To get a sense of how this occurred, I draw evidence from the travel writing and personal accounts of European observers, sources offering a local focus and degree of detail generally not found in Chinese-language sources. Considerable interaction between Kashgar elite occurred in the early twentieth century. This included formal visits, as in business between the British and Russian consulates (separated by a distance of 15 minutes by foot), as well as the British consuls’ “ceremonious calls” with “the chief Muhammadan religious and legal luminaries, the Yamen Begs and two or three of the wealthiest merchants engaged in Russian trade.”95 There were also “frequent calls” between Chinese and European dignitaries. In her memoir of 14 years in the Kashgar consulate, Lady Macartney describes these affairs as generally routine, but shot with surprising interactions. She recounts, for example, how a Chinese officer, “Colonel” (xietai 協台) Yang, habitually held hands with George Macartney, “swinging them as they walked.” “The custom,” she notes drily, “seems to be reserved by the Chinese as a special mark of friendship for a foreigner, for they do not do it among themselves.” George Macartney fully understood the situation, and accepted Yang’s practice with “the utmost solemnity.”96 That is to say, Chinese officials did not hold hands, and British officials did not either, yet there these distinguished Kashgar leaders were . . . holding hands. It seems precisely the kind of creative miscommunication described by Richard White. As Claremont Shrine wrote, Kashgar also had a “society” that “consisted of the Chinese official world, the Swedish Mission, the Russian colony, and the British Consulate-General.”97 Within it, “the official and foreign community met

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frequently and on the most friendly terms” with the circuit attendant, magistrates of the old and new cities, postmaster, master of the mint, Russian consulategeneral, and British consulate-general commonly in attendance.98 The exchanges of this society included outings, tennis, or home visits, as seen in Lady Macartney’s soirees with prominent European, Chinese, and Turkic women.99 Most common, however, were rounds of dinner parties hosted by European diplomats, Chinese officials, and “leading Turki merchants.”100 Banquets provided sites of fascinating cultural accommodation. When Lady Macartney organized a New Year’s party in 1915, for instance, she carefully arranged the guests, separating Turkic Muslims from Han but bridged by the consulate staff.101 “Russian, English, Swedish, French, Chinese, Turki, Hindustani, and Persian” were spoken at such engagements, with people positioned to provide translation.102 Dishes served, moreover, ranged from Western pork fritters and baked mutton to Chinese Swallow’s Nest Soup and sea slugs, often with both chopsticks and western cutlery used.103 Drinks, offered to the sounds of “European airs” on the gramophone, might include vodka, wine, or distilled spirits, with rounds of “finger-out” (guess fingers) drinking games.104 Hybridization was also evident in party fashion, as when a Chinese military commander arrived to the British consulate “wearing a black frock coat, flowered waistcoat, tight black silk trousers . . . a bowler hat, and . . . his bright green tie was tied round the top of his collar” – a failed guess at European garb that was yet accepted as appropriate in that context.105 These social encounters, literally and metaphorically “handshakes [between] Chinese and English,” provided a means not just for contact, but for shared communication and understanding that created the basis of (in Richard White’s words) a “common, mutually comprehensible world.”106 That is, it served the purpose of allowing local elites to know one another and thereby engage more effectively in matters of mutual local interest.107 This is suggested in 1896, for example, when the threat of a Tungun revolt and the spread of the Elder Brothers Society led to security negotiations between the Russian consulate and Kasghar circuit attendant, as well as a sharing of information between Russian and British representatives.108 It is also seen in 1900, when the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion incited fears of both an attack on the Russian consulate and Russian invasion from across the border, eased by Macartney’s efforts to promote moderation, avoid discussion of the Boxer issue, and keep up the “appearance of friendship” between all parties.109 The dynamics at play in elite relations were perhaps most vividly illustrated with the arrival of the revolution in May 1912. An attack by revolutionary “gamblers,” secret society brothers, and disbanded soldiers upon the yamen offices had rendered Kashgaria “more or less independent of the provincial government at Urumchi,” while concurrently pushing the region into crisis.110 Local officials were massacred, and many took shelter in the British consulate. There were further fears concerning the plans of the revolutionaries, as the Russian consulate stood on the brink of military action. Circumstances, however, did not deteriorate, in part due to a network of pre-existing relationships. Colonel Yang, head of

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the troops of the old Kashgar city, visited George Macartney to get advice and, through him, extend assurances to the Russians (who by this time were already in contact with Macartney). Yang also negotiated a settlement with the radicals, who he organized into a “New Regiment,” as well as selected replacement officials. In doing so, as Yang said, he “borrowed [Russian Consul-General Sokov’s] prestige” and threat of Russian intervention to convince the New Regiment to remain peaceful – an approached communicated to, and accepted, by both Sokov and Macartney.111 As the summer wore on, with flaring tensions between the Chinese and Russians, Yang turned repeatedly to Macartney for mediation and advice, as did representatives of the New Regiment. Macartney generally complied, not just counseling restraint, but on at least one occasion giving officials information on the local Russian military disposition to avert a conflict.112 This brief examination of elite interaction in early twentieth-century Kashgar, then, indicates a third Chinese borderland possessing state representatives and an “infrastructure of empire” that, in its physical and political seclusion, both worked beyond external nations and sited multiple groups roughly balanced to ensure survival and well-being. The exchanges that transpired resulted in distinctive local practices accepted, if not embraced, by these diverse inhabitants. A middle ground perspective illuminates this dynamic, casting local history in a discernably different light. From this vantage we see that local officials – even the maverick strongman Ma Fuxing – acted in the context of cultivated relationships with foreign nationals and Turkic elite. The British and Russians consulates, diehard international rivals, appear more like connected and concerned regional powers. And George Macartney, a well-recognized promoter of British interests, served as a force for local mediation. It is an intriguing corrective to received historical narratives centered on political or ethnic conflict, the Great Game, and (malicious) imperialist intervention. Less clear, however, is the effect that this “moment” of intensified accommodation had upon longer-term intergroup interaction and hybridization. Xinjiang’s tempestuous political history in the late 1920s and 1930s shows widening divisions between Kashgar’s Turkic Muslims and Chinese, Russians, Soviets, and Tungans (if not British), leading to the creation of the xenophobic, Shari’a-based “TurkishIslamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan” of 1933–1934.113 The rise of local “ethnonationalism” is connected to an array of factors, many of which signify how this case is unlike the previous two discussed, including reemerging bordering states (particularly the Soviet Union) more sophisticated technology, currents of panTurkic and pan-Islamic thought, and a (re)opening of a major trade route to the outside world. These circumstances curtailed existing intergroup middle ground patterns, although perhaps still permitting an impact on evolving intragroup interaction and accommodations within the region’s dominant Uyghur population.

Conclusion: accommodation in Qing borderland studies It can be contended, then, that Richard White’s middle ground model is relevant to the study of Chinese borderlands. The Middle Ground presents a precise

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configuration, and superbly conceived context, of culture-creating regional accommodation in lands at the edge of empires or states. If White’s specific model based on dissimilar conditions of North American Great Lakes history is not entirely applicable to analyses of later Qing circumstances, as I suggest, it can be adapted. This chapter outlines the modified approach of “middle ground moments” – approximate, if temporary, conditions of intensified intergroup accommodation and regional cultural production on isolated peripheries in turmoil. Such circumstances, it is posited, arose on multiple fringes, as discussed in the examples of rapid population growth on the Southern Shaanxi Dabashan highlands in the 1770s and 1780s, warfare and social crisis in the Western Hunan Miao Frontier in the 1790s, and isolation with the fall of empires in the Southwest Xinjiang Kasghar oasis of the early twentieth century. There is value in attention to this middle ground vantage and accommodation perspectives more generally. As Donald Sutton argues, “its advantage is to draw attention to productive, dynamic roles of the people at China’s periphery and to allow agency to these locals in the period expansion, and even gradual transformation, of the Chinese order.”114 We better see how the exercise of such agency in circumstances of urgency and political balance contributed to distinctive forms of borderland culture, as well as to longer-term patterns of group interaction. In addition, the study of middle ground dynamics, rooted in the local, offers a corrective focus to a historical literature predominately centered on frontier breakdown, imperial administration, rebel pacification, ethnic resistance, and Great Game politics. Finally, the perspective helps us move beyond the single-case approach in the study of Qing boundaries. In 1996, James Millward observed parallels common to many imperial fringes, arguing a need to better “consider the Qing frontier as a whole.”115 White’s middle ground model traces a dynamic that is in vital respects part of that whole. I wish, in addition, to advance one further point of relevance: the manner that adapted notions of the middle ground, and other configurations of the accommodation perspective, might aid communication across the contentious New Qing History and Chinese nationalist divide in Chinese frontier studies.116 The concepts of encounter and cultural hybridity are well recognized in both scholarly fields, engaged by many historians, if approached with different assumptions and goals. In such circumstances where (otherwise disagreeing) scholars are looking at similar topics in somewhat similar ways, the points of overlap have promise to frame questions, and allow answers, of common concern. What are the contrary New Qing History and Chinese viewpoints, at least in relation to Chinese borderland studies? One key point is that the New Qing History conceptually frames the Qing dynasty as an empire – an imperial system and phenomenon similar, and comparable, to other early modern world empires. As such a realm, the Qing is then understood as constituted of potentially similar political and social dynamics, if with differing specific historically constructed conditions. Accordingly, New Qing History scholars both allow the possibility that Chinese peripheries may have at times been autonomous and are amenable to the application of abstract models (such as imperialism and colonialism) to

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explain related frontier developments.117 They also tend to be resistant to the traditional Chinese conceit of “sinicization,” which assumes a very distinctive tendency for peoples at the edges of Chinese civilization to have naturally turned toward, embraced, and been transformed by that civilization. Indeed, it seems a trademark of New Qing History research to both avoid and challenge the sinicization perspective.118 The New Qing History approach conflicts with that of advanced by many Chinese scholars.119 The latter group asserts that the Qing was not an empire, or at least not one of the European or American mold. Moreover, in an echo of the sinicization assumption, political and cultural ties to the Chinese metropole had been attractive to border populations, China’s connections with its boundaries occurred early and were never truly severed, and the procedures and dynamics of this connection are part of what fundamentally defines China’s historical frontiers.120 In other words, the center linked to its frontiers “as the body is to the four limbs,” delineated by a central process in which peripheries (under the guidance of the state, in accordance with the wishes of local folk) deepened their connection as “Chinese people” (Zhonghua minzu 中華民族).121 These Sinitic circumstances are deemed distinct, even unique, being both not comparable to Western experience and sharing in a larger (meta)historical progression that would, or yet will, yield a unified and organically aligned nation. Hence, external Western-based models (such as colonialism or imperialism) are deemed to be inapplicable and efforts to artificially impose them are unwelcome. From a nationalist Chinese perspective, the concept of a strictly defined middle ground is likely also viewed with suspicion. White’s model, after all, conceives a boundary region as an external and separate place – one in which culture was changing, and being changed by, local peoples. Its processes may have been linked to distant imperial centers, but it was never definitively defined by them, with local exchanges that eschewed any unilateral transformation toward that center. White’s approach was designed to defy, or even replace, nationalist United States conceptions of the American frontier and, in this capacity, it offers a corresponding challenge to culturalist Chinese perspectives of assimilation or sinicization. It thus seems to conflict with fundamental assumptions, presumably opening it to challenges on these grounds. At best, middle grounds represented inconsequential bumps on the “long and winding road” toward full unification. At worst, they did not or could not happen, being framed by ideas that misconstrue fundamental circumstances distinctive to the Chinese condition. This said, we should recognize that New Qing History and Chinese nationalist perspectives on China’s historical frontiers, if at variance, are neither unrelated nor unconnected. The concept of accommodation is a common tool of historical analysis, if employed in different ways. Scholars from the People’s Republic of China assert that China’s borderlands experienced significant intergroup and multiethnic interaction. Early melding of disparate peripheral peoples, for example, purportedly created the original Chinese populace.122 In recent years, significant new attention has also been paid to the active role of non-Han border people in frontier processes critical to imperial China’s stability and development. This

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is seen, for instance, in Yan Yuda’s study of the Burma-Yunnan frontier, which examines not just control methods of the Qing regime, but also the assisting agency of tusi (土司) tribal chiefs in steadying the region and enabling stronger links with the interior. Indeed, Yang references the concept (if not full dynamic) of White’s middle ground to underscore the importance of that regional focus in framing local interaction and cultural exchange.123 New publications in China’s premier journal on frontier history, China’s Borderland History and Geography Studies (Zhongguo bianjiang shidi yanjiu 中國邊疆史地研究), have similarly examined a range of encounters encompassing native groups as historical agents, for periods spanning antiquity to the Republican era.124 Recognizing points of convergence is, I believe, vital to a shared discussion of China’s boundary regions. In this context, the leading question that might be asked in relation to Richard White’s model is not, “Were there middle grounds on Chinese frontiers?” That likely stops the conversation. Rather, it is, “What happens when we pose border history as local history – lands harboring multiple actors of significance – and what do we find when we focus on the interaction, cooperation, hybridization, and shared cultural creation of these actors in that place?” This query indicates a direction that can be (indeed, is currently being) considered in common and which promises answers of shared interest. In pursuing such study, we might then return to, or modify, middle ground or other accommodation-oriented models for insight into regional dynamics and their contribution to late imperial history. Doing so will likely not overcome the recalcitrant political divide that now separates historians devoted to similar studies. But if it allows a meeting point that profitably increases exchange on Qing frontier research, then it is yet worth consideration.

Notes 1 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix. 2 Richard White, “Creative Understanding and New Understanding,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63.1 (2006): 10. 3 White, The Middle Ground, x. 4 White, “Creative Understanding,” 10. 5 White, The Middle Ground, 52. 6 Ibid., 10. 7 Ibid., 52 (former quote); White, “Creative Understanding,” 9 (latter quote). 8 Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Introduction,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63.1 (2006): 3–4. 9 Philip J. Deloria, “What Is the Middle Ground, Anyway?,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63.1 (2006): 19. 10 White, The Middle Ground, xi. For discussion of “New Western History,” see Elizabeth Furniss, “Imagining the Frontier: Comparative Perspectives from Canada and Australia,” in Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, eds., Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006), Ch. 2; Patricia N. Limerick, et al., eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991). 11 Heidi Bohaker, “Nindoodemag: The Significance of the Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701,” The William and Mary

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17 18 19

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Conceptual perspectives Quarterly 63.1 (2006): 23–52; Brett Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63.1 (2006): 53–80. Rushford, ibid., esp. 80. For a more conflict-oriented account, see Charles E. Cleland, Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), chs 3–5. Deloria, “What Is the Middle Ground?,” 15. Consider Leonard Thomson and Howard Lamar’s formulation of “a frontier not as a boundary or line, but as a territory or zone of interpenetration between two previously distinct societies,” as well as Pamela Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton’s call for greater attention to “native voices” and “local agents who sought to identify, differentiate, and negotiate with a real or imagined center.” See Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and South Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 7; Pamela K. Crossley, et al., “Introduction,” in Pamela K. Crossley, et al., eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 3. Concerning accommodation perspectives in the study of Chinese peripheries, see Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin, and Jean Micaud, Frontier Livelihood: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015); and Anke Hein and Deyun Zhao, “The Cultural Other and the Nearest Neighbor: Han-Nuosuo Relations in Zhaojue County, Southwest China,” Asian Ethnicity 17.2 (2016): 273–93. C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006). For the Miao Frontier, see Donald Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795–1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major Third Series, 16.2 (2003): 108–9; Daniel McMahon, Rethinking the Decline of China’s Qing Dynasty: Imperial Activism and Borderland Management at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2015), Ch. 3. Concerning Yunnan, see Bin Yang, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 171–4; James A. Anderson and John K. Whitmore, China’s Encounters in the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery Frontier over Two Millennia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), vii. Concerning discussion of Chinese frontiers of inclusion and exclusion, see Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1929–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 475–77. See also Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: National Geographic Society, 1940), 206. Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 25–33. Donald Sutton, “Violence and Ethnicity on a Qing Colonial Frontier: Customary and Statutory Law in the Eighteenth-Century Miao Pale,” Modern Asian Studies 37.1 (2003): 109. James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644– 1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). See also Amy Kardos, “A New ‘Frontier Thesis’ for the Northwest Chinese Borderland? The Reinvention of Xinjiang from a Place of Chinese Exile to a Land of Opportunity,” Central Eurasian Studies Review 7.2 (2008): 7. White, The Middle Ground, ix–xvi, and “Creative Understanding.” Deloria, “What Is a Middle Ground?,” 22. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). Concerning G. William Skinner’s macroregional model, see “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China.” Concerning imperial state strategies for managing

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24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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macroregional peripheries, see G. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems.” Both are in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977). See esp. 211–20 and 308–9. McMahon, Rethinking, 106–19. Wang, White Lotus, 59, 61–2; Eduard B. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier in Late Imperial China: Economic and Social Developments in the Bashan,” T’oung Pao 78.4–5 (1991): 316–17. Wang, ibid., 54–72, 58 (quote). Wang further describes the area as “in many respects an archetypal frontier region: a topographically rugged, ecologically challenging, politically divided, economically strained, and violence prone region with a reputation as an inviting bandit lair” (58). Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 308, 315; Leong Sow-Theng, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and Their Neighbors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 168–70; Evelyn S. Rawski, “Agricultural Development in the Han River Highlands,” Late Imperial China 3.4 (1975): 72. Vermeer, ibid., 302. Suzuki Chūsei, Shin-chō chūkishi kenkyū (Tokyo: Ryōgen Shobō, 1952), 71. Daniel McMahon, “Essentials of a Qing Frontier: Yan Ruyi’s ‘Conditions and Customs in the Mountains,’” Monumenta Serica 51 (2003): 320–1. (This translation is reprinted in the appendix). Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 306, 311, 325; Rawski, “Agricultural Development,” 72; Wang, White Lotus, 40; Liu Cheng-Yun, “Kuo-lu: A Sworn Brotherhood Organization in Szechwan,” Late Imperial China 6.1 (1985): 59–61. Wang, ibid., 25–6; Vermeer, ibid., 317. Yan Ruyi wrote that, “If they find someone from their native place, they will settle for a while, open land, and build huts, moving on after a few years.” See McMahon, “Essentials,” 322–3. Wang, White Lotus, 58. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 302 (quote). See also Wang, ibid., 25–6. See Mullaney et al., eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), esp. the introduction and chs 8–11. Yamada Masaru, Ijūmin no chitsujo: Shindai Shisen chiiki shakaishi kenkyū, pt. I (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku suppan-kan, 1995). For Yan Ruyi’s account, see McMahon, “Essentials,” 323–4. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 311. This is a quotation from the 1785 Zhushan 竹山gazetteer. McMahon, “Essentials,” 324–5. See also, Rawski, “Agricultural Development,” 68. Suzuki, Shin-chō, 86; Wang, White Lotus, 40; Sakai Todao, Chūgoku minshū to himtsu kēssha (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Jirofumi kan, 1992), 60; Liu, “Kuo-lu,” 75. McMahon, “Essentials,” 323. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 323–4; Leong, Migration, 170; Sakai, Chūgoku, 21–2; Dingyuan tingzhi 5:13a – 17a. The discussion of “debased customs” in the Dingyuan tingzhi (Dingyuan subprefectural gazetteer) hints at a highland world in which men often died young and poor, and women had considerable personal authority in matters of marriage and family. Blaine Gaustad, “Prophets and Pretenders: Inter-Sect Competition in Qianlong China,” Late Imperial China 21.1 (2000): 20, 23. Liu, “Kuo-lu,” 61–4, 76; McMahon, “The Essentials,” 172; Gaustad, “Prophets,” 19 and “Religious Sectarianism and the State in Mid-Qing China: Background to the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796–1804,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1994, Ch. 3; Kobayashi Kazumi, “The Other Side of Rent and Tax Resistance Struggles: Ideology and the Road to Rebellion,” in Linda Grove and Christian Daniels, eds., State and Society in China: Japanese Perceptions on Ming-Qing Social

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56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Conceptual perspectives and Economic History (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984), 231; Liu, “Kuo-lu,” 75; Sakai, Chūgoku, 22–3. McMahon, “The Essentials,” 172; Yan Ruyi, Leyuan wenchao (foreword 1844), 7:9a – 10a. See, for example, Suzuki, Shin-chō, Ch. 2, esp. 86; Wang, White Lotus, 62. For a recent effort in this direction, focused on the galvanizing power of state repression and the development of a “cultural nexus of nonstate power,” See Wang, White Lotus, Ch. 2, esp. 78. See Kobayashi, “The Other Side,” 231; Wang, ibid., 40, 48, 76–8. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 328. For related discussion, see McMahon, Rethinking, chs 5–6. Wang, White Lotus, Ch. 2; Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 312. Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 41–50. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier,” 317; Suzuki, Shin-chō, chs 5–6. For discussion of Qing imperial reconstruction after the revolt, see McMahon, Rethinking, chs 5–6, esp. 122–3. For examples of continuing local practices see the Dingyuan tingzhi, juan 卷 5 (quote 5:4a). White, The Middle Ground, xv (quote). See also Ch. 7 for discussion of the Pontiac Rebellion. For primary sources, including memorials and deposition of captured rebels, see Qingdai qianqi Miaomin qiyi dang’an shiliao, comp., Guizhou provincial archive (Guizhou: Guangming chubanshe, 1993) (hereafter QQMQDS), vols. 2–3. McMahon, Rethinking, 62, 87–8. Daniel McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontiers,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1999, 43–51. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 285. Concerning the eighteenth century history of the Miao Frontier, see Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1999), Ch. 4; and Donald S. Sutton, “Violence and Ethnicity” and “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” in Empire at the Margins, 190–228; McMahon, Rethinking, 88–9. Sutton, “Ethnicity.” Ibid.; Donald S. Sutton, “Myth Making on an Ethnic Frontier: The Culture of the Heavenly Kings of West Hunan, 1715–1996,” Modern China 26.4 (2000): 448–500; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 36–69. For discussion of Han collaborators, see Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 125–32. QQMQDS, vol. 2, 550. For an example of a Han man recruited by gambling partners, see 338. Many of the Han confessions claim they had been coerced into joining. See, for example, 337, 405, 438–84. QQMQDS, vol. 2, 550. For other examples of Han participation in blood oaths, see 186–7, 339, 340. Concerning the Heavenly King cult, see Sutton, “Myth Making.” QQMQDS, vol. 2, 339. James Scotts refer to such leaders as “prophets of renewal.” See The Art of Not Being Governed, Ch. 8. For discussion of the suitability of Scott’s model in this case, See Chapter 2 of this volume. QQMQDS, vol. 2, 339. Here Liu is quoting the “Miao King” Shi Sanbao, making it uncertain who precisely the antecedent “we” refers to in the statement. See also 406, 437, 508–9; and Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 129–30. QQMQDS, vol. 2, 275–6, 415–16. QQMQDS, vol. 2, 276–82. For a deposition of a local Hui man acquainted with Yang Guoan, suggesting Yang had, in fact, colluded with the rebel baihu leader Wu Longdeng, see 361–2. Concerning the mediating role of baihu in local Miao Frontier

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73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

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society, see Sutton, “Ethnicity,” 211–17. For a discussion of Yang Guoan, see Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 133–5. For memorials on Wu Longdeng’s defection, and the captured rebel leaders he offered, see QQMQDS, vol. 3, 112–14. See also Wu, Zhongguo, 397; Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 141–2. QQMQDS, vol. 2, 438; Wu, ibid., 404–5; Sutton, ibid., 138; McMahon, Rethinking, 90–7. Concerning Qianlong’s call for leniency and reward for Miao that surrendered and repented, see QQMQDS, vol. 2, 569–70 and vol. 3, 54. This approach was supported by the commander Helin和琳 (1753–1796), but later railed against by local officials supportive of Han settlers such as Fu Nai 傅鼐 (d. 1812). See Wu, ibid., 404–7 and McMahon, ibid., 90–4. For a detailed study of Yan’s recruitment of the Gelao, based on Yan Ruyi’s own account of events, see McMahon, ibid., Ch. 3. Wu, Zhongguo, 411–13; McMahon, ibid., 93–7. These developments were noted in a 1820s essay by the Hunan scholar He Xiling 賀 熙齡 (1788–1846). For related discussion, see McMahon, ibid., 97–9. C. Patterson Giersch, “A Motley Throng: Social Change on Southwest China’s Early Modern Frontier,” Journal of Asian Studies 60.1 (2001): 88–9. For a more detailed case study, basis of the current discussion, see Daniel McMahon, “Cooperation at Empires’ Edge: British Observers and Kashgar’s Early Twentieth Century Middle Ground,” Journal of Ching-Yun University 30.1 (2009): 183–207. Michael Dillon, Xinjiang and the Expansion of Chinese Communist Power: Kashgar in the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 2–5. See James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia: China Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). For a description of the composition of Kashgar’s markets, see Lady Macartney, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1931]), 41–50, Ch. 5. For similar descriptions by resident European observers, see Ella Sykes and Percy Sykes, Through Deserts and Oases of Central Asia (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920), 57–8. Concerning relations between begs and amban, see Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 100–1, Dillon, Xinjiang, 13–14. Concerning the cultural hybridization of both senior begs and Tungans, see James A. Millward and Laura J. Newby, “The Qing and Islam on the Western Frontier,” in Empire at the Margins, 113–34. Concerning Turkic Muslim traders and their connection to the Qing, see Kwangmin Kim, “Profit and Protection: Emin Khwaja and the Qing Conquest of Central Asia, 1759–1777,” Journal of Asian Studies 71.3 (2012): 603–26. Concerning regional thought and the development of Uygur ethnic nationalism, see Brophy, Uyghur Nation. Millward, Eurasian Crossroad, 136–58. Quoted in Claremont P. Shrine and Pamela Nightingale, Macartney at Kashgar: New Light on British, Chinese, and Russian Activities in Sinkiang, 1890–1918 (Hong Kong and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1973]), 162–3. Ibid., 24 (quote); Dillon, Xinjiang, 24. For a related discussion of this multi-polar political environment, comparing it to the Qing’s coastal treaty ports, see Brophy, Uyhgur Nation, 6–10. Andrew D.W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Chinese Sinkiang, 1911–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 21–8; Justin M. Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016), 53–63. Shrine and Nightingale, Macartney, 88; Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 10, 78. The transnational nature of Macartney’s life merits emphasis. Of mixed British-Chinese descent, he spent his childhood in China, spoke fluent Chinese, and was the son of Halliday

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Conceptual perspectives Macartney, a ranking Scottish-born Qing official patronized by powerful statesmen such as Li Hongzhang 李鴻章and Zeng Jize曾紀澤. Arriving to Kashgar, George Macartney was not easily turned away, an advantage he used to routinely visit the yamen offices over nearly three decades, building unusually strong relationships with local ambans. See Shrine and Nightingale, Macartney, 2–3. Dillon, Xinjiang, 20–1. See also Forbes, Warlords, Ch. 1; Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 114–22. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 183–5; Jacobs, Xinjiang, 56–60. Jacobs, ibid., 49–52 (quote on 52). Dillon, Xinjiang, 56. Shrine and Nightingale, Macartney, 20. Ibid., ix, 40–2. Dillon, Xinjiang, xxiii; Claremont P. Shrine, Chinese Central Asia (London: Methuen and Co., 1926), 67 (quote). Macartney, An English Lady, 41–2. Shrine, Chinese, 65–6. Ibid., 66–7. See Sykes and Sykes, Through Deserts, 46; Marcartney, An English Lady, 121–4. Shrine, Chinese, 66–7. These Turkic merchants included Akhun Bay and his sons, powerful wool and cotton dealers of the Old City. David Brophy notes that they “cultivated good relations with both Qing and Russian officialdom, regularly wining and dining the circuit commissioner and the consul.” See Uyghur Nation, 102–3. See, for example, Shrine, Chinese, 101, 206, 213. Macartney, An English Lady, 205–6. Division by nationality with interpreters between them was also a practice of Chinese officials, such as “Chu Tao Tai,” who had “made a special study of European tastes and manners, and as far as possible he tempered the wind of Chinese hospitality to the shorn Western lamb.” See Shrine, Chinese, 66–7, 81 (quote). Macartney, ibid., Ch. 6, 97–8; Shrine, ibid., 81–5; Sykes and Sykes, Through Deserts, 46–51, 72–3. Shrine, ibid., 82–5; Sykes and Sykes, ibid., 47, 72–3, 78. Macartney, An English Lady, 213. For the quote, see Shrine, Chinese, 82. These matters could also include transactions and exchanges to secure new production, commerce, and educational reform. For examples, see Brophy, Uyghur Nation, 103, 106. Shrine and Nightingale, Macartney, 85–7. Ibid., 114–15. Ibid., 188 (quote). For an account of these events, see Macartney, An English Lady, Ch. 7. Shrine and Nightingale, Macartney, 182–3 (quote 182), 188–201. Ibid., 197–200. For an account of these events, including references to fleeing Chinese officials being sheltered by local Kashgari Muslims, see Macartney, An English Lady, Ch. 12. For overviews, see Forbes, Warlords, chs 2–4; Dillon, Xinjiang, Ch. 3; Jacobs, Xinjiang, chs 2–3. David Brophy sees this as part of the process of Turkic Muslims “re-inventing themselves as a modern Uyghur nation.” Uyghur Nation, dust jacket (quote), Ch. 8. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 109. James M. Millward, “New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier,” in Gail Hershatter, et al., eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 124. The “New Qing History” grouping of scholars is often noted, if loosely defined. There is not, however, a commonly used equivalent category to indicate those

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(predominately Chinese and People’s Republic of China-based) scholars that oppose the New Qing History approach in favor of more traditional, Marxist-influenced, and/ or nation-oriented perspectives. The grouping “Chinese nationalist” is not precisely accurate, but is used here for the purposes of simplifying the discussion. Concerning New Qing History perspectives, see for example Peter C. Perdue, “Comparing Empires: Manchu Colonialism,” The International History Review 20.2 (June 1998): 255–62; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The New Qing History,” Radical History Review 88 (2004): 193–206. Examples from recent study of Xinjiang history include Millward and Newby, “The Qing and Islam”; Millward, Eurasian Borderlands; Kim, “Profit and Protection”; and Brophy, Uyghur Nation. See Millward, “New Perspectives,” 118–21. Concerning arguments for the distinctiveness of Chinese circumstances, see Cheng Chongda, “Qingdai qianqi bianjiang tonglun (xia),” Qingshi yanjiu 98.1 (1998), esp. 18, 24; Ma Ruheng and Cheng Chongde, eds., Qingdai bianjiang kaifa (Taiyuan: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1998), 42–65; Ma Dazheng, “Zhongguo jiangyude xingcheng yu fazhan,” in Ma Dazheng wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2005), 503, 511. Concerning the essential link of frontier to interior, see Ma, ibid.; Ma Dazheng, “ ‘Zhongguo bianjiang tongshi’ congshu zongxu,” in Ma Dazheng, ed., Zhongguo bianjiang jinglüe shi (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 2000), 1–22. Yang Yuda, Qianlongchao Zhong-Mian chongtu yu Xinan bianjiang (Beijing: Shehui kexue xenxian chubanshe, 2014), 8 (former quote); Ma Dazheng, Zhongguo jiangyude, 491–503, 510–11 and Zhongguo bianjiang, 1–4 (latter quote on p. 4). James Millward observes that modern Chinese scholarship, advanced in accord with the People’s Republic of China government guidelines and support, echoes a longer Chinese tradition of having frontier study “serve to strengthen the state,” to the ends of (as Chinese scholars themselves write) “protecting sovereignty over national territory, handling relations with neighboring countries and strengthening the unity of domestic nationalities.” See “New Perspectives,” 119. Ma Dazheng, Zhongguo jiangyu, 503, 510; Ma, Zhongguo bianjiang, 2–7; Yan, ibid., 9. Yan, ibid. For reference to the middle ground, see 7–8. See, for example, the research of Li Deshan 李德山 on the early development of Han culture (vol. 24, no. 3); Duan Hongyun 段紅雲 on “the formation of multiple trans-state peoples” during the Qing (vol. 25, no. 1), Wang Wenguang 王文光 on the evolution of China’s “Great Unification” ideology (vol. 25, no. 4); Gao Fushun 高福順 on multiethnic interaction and Confucian cultural identification (vol. 26, no. 1); and Yang Chaofang 楊朝芳 on the role of Republican era tusi chieftains in the construction of national borders (vol. 26, no. 3).

Part III

New Military History

4

Geomancy and walled fortifications on a late eighteenth century Qing borderland

In this and the following chapter, the discussion turns from an assessment of a range of “perspectives” employed in the study of Qing dynasty boundary regions to more direct efforts to engage topical “approaches” of potential relevance. Specific to this section, framed in the context of the New Military History, is attention to the intersections of borderland management, military defense, and imperial culture, as particularly arising in Qing governmental pacification of the highland Miao and White Lotus rebellions. The preceding discussions have observed the turmoil of the 1795–1797 Miao Rebellion along the Hunan-Guizhou “Miao Frontier” (Miaojiang 苗疆) borderland. Consideration of its disruption allows a means to identify both potent native agency guided by “prophets of renewal” and “middle ground” accommodations linking peripheral peoples.1 As will be seen in the current discussion, attention to Qing defensive planning in response to the turmoil, and the manner it was interwoven with popular beliefs, also offers insight into the imperial logic and methods that underlay contemporary regime goals to stabilize, preserve, and even socially transform a fraying hinterland. The focus here is upon a proposal tendered by the scholar Yan Ruyi (嚴如熤, 1759–1826), then serving as an advisor to the Hunan governor, for the defense and restoration of Pushi 浦市, an outlying region of the Miao Frontier. Critical to this area, he argued, was calculated construction of bao 堡 fortifications. The high walls of these compounds would secure merchants and farmers. Their particular positioning would also improve the area’s geomancy (fengshui 風水).2 Here one might pause. It makes sense to suggest forts in times of war. But why would the scholar bring up geomancy in the course of a practical defensive discussion? Studies of Chinese fengshui and military arts, after all, suggest that these topics are different and unrelated.3 Recent research on the history of Chinese military culture, however, indicates that military practice did in fact share a significant common ground with imperial culture and popular religion.4 Did a similar link exist with fengshui? How widely accepted was geomancy and what does Yan Ruyi’s reference tell us about the role this practice may have played in state-sponsored (if community-based) martial action, particularly at a moment of breakdown on a late eighteenth century internal frontier?

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As will be explained, there was a link. Traditions of Chinese geomantic siting and military arts share common concepts rooted in early Chinese thought, as well as orient these ideas toward compatible goals of environmental manipulation and regional well-being. Fengshui has accordingly had a small but significant role in military sabotage and defense reaching back to the Song dynasty (960–1279), with elements extending to pre-imperial times. In the late eighteenth century, Yan Ruyi’s reference to geomancy, and its connection to defensive fortification, was neither odd nor much out of place. This linkage appears to have been even further solidified in the context of strengthened eighteenth-century exchange between civil and military ideas, suggesting a way in which popular culture practices of the Qing heartland were enlisted on borderlands not just to support militarized protection, but contribute to larger projects of community ordering.

Yan Ruyi and the fortification of Pushi Insofar as the literatus Yan Ruyi is now remembered, it is mainly for his role as a Shaanxi official and leading local defense strategist during the White Lotus Rebellion.5 His involvement with fortification planning, and concern with both martial and civil affairs, however, started years earlier. When Miao natives revolted in west Hunan in 1795, he was an ambitious scion of a regional gentry family with strong connections to the Yuelu Academy in Changsha, who instructors recommended him to the provincial governor. Securing a post on that governor’s secretariat, Yan tendered several lengthy proposals for an army offensive, community defense, and post-war reconstruction. Among these plans were at least four essays arguing for expanded construction and use of “earthen fortifications” (tubao 土堡).6 Initially, the scholar was ignored. When the revolt broke out, the Qing military commanders had “no leisure” to consider the systematic building of defensive walls.7 Rather, “in great haste to win martial achievement,” they launched a roving pacification.8 Over the next two years, Yan watched in horror as that strategy led to financial waste, dispossession of settlers, and “cruel” Miao attacks. He repeatedly appealed to Hunan-Hubei Governor-general Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730– 1797), Hunan Governor Jiang Sheng姜晟 (1725–1811), and Pushi Assistant Prefectural Magistrate Zhou 周 to consider more appropriate fortification projects.9 It was in the context of this frustration – on the heels of a questionable Qing declaration of victory in early 1797 – that Yan Ruyi presented his plan to use bao to fortify Pushi. This region was a river valley set at the outer edge of the mountainous Hunan-Guizhou borderland, being relatively flat, suitable for intensive agriculture, and positioned along the Yuan River, with water links to the distant urban centers of Hunan and the Yangzi River. With these geographic assets, Pushi had grown into a commercial hub with a concentration of merchants, agriculture, and material wealth. The region’s economic strengths, however, were also its military weaknesses. Pushi’s open area, riches, and close proximity to Miao land made it an ideal target for raiders. During the course of the Miao rebellion, bands of marauders

Geomancy and walled fortifications 101 repeatedly descended from the hills to attack the town of Pushi and surrounding villages. The settlements outside Pushi Town proved particularly vulnerable and, by the end of 1796, the entire region had been devastated: homes were abandoned, merchants fled, regional trade ground almost to a halt, and local people “feared the Miao like tigers.”10 By early 1797, the Miao Revolt was officially quelled and Pushi Town had completed the erection of a large surrounding wall (also called a bao 堡). The Qing government withdrew its soldiers and sent them north to fight the White Lotus Rebellion. Yet a pervasive dread remained. Many merchants and residents still distrusted the Miao and believed these natives fully capable of mounting a new assault on Pushi. If they attacked this time, however, there would be fewer Qing troops stationed to resist them. Local security was, as Yan Ruyi put it, as frail as “as a stack of eggs.”11 The scholar had two basic goals for Pushi. First, he wished to build a viable system of defense based on local initiative and funding. Second, he wanted to ensure that this system remained as a permanent institution, such that the region would “experience good fortune for several centuries to come.” His means for achieving these goals was the strategic construction and deployment of four fortifications.12 In his report, Yan Ruyi discussed their placement. The walls around Pushi Town would serve as the foundation. Surrounding the city on three sides, acting as a defensive screen, would be three smaller forts positioned near settlements and mountain roads used by raiding Miao. Such an arrangement, Yan contended, would block rebels and shield villages while encouraging refugees to return home. Local merchants, secure once again, would then resume regional trade. Together, the four coordinated defenses would allow mutual support, a wider scope of protection, separation of population to limit disease, and a means to divide the strength of the attacking enemy. As Yan Ruyi put it: “when divided there will be four bao and when united there be one bao.”13

Characteristics of fengshui Yan Ruyi’s Pushi report provides a straightforward argument to build, man, and finance walled fortifications in order to increase regional security. Yet it is precisely in this pragmatic context that reference to geomancy is made. The scholar obviously believed his reasoning concerning fengshui was clear and compelling. To what, then, was he referring? Let us review some background and basic principles. As Maurice Freedman tells us, the underlying perspective of Chinese geomancy is that the untouched world is one of specific conditions with specific consequences, good or bad. Any change in this world, planned or unplanned, constitutes an “intervention in the universe,” something that “reverberates,” leading to new conditions and consequences.14 The challenge of geomantic practice is to identify bad (or potentially good) conditions and, as needed, devise changes that encourage the flow of positive qi, promote good fortune, avert bad fortune, and generally maintain “a harmonious yin-yang balance in the midst of constant

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change.”15 The associated techniques, grounded fundamentally in attention to “orientation,” defy simple classification. As Ole Bruun notes, Western observers have variously viewed fengshui’s eclectic analytical and operative systems as “primitive psychology, proto-science, pseudo-science, environmental concern, practical techniques for utilizing winds and waters, primitive magic, the essence of Chinese folk religion or simply superstition.”16 This thinking has quite a long history. The notion of fengshui (“wind and water”) is, J.J.M. De Groot tells us, “almost as ancient as China itself,” reflecting an abiding attention to environment in grave placement, ancestor worship, and divination.17 Early siting ideas merged with a larger conceptual world that also included notions of imperial divination, yin-yang duality, and qi energy.18 As Bruun explains, geomantic thought developed in pace with emerging philosophical and “scientific” currents. Zhou period (1027–256 B.C.) sources on grave divination reflected concerns of proper placement and orientation, yin-yang dualism, and the Five Elements. The Han dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.) flourishing of Daoism, alchemy, and astrology witnessed concurrent geomantic speculation using common ideas of the Twelve Branches and cycle of the Twelve Animals. The Six Dynasties (300–600) and Tang (617–907) periods, as a “golden era” of divination, yielded the first fengshui classics (such as the Book of Burial) and innovations with the Five Planets and Nine Stars concepts.19 The Song dynasty (960–1279), however, proved to be the seminal period in defining fengshui as a distinct branch of knowledge and practice. Neo-Confucian philosophers, such as Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) and Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), directly addressing the powerful metaphysical insights of Daoism and Buddhism, fashioned a synthesis to explain the interconnected nature of all things: Heaven, Earth, and Man. This unifying theory became the basis of the subsequent state orthodoxy and imperial examinations. It was also widely adopted by geomantic thinkers who found in it both an integrated system of analysis and a wealth of influential physical and metaphysical terminology.20 Disagreement still exists concerning the precise scope and nature of Chinese geomancy, but some basic elements can be identified. At the heart of this conception is the idea of qi (氣) – a substance variously translated as “air,” “gas,” “ether,” “breathe,” “wind,” “pneuma,” and “energy.” In traditional Chinese thought, qi is understood as the basic stuff of the universe, present in all form, including the human body and external environment (internal human qi and external worldly qi). Some aspects of this manifestation, moreover, are fluidic and the manner, composition, and direction of their flow is held to influence a person’s health, luck, ability, reproductive success, and general fate. As argued by Zhu Xi, who placed the concepts of “Heavenly Qi” and “Earthly Qi” at the heart of his philosophical system, “all men’s capacity to speak, move, think and act is entirely a product of qi.”21 In fengshui thought, the physical environment is also of central importance: a belief demonstrated by this tradition’s concern with the shape of landscape, its relationship to the cardinal directions, and the type of interacting qi (air, earth, or water) that accumulates as a result. Topographical features thus provide clues for

Geomancy and walled fortifications 103 interpretation.22 The carp shape of ancient Quanzhou City, for example, suggested this settlement’s vulnerability vis-à-vis a neighboring town shaped like a fishing net.23 A cat-shaped peak in Qing-era Macheng County revealed the raw power of the Lion Fort placed atop it.24 The fengshui significance attributed to external form and placement likewise encompasses the shapes and materials of the manmade world. Graves and homes, in particular, have been perennial objects of anxiety as their shape, material, location, direction, and surroundings are understood to affect not only their owners, but also later generations of the owners’ families.25 These human conditions, however, can be manipulated either by reshaping the landscape or by placing objects in that landscape symbolizing what is desired. The people of Quanzhou City, for instance, are said to have erected two tall pagodas to catch the “net” created by the neighboring town.26 Fengshui and the construction of Pushi forts Let us now return to Yan Ruyi’s proposal for Pushi. In listing the five anticipated advantages to constructing new forts, Yan Ruyi presented improved fengshui as the fourth topic of consideration, set between a potential increase in commercial wealth and enhanced ability to stop the spread of disease. The new geomantic configuration created by the forts, it seems, promised commensurate social and military benefits. The scholar was not a fengshui expert, nor did he claim to be, but he did grasp the principles of Chinese geomantic manipulation. In his Pushi proposal, he articulated them to explain the relationship between new fortifications and local fengshui: Behind Pushi is a large range of mountains. In front, it is encircled by a large river. This geomantic formation is referred to as a “prosperous place” (shengdi 盛地). However, the land’s strategic configuration of power (shi 勢) is dispersed. With the construction of the three forts that which lies in front and that which lies behind will be correlated, and to the left and right there will be circulation [of qi] collecting in the center. Residing here will incur good results. The geomancy will become even better. This is the fourth advantage.27 Yan Ruyi, that is, argued that the geomantic positioning of Pushi had great potential, although this potential had not yet been realized. The beneficial configuration of terrain he envisioned, likely in line with the thinking of the Jiangxi (Form) School of fengshui, was one in which there were mountains behind, a river in front, and a set of hills, running perpendicular to the mountains, on either side: land shaped like a giant armchair. Such a geographic arrangement was understood to permit a positive and free circulation of qi, spiraling inward to concentrate most potently at the center.28 The problem, as Yan defined it, was that the Pushi plain was too wide open. There were mountains in back and a river in front, as desired, but there were

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no hills on either side to contain or direct the circulation of qi. As a result, the geomantic forces were scattered and their benefit lost. In a sense, the land had not yet been tamed, as it had been further into the heartland. Given these circumstances, the scholar suggested that the fortifications might take the place of the missing hills to create a complete geomantic configuration. Strategically positioned in three places around the wall of Pushi Town, these structures would block and guide the flow of qi, with corresponding geomantic profit for the people of the entire Pushi region. The fortifications, that is, would not only provide added security against the Miao; they would also enhance the environment’s natural advantages to yield added good fortune and prosperity. Or, at least, it would give the appearance of doing so, potentially strengthening morale among the resident settlers, encouraging their contribution of funds and labor, as well as inscribing (or re-inscribing) cultural patterns of thought deeply rooted in the Qing interior.

Shared aspects of traditional fengshui and military thought Is there, however, more to this picture? Why would a reference to geomantic positioning and qi circulation be placed in an otherwise hard-headed discussion of defensive fortification? Was this happenstance – simply a loosely associated point to further press Yan Ruyi’s advocacy of bao fortifications and regional restoration – or did geomantic ideas in fact connect with imperial military reasoning? To the outside observer, there is little conspicuous link between Chinese military arts and geomancy. The essential foci of these traditions, after all, seem different. Chinese military thinking concentrates on speed, flexibility, variation, human effort, and the concrete results of clear and tangible victory. Fengshui, in contrast, focuses on long periods of time, stable balance in the midst of change, reliance on natural forces, and results that, if positive and harmonious, are nonetheless difficult to directly identify. Yet traditional Chinese fengshui and military arts do have common ground. They both share a conceptual foundation in Chinese thought – the notion of qi as a universal natural energy, yin-yang dualism, Book of Changes-based progressions, and Neo-Confucian cosmology.29 Fengshui and military arts, in particular, also share a fundamental concern with environment and its impact on human conditions. Specifically, they both investigate terrain, land shape, and natural resources and they both have sophisticated systems for manipulating these environmental conditions to protect oneself and/or harm one’s enemies.30 Traditional Chinese fengshui and military arts likewise employ specific terminology reflective of these traditions’ common origins, related focus, and shared cultural context. Consider the example of qi. The concept of qi reaches into almost every corner of Chinese civilization, united by an understanding that this substance’s shape, flow, obstruction, and accumulation influence virtually everything. The Chinese military classics generally discuss internal human qi and its relationship to troop morale, vivaciousness, and disposition to fight.31 Chinese fengshui, in contrast, generally considers external

Geomancy and walled fortifications 105 worldly qi, particularly that of air and earth, and how its flows are patterned by the shape and nature of physical terrain. The former is directed toward making soldiers better fighters; the latter is directed toward giving residents enhanced prosperity. What must be understood, however, is that both kinds of qi were (and are still) viewed as connected and mutually influencing. This is most clearly seen in fengshui writing, in which the proper manipulation of external qi is believed to create a beneficial impact on human internal qi.32 The idea that qi was more than just a matter of troop psychology is hinted at in the military classics. Consider a passage from Tai Gong’s Six Strategies 太公 六韜: In general, when you attack city walls or surround towns, if the color of their qi is like dead ashes, the city can be slaughtered. If the city’s qi drifts out to the north, the city can be conquered. If the city’s qi goes out and drifts to the west, the city can be forced to surrender. If the city’s qi goes out and drifts to the south, it cannot be taken. If the city’s qi goes out and drifts to the east, the city cannot be attacked. If the city’s qi goes out and overspreads our army, the soldiers will surely fall ill. If the city’s qi goes out and just rises up without any direction, the army will have to be employed for a long time.33 In this passage, we see a conception closer to that found in fengshui thought. Discussed here is the qi not of individual people, but rather of a fortified town. Its color and flow, however, is intimately influenced by the psychological and physical conditions of those who defend it. Tai Gong tells the observer to note this qi as its shading and movement will indicate the disposition of the town. The strategist’s depiction thus not only suggests the natural link between internal and external energies, but also that this link (the observable qi) is a potential source of military intelligence.34 A similar point of contact between traditional military and fengshui thinking is found in the use of the term shi 勢. Like the concept qi, shi has been translated in a variety of ways, including “position,” “circumstance,” “disposition,” and (perhaps most apt for our purposes) “strategic configuration of power.”35 Francois Juillien – who discusses shi in relation to Chinese strategy, politics, painting, and literature – defines it as a view that “reality – every kind of reality – may be perceived as a particular deployment or arrangement of things to be relied on and worked to one’s advantage.”36 In both military and fengshui terms, shi refers to strategic action upon environment to create an optimum position of strength. In military thought, this generally indicated advantageous deployment of troops and/ or defensive fortification. In fengshui thought, this indicated how to make best use of geographic configurations of mountains and water for the most beneficial form and circulation of qi.37 In all cases, the realization of shi provides advantages. In military terms, this entails creating an ideal position for attack or defense, with a latent power like (as Sunzi puts it) a massive log placed at the top of a hill: ready for a lethal roll

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at a moment’s notice. Proper martial positioning finds power through properly assessed and arranged resources. Successful implementation, however, is understood to also strengthen those placed within that strategic configuration. Sunzi argued that “courage and fear are a question of shi.” That is, as Tai Gong also observed, good fortifications improve soldiers’ qi, making them stronger, more confident, and more internally fit.38 In fengshui terms, the realization of shi similarly allows qi to configure in ways beneficial to those within its purview. The outcome is less specific but equally ideal – good fortune, health, prosperity, longevity, and (inferred if not always stated) security.

Fengshui and military action Yet, Yan Ruyi’s fortification discussion seems to move beyond the conceptual ground shared by Chinese fengshui and military arts to suggest that geomancy might be directly used towards martial ends. Such a notion of harnessing spiritual or supra-normal forces perhaps should not be surprising. Studies by Meir Shahar and Joanna Waley-Cohen indicate that this endeavor was not only countenanced in imperial China, but even willfully pursued when deemed beneficial. In the late Ming, for instance, Shaolin Monastery monks were engaged as advisors and warriors, and troops were trained in combined martial/therapeutic/spiritual Shaolin fighting techniques.39 In the 1740s, on the Sichuan frontier, the Qing military employed Yellow Hat lamas to counteract its Jinchuan enemy’s purported curse charms, “demon traps,” and rain spells, while unleashing these lamas’ own confounding weather magic.40 Geomancy, as it was articulated and accepted, also has clear military applications, based most fundamentally in the belief that the external milieu is potent and this potency can be manipulated.41 As previously discussed, geomantic techniques have the potential to bring great benefit, but in the right hands they can cause great harm. This was manifested in the so-called “fengshui attacks”: in essence, willful sabotage of the environment to create a geomantic positioning that weakened one’s opponent. Perhaps the most conspicuous historical example of such strikes was the desecration of graves. The founder of the Later Tang dynasty had the tomb of the rival House of Liang defiled.42 The late Ming Shaanxi governor ordered the destruction of the ancestral grave of the rebel leader Li Zicheng李自成 (1606–1645), wherein soldiers dug up the coffins of Li’s grandfather and father then obliterated their bodies. Such methods continued to be directed against rebel commanders throughout the Qing period, including against the rebel leader Lin Shuangwen 林爽文 (1756–1788) on the Taiwan frontier, less than a decade before the Miao Revolt.43 A related method of state sabotage, extending back to pre-imperial times, involved altering the configuration of landscape. The most common method was placement of symbolic objects – jade, towers, dirt hills – in strategic locations designed to obstruct the form and flow of qi beneficial to one’s enemy. In some cases, this action proved both vast and enduring, as when the Jin built Jing Mountain (Jingshan 景山) in Beijing to stop the advance of the Mongols. In another

Geomancy and walled fortifications 107 account, it was the Ming regime who built this hill to impede the “kingly qi” (wang qi 王氣) of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368).44 There are hints that the imperial Chinese armies even incorporated geomantic methods in direct deployment of troops. The Song Dynastic History (Songshi 宋 史) discusses instances in which advancing soldiers “used fengshui to shock and awe,” as well as the “fengshui of shoals and sand” to defeat river-bound boats.45 Similarly, the Ming general Wen Gongyi 溫恭毅 observed the use of the nanlong 難龍 geomantic configuration to augment the defense of military supplies.46 The utilization of fengshui as an offensive weapon endured to the end of the imperial period. Geomancers were recruited as advisors in the Qing regime’s fight against Taiping rebels.47 More, as J.J.M. De Groot wrote, when territory was forcibly ceded to the Western powers, “the Chinese government invariably selected ground condemned by the best experts in fengshui as combining a deadly breath with all those indications of the compass which imply dire calamity to all who settle upon it, even to their children’s children.”48 Such, he argued, was the rationale for giving Xiamen Island to the British.49 In light of the enduring potency of Chinese fengshui views, De Groot suggested in 1897 that European armies seize the Qing imperial tombs and use this threat to force concessions from the Chinese court.50 This said, the most significant link between imperial Chinese geomancy and military affairs – and the most relevant connection in Yan Ruyi’s Pushi planning – is seen not in attacks, but in defensive positioning. It is at the site of fixed fortifications, after all, that concerns of fengshui and military arts most conspicuously converge. Defensive walls in imperial China were positioned in the context of regional terrain, with factors such as width, height, length, shape, and material all determined in light of how they might take best advantage of geographic conditions: using, or creating, the most effective shi strategic configuration of power. Once in place, such defensive walls were generally intended to remain to ensure long-term stability. Martial positioning thus has strong potential to be combined with fengshui positioning to create, seemingly, an extra layer of defense: shelter and security in military terms, good fortune and natural/metaphysical protection in geomantic terms. The Chinese connection made between a place’s defensive walls and its environmentally inspired fate is both ancient and pervasive. Discussion of this link is most extensively found in historical accounts of the construction of cities and city walls, particularly dating from the Song period. The Annals of the States of Wu and Yue, written some 2000 years ago in connection to purported events 500 prior, offers an illuminating early example of this perspective. According to a passage of the Annals, King He Lu of Wu asked his minister Wu Zixu how to ensure peace and good rule. The minister replied that good rule starts with appointing military officers, filling the granaries and arsenals, and erecting city walls and moats. He Lu agreed, but added that construction required particular attention: though in building fortifications, store-houses and arsenals we really take notice of what ought to be taken notice of with regard to the terrestrial

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Simply having walls and granaries was not enough. The placement and preparation of these structures required a correspondence with “terrestrial influences” and “Celestial Breath” to achieve even greater and more far-reaching benefits. The result, in this account, was that land was investigated and a city was built “imitating the configuration of Heaven and Earth,” with land gates “in imitation of the eight winds of Heaven” and water gates “corresponding to the eight good qualities of the Earth.”52 Within the city was a smaller city with two gates: the Gate of Effulgent Sunlight, representing the portal of Heaven, and the Serpent Gate, representing the door of Earth. The former was built (admitting “the breath of the heavens”) in order to defeat the kingdom of Chu; the latter was constructed to subdue the kingdom of Yue. Nor was this all. The walls and gates having been built, further geomantic modifications were pursued: Wu [He Lu’s realm] being situated in Ch’en, which point of the compass corresponds to the Dragon, a pair of i-yao fishes with reversed fins were placed over the southern gate of the small city, to represent the horns of the Dragon. And Yue being situated in Sze, a point of the compass corresponding to the Serpent, there was over the great south gate a wooden snake, stretched toward the north and pushing its head into the gate, thus indicating that Yue belonged to Wu.53 Symbolic objects (fish, snake) were placed on the gates and positioned strategically to strengthen the geomantic influence of both the Wu city and state. In this account, we find a confluence of varied practices of geomancy in relation to martial concerns, as well as a convergence of the geomantic and military notions of shi. The gates were strengthened by their placement in cardinal directions, symbolic correspondence to Heaven and Earth, and capacity to accept or block qi. Symbolic objects were then placed upon the gates to augment the Wu state’s designs against Yue and Chu. The objectives pursued via these methods, moved beyond simple security to keeping “neighboring kingdoms in fear and awe,” even to the point of destroying or absorbing these rival states. Militarily, the Wu gates defended; geomanticly, they both defended and attacked. It is difficult to confirm the historical veracity of the Annals. The tale itself, however, indicates a sophisticated connection made between siting and fortification extending back to the Han dynasty, and likely much earlier. There is little argument, moreover, that this perceived link continued to be highly significant in imperial Chinese urban planning. Virtually all Chinese cities had walls, and the construction of these walls was planned in light of geomantic conditions, “merging Heaven and Man into One.”54 Certainly this was true in regard to the

Geomancy and walled fortifications 109 imperial capital of Beijing: a city shaped by careful geomantic planning. During the Qing, Beijing had no central northern gate “for fear of allowing access to evil influences,” and Jinshan Hill was enlarged beyond the interior Forbidden City to shield its northern gate.55 Beijing’s northern and southern walls also had a harmonious balance of convex and concave elements, with a wood tower placed on the Front Gate in order to provide an intervention between conflicting inner/outer forces of water and fire.56

Perceptions of fengshui in the late eighteenth century Knowing that traditional fengshui thinking was compatible with Chinese military thought helps us better understand Yan Ruyi’s reference to geomancy and strategic placement of fortifications in the late eighteenth century. But how widely were these ideas accepted? Did the readers of Yan Ruyi’s report (Hunan provincial officials and elite) or the recipients of his plans (fearful Han Chinese settlers on a war-torn internal periphery) understand the importance of geomancy? Would they have been swayed by, or at least considered, Yan Ruyi’s argument that it was beneficial? The answer is likely, “yes.” As Ole Bruun argues, although new schools developed, there was little change in fengshui philosophy from the Yuan to Qing dynasties. The impact of these ideas and practices, however, was profound and “much evidence points to divination becoming increasingly powerful in late imperial China, particularly during the Qing period.”57 This popular awareness is amply reflected in fengshui-related lawsuits, jokes, novels, and missionary accounts.58 It was, as Paul Ropp says, “not uncommon to find amateur geomancers among the upper class,” although fengshui techniques to aid survival and improve family fortunes was also widely practiced among non-elites.59 By the seventeenth century, fengshui matters had likewise drawn the attention of civil officials. One manual for local magistrates, for instance, stressed the importance of geomancy in initiating public works, such as the digging of ditches for town defense.60 This said, widespread belief in fengshui was not tantamount to blind acceptance. Condemnation of wasteful burial practices reaches back to Confucius and was echoed by Song thinkers such as Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi.61 In Qing times, Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610–1695) similarly castigated fengshui expenses, as the novel The Scholars (and contemporary jokes) lampooned its lack of rationale sense.62 Some in governmental and military circles, moreover, were skeptical if fengshui practices were effective. Emperor Kangxi (r.1662–1722), for example, wrote that the “Seven Military Classics are full of nonsense about water and fire, lucky omens, and advice on the weather . . . if you follow these books, you [will] never win a battle.”63 Such criticism, however, reflected not so much a rejection of fengshui, as fear that excesses harmed the public weal. Concerned observers, such the eighteenth-century official Chen Hongmou 陳宏謀 (1696–1771), may have derided its pretension and inappropriate delay of burials, but even Chen himself used geomantic practices in important lineage decisions, such as grave selection.64

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This pervasive attention to geomancy in the heartland of Qing society might be further framed in the context of growing linkages between civil and martial affairs over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.65 As Joanna WaleyCohen argues, there was a “militarization” of Qing political culture in which the Qing emperors and their imperial bureaucracy systematically dignified martial matters. This included introducing military values into civil institutions such as the Grand Council; integrating “references to war and martial values into aesthetic production” such as literary projects, architecture, painting, and ritual; as well as celebration of the Qing’s victories in a string of military campaigns in restive imperial boundary regions – the last of which was the pacification of the Miao Revolt.66 This continued at least to 1799 and the point at which, she notes, that later emperors “struggled in the face of growing difficulties to maintain the status quo.”67 It is thus almost certain that the audience of Yan Ruyi’s late eighteenth-century Pushi report knew and accepted fengshui. Yan Ruyi saw no need to detail the exact geomantic working of the new fortifications. Nor did he deem it necessary to explain the core concepts he used, such as qi, shi, and shengdi. This would have been common knowledge. It is equally likely that they accepted the juxtaposition of civil culture with military practices. As noted, the trend over the eighteenth century, and several generations of imperial life, was toward an interaction of these spheres. Perhaps in no way is this better illustrated than by Yan Ruyi himself, as a literati advisor providing recommendations for community defense, military pacification, and social reconstruction. For the communities of the borderland Pushi region, faced (as reviewed in the previous two chapters) with hostile native spiritualism, disconcerting collaborations with natives, and direct attacks on settlements, a stress on fengshui in the course of defensive fortification was probably comforting – not just as a layer of protection, but as an expression affirming the presence of imperial civilization. For regional officials, it was at worst seen as harmless, but likely also as an affirmation of an imperial order buttressed by a natural order again (or at last) brought into balance. Certainly, the very phrasing of Yan Ruyi’s report suggests that attention to geomancy was not extra, but rather integral, to larger governmental plans of regional security, community order, and limitation of the native Miao threat on this internal frontier. In the end, the forts were built. Relying on merchant contributions and gentry assistance, Assistant Prefectural Magistrate Zhou oversaw the erection of brick walls in late 1797, with additional ramparts, gates, and sentry posts added over the next three years.68 Pushi officials and elite had heeded the logic that bao were needed. Nor, indeed, were they alone on the Miao Frontier. In 1797, Fenghuang Sub-prefectural Magistrate Fu Nai 傅鼐 (1758–1811) had also mobilized local Han Chinese as irregular troops to occupy and defend a number of newly constructed highland bao. In 1799, following the death of the Qianlong emperor, the Jiaqing emperor presented Fu a new mandate to expand and consolidate this fortification system throughout the Miao Frontier, which Fu did over the next decade.69 That ambitious project, in which a reported one thousand blockhouses were built and strategically deployed, were used not just as the backbone of regional security, but

Geomancy and walled fortifications 111 as the foundation for a new segregated ethnic order that promoted imperial culture along both sides of the Han-Miao social divide.

Conclusion The scholar Nicola Di Cosmo argues, in accord with the principles of the New Military History, that attention to culture is essential to understanding military history. This requires moving beyond simply an investigation of war or battles to stress the “relationship between war, society, and thought” and the intervention of “intellectual, civilian, and literary developments” in the shaping of “military institutions, military theory, and the culture of war.”70 In considering late imperial China more specifically, there should be further recognition that civil culture (wen 文) intertwined with and gave expression to military affairs (wu 武) – a circumstance, I would contend, as relevant for martial affairs occurring on the Qing Empire’s borderlands as in its heartland. This discussion of geomantic ideas in defensive planning on the Hunan Miao Frontier suggests that fengshui constituted one such cultural “intervention,” emphasized in a moment of breakdown. As our review of traditional geomancy indicates, fengshui was not only an important part of the imperial Chinese worldview. It also shared significant connections with classical Chinese military theory, commonly recognizing the potency of environment, centrality of configurations of qi energy, as well as the critical role of proper “disposition” (shi) based on manipulation of environment and resources. Such conditions brought the use of geomancy into military action from very early times as a tool for intelligence, sabotage, and enhanced defense. The reference to fengshui in Yan Ruyi’s late eighteenth-century proposal for the building of bao fortification in the Pushi region was thus not outlandish. Indeed, attention to geomancy in this context hints at the changing nature of Qing political culture, in which imperial military affairs, literary endeavor, and popular culture had been coming into closer alignment. It is at that intersection that we see not only a fusing to address problems of social order, but it occurring in relation to a contested borderland. This resonated with responses of Qing frontier pacification common to the eighteenth century; stories that Yan Ruyi himself grew up with and referenced. In addition, it suggests a further focusing of the folk culture of the heartland in a martial context, as an ancillary and “aesthetic” element contributing to the stabilization, ordering, or even socialization of that borderland. Consideration of fengshui helped those who embraced the Pushi bao initiative – local leaders weaned on the glory of the Qing armies but officially separated from martial matters – to conceive how an association might at once benefit a border society, mobilize its members, and reinforce imperial patterns in a vulnerable fringe territory. As part of a highland community effort, it also presaged more extensive changes after 1799. The attention to bao forts, largely funded and operated by the local population, exalted militarization and solicited fuller support for essentially new forms of civilian-based local defense organization. The work would not only be expanded on the Miao Frontier, but implemented broadly in the

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highland pacification of the White Lotus Rebellion, in which civilian settlements led by civil officials (Yan Ruyi prominent among them) worked out systems for fortification and reordering.71 As hinted at in Yan’s reference to fengshui in fort building on the Miao Frontier, that is, the militarization of Qing culture seemed now to be fading into a “culturalization” of hinterland military affairs.

Notes 1 Concerning the Miao revolt and its aftermath, see Daniel McMahon, “New Order on the Hunan Miao Frontier, 1796–1812,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9.1 (2008): 1–26. 2 Concerning Yan Ruyi’s work on the Hunan Miao Frontier, see Yan Ruyi, Leyuan wenchao (hereafter LYWC) (preface, 1844), juan 卷5; Daniel McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontiers, 1795–1805,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1999, chs 2–3; and Daniel McMahon, “Identity and Conflict on a Chinese Borderland: Yan Ruyi and the Recruitment of the Gelao During the 1795–97 Miao Revolt,” Late Imperial China 23, 2 (2002): 53–86. For Yan Ruyi’s Pushi reconstruction report, see LYWC 5:25a – 27a, and Yan Ruyi, ed., Miaofang beilan (hereafter MFBL) (preface, 1820) 22:28a – 29a. Internal evidence suggests that the essay was most likely written in middle or late 1797. 3 My review of the literature on fengshui and traditional Chinese military arts finds little discussion of their common ground, either in term of their conceptual foundation or fengshui’s potential military applications. For exceptions, listing historical examples of fengshui use in military situations, see Liu Xiaoming, Fengshui yu Zhongguo shehui (Nanchang: Jiangsu gaoxiao chubanshe, 1994), 213–21; and Richard J. Smith, Fortune-Tellers and Philosophers: Divination in Traditional Chinese Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 157, 168–9. The geomancy literature is generally consistent in its presentation of fengshui as a tool for health and harmony. 4 See, for example, Nicola Di Cosmo, ed., Military Culture in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006); Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). 5 Concerning Yan Ruyi’s career as a mountain control expert, see McMahon, “Restoring the Garden”; McMahon, “Identity and Conflict.” 6 For these reports, drawn from Yan Ruyi’s collected writings, see LYWC, juan 5. The bao to which Yan Ruyi referred in his Pushi report involved walls (usually of earth or stone) constructed to defend or strengthen a strategic area. This could be a wall around a town, military fort, or fortified stockade with wide variation in size, height, length, shape, location, and materials used. Reliance on bao to protect settlements was known in Qing times and some structures had histories reaching back centuries. The Qing state famously renewed its advocacy of these fortifications during the 1796–1804 White Lotus Revolt. See William T. Rowe, Crimson Rain: Seven Hundred Years of Violence in a Chinese County (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), esp. 11–13, 128–35, 205; Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 42–50. 7 LYWC 5:18b. For a chronology of this revolt, see MFBL, juan 10. 8 Yan, LYWC 5:23b. 9 The reports in LYWC, juan 5 extensively discuss these problems and possible solutions. 10 LYWC 5:25a – 25b. 11 Ibid.

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18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

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LYWC 5:25a – 27a. See 25:26b for the quotation. LYWC 5:25a – 27b. See 5:26b for the quotation. Freedman, “Geomancy,” 7. Smith, Fortune-tellers, 131. Chapter 4 of Smith’s work provides a good overview of the function and impact of fengshui in imperial China. Ole Bruun, Fengshui in China: Geomantic Divination between State Orthodoxy and Popular Religion (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003), 2. J.J.M. De Groot, The Religious System of China, vol. 3 (Taibei: Southern Materials Reprint, 1982 (1897)), 932. Concerning the origin of fengshui, see He Xiaoxin and Luo Jun, Fengshui shi (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 38–87. For more accessible discussions of fengshui history, see Ernest J. Eitel, Fengshui (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1987 (1873)), Ch. 6; Stephen L. Field, Ancient Chinese Divination: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), Ch. 4; and especially Ole Bruun, An Introduction to Feng Shui (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Ch. 2. Bruun, ibid., 11–25; Field, ibid., 63–9. See also, Mitukuni Yosida, “The Chinese Conception of Nature,” in Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin, eds., Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1973), 74–84. Bruun, ibid., 16–24; Eitel, Feng-Shui, 51–60. The impact of Daoist “internal alchemy” and meditation, exploring the sympathetic relationship between the internal and external world, proved particularly influential. As Stephen Field notes, for example, “the physiological qi of the Daoists and the geophysical qi of Prince Jin merged in the Book of Burial. See, Field, ibid., 68–9. Bruun, ibid., 25–8; Yosida, “The Chinese Conception,” 81–4. Bruun, ibid., 27. See also De Groot, Religious System, 935–6; Bruun, Fengshui, 3–4. “Pneuma” is perhaps the most apt English translation for qi, signifying the manner that this subsistence both flows and is intrinsic to myriad mediums and form. Concerning the importance of landscape shape in fengshui thinking, see Stephan Feuchtwang, An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2002), 2–4. For this story, see De Groot, Religious System, 977–8; Maurice Freedman, “Geomancy,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1968): 5; Feuchtwang, An Anthropological Analysis, 270. Rowe, Crimson Rain, 205. There is a literature on the topic of fengshui in relation to graves and homes. See, for example, Sarah Rossback, Fengshui: The Chinese Art of Placement (Taibei: Mingwen shuju reprint, 1987), esp. Ch. 6–8; Hong Pimo, Zhongguo fengshui yanjiu (Hubei: Hubei kexue jishu chubanshe, 1994). Fengshui divination stems from the ability to recognize significant geomantic configurations and interpret the outcome that will logically follow. Ibid.; Feuchtwang, An Anthropological Analysis, 270. LYWC 5:26a. Sang Hae Lee defines good fengshui as follows: “The starting point of fengshui theory is, therefore, that the site of a human dwelling must be located at the place where Heavenly qi and Earthly qi are in constant interaction and in harmony with each other – the place where qi is primarily accumulated.” See Sang Hae Lee, “Feng-Shui: Its Context and Meaning,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1986, 17, 189–90. Zhang Wenru, Zhongguo bingxue wenhua (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997), 281–316; Rossbach, Fengshui, 62–6; Liu, Fengshui, 369, 382–400; He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 38–87; Bruun, Fengshui, 272–80. For a Han dynasty reference to the connection shared by fengshui and traditional Chinese medicine, see Ji, ed., Jinkui yaolüe. For related discussion, see Smith, Fortune-tellers, 131. These topics are extensively discussed in the “Seven Military Classics,” especially the most famous – Sunzi’s Art of War 孫子兵法 – which has chapters such as

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35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

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“Configurations of Terrain” and “Nine Terrains.” For a translation of these classics, see Ralph D. Sawyer, The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). For a related discussion, see He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 147–60. Sawyer, ibid., 49, 60, 74, 121–3, 136, 155, 170, 179, 211, 217, 224, 234. This connection continued in subsequent Chinese military theorizing. See, for example, the late Ming general Qi Jiguang, Lianbing shiji 2:1a. Rossbach, Fengshui, 68–77; He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 160. Sawyer, Seven Military Classics, 75. For related discussion on this topic, in far greater detail, see Ralph D. Sawyer, “Martial Prognostication,” in Military Culture, 45–64. Even with attention to clouds, it is not entirely clear how they expected to see qi. As suggested by Song theories of landscape painting, in which depiction of qi was a critical component, proper self-cultivation offered a solution. Methods included “revolving [one’s] thoughts and preparing [one’s] brushes” and “being in touch with divinity (shen 神).” See Yosida, “The Chinese Concept of Nature,” 88–9. Sawyer, Seven Military Classics, 429–32. Other translations of qi are “energy,” “latent energy,” “combined energy,” “situation,” “formation,” “power,” and “strategic power.” Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, Janet Lloyd, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1995), cover, 11–12. For his discussion of fengshui, see 92–3. Sawyer, Seven Military Classics, 61, 156, 165, 268, 334, 424–32; He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 152. For a discussion of the role of shi in Chinese military thinking, see William H. Mott and Jae Chang Kim, The Philosophy of Chinese Military Culture: Shih vs. Li (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2006). Sawyer, ibid., 74, 165, 334. See Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery. The use of Shaolin monks as trainers or troops was episodic – most prevalent in the late Ming, but regarded with “ambivalence” in the Qing. See Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War, 57–61. Freedman, “Geomancy,” 7. De Groot, Religious System, 1052. Ibid., 1051–2; Liu, Fengshu yu Zhongguo, 216–17; Eitel, Feng-Shui, 66–7. For a story of an attack on the ancestral grave of the first Sui (581–618) emperor, see Bruun, An Introduction, 22–3; Eitel, op. cit., 60. The late Ming rebel leaders Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong were said to have employed similar methods of geomantic sabotage. Richard Smith recounts stories of nineteenth century attacks on the graves of Taiping rebel leaders, as well as Empress Cixi’s alteration of an imperial grave to prevent a rival emperor from being born. See Fortune-tellers, 157–8. For a related story of a fengshuiguided attack on Qing authority and the Manchu’s fengshui-inspired retaliation, see Wolfram Eberhard, ed., Folktales of China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 77–9. Liu, Fengshui yu Zhongguo, 218–19. For a discussion of the role of geomancy in Beijing urban planning, see Hok-lam Chan, Legends of the Building of Old Peking (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008), chs 1–2. Malicious use of fengshui was not limited to the imperial state. There is also a folk tradition of “bad geomancy” (huai fengshui 壞風水) which most commonly involves grave and house sabotage. See, for example, Wolfram Eberhard, Studies in Chinese Folklore and Related Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1970), 49–65; and Deng Qiyue, Wugu kaocha – Zhongguo wugu de wenhua xintai (Taibei: Hanzhong wenhua, 1998), 116–25; Smith, ibid., 168–9. Many of these methods drew from the Song carpentry text Lu Ban jing 鲁班經. Xinxiaoben Songshi (Taibei: Dingwen shuju, 1983), 4251 (juan 175, zhi 志 128), 13249 ( juan 450, liezhuan 列傳 209). See Wen Gongyi, Wen Gongyi ji (Taibei: Tawan Shangwu, 1983) juan 9. See Smith, Fortune-tellers, 157. One fengshui expert, Shen Zhureng, even joined the Sino-foreign “Ever-Victorious Army,” advising Fredrick Ward and Charles Gordon.

Geomancy and walled fortifications 115 48 De Groot, Religious System, 1053. 49 Ibid. For related examples of Qing efforts using fengshui to sabotage Westerners, see Smith, Fortune-tellers, 132, 169–70. Smith observes that Qing society’s fear of fengshui sabotage allowed Chinese officials to organize local people against foreigners and the perceived threat posed by their new towers, churches, railroads, and telegraph. See also Bruun, An Introduction, 45. 50 De Groot, Religious System, 1052. 51 Ibid., 985. This is De Groot’s translation of the passage. 52 Ibid., 985–6. 53 Ibid., 986. 54 Bruun, An Introduction, 31–2; Lee, “Fengshui,” 195–6; He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 144; Liu, Fengshui yu Zhongguo, 212–18; Kang Liang and Kang Yu, eds., Fengshui yu chengshi (Tianjin: Baijua wenyi chubanshe, 1999), Ch. 1. 55 Smith, Fortune-tellers, 147. 56 Ibid., 146–55. Another example was the Han and Tang dynasty capital of Chang’an. Its north wall curved like the seven stars of the Northern Constellation (Big Dipper) and its south wall curved like the six stars of the Southern Constellation, symbolizing Heaven. This was called the “Constellation Wall” (dou cheng 斗城). See Kang and Kang Yu, Fengshui, 19 (Chapter 1 discusses fengshui and urban planning over the course of China’s history). For related discussion, see Lee, “Fengshui,” 39–48. 57 Bruun, An Introduction, 29–30. From the Song, fengshui thought separated into the “Jiangxi School” focused on an intuitive analysis based on the shape of terrain, and the “Fujian School,” which relied on a more intellectual analysis using the fengshui compass. See Liu Pulin, Fengshui – Zhongguoren de huanjing guan (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 1995), 379–80; Bruun, Fengshui, 5. 58 De Groot, Religious System, 1042–56; Freedman, “Geomancy,” 5–6; He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 138–42; Smith, Fortune-tellers, Ch. 4. For examples of lawsuits protesting the disruption of fengshui, see Da Qing Shengzuren (Kangxi) huangdi shilu (Taibei: Huawen shuju, 1969), 141:7b – 8a, 165:23a. For literary references to fengshui in the Ming and Qing periods, see for example Shuihu zhuan Ch. 116; Xiaolin guangjishuye bu 術業部; Honglou meng, Ch. 2, 117; and Rulin waishi, Ch. 4, 44, 45, 47. 59 Paul S. Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China: Ju-lin wai-shih and Ch’ing Social Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 160, 189, 190. See also Lee, “Fengshui,” 131–2. 60 For related discussion, see Bruun, An Introduction, 30, 34. 61 He and Luo, Fengshui shi, 204–16; Liu, Fengshui yu Zhongguo, 371–80; Lee, Fengshui, 121–6. 62 He and Luo, ibid., 217–19; Liu, ibid., 376; Smith, Fortune-tellers, 159–263. Fengshui experts, in particular, were targeted as naïve, lascivious, corrupt, or just dumb. For a discussion of related jokes, see also Daniel McMahon, “Fengshui Humor in Late Imperial China,” paper presented at the Conference on Culture and Space Management, Ching Yun University, Zhongli, Taiwan (May 2010), 1–17; Freedman, “Geomancy,” 9–10. 63 For this quote, see Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 22. Concerning Kangxi’s use of Book of Changes divination to guide military action, see Smith, Fortune-tellers, 115–16. 64 Ropp, Dissent, 190; Lee, “Fengshui,” 132–4; William T. Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 98, 236. 65 Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Militarization of Culture in Eighteenth-Century China,” Military Culture, 278–95; Waley-Cohen, The Culture of War. 66 Waley-Cohen, “Militarization,” 280–90. 67 Ibid. See p. 295 for the quote. 68 Ibid., 15. Concerning fortification-building in the Pushi region, see MFBL 11:2a.

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69 See McMahon, “New Order,” 11–16. 70 Nicola Di Cosmo, “Introduction,” in Military Culture, 4. This discussion pertains most closely to what Di Cosmo refers to as “strategic culture:” how decision-making occurs, as well as the circumstances and ideas upon which it is based. 71 Concerning these events, see Xiao Yishan, Qingdai tongshi, vol. 2 (Taibei: Shangwu yishuguan, 1963), Ch. 6; Kuhn, Rebellion, 41–50; Susan Mann Jones and Philip Kuhn, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pt. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 132–44.

5

Fortified walls and social ordering in Qing China’s early Jiaqing borderland revolts

This discussion continues a “New Military History” focus on the intersections of Qing borderland management, military defense, and imperial culture. As argued in the last chapter, local defense planning in the wake of the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt on the Hunan Miao Frontier embraced popular culture notions of fengshui geomancy to enhance the security, morale, and social order of the Pushi region. It is suggested here that the infiltration of cultural ideas in early Jiaqing 嘉慶 (r. 1796–1820) martial organization, particularly in relation to fortification of civilian communities, was evidenced more broadly in the planning of the Qing government’s leading local defense strategists. This was seen not just during the Miao Uprising, but also more extensively in the course of the subsequent (and far larger) 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion. Among the most important imperial responses to these highland conflicts was a shift toward greater acceptance, and active recruitment, of non-military subjects to form tuanlian 團練militia, as well as build and maintain bao 堡 walled enclosures. Historians have observed the military effect of this shift, posing it as instrumental in restoring dynastic order.1 The social and cultural aspects of civilian-based fortification have, however, received relatively little notice. Although, as Nicola di Cosmo argues in his attention to “military culture,” new insights might be found in a closer look at how evolving civil ideas “intervened to shape the nature of military institutions, military theory, and the culture of war.”2 Consider that the architects and implementers of the wartime fortification planning were largely not soldiers, and that those plans consistently intertwined both defense and reconstruction initiatives. It seems clear that bao walls were intended to be more than a simple expedient to shield people and supplies. This essay argues that the fortification proposed in the course of the pacification of the early Jiaqing borderland revolts functioned as a vital tool for new social ordering. Bao, that is, served to concurrently isolate disruptive rebels and regiment Qing subjects, working (as illustrated with medical metaphors) much like an instrument for disease control. In conception and implementation, the essential focus of these structures was quarantine – to shut the “ill” out (or in) while shielding, constraining, and strengthening the “healthy.” Walls provided the physical barrier of separation, setting and shielding spaces within which intensified cultural correction would take place. In this way, they fit seamlessly with

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other state reformist measures that extended beyond defense or security to designs of imperial settlement, control, and inculcation.

Borderland revolt and local defense initiative Late eighteenth-century insurgency erupted along the inner peripheries of the Qing empire, if in different social milieu. The Miao Revolt, raging on the mountainous Hunan-Guizhou provincial boundary, was an ethnic conflict in which native Miao clans united to reclaim lands lost to intrusive Han Chinese settlers.3 In contrast, the White Lotus revolt – spread along the highland border linking Hubei, Shaanxi, and Sichuan provinces – was a conflict not of natives, but of scattered, rootless, and predatory Han Chinese. In scope and numbers, it was several times larger than the Miao uprising.4 For both conflicts, the Qing armies encountered difficulty when utilizing established military methods. In west Hunan, the campaign to apprehend insurgents and solicit surrender shattered the native alliance, but left lingering insurgency. In the “three-province border region,” sustained efforts failed to yield even this scant success. Rebels remained elusive and the rapaciousness of local soldiers and officials exacerbated, rather than curtailed, the conflict. Rural communities were thus vulnerable; homes were destroyed; families were uprooted; fields went to seed; people seethed in bitterness; and (later reports lamented) imperial “subjects were turned into bandits.”5 As disorder reigned on these borderlands, local people turned to their own defense. This began as early as 1796 as communities were organized by gentry, in some cases with the aid of concerned field officials such as Fu Nai 傅鼐 (d.1812), Fang Ji 方積 (1765? – 1815?), and Gong Jinghan龔景翰 (1747–1802). Militia were formed, walls were girded around towns, and forts arose along roads and strategic passes – mobilization funded by merchant donations, led by local elite, and manned by local stalwarts. The justification advanced for this action, as yet unsanctioned by the imperial state, was that residents would protect their homes more fiercely than soldiers, communities could provide necessary mutual aid, rural fortification would slow roving rebels, and there otherwise would be chaos without it.6 Reports of these grassroots efforts were communicated to superiors in the Qing bureaucracy but were coolly received. In 1797, pacification general Delengtai 德 楞泰 (1745–1809) acknowledged a need to “succor the refugees and impede the rebels.” He recommended that locals “be encouraged to repair and build earthen fortifications (tubao 土堡),” as had already begun. In this way, subjects would be systematically sheltered under state supervision and “to kill one rebel is to have one rebel less.”7 The notion of arming civilians, however, was anathema to the elder (retired, but ruling) Emperor Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1736–1795), echoed by many others in government who feared the border peoples’ potential to aid the enemy.8 Change came in 1799, with Qianlong’s death and the consolidation of power under his successor, the Jiaqing emperor. In the context of the “Jiaqing

Fortified walls and social ordering 119 Reforms” – a Confucian promotion of enhanced fiscal responsibility, public morality, and governmental integrity – pacification policy also shifted. Speaking of the White Lotus conflict, Jiaqing proclaimed that “officials have forced subjects to rebel” and “in all places good subjects have been pillaged, their villages burned . . . they roil in confusion and cannot but follow the rebels.”9 Given such circumstances, “good subjects” (liangmin 良民) – now indicating compliant regional populations – would be permitted to participate in imperial defense. Indeed, such participation was imperative if they were to avoid “confusion,” coercion, and collusion with state foes. Accordingly, Jiaqing praised a case in which locals had “dredged deep moats and erected ramparts of earth” to defy rebels and deprived them of resources. “This is a good strategy,” the emperor proclaimed, and he commanded that “village fortification” (cun bao 村堡) be extended to Hubei, Sichuan, and Shaanxi.10

Local defense and imperial objectives Civil fortification of China’s war-torn borderlands had a clear military purpose. It sheltered subjects from attack and protected homes and families, while mitigating a crippling terror that left highlanders scattered and prone to flight. As important, new walls deprived the enemy of resources such that insurgents had “nothing to which to return and nothing they can loot in the wilds.”11 “If the subjects have one more day of grain,” one strategist wrote, “the bandits have one day less of food.”12 The larger regional designs for militia and fortified walls, however, differed. In Miao areas, the objective was an interconnected line of fortification (forts, blockhouses, and sentry posts) that would divide settlers from natives. This partition was in later years to be organized and financed using the classic frontier strategy of “military farms” (tuntian 屯田), in which men were granted land to serve as both farmers and soldiers.13 In the White Lotus areas, where an extended dividing wall was not feasible, the goal was concentration of scattered highland populations in secure locations: a strategic hamlet policy of “strengthening the walls and clearing the countryside” (jianbi qingye堅壁清野). What should be observed in Jiaqing’s support of these local defense initiatives, however, was not just their military necessity, but also the manner that they spoke to Confucian social concerns. Fortification was the backbone of resettlement and all that it implied. “Subjects desire to return home,” the emperor wrote, “but have nothing to which to return. If they return, they have no food.”14 With walls and militias, refugees would now have security to rebuild, restore livelihoods, start families, learn proper teachings, and be thus vindicated in their contribution to the Qing cause. This path – based on an established template of dynastic reconstruction planning – suggested restoration not just of essential order, but of imperial civilization. Enabling this process was an array of interlocking and mutually supporting plans that accompanied fortification: baojia household surveillance, village policing, granaries, lectures on Confucian ethics, and promotion of agriculture and trade. Such defense and rebuilding measures were advanced in tandem in

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order to “transform good subjects” such that “far and near would be one body and above and below would be one heart.”15 A common metaphor applied to new defensive strategizing was one of Chinese medicine, in which society was depicted as a body, dissent as sickness, and compliance as health. “Defending against the Miao is like defending against an illness,” the scholar Wei Yuan 魏源 (1795–1826) said of the Miao uprising.16 The “rebels are like a disease,” literatus Zhou Yangpu 周鍚溥 lamented during the White Lotus Rebellion.17 Such portrayal of rebellion as affliction mandated accommodating forms of curative treatment. As the scholar Yan Ruyi 嚴如熤 (1759–1826) advised the Hunan governor Jiang Sheng姜晟 (1725–1811) in the course of unrest on the Miao Frontier: “since ancient times, when healing an illness, one looks first at its root.” He then recommended two strategic “cures” indicative of prevailing Jiaqing Reform views on pacification: isolating illness such that “it will not manifest any symptoms” and nourishing the body such that its health overcomes sickness.18 Specific prescriptions to effect this restoration were then required “modified based on [the doctor’s] own insight into the sickness.”19 As these medical metaphors also suggest, new local defense along these provincial borderlands was never regarded as just a matter of plans. When Emperor Jiaqing advanced reforms, he concurrently patronized Men of Ability: his “doctors.” Promoted to border posts and mandated to speak out were able field officials such as Liu Qing 劉清 (1742–1827), Gong Jinghan, Fang Ji, Yan Ruyi, and Fu Nai.20 These were not soldiers, but officials versed in both civil (wen 文) and martial (wu 武) traditions, whose early service had led to successful innovation of community fortification methods. Wary of the Qing armies, if coordinating with them, these administrators elaborated on the approaches they believed worked best, notably Fu Nai’s proposal for “rectification of the border” (xiubian 修邊) in western Hunan and Gong Jinghan’s call to “strengthen the walls and clear the countryside” in northern Sichuan.21

Isolating illness: bao fortification and the Miao revolt Turning to the case of the Miao conflict, how did local defense ideas play out on the Miao Frontier, particularly in relation to bao fortified walls? What root problems were identified and what curative “prescriptions” were offered? As will be seen, solutions were sought in a separation of Miao and Han peoples capable of isolating and eliminating disorder-generating “symptoms.” Tubao (earthen fortifications) and diaobao 碉堡 (blockhouses) served as the fundamental structure of this separation. A better definition of bao is needed. This term has typically referred to fortified walled enclosures positioned in strategic locations to enhance defense. As Yan Ruyi wrote of tubao in 1795, “some rely on mountains and rivers and some rely on town walls.”22 In highland areas, these were ideally built on level ground possessing springs and arable land sufficient to support several hundred families, prepared with a stone foundation and a circular wall of stamped earth some four meters high and 50 meters around. Dirt would be drawn from just beyond the

Fortified walls and social ordering 121 walls to create moats, with thorny vines planted beyond. Thus prepared, they had “strength comparable to a small city:” “arrows cannot pierce them, fire cannot burn them, and rebels cannot cross them.”23 Use of such walled fortification in China extends back over 4000 years, but came to particular prominence during the North Song 北宋 dynasty (960–1127), in the course of a “stockades and forts” (zhaibao 寨堡) policy against the Xixia 西 夏 kingdom. Organized in the context of a military farm (tuntian) network, frontier populations were concentrated in secure sites, where some 500 men per fort were provided fields and martial training. This militarized coordination of selfsustaining stockades allowed the Song to claim Xixia lands via gradual extension of protected settlements.24 During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a system of 24 bao was built on the west Hunan “Miao Frontier” (Miaojiang 苗疆) but was later dismantled.25 From 1795, Qing strategists such as Yan Ruyi called for its revival. As the frontier opened in the eighteenth century, permitting Han to migrate in and Miao to expand out, natives became scattered, impoverished, and bitter – grown desperate in a mountain environment ideally suited for guerrilla resistance. Restored walls, Yan claimed, would not just defend against attack, but also better regulate the region’s seething border society.26 As the Miao uprising broke out, Yan Ruyi presented plans for military forts to simultaneously reclaim strategic locations and encircle native insurgents. Soldiers were to start at the edges of the highlands, in places such as Pushi, and then push in along roads used by the rebels, building stockades at intervals. With mutual coordination and gradual application, the “fierce Miao” would be naturally fenced in.”27 Refugee and settlers could then follow the advancing line, settling around forts, sheltering within them, and contributing to their sustenance in the form of manpower, food, and supplies. This method, the scholar argued, “establish[ed] proper conditions for reconstruction.”28 Subsequent planning reflected much the same principles, albeit advanced on a larger scale. As Qing troops were moved north to fight the White Lotus Rebellion from 1797, local Han settlers had seen it necessary to see to their own protection. In response the magistrate Fu Nai, supported by the Qing court from 1799, established a border-wide system of some 1000 military and civilian-manned fortifications: “watch towers for observation, cannon towers to block the enemy, forts to gather families into a home.”29 This expanded fortification functioned not just to enhance military defense, but also to provide ethnic separation. Fu Nai, as Yan Ruyi and many others in the Qing imperial government, held that the source of local disorder lay in the unregulated mixing of socially and culturally dissimilar Miao and Han peoples. Accordingly, the restive natives had not only to be better controlled, but also physically contained to curb inter-ethnic alliances and Han Chinese interference. Fu Nai’s “border wall to restrict the frontier” thus focused on situating Miao in designated territory and then encircling this territory with a “Miao Pale” that demarcated, defended, and sustained Han/Miao division. Doing so served to “isolate the root illness.”30

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Fortified walls also structured an agenda of social correction and imperial “health” on both sides of the divide. As Fu Nai argued, “[Han] people can hide in the bao.”31 If given land nearby, they could then rely on forts to settle, farm, and trade. “Call back the refugees and build military farms,” Fu advocated, “disseminate weapons and tools, then command them to restore their livelihood.”32 In this way, “for several hundred li里 fathers and elders, sons and younger brothers, would be sheltered to produce and be safe.”33 Confucian logic suggested that they would then start families and naturally embrace imperial authority, ethics, and practices. The Miao, in contrast, were subject to a sterner correctional focus. New fortifications housed a system of subsistence and supervision in which natives were employed as tenant farmers, regulated by “Miao officers,” and educated by better-acculturated natives. In this way, authorities sought to “use Miao to rule Miao and . . . instruct Miao” such that “their customs change, families stabilize, minds become correct,” and the natives “transform into good subjects.”34 By 1812, the fortified network connected to military farms (tunzheng 屯政) had linked settlements, controlled roads and waterways, and systematically segmented Miao and Han territories. These bao were supported by some 23,000 acres of appropriated arable land, manned by 8,000 irregular soldier-farmers and 5,000 allied Miao troops. The militarized line, exemplified by the forty li 里 “Hunan Great Wall,” grounded a new order on the Miao Frontier that lasted to the early twentieth century.35 The result was a segregated and stratified mountain society, albeit one that largely lacked the security, clean divisions, and cultural transformation originally envisioned.36

Nourishing the body: bao fortification and the White Lotus Rebellion As rebellion ravaged the highland border of the Hubei, Sichuan, and Shaanxi provinces, Qing planners again turned to the solution of bao walls. Mirroring implementation of earthen fortifications in west Hunan, newly built “stockades and forts” (zhaibao) interlocked with an array of measures to promote subsistence, order, education, and mutual defense. These structures served the common function – at once, social and martial – of dividing, defining, and strengthening a chaotic borderland society. In this case, however, the region in question was far larger and populated predominately by a single ethnic group. Loyal Han Chinese subjects in these hills were mixed with numerous seditious, coercive, and drifting Han insurgents. Accordingly, defense required a different kind of quarantine: one in which the “good” (rather than rebellious) were to be sealed within walls. In 1799, Emperor Jiaqing embraced local defense initiatives and called for plans to enable community fortification. Responses came from men such as Yan Ruyi (now a Shaanxi official), Liu Qing, and Gong Jinghan.37 The ideas they offered showed much the same principles, logic, and technology seen in Miao Frontier fortification. Walls were to be of stamped earth surrounded by moats: a design simple enough, with materials accessible enough, to be built in extensively and in large numbers. The positioning in this case, however, was to be more

Fortified walls and social ordering 123 radical. Not only were “walls strengthened, but the “countryside was cleared” via forcible concentration of highland populations into centralized stockades – here planned as temporary relocation rather than lasting resettlement.38 These fortifications would shield locals, refugees, food, livestock, and tools. With expanded coordination between communities, they would concurrently provide defenders a means to harass and delay the enemy such that the rebels, exhausted and afraid, could be destroyed by Qing troops.39 In light of regional conditions, such defensive measures were deemed a military necessity. The enemy here was not the Miao: conspicuously different people with clan affiliations and home territories. Rather, the adversary was other Han Chinese: a vast pool of drifting and predatory settlers prone to aiding the rebels or becoming rebels themselves. The guerilla bands they formed lacked homes or independent resources such that their survival depended upon the illicit extraction of materials and assistance. Accordingly, the destruction of the insurgents lay in ensuring that extraction and collaboration did not occur. If the rebels lacked supplies they would starve; if they lacked supporters they would fade.40 Bao (the walls strengthened and the area within which the countryside was cleared) were intended to provide the space where this interference would occur. New walls, however, functioned for more than just military defense. In the three-province border region, as in west Hunan, fortifications also served to “establish clear dividing lines in rural society.”41 Such imperial separation was critical in this case, as authorities had little alternative means (whether appearance, language, or culture) to distinguish friend from foe. Insurgents looked the same as subjects, mixed with them, posed as them, and had success in coercing and subverting them. Bao physically divided – and thereby distinguished – the loyal from disloyal, “good” from “chaotic,” healthy from ill. The walls clarified a social morass, providing a tangible inner and outer partition that could be ascertained, defended, reported on, and gradually refined. Given that virtually the entire highland population was viewed as a diffusion of common traits and suspected rebel sympathies, bao concurrently functioned not just to keep the enemy out, but also to ensure the loyalty of those within. That is, local defense initiative, bounded by fortified walls, was “as much for internal control as external defense,” giving aggressive attention to the “unreliable,” “vagrant,” and “treacherous” folk within its purview.42 Measures designed to strengthen internal observation and regulation, “nipping disloyalty in the bud,” included hierarchies of fort officers, militia training, baojia surveillance, and careful oversight by regional officials.43 Under these circumstances, notions of quarantine became particularly significant. Victory was contingent not just on isolating “illness,” sheltering loyalty, and regulating deviance, but also on nourishing more dynamic forms of corrective “health.” As also seen on the Hunan Miao Frontier, defensive walls girded state efforts to inculcate and shape imperial subjects, evidenced by renewed emphasis on schools, Confucian classics, Sacred Edicts, and civic responsibilities. Gong Jinghan argued that only a combination of imperial education and control would ensure that collaborators were “afraid and not dare to be unrestrained and so can

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be gradually transformed into good subjects.” In this way, all within the walls would “unite together as one family” to support the Qing.44 Arguably, the ambitions of this effort advanced a step further. Bao walls, and the ordering practices they aided, sited a strategy of using “health” to overcome “illness” in ways that aggressively pushed the scope of imperial influence. Recall that the loyal and disloyal on this borderland were of one folk and, unlike on the Miao Frontier, planners saw a clear zero-sum relationship between them. As Gong Jinghan observed, “if there is one more subject, there is one less rebel.”45 Girding Qing subjects behind fortified walls reduced the insurgent pool. But this was only the beginning. Expansion of defense networks also progressively increased the loyal population. Herein lay a vision for comprehensive cure. Given time, the entire war zone could be encompassed by networks of sheltering and transformative walls. The inner would thereby replace the outer, the rebels would disappear, all would become “healthy,” and there would cease to be need for fortified divisions at all. The martial, if not social, effectiveness of this fortification initiative has been noted. Susan Mann Jones and Philip Kuhn, for example, wrote that the White Lotus armies “constantly in flight and cut off by a spreading strategic hamlet strategy . . . were hunted and destroyed.”46 The immediate impact of new community walls, however, may have been overstated. Contemporary critics argued that rebel forces, numbering over 100,000 at their height, were powerful and forts were weak, thus bao “helped concentrate people so that they might all be destroyed at once!”47 Strategists such as Yan Ruyi rejected this view, but recognized that the potency of rural defense declined as rebel forces became smaller and more determined: one reason why the revolt endured an additional five years. By 1804, however, most of the three-province border region had been “cleansed,” although some fortifications remained to guard against “scattered bandits.”48

Conclusion As Philip Kuhn observes in his classic study of Qing militarization, the aim of local defense at the turn of the nineteenth century “was never simply a matter of keeping armed rebels out.”49 It was, rather, a system of external defense and internal control inextricably linked to the designs and institutions of the imperial state. This brief discussion of bao fortification in China’s Miao and White Lotus revolts supports Kuhn’s insight, but suggests that Qing administrative plans for state-sponsored community mobilization on war-torn provincial borderlands had even greater social ramifications. In the context of the 1799–1805 Jiaqing Reforms, bao – a seemingly simple expedient to defend villages and guard strategic sites – played a vital role in new bureaucratic projects for sustained state ordering. Conceived and constructed in the context of overarching military farm and strategic hamlet initiatives, locally manned ramparts formed the stage for the realization of imperial rectification. Walls would not just protect and police, but concurrently strengthen state authority, secure livelihood, and gird orthodox education. Towards these ends, bao were

Fortified walls and social ordering 125 mobilized in specific response to borderland ecology, social conditions, national political change, and court patronage of a new and more martial breed of civil administrator. Contemporary pacification metaphors of imperial “illness” and “health” were not incidental to this development. Rather, they lay at the heart of a larger social vision aided by fortified walls. With the Miao revolt, fortifications not only separated Han from Miao, they quarantined natives – suppressing the “symptoms” of illness – in the context of a self-sustaining line that bifurcated highland society and strove for gradual acculturation across a policed divide. In the White Lotus conflict, in contrast, bao walls quarantined Han Chinese subjects (from Han insurgents), serving as a foundation to isolate dissent, strengthen control, and secure compliance. Here, the focus on “nourishing health” proved even more aggressive, with an agenda of mass transformation that would ideally eliminate the entire rebel population. Bao walls, thus, were more than just physical barriers to keep Miao from crossing or rebels from pillaging. They were the material lines that re-inscribed the Qing’s tumultuous borderlands: tangible tools to divide, define, shelter, and encompass in pursuit of restored imperial civilization and social order. Such circumstances, if accurate, suggest at least three points of scholarly significance. First, if the Miao and White Lotus revolts presaged “dynastic decline” – as has often been observed – the Jiaqing regime’s use of fortified walls provide signs of continuing administrative flexibility and vigor, in evident continuity with an eighteenth-century precedent.50 Although China was in crisis, its government yet retained sophisticated means to maintain its disrupted internal fringes. Second, the early nineteenth-century proliferation of bao walls (and related bao discourse) suggests continuing and dynamic interaction between Qing cultural and martial thinking. This was a regional and popular phenomenon, emerging on internal borderlands, and thus somewhat different from the Manchu martial aesthetics of eighteenth-century imperial promotion identified by Joanna WaleyCohen. Consistent with that overarching elevation of military achievement, however, this turn towards civilian mobilization also aimed “to forge a new and distinctively Qing culture that would generate a shared sense of community.”51 Such linkage suggests that the “militarization” of China’s political culture not only continued past the 1799 mark set by Waley-Cohen, penetrating more deeply into society, but also shifted toward regional strategists, Han military traditions, and the preservation of Qing territorial integrity. Third, the planning of bao walls, evidenced by metaphors of health and designs of social structuring, also indicate an opposing line of influence: civil concerns shaping military ideas, institutions, and practices. A “culturalization” of Qing military affairs. With local defense, martial methods of drilling and fortification were redeployed beyond the Qing armies toward designs of mass mobilization, social order, and regional reconstruction. This redirection – as, indeed, the larger crossfertilization of Qing civil and martial spheres – presaged forms of state planning seen throughout China’s subsequent nineteenth century. Innovated methods of community organization and defense were brought to bear on a larger scale in projects such as the 1851–1864 Taiping pacification and the 1862–1874 Tongzhi

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Restoration. Community fortification thus continued to be more than a simple defensive expedient. In intent, if not always fact, it focused both civil and martial planning toward goals of imperial rehabilitation.

Notes 1 See, for example, Philip Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 37–50; Susan Mann Jones and Philip Kuhn, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 107–62; Daniel McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontier, 1795–1805,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1999; Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795–1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major 16.2 (2003): 105–2; Daniel McMahon, “New Order on China’s Hunan Miao Frontier, 1796–1812,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9.1 (2008): 1–26. 2 Nicola Di Cosmo, ed., Military Culture in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4. 3 Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt.” 4 Jones and Kuhn, “Dynastic Decline,” 136–44; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” Ch. 4. 5 See essays in He Changling, ed., Huangchao jingshi wenbian (1826, 1827) (hereafter, HCJSWB) 88:1a – 89:19b. See aso Kuhn, Rebellion, 37–50; Jones and Kuhn, ibid.; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” chs 2 and 4; McMahon, “New Order.” 6 HCJSWB juan 卷89. 7 HCJSWB 89:9a – 10a. 8 Kuhn, Rebellion, 44–5; Jones and Kuhn, “Dynastic Decline,” 140–3. 9 Da Qing Renzong rui (Jiaqing) huangdi shilu, comp., Ledehong (Taibei: Huawen shuju reprint, 1964) (hereafter, DQRRHS) 38:16a, 39:3a. 10 DQRRHS 40:4b, 8b-9a. 11 DQRRHS 39:3a. 12 HCJSWB 89:11a. 13 McMahon, “New Order,” 11–16; Wu Xinfu, ed., Zhongguo Miaozu tongshi, vol. 1 (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1999), 404–13. 14 DQRRHS 39:3a. 15 HCJSWB 89:12a. For similar views in regard to west Hunan see 88:1b and Yan Ruyi, Leyuan wenchao (preface 1844) (hereafter, LYWC) 6:21b – 22a. 16 HCJSWB 88:1a. 17 HCJSWB 89:19b. 18 LYWC 5:23b – 24a. 19 LYWC 6:7b; Yan Ruyi, ed., Yangfang jiyao (1838), xu 序:2b. 20 Daniel McMahon, “Southern Shaanxi Border Officials in Early Nineteenth Century China,” T’oung Pao 95.1–3 (2009): 120–66. 21 HCJSWB 88:1b-2a; 89:10a-11b. 22 LYWC 6:21b. 23 LYWC 5:5b, 19a – 1b; HCJSWB 88:1a; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 112. 24 Zhongguo junshi shi, eds., Chinese Military History Editing Committee, vol. 6 (Beijing: Jiefang jun chubanshe, 1991), 6–9, 209–10. 25 LYWC 5:16b – 17a. 26 See, for example, LYWC 5:16b – 20a. 27 LYWC 5:23b. 28 LYWC 5:18b – 19a. 29 HCJSWB 88:1a.

Fortified walls and social ordering 127 30 HCJSWB 88:1a; Yan Ruyi, ed., Miaofang beilan (preface 1820) 13:5b. The term “Miao Pale” was coined by Donald Sutton. 31 HCJSWB 88:1b, 10b. 32 Dan Xiangliang, ed., Hunan Miaofang tunzheng kao (1884) 11:4b. 33 LYWC 5:20a. Li is a unit of distance, approximately equal to half a kilometer. 34 HCJSWB 88:2a, 2b; LYWC 5:7a – 7b. 35 McMahon, “New Order,” 11–20; HCJSWB 88:1a-2a, 10b, 12b: Dan, Hunan Miaofang, juan, 11. 36 McMahon, “New Order,” 16–18. 37 HCJSWB 89:9b; Kuhn, Rebellion, 42–50; McMahon, “Southern Shaanxi,” 131–42. For accounts, see Yan Ruyi, ed., Sansheng bianfang beilan (preface 1822) 18:25b – 30b, 34b – 35a. 38 LYWC 6:22a – 22b. 39 HCJSWB 89:9b, 11a-11b, 13a – 13b. 40 For contemporary reports discussing these matters, see HCJSWB 89:10a – 17b; LYWC 6:4a – 7a (and juan 6 generally). 41 Kuhn, Rebellion, 49. 42 Ibid. 43 HCJSWB 82:17b, 89:11a; Kuhn, Rebellion, 48–9; McMahon, Restoring the Garden,” Ch. 5. 44 HCJSWB 89:10a – 12a. See also, LYWC 6:8b, 10a; McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 202–4. 45 HCJSWB 89:11a. 46 Jones and Kuhn, “Dynastic Decline,” 143. The military effectiveness of the jianbi qingye policy is disputed by Dai Yingcong, who argues that its implementation and vigor never achieved the goals of contemporary imperial policy planners. See The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 327–38. 47 LYWC 6:22a – 22b. 48 Daniel McMahon, “Qing Reconstruction in the Southern Shaanxi Highlands: State Perceptions and Plans, 1799–1820,” Late Imperial China 30.1 (2009): 100–4. 49 Kuhn, Rebellion, 49. 50 See, for example, Kuhn, Rebellion; McMahon, “New Order” and “Qing Reconstruction.” 51 Concerning militarized Qing culture, see Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Militarization of Culture in Eighteenth-Century China,” in Military Culture in Imperial China, 278–95 (quote on p. 278).

Part IV

Political Discourse Analysis

6

Treachery at imperial edges Criminality and bureaucratic classification as jian in middle Qing China

The following two chapters examine the “text and talk” of the Qing imperial administration, applying approaches of Political Discourse Analysis to explore bureaucratic writing in relation to the management of multiple restive or rebelling boundary regions. Of interest are not just the categories asserted, but the manner that formal articulation connected to, and interacted with, governmental perception, goals, procedure, and policy. In this work, the essays seek to apprehend the impact that state language had on Chinese historical conditions and, accordingly, the relevance of political discourse as a subject of inquiry in Qing studies. The discussion starts with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s observation that government administrative systems are “structuring structures,” having power through language and action to not just create “a particular vision of the state,” but also “produce and impose . . . categories of thought we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world.”1 Jutta Bakonyi, in a related examination of “managerial rationality,” cautions us that such systems, and the discourse they produce, create ignorance as well as knowledge as a consequence of their imposed categories.2 The observations of these scholars were not made in any conscious connection to China’s Qing government, but the insight is still apt. The Qing bureaucracy, in its efforts to define people at imperial centers and margins, was arguably also a “structuring structure.” The ethical-behavioral classifications it advanced set parameters of criminal action that both framed and legitimized a repertoire of governmental responses, with implications for how imperial society was treated and came to see itself. The simplifications involved likewise masked historical complexity, leading to “blind spots” detrimental to effective state rule. To be reviewed in this context, as an illustration of these points, is the governmental language addressing social deviance over the Qianlong 乾隆 (1736– 1795), Jiaqing 嘉慶 (1796–1820), and Daoguang 道光 (1821–1850) reigns, as the empire underwent dramatic expansion in population, acquisition of external frontiers, and integration of internal fringes. Specifically examined is the classification jian 奸 (treacherous or villainous), a category that encompassed a constellation of criminal activity, albeit also frequently used in reference to illicit activity identified, condemned, and managed on Qing territorial boundaries. What, then, qualified as jian behavior, particularly on imperial boundaries, and how did the Qing administration respond to it? How did this differ in space,

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between borderlands, and in time, from the eighteenth to early nineteenth century? And what perspective does this give us on the seemingly ethnic label Hanjian 漢 奸 (treacherous Han), particularly during the identified jian crisis of the 1839– 1842 Opium War? Answers will be sought predominately from the Qing Veritable Records (Qing shilu 清實錄). This text is chosen as it reflects the formal views of the Qing emperors and their high command, reviews day-to-day administrative issues, and is accessible via an electronic database that facilitates tracking among the 7,857 times (and 5,105 dates) the term jian is referenced.3 We find that, as a bureaucratic classification, jian (and variations such as jianmin 奸民, Hanjian, and jianshang 奸商) was highly flexible as a referent to behavior deemed corrosive to imperial institutions and society. In this context, jian was posed as a conceptual opposite to liang 良 (good) and yi 義 (righteous), an action accounted as cohesive to the Qing system. In discussion of imperial borderlands, the jian were also often paired with the yi 夷 (strangers, barbarians), the former as transgressing Qing subjects and the latter as alien people: a link wherein jianmin were posed as both exploiters and critical agents in the precipitation of frontier discord. Reference to this jian-yi collaboration reached a peak with the Opium War, precipitating both adjustment and popularization of the Hanjian classification.

Qing imperial shorthand For a government to manage a society, it must define the people within that society in ways that enable bureaucratic intervention, typically toward goals of correction, refashioning, or standardization. As James C. Scott argues, “no administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification.”4 To the nineteenth century, he asserts, this was most prominently focused upon concerns of taxation, political control, and conscription. China’s Qing administration was not an exception. By the early nineteenth century, that regime oversaw a population and territory more than twice that of the previous Ming dynasty (1368–1644), encompassing the Chinese “interior” (neidi 內地), newly claimed Inner Asian territory, and more firmly incorporated internal physiographic fringes. Brought to bear in this management were some two millennia of administrative tradition, adopting the governmental and legal structure of the Ming in conjunction with Qing innovations for the rule of northern borderlands. Understanding and effectively governing an expanded multiethnic polity required a system of schematized representations framed by serviceable simplifications. The result was a kind of “imperial shorthand” of ethical-behavioral designations: categories used to not just identify key societal patterns affecting the success of administrative priorities, but also to determine relevant (culpable) social groupings and highlight possibilities of appropriate response. Such shorthand clarified and condemned, in dramatic fashion, winnowing complex social and economic conditions down to imperially prioritized essentials.

Treachery at imperial edges 133 The designations, employed at all levels of the Qing bureaucracy, included the “good” (liang 良), “righteous” (yi 義), “foolish” (yu 愚), “distressed” (nan 難), “treacherous” (jian), “evil” (xie 邪), “chaotic” (luan 亂), and “villainous” (zei 賊). These adjectives were typically linked with the noun “people” or “subjects” (min 民), such as liangmin良民 and jianmin 奸民. Each binome was then engaged in connection with a range of circumstances, signifying parameters of behavior in the context of bureaucratic visions of local order, state management, and moral orthodoxy. Although essentially descriptive, their use linked to administrative analysis and methods of operation. The label “bandit” (zeifei 賊匪), for example, was employed to designate restive people of highland southern Jiangxi, serving (in Zhao Shiyu’s words) as “a kind of political discourse . . . used in the process of controlling the movement of populations as well as regional development.”5 The classifications, moreover, did not exist independently, but rather stood in implicit (and often explicit) relation to one another in accordance with an overarching imperial logic. To assert a label designating one part of a regional society was to speak to the conditions, or potentiality, of that community overall – how such circumstances affected basic goals of social order, imperial authority, and Confucian world-ordering.6 Accordingly, we should not understand labels such as “good” or “villainous” to indicate any one specific action, but rather to reflect the extent to which administrative observers deemed the work of subjects to be either conducive or corrosive to imperial goals. The process of taking stock created a framework to assess social conditions, defining who was helping and who was hurting, thereby posing responses to strengthen the former and eliminate the latter. The classifications did, however, encompass certain kinds of behavior, in a rough spectrum from best to worst. The “good” were those that, practically speaking, obeyed the laws, paid taxes, provided services, farmed, and were at least amenable to Confucian conventions of ritual and propriety. The “righteous” aided or fought in the defense of imperial territory, authority, and civilization. Equal or greater attention, however, was paid to those who either suffered or caused harm. The refugees, “foolish,” “coerced” (xie 脅), or “crazed” (dian 癲) were linked to larger social disruptions (such as rebellion or sectarianism), but were seen as largely victims of circumstances, exploited by malign forces in moments of crisis. More odious were those that willfully committed crimes (jian), engaged in banditry or rebellion (zeifei), or promoted heretical or seditious teachings (xiefei 邪匪). Table 6.1 Number of references in the Qing Veritable Records (ethical-behavioral categories) Liang 13,667 Yi 12,602 Yu 2,714 Nan 31,612 Jian 7,857 Xie 2,598 Luan 3,911 Zei 64,808

Liangmin 871 Yimin 300 Yumin 724 Nanmin 946 Jianmin 1,278 Xiejiao (邪教) 1,230 Luanmin 97 Zeifei 11,370

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Defining jian What, then, was the classification jian as a bureaucratically framed category of deviance? How was it defined and to whom did it refer? The term has roots in the Chinese classics as a marker of non-virtuous action. The Guanzi 管子 states, for instance, that “the sage (xianren賢人) comes in and the treacherous man (jianren 姧人) retreats.” The Shangjun shu 商君書 contrasts the “good folk” (shanmin 善民) and “treacherous folk” (jianmin) in matters of effective rule.7 And the Shangshu 商書 observes the four criminal categories of “pirate, bandit, collaborator, and traitor” (kou, zei, jian, gui 寇, 賊, 奸, 宄). By the Eastern Han period (25–220), the term signified not merely criminality, but deviant action that was largely internal but done in relation to external enemies. As the Shiji 史記 put it: “From inner treachery arises outer perfidiousness.”8 As the Veritable Records indicate, the designation jian was used throughout the Qing period, carrying with it certain consistent connotations. The general sense was negative, indicative of action detrimental to social order, public morality, and imperial authority. In this sense, it was of a kind with related designations of treachery, such as ni 逆 (indicating betrayal of familial relationships). The term jian, moreover, implied, and often directly indicated, injurious expressions of selfishness or greed. This was indicated by phrases such as “coveting profit” (tan li 貪利) or “seeing profit and forgetting life” (jian li wang sheng 見利忘生).9 In effect, a profound and immoral lust for wealth led some to act “without any scruples” (wu suo wei dan 無所畏憚) or fear of retribution, leading to unlawful behavior.10 The jian, in addition, were often posed as nested or hidden, engaged in acts such as clandestine criminality, spread of secret heretical teachings, or stealthy support of state enemies.11 The Qing bureaucracy noted several kinds of jian. This included “treacherous people” (jianmin奸民), “treacherous Han (Hanjian), “treacherous merchants” (jianshang), “treacherous bandits” (jianfei奸匪), “treacherous elements” (jiantu奸徒), and “treacherous intriguers” (jianxi 奸細). The Veritable Records also referred, if more rarely, to “treacherous Hui” (jian Hui 奸回), “treacherous Vietnamese” (Yuenan guo jianmin 越南國奸民) and “treacherous barbarians” (jian yi 奸夷) in borderland regions.12 Of these categories, the most commonly used was jianmin, indicating individuals or groups that exhibited forms of greedbased, transgressing, criminal deviance. In more specific nuance, the jianshang were traders or agents whose criminality was largely defined by illegal economic activity, jianfei were either bandits or rebels who presented a direct challenge to Qing authority, and jianxi were conspirers or spies. These classifications, however, were often used interchangeably. There was, for example, great overlap between a “treacherous person” and a “treacherous element,” as well as instances when Hanjian were also be called jianmin, jiangshang, or jianfei.13 Insofar as there has been research on Qing era jian, virtually all of it has centered on Hanjian: the so-called “Han traitors.”14 Our discussion is dissimilar in that it is focused on the middle Qing period, bureaucratic discourse, and the jian classification more broadly. This approach is needed for two reasons. First,

Treachery at imperial edges 135 Table 6.2 Number of references in the Qing Veritable Records ( jian categories) Jian (alone or as part of a binome) Jianmin Hanjian Jianshang Jianfei Jiantu Jianxi

7,857 1,278 562 662 581 521 412

administrative references to jian encompasses a substantial scope of time, action, territory, and population. Considering it allows us fuller, and perhaps corrective, insight into the classification, including the contemporary and evolving meaning of Hanjian. Second, scholars have often assumed that Hanjian referenced an essential and enduring Han ethnic category, which (as will be discussed) was not necessarily the case, at least for the eighteenth century. Looking only at Hanjian, particularly with this assumption, begs the question of how ethnic identity fit with governmental responses to shifting circumstances of criminal deviance, among other problems failing to explain how, by the late Qing period, even Manchu and Mongol officials could be, and were, castigated as “Hanjian.”15

A constellation of criminality Drawing on the Veritable Records’ excerpted reports of leading administrators and Qing emperors, let us now consider the transgressions formally identified as jian (particularly jianmin) action. As will be seen, the scope of this misbehavior reflects a constellation of criminality and social disruption, identified in virtually every corner of the empire. As a flag marking a need for enhanced administrative attention, it also reveals the control concerns most pressing to the middle Qing bureaucracy. One central kind of identified jian offense was open defiance of the imperial order. Here, jianmin was largely a synonym for zeifei (rebels or bandits) and jianfei (treacherous bandits), indicating insurgent leaders as well as followers, who willfully engaged in organized crime or open rebellion. For instance, the adherents of the 1786–1788 Lin Shuangwen Revolt in Taiwan, and Lin Shuangwen 林爽文 (1758– 1788) himself, were often referred to as jianmin, in explicit contrast to local statesupporting yimin (righteous subjects).16 The label was similarly applied to those that perpetrated melee violence, robbed, resisted arrest, attacked soldiers and officials, committed arson, abused good subjects, cut queues, and dug up state dikes.17 Related jian behavior included furtive support of such defiance. One example was conspiracy to flout state authority, commit murder, spread malicious lies, perpetrate theft, or illegally appropriate land.18 A second example was collaboration, including provision of aid and materiel to rebels, bandits, and pirates, bonds with corrupt imperial clerks, runners, or soldiers, as well as illegal relationships with the non-heartland yi peoples on or beyond imperial boundaries.19 This understanding of the jian classification was, for instance, much in evidence during conflicts

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at the turn of the nineteenth century, notably the 1795–1797 Miao Uprising, the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion, and 1790–1810 pirate incursions.20 Another form of noted jian activity was a sweep of economic crime perpetrated by jianshang. This included the illegal appropriation of vital commodities, such as unsanctioned mining of gold, copper, and saltpeter, cutting of timber, theft of grain, rice, and water, as well as the cultivation of poppies and production of opium.21 It also included smuggling, such as the black market transport of salt (circumventing a state monopoly) and opium.22 In addition was the illegal movement of women, saltpeter, gunpowder, iron implements, jade, lumber, rice, silver, and more.23 The unsanctioned sale of these commodities was likewise accounted jian action. Such exchanges could occur in regional black markets, with criminal organizations such as bandits or pirates, furtively in support of rebels, or in cooperation with foreign merchants.24 There were other kinds of recorded jian economic malfeasance. Particularly lamented was counterfeiting of Qing currency. This was influenced by fluctuations in the worth of silver and copper, the two main types of imperial money. Depending on conditions, the metal of these currencies would be melted down and used for other purposes, or else debased and reintroduced as counterfeit coins, devaluing the worth of genuine currency.25 Similarly excoriated was jianshang hoarding and manipulation of the price of vital goods. Here, it seems, was the starkest example of how personal selfishness and greed directly damaged the public good – the very essence of being jian.26 The Veritable Records contain numerous records related to the stockpiling of foodstuff, such as rice, in order to raise its market value, in some instances taking advantage of blockades and famine to create greater profits.27 A final form of jian behavior identified and discussed in Qing bureaucratic writing was the willful deception of the populace to the end of acquiring personal wealth and influence. This included virtually any manner of fraud that might be used to swindle the ingenuous or falsify records.28 Also included, if often condemned with other appellations, was the propagation of religious beliefs deemed threatening to the imperial order – so-called “evil teachings” (xiejiao). Sectarian leaders such as Liu Zhixie 劉之協 (1740–1800) of the White Lotus Rebellion and Lin Qing 林清 (1770–1813) of the Eight Trigrams Revolt were castigated as jianmin tricksters who impersonated holy men, “falsely burned incense and cured illness, deceived the masses, and took their money.”29 Indeed, any who sincerely embraced the millenarian doctrine of the return of the Maitreya Buddha and Niuba 牛八 (heir of the Ming ruling house) – thereby deluding “ignorant stupid people,” sowing confusion, and inciting disturbances – were classified as jianmin.30 These examples, then, suggest a more distinct shape to how the middle Qing administration understood jian behavior. First, it was defined by action deemed immoral, destructive to social order, or challenging to imperial influence, rather than by clear links to ethnic affiliation. Second, although the parameters of the imputed behavior were broad, it rarely encompassed purely familial crimes such as patricide. Third, it indicated crimes perpetrated by intentional design rather than resulting from unthinking passion or external coercion. Finally, observed

Treachery at imperial edges 137 jian action often involved people or groups working together. That is to say, a jian threat was often posed as one of organized criminality, focused on both the selfish pursuit of profit and calculated (if clandestine) circumvention of proper dynastic authority.

Treachery at the margins: the eighteenth century The designation jian had a critical connection to administrative discussions of, and policy for, Qing frontiers. This occurred not just in relation to internal boundaries from the early eighteenth century (particularly the “Miao frontiers” of highland Guangxi, Guizhou, and Hunan), but also with external fringes into the nineteenth century (such as the South China coast, Taiwan, Yunnan, Annam, Jinchuan, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Zhili).31 Our discussion turns now to the eighteenth-century state’s use of the jianmin category as a means of defining regional criminality, defiance, and relations with borderland groups. In the eighteenth century, the Qing extended its authority over vast swathes of Inner Asian territory – in Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet – doubling the size of the dynasty as compared to the previous Ming dynasty. There was concurrent consolidation of hinterlands within or at the edges of the empire, notably via the southwest gaitu guiliu 改土歸流 policies of the Yongzheng emperor.32 This expansion advanced in tandem with population growth as the size of the imperial polity doubled to over 300 million by the century’s end.33 With land becoming scarcer, steady streams of settlers moved from the imperial interior into geographic peripheries, both prompting and enabling greater imperial incorporation even as border societies were destabilized and, to varying extents, remade. The process was often turbulent, sparking conflicts of intense concern to the Qing administration. As occurred in the empire’s heartland, the category jian (and variants such as jianmin, jianshang, and jianfei) was applied to bring enhanced, and sanctioned, clarity in assessment.34 Jian classification used in connection to imperial boundaries was, in many ways, of a kind with that seen throughout the empire. It depicted selfish, often organized behavior believed corrosive to the imperial order, a consistent counterpoint to cohesive yi (righteous) or liang (good) action.35 This included criminality such as illegal movement and sale of Xinjiang jade, unsanctioned gold mining near the Russian border, stockpiling grain in Mongolia, poaching sable, ginseng, or water pearls in Manchuria, sectarian recruitment or fraud in the Han River highlands, falsifying land reports in Guizhou Miao territory, providing aid to South China Sea pirates, or spying for Hunan Miao rebels.36 There were, however, differences in the nuance of the jian categorization presented in a borderland context. This was linked to the Qing administration’s focus on separation in its imperial frontier policy, establishing clear boundaries between areas inner and outer to the realm. In the seventeenth century, multiple peripheries were quarantined (including Taiwan and west Hunan) to minimize potential disruptions and the expense of ensuing pacification.37 Into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain key areas, most notably Manchuria, continued

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to be fiercely segregated in the interest of preserving the region, keeping a state monopoly over highly valued natural products, and preserving calculated strategies of Qing rule adapted to frontier environments and populations.38 Even with the widespread mitigation or removal of boundary quarantines from the early eighteenth century, the imperial government continued to envision and enforce internal divisions, in particular between new settlers and local or indigenous peoples. This policy followed largely consistent security aims of defending the Qing interior, protecting native residents, reducing local conflict, and galvanizing social blocks that might, in need, be mobilized against one another.39 In this context, jian were most often subjects from the interior who violated state-imposed barriers: illegal border-crossers who knew where the lines were drawn but chose to disregard them. These miscreants were identified in internal peripheries, such as northern Gansu, the Miao frontiers of Guizhou and Hunan, and indeed throughout the Qing’s highland southwest, as well as in external frontiers such as Taiwan, Annam, Burma, and Jinchuan.40 There they illegally acquired land, as in Taiwan and the west Hunan Miao Frontier.41 They engaged in illicit trade, such as the sale of gunpowder to the Miao, rhubarb to the Russians, tea to the Mongols, and silk and medicines to the Andijani.42 They raided natural resources, such as illegal timbering and digging of ginseng in the banner territories of Jilin.43 And many even chose to remain “beyond the pale,” intermarrying or forming kin relations with native people that enabled further illegal settlement, trade, resource extraction, or revolt.44 Given the frailty of local conditions and restraints of effective imperial regulation, such intrusions – the building of what David Bello refers to as “borderland Hanspace” – could and did have a powerfully disruptive impact. Having expanded into boundary regions, the jian threat was further identified not just with criminality, but also with distinctive relations between straying subjects and borderland yi people. The linkage, as depicted, was rooted in a concept of Qing (or Chinese) centrality, in which the people of the imperial interior (min 民) were assumed to be at a higher level of civilization, technology, and sophistication – more cultured and capable, but also more cunning and exploitative. They stood in contrast to external peoples (yi), who were generally posed as violent and mentally simple, even crazed, but also innocent and ingenuous.45 Proscribed or unregulated mixing between the two was accordingly understood to incur detrimental results, precipitating discord. There was, in fact, debate concerning how much interaction should be permitted between interior subjects and borderland yi. The Qing administration had a foundational belief in the power (“moral suasion”) of orthodox Confucian learning to positively attract and transform those who came into contact with it. The good made others good. Indeed, eighteenth century officials such as Chen Hongmou陳宏謀 (1696–1771) advocated contact through education and marriage as a means to civilize fringe regions in Hunan and Yunnan.46 The countervailing worry, potently expressed in the Qianlong emperor’s “obsessive concern” with Hanjian, was that when imperial subjects lacked loyalty or morality – that

Treachery at imperial edges 139 is, when they were not good – then their inevitable impact was corrosive rather than cohesive.47 By the Qianlong period, and at this emperor’s prompting, the imperial government routinely referred to a narrative template of jian activity on imperial borderlands. Two consequences were stressed. First, interaction with bad subjects led to the exploitation, dispossession, poverty, corruption, desperation, and often outright revolt of border natives. Such was the ready explanation for Miao and Yao uprisings, as well as the unrest of the native Yi彝 in Sichuan and Fan 蕃 of Taiwan.48 It similarly grounded Qing policies favoring the solicitude and protection of local folk from immigrants of the imperial interior.49 The second emphasized consequence was that the jianmin (or Hanjian) invariably took charge, but could have done so secretly in circumstances of native criminal activity or revolt, manipulating behind the scenes. The Qing response to the outbreak of borderland uprisings typically began with a search for an assumed Hanjian cabal. This action was frequently pushed by the Qianlong emperor, centering pressure on the imperial bureaucracy to locate (and even exaggerate) jian criminality as a means of both explaining and curtailing frontier conflicts.50 Thus, when the eighteenth-century Qing administration spoke of jian in relation to China’s troubled imperial fringes, it referred not just to a greed-driven threat, but to a growing group in a particularly perilous position of regional influence. Accepted classifications, and the understanding invested in them, underscored the terrifying agency that such immoral people from the interior had in creating undesirable change. In effect, from this perspective, the jian acted and the yi reacted: a frame of reference that logically required policies of group segregation, regulation of imperial subjects, and sheltering of non-interior populations as a basic means of maintaining local order.

Treachery at the margins: the early nineteenth century The relationship of the Qing administration to its imperial fringes shifted in the nineteenth century. Population growth and movement from lowland cores to hinterlands continued largely unabated. However, the range – and, in some regions, intensity – of this settlement increased. Notable was a softening of the eighteenthcentury barriers to Inner Asian borderlands such as Manchuria, Mongolia, and Qinghai that permitted infiltration on an unprecedented scale.51 Directly linked to these developments was the demise of the Qing “prosperous age,” as complications of eroded imperial finances, military power, and regional authority precipitated a succession of destructive challenges along physiographic boundaries. This included the 1795–1797 Miao Uprising, the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion, the 1790–1810 coast pirate attacks, the 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Revolt, and 1839–1842 Opium War. The result, broadly speaking, was a transition from an eighteenth-century imperial focus on border expansion to a nineteenth-century focus on border preservation. This was pursued via greater empowerment of (or reduced restrictions on) local peoples in support of imperial ends combined with,

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particularly toward the century’s end, stronger formal integration of Qing frontiers into national territory.52 These developments had an impact on the bureaucratic meaning of the category jian. That is to say, to a significant extent the borderland classification remained consistent with eighteenth century usage. There was a dominant association with illicit border crossers from the imperial interior callously in pursuit of selfish advantage. Commonly identified as jian were also those who formed unsanctioned personal relations with borderland yi, engaged in illegal trade, defrauded, bullied, and exploited natives, as well as instigated either criminal conspiracies or open rebellion.53 There were, however, notable changes. One was a more extensive focus on external borderlands. This continued an eighteenth century concern regarding “treacherous subjects of the heartland” (neidi jianmin 內地奸民) on southwest boundaries, such as those with Vietnam and Burma.54 Added to it was growing attention to an unregulated influx of imperial population moving north into banner lands of Zhili, Jilin, Fengtian, and even entirely beyond the empire into North Korea.55 There was also a discernable uptick in new settlement, illegal land cultivation, and merchant jian activity in Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Qinghai, again with reports that activities reached beyond Qing borders into Central Asia.56 The jian problems noted in this connection followed familiar patterns. State lands, as well as the pasture of the Manchu and Mongol banners, were being rented or seized then transformed into farmland.57 The banners’ limited supply of staples, particularly rice and salt, were being shipped elsewhere or else hoarded to raise prices.58 Bannermen were being impoverished through merciless Han usury. And markets were being disrupted as Chinese traders colluded with banner princes and Hui merchants in the illegal trade of opium and other products.59 The result was disorder, as well as expanded inter-group cooperation, cultural adaption, and criminal conspiracy.60 The scope of identified jian activity also altered in the nineteenth century. Notable was expanded involvement in, and imperial attention to, illegal resource extraction in peripheral regions, moving beyond unregulated settlement or trade to the empire-wide exploitation and transport of raw materials. This illegal behavior included the cutting of timber in lands as disparate as Haikou海口 in the south, the Central Mountain belt, as well as Zhili and Jilin in the northeast.61 It also included extensive borderland mining, as with the extraction of gold in Zhili, Gansu, Xinjiang, and the Korean border.62 In Manchuria, in particular, the relatively pristine environment, and booming demand for its natural wealth, led to intensified poaching of lumber, pelts, deer antlers, and herbs from the imperial hunting grounds of Jilin and Zhili.63 Population growth, commercial development, and stronger integration of peripheries with imperial cores appear to have driven both access to and demand for these resources. A second, more famous, shift was an intensification of trade relations with yi (notably, European) merchants along the south China coast. Such relations were not new. Chinese traders had pursued extra-legal “jian” maritime exchange with the Pacific world for centuries, and related relationships (with the Vietnamese Tayson regime, for example) had been invigorated in the course of the 1790–1810

Treachery at imperial edges 141 corsair incursions.64 Indeed, a central focus of the early Jiaqing pirate pacification was the isolation of coastal traders from points of possible contact, curtailing sale of food and gunpowder, building or repair of pirate ships, and support of furtive intelligence or shelter.65 Contemporary trade with yi merchants was also not an exclusive concern of the coast – a similar phenomenon was lamented in connection to the Ili trade in Xinjiang.66 As the Qing moved toward the 1839–1842 Opium War, however, there was palpable imperial apprehension regarding treacherous behavior in Guangdong and Fujian. Central to the matter was, of course, the burgeoning and highly destructive opium trade, as Chinese merchants bought British opium, developed distribution networks, sold the drug, shipped silver out of the empire, as well as camouflaged the operations.67 In this context, jian traders sustained and consolidated illegal collaboration with foreigners by encouraging trade, selling supplies, working as translators and guides, disguising foreign ships, and more.68 As Wang Ke and Wu Mi observe, in some cases the imperially depicted jian-yi dynamic also changed. When early nineteenth century governmental observers spoke of interactions with Manchu bannermen, Mongol princes, coastal pirates, Kokandi merchants, or British traders, the circumstances differed from, say, that between bad settlers and Guizhou Miao. This was still cast as treacherous collaboration motivated by selfish and immoral greed, with consistent assumption that jian involvement was critical to the troubles at hand. What faded was the understanding that jianmin were in command of the disturbances, orchestrating them as a consequence of their superior mental or cultural capabilities. Jianshang in the coastal opium trade were criticized for manipulating and corrupting “foolish people” (yumin). Wicked merchants in Mongolia were criticized for impoverishing Mongol bannermen. In neither case, however, were the “jianmin of the heartland” advanced as truly (or fully) in charge, corrupting and controlling when they should have been civilizing.69 Rather, the jian involved were more commonly attributed a role that assisted, enabled, or exacerbated the disturbances. In these instances, that is, certain boundary groups were imputed more exceptional and assertive capacities, possessing the power to act, not just react.

Hanjian again Let us turn to the category of Hanjian: a label increasing common in bureaucratic parlance over the nineteenth century. As previously noted, historians have often posed it as a dominant classification of borderland jian activity, subsuming within it related classifications such as jianmin or jianshang. Doing so, however, implicitly stresses the significance of the term Han in our understanding of the action, events, and impact that the imperial state associated with jian subjects. To what extent, however, is a focus on Han ethnicity accurate, or illuminating, when considered in a middle Qing context? A few points might be considered. First, care is required in making assumptions concerning the contemporary meaning of the term Han. The identification Hanjian appeared first in the Song (960–1279) or Yuan period (1279–1368), referencing the Han dynasty rather than

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the Han race. As a category of bureaucratic writing, it became commonly used only from the early eighteenth century.70 Scholars of critical Han studies argue that, at that time, Hanjian (and Han) did not yet indicate a well-defined ethnic group. Rather, over the Qing period, “the category Han took shape by means of a ‘default contrast with all other ethnic groups,’ is a by-product of ‘internal colonialism,’ and is a ‘residual category comprised of all those who were not barbarians.’ ”71 Or, as one Chinese scholar put it: “the word Han in Hanjian did not specifically refer to Han people.”72 C. Patterson Giersch discusses this possibility on southwestern borderlands prior to the nineteenth century. As he argues, migrants identified most strongly with their native place and the label “Han” was mainly a term to lump together these groups in their competition with indigenous communities.73 Frontier Han, that is, did not necessarily have a strong a priori ethnic consciousness, nor did the Qing administration insist that one existed. The ethnic identity known today, rather, coalesced from the late nineteenth century, contributing to the formation of the modern Chinese nation, as well as to a tendency to read Qing documents in hindsight of later social perspectives.74 Second, the people and behavior identified as Hanjian overlapped with that of jianmin, spanning a wider range of action than historians often recognize.75 In a classic early discussion, Arthur Waley defined Hanjian as a term referring to Chinese “who entered the service of the foreigners,” as well as collaborators who “favored appeasement over war to the death.”76 This view has been echoed, as with Wang Ke’s definition of Hanjian as those who colluded with national enemies or otherwise sold out the motherland.77 Into the early nineteenth century, however, Hanjian as an administrative category was largely interchangeable – in connection to borderland circumstances, at least – with terms such as jianmin, jiantu 奸徒, and jianshang, indicating greed-based socially corrosive criminality, border crossing, and inappropriate collusion with borderland yi.78 Hanjian, for instance, were reported to have incited native chieftains in Yunnan, illegally traded with and married natives in Annam, spied for rebels in Burma, as well as smuggled goods, spread rumors, cut queues, dug up irrigation embankments, and wantonly killed and burned.79 Third, in this overlap, Hanjian was a subset of a larger jianmin rubric – that is, a kind of jianmin. In the middle Qing period, the term Hanjian almost invariably indicated criminal Qing subjects along imperial boundaries, in borderlands as far-flung as Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan Sichuan, Taiwan, Guangdong, Zhili, Qinghai, Mongolia, and Xinjiang.80 As Wu Mi observes, the usage arose as a direct consequence of eighteenth century expansion, particularly disruptions stemming from gaitu guiliu opening policies.81 Earliest references were in fact to the abuse of Miao in Guizhou’s Guzhou highlands, establishing an imperial narrative (and abiding bureaucratic concern) that would be echoed in connection to multiple frontiers over the next two centuries.82 Fourth, the original dominate nuance of Hanjian was of bad subjects who dominated and manipulated peripheral peoples (such as the Miao), taking advantage of those natives’ “absolutely ignorant,” “stupid, weak, and easily bullied” nature.83 As Donald Sutton observes, this was the favored view of the Qianlong

Treachery at imperial edges 143 emperor and remained firm to the late eighteenth century.84 The role imputed to Hanjian, however, had a corresponding shifted in the early nineteenth century, at least in relation to borderland forces such as Mongol princes, Manchu bannermen, and British merchants. In these instances, Hanjian (as jianmin) were more often depicted as assisting and colluding than secretly leading. Given these circumstances, what are we to make of the “Han” in Hanjian? To the Opium War, the answer is ambiguous. In reviewing the statements of the Qianlong emperor, for instance, it seems difficult to question that he saw the Han as a precise (and flawed) group that required special approaches in borderland management. On many frontiers, moreover, resident groups (such as those of the Hunan Miao Frontier) were designated as, and saw themselves as being, genuinely different.85 And certainly as we move into the nineteenth century, ethnic distinctions – recognized by both Qing bureaucracy and people – became more pronounced and easily identifiable. This said, I would argue, in general accord with critical Han studies scholars, that Hanjian as an ethnic marker has been overly stressed. The focus of the middle Qing administration was upon security and the impact of criminality. Accordingly, for many or most borderland references, the bureaucratic sense was largely indistinguishable from that of the (also commonly applied) classification “jianmin of the heartland” (neidi jianmin). That is, indicated here was not so much a Han race as unruly subjects of the Qing interior – disruptive settlers and traders assessed in imperial, behavioral, and ethical terms.

The Hanjian crisis of the Opium War What perspective does our discussion then give us on the 1839–1842 Opium War: a moment of much-lamented jian calamity? Chinese residents of the Guangdong coast had cooperated with British merchants in the opium trade and, once hostilities broke out, many continued collaborations, to the consternation of both imperial authorities and regional gentry.86 When historians speak of the Hanjian phenomenon, moreover, they often trace its roots back to this conflict, taking it (rightly) as a dramatic example from the late imperial period.87 It might be argued, however, that the event is even more significant than generally understood. This was not just a Hanjian crisis of the nineteenth century; arguably it was the crisis, representing a turning point in the application, understanding, and scope of that classification. It is clear that something happened. The Veritable Records indicate that bureaucratic usage of the terms Hanjian increased appreciably over the Daoguang era. Of the dates spanning the Qing period in which this term appeared at least once, 27% are during the 60-year Qianlong reign and 58% are during the 30-year Daoguang reign. Within the Daoguang period, moreover, 38% occur between 1839 and 1842, predominately in reference to Opium War problems. In effect, the classification was referenced more times in the years of that clash than in the entire eighteenth century. If the Qianlong emperor had an “obsessive concern” with Hanjian, then the Daoguang emperor, it seems, displayed a fullblown neurosis.88

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Opium War discussion echoed middle Qing patterns in its reference to Hanjian, jianmin, and jianshang (terms that continued to be used interchangeably).89 Indeed, there was arguably an intensification of the stark images, and underlying narrative, of this discourse, resonant of administrative writings on pirate pacification four decades prior. As the Daoguang emperor remarked, “The treacherous [British] barbarians use the Hanjian as their talons and teeth; the Hanjian use the treacherous barbarians as a den of profit. This conspiracy with people working on the inside is insufferable in the extreme.”90 Here again, state leaders suggested, boundaries had been breached as consequence of shameless greed and contempt for imperial authority. And again, it took the form of unlawful jian-yi collaboration, albeit with a vision of the British as particularly empowered and blameworthy. What makes observations on this event exceptional, however, is the reported extent of the cooperation. Not only were “the treacherous barbarians recruiting and assembling Hanjian as part of their plan to seduce and confuse.”91 Their supporters had purportedly infiltrated Guangdong society to its roots, at work in both fishing fleets and towns.92 Lamented were furtive traders and suppliers, clandestine agents and provocateurs, guides, spies, translators, scribes, rumor-mongers, messengers, diplomats, thugs, arsonists, and killers.93 As Frederick Wakeman writes, “When the Opium War began, the world ‘traitor’ was used so indiscriminately that it came to include the entire commercial establishment at Canton.”94 As occurred with previous coastal piracy and highland “White Lotus” disruptions, these turncoats were, in addition, exceedingly difficult to either identify or root out.95 The imperial bureaucracy thus posed the Opium War in familiar (if extreme) terms, as a dilemma of yi British and jian accomplices. The solution advanced, based on this casting of circumstances, was equally recognizable: stricter Hanjian management. As occurred during the 1790–1810 pirate pacification, the thinking was that although the enemy may have been cunning, mobile, and powerful, they could not succeed without links into the imperial interior. That is, “if you desire to control the external, you must control the internal.”96 As the emperor stated, “The treacherous barbarians completely rely on the Hanjian as their guides; if we do not eliminate the Hanjian, then we cannot overcome the barbarians.”97 Similarly, “If the Hanjian have one day of not being eliminated, then the barbarian ships have one day of not being stopped.”98 Accordingly, apprehending Hanjian was accounted a “first priority.”99 The administration moved to block the collaborators using surveillance, searches, fortification, prohibition of sale of food or supplies, summary executions, calculated clemency, as well as redeployment of surrendered criminals.100 In recent years, historians have suggested that the insistence of the Qing bureaucracy to view conditions in these terms impeded their response. Reliance on received systemized classifications, that is, created ignorance as well as knowledge. In particular, Mao Haijian references the over-arching conception of Tianchao 天朝, a vision of Qing-centered universal sovereignty, which he held “structured the Qing dynasty’s interaction with the world” and led to

Treachery at imperial edges 145 military disaster.101 In “a domestic climate of fear” and sycophancy, imperial leaders rejected alternative political worldviews and thus skewed their assessment of both problems and solutions.102 The British were conventionally cast as yi and of a kind with pirates or other alien trouble-makers, viewed equally with an “inbuilt disdain.”103 In this context, true agency (and root culpability) for the disruption was then attributed to the jian. Mao indicates that it was precisely the fervent embrace of this mentality that resulted in the Hanjian label being used so often. The official account needed to square with the Tianchao orthodoxy, even in regard to questionable circumstances, thus “every event, cause, consequence and question of responsibility that was difficult to explain was shifted onto the shoulders of ‘traitors.’”104 But did the wartime administration so easily echo earlier bureaucratic perspectives? Arguably, the British were not, as Song-Chuan Chen states, entirely “seen as another group of the uncultured, the same as the other peoples surrounding China proper.”105 Their depiction, rather, resembled administrative views of more select and potent frontier groups such as the Mongols, Russians, or Khokand Khanate. In addition, it should be noted that the state’s Opium War rhetoric was not of Chinese wrongfully penetrating the frontier and corrupting natives, but rather of outsiders penetrating the interior and corrupting subjects. In this circumstance, bureaucratic assessment placed greater stress on Hanjian collaboration and subordination, as well as violation of the laws and territory of the dynasty.106 Wang Ke argues that it was at this juncture that Hanjian was more clearly posed as the opposite of yimin (righteous subjects).107 There were other significant changes at play. Over the Qing period, the classifications jianmin, jianshang, and Hanjian were categories of governmental discussion framing visions of social circumstances, pursuant of state action. As Wu Mi observes, however, by the nineteenth century the terms were used not just by the bureaucracy, but by Qing society more broadly.108 Hanjian, that is, was (and has since been) incorporated into China’s popular discourse as a classification for particular kinds of action destructive to the commonwealth, as perhaps most famously evidenced by excoriation of Hanjian collaborators with the Japanese during World War II. The Qing imperial administration, having imposed the category through processes of policy and punishment, shaped but did not control its wider meaning and usage, indeed so much so that, by the late Qing, supporters of the Manchu rulers were also being castigated as Hanjian.109 The turning point, it seems, was the Opium War.110 Identification of a Hanjian crisis triggered not just intensified state discussion, but also popular gentry-led outrage, particularly among Cantonese. This was, Frederick Wakeman argues, a result of anti-urban, anti-mercantile, and anti-foreign sentiment.111 It likely was also shaped by the region’s history of jianshang-pirate collaboration and administrative empowerment of local leaders. With results that moved beyond the imperial apparatus to widespread public scapegoating and a Hanjian “witch hunt.”112 In this process, “scholar-paramilitaries” established a local propagandistic discourse of “righteous people” striking out against “foreign devils” and their perfidious supporters – an expression, James Polachek tells us, that was in turn

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borrowed, modified, and reinforced by the imperial bureaucracy, as well as spread and embraced more widely among Qing literati.113 It is in this context, that we might consider the branching nineteenth-century meaning of the term Hanjian, as well as the association this term had with a concurrently intensifying embrace of Han ethnic identity. The Qing state and regional scholars may have had shared views in the course of Opium War. Nevertheless, subsequent outlooks increasingly diverged. As the administration struggled to preserve imperial boundaries in the face of internal weakness and external assault, locally focused gentry had expanded autonomy not just to act, but also to redefine the dynasty’s problems and conditions. By the end of the century, this included revolutionaries and ethnic nationalists who identified Manchu rule over the Han, the very foundation of the Qing imperial system, as a root concern to be challenged. Hanjian thus came to indicate multiple and contradictory actions, reflecting a range of divergent political perspectives, if connected to a common perception of treachery. Most broadly, it was to wrongfully aid or engage foreign powers. It, however, could also be, variously, to work against the Qing regime, support the Qing regime, betray the interests of the Han race or, moving into the twentieth century, work against the people of the Chinese nation (Han and non-Han alike).114 In these circumstances, one had to be an imperial subject or Chinese, but not always ethnically Han, to be labeled as Hanjian.115

Conclusion As we have seen in this brief examination of Qing bureaucratic discourse from the early eighteenth to early nineteenth century, the imperial government employed a loose system of ethical-behavioral classifications in its management of a vast, varied, and widely populated territory. Categories such as “treacherous” (jian), “good” (liang), and “righteous” (yi) allowed the administration to assess local societies in terms of imperial orthodoxy and immediate priorities, as well as legitimize state interventions on the basis of that assessment. Jian, in particular, was used to categorize a vast scope of putatively greedbased disruptive criminality, both in the imperial interior and along the Qing’s expanding boundaries. In the discussion of border regions seen in the Veritable Records, the classification was not just positioned in opposition to the “good” or “righteous,” but also linked with outsiders or “barbarians” (yi), engaging a narrative of cunning subjects coming from the heartland that exploited and incited borderland natives. Here, designation as jian (and subcategories of jian such as jianmin, jianshang, jianfei, jiantu, and, on frontiers, Hanjian) was malleable, simplifying and homogenizing, flagging circumstances requiring resources and redress. It was vocabulary to achieve operational clarity: alternatively asserting a quick overview of regional people, glossing a lack of detailed understanding, and accommodating shifts in state policy. Reliance upon it suggests why (and how) starkly different borderlands and borderland people – say, in northern Xinjiang or southern Guangdong – were depicted and managed in similar ways.

Treachery at imperial edges 147 The discussion’s focus on political discourse enables some historical insights. From this vantage, for example, Matthew Mosca is not quite correct in suggesting that “where informants from around the empire submitted parallel reports about the same events, no common idiom exist to which to amalgamate them.”116 A common idiom of sorts did exist, necessarily, and was widely employed, and had a powerful impact. More accurate is Mosca’s observation of a transition in both the form and content of imperial intelligence from 1800. As our study indicates, the powerful frontier groups encountered brought adjusted recognition and a crisis of bureaucratic understanding. The Opium War presents a vivid example. The British may have been regarded as yi, but were of a potency that bruised the Qing imperial worldview. And disaster ensued with the administration’s emphasis instead on the jian as the critical agents of discord – an old perspective that dangerously obscured new circumstances. A second insight lies in how we might understand the category Hanjian. Critical Han Studies scholars advocate taking “premodern categories seriously while critically investigating their relationship to the contemporary category of ‘Han.’”117 The effort made here reveals not so much a marker of Han ethnic identity as a “structuring” discourse that both centered on imperial polity and differentiated that polity in largely behavioral terms. Throughout the eighteenth century, and significantly into the nineteenth century, Hanjian were understood as jian more than Han; that is, as criminals. As a variant of jianmin, the Hanjian classification designated Qing subjects in terms of provenance and location (of the imperial interior but active in boundary regions), as well as deviance (in transgressing borders, colluding with yi, and committing crimes). The category, that is, indicated difference, from yi natives and liangmin subjects, but not a clear or consistent racial distinction. With the Opium War, however, Hanjian both shifted in meaning (in dominant nuance from borderland trespassers and ringleaders to “talons and teeth” supporters of foreign powers, as well as betrayers of national or ethnic Han interests), as well as further infiltrated, and was co-opted by, popular discourse. The historian Wang Ke argues that this changed conception had contributed, by the late Qing, to the “imagining” of China as a monoethnic Han nation.118 The point is valid, but obfuscates both the vital relationship of that term to the larger jian classification and the lingering impact of the content of that classification. The discursive categories employed by the Qing imperial administration were thus significant and worth further study. They enabled governmental focus, flexibility, and decisiveness, a necessity when faced with vast and unruly boundaries, if limiting when (as during the Opium War) confronting unprecedented challenges. Use of these terms also shaped how Qing society saw itself, as it cleaved to familiar categories progressively redefined in ethnic, and even seditious, ways. Overall, the “imperial shorthand,” and the grouping jian, grounded a vital, if often overlooked, part of the vast Qing legacy inherited by the modern Chinese nation. Post-imperial states, in claiming the dynasty’s multiethnic populace and lands, continued (and continue) to embrace an administrative vision that formally carves China’s society in related terms of criminality, conspiracy, and boundary stability.

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Notes 1 Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12.1 (March 1994), esp. 1–3, 12–13 (quotes on pp. 1, 3, 13). 2 Jutta Bakonyi, “Seeing Like Bureaucracies: Rearranging Knowledge and Ignorance in Somalia,” International Political Sociology 12 (2018): 256–73. 3 The Ming, Korean, and Qing Veritable Records Database (Ming shilu, Chaoxian wangchao shili, Qing shilu ziliaoku, www2.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/resource3.php?TM= 6&M=3&C=85 (hereafter: IHP QSZ). The Qing shilu documents of this database are based on the version printed in Beijing, Zhonghua shuju, 1986. 4 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 22–3. 5 Zhao Shiyu, “Forty Years of Ming and Qing Research Following China’s Opening Up and Economic Reform,” Frontiers of History in China 13.3 (2018): 380. 6 For a related discussion of these virtue-based imperial categories and the relationship posed between them, see William T. Rowe, Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 291–3. 7 Li Yujie, “Shangjun shu ‘yi jianmin zhi shanmin’ lun tanxi,” Chongqing shifan daxue xuebao 2 (2006): 49. 8 Wang Ke, “Hanjian: Xiangxiangzhongde danyi minzu guojia huayu,” Ershiyi shiji (March 2009): 1–2, www.aisixiang.com/data/26582.html (accessed September 25, 2018). More generally, Frederick Wakeman defines jian as transgression, reaching across acceptable boundaries and prompting disorder. See “Hanjian (Traitor)! Collaboration and Retribution in Wartime Shanghai,” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 298–9. 9 For early use of these phrases see IHP QSZ KX (Kangxi 康熙, r. 1661–1772) 25/4/5, KX 57/2/5, QL (Qianlong) 2/9/26. For variants such as xitu sheli 希圖射利 (hoping to make a profit), see QL 2/04/19, QL 55/03/24, QL 55/09/1. 10 See, for example, IHP QSZ QL 02/09/26, QL 52/10/17, QL 53/4/27, QL 53/9/8. For variation on this phrase indicating a lack of fear or scruples, see QL 2/8/11, QL 8/12/28, JQ (Jiaqing) 19/2/17, JQ 23/8/9; DG (Daoguang) 11/3/7, 11/5/22. 11 For a quote from the Shunzhi 順治 emperor (r. 1643–1661), see Wang, “Hanjian,” 6. 12 Concerning Hui, see IHP QSZ QL 54/3/25, JQ 10/2/25 (this date also refers to “jianmin herders” youmu zhi jianmin 游牧之奸民), DG 13/07/10. Concerning Vietnamese, see IHP QSZ DG 13/3/1, DG 13/3/25, DG 13/8/27. Concerning “barbarians,” see DG 14/5/19, DG 20/3/17, DG 22/7/22. The scholar Yan Ruyi 嚴如熤 (1759–1826) spoke of “treacherous Miao” (jian Miao奸苗) in the 1795–1797 Miao revolt. See Miao (preface 1820) 5:12b. 13 For examples of overlapping use of jian categories, see IHP QSZ QL 8/10/6, QL 24/7/14, QL 26/3/23, QL 33/11/29, QL 37/4/17, QL 41/11/26, 58/9/1, JQ 10/2/25, DG 21/09/22. The Ming Veritable Records references jian some 4,243 times, jianmin 151 times, jiantu 101 times, jianshang 72 times, and jianxi 236 times (albeit Hanjian not at all). 14 See Wang, “Hanjian;” Wakeman, “Hanjian;” Fredrick Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Wu Mi, “ ‘Hanjian’ kaobian,” Qingshi yanjiu 4 (November 2000): 107–16. 15 Concerning this usage of Hanjian, see Wu, ibid., 112–13; Wang, ibid., 8–9. 16 Concerning this usage in connection to the Lin Shuangwen revolt, see IHP QSZ QL 47/10/29, QL/47/12/21, QL 47/12/25, QL 48/2/23, or QL 52/11/3. Concerning “the jianmin Lin Shuangwen,” see QL 52/zheng 正/8 and 10. Zhu Yigui朱一貴 (1689– 1721), leader of an earlier Taiwan revolt, was also labeled a jianmin, as indeed were most rebel leaders. See KX 60/6/3. See also the Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Qingdai gongzhong dang zouzhe ji Junji chu dang zhejian ziliaoku (National Palace Museum

Treachery at imperial edges 149

17

18 19

20

21

22

23

24

25

Qing Court Memorial and Grand Council Report Database) http://npmhost.npm.gov. tw/tts/npmmeta/GC/purchase01.html (accessed October 2018) (hereafter: GGB), #001985, 002027, 002029, 002147, 002369. See, for instance, IHP QSZ QL 13/12/25 (resisting arrest and arson), QL 16/2/12 (digging dikes and stealing water), QL 33/7/21 (cutting queues), QL 47/10/26 (feud violence), QL/10/29 (resisting arrest), QL 44/3/13 (beating officials), QL 48/zheng/21 (burning and looting), QL 48/2/25 (violence and resisting arrest), JQ 20/9/28 (recruiting bandits and tormenting the good), DG 6/6/12 (looting and burning); DG 12/9/3, 4, 6, 18, 20, 28 (digging up state dikes). See Wang, “Hanjian,” 8; IHP QSZ KX 6/4/20 (plotting rebellion, slandering civilians), QL 17/8/29 (spreading falsehood), QL 35/10/25 (plotting murder). See, for example, Wang, ibid., 8; IHP QSZ QL 2/4/19 (clerks and runners), QL 8/12/28 (soldiers); QL 17/2/12, 13 (Taiwan hill tribes); QL 17/4/29 (bandits); KX 18/6/24 and JQ 5/5/29 (pirates), DG 8/8/20 and DG 9/5/13 (Central Asian tribes and border checkpoint soldiers). Concerning Yan Ruyi’s use of this classification, see Daniel McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontiers, 1795–1805,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Davis, 1999, 50–5, 200–6, 300–8. Stricter control of jianmin collaborators lay at the heart of the jianbi qingye堅壁清 野 social separation policy that eventually resolved both the White Lotus and pirate conflicts. See McMahon, ibid., 222–7; Daniel McMahon, Rethinking the Decline of China’s Qing Dynasty: Imperial Activism and Borderland Management at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 114–15, 181–2; Robert Antony, “State, Community, and Pirate Suppression in Guangdong Province, 1809–1810,” Late Imperial China 27.1 (June 2006): 1–30. See IHP QSZ QL 2/6/8 (making wine), DG 2/12/7 (gold mining), DG 9/7/26 (copper mining), QL 16/7/19 (stealing water), DG 3/82 and DG 11/6/13, 29 (growing poppies and making opium paste); DG 20/9/18 (mining and selling saltpeter). See also, GGB QL 12/12/19 (#001687, copper mining), QL 17/7/4 (#008910, stealing grain), QL 35/11/18 (#012831, stealing lumber), Yongzheng雍正 (r. 1722–1735) YZ 5/3/22 (#402008303, digging saltpeter). For examples of salt smuggling, see IHP QSZ QL 5/5/29, QL 10/2/30, QL 23/9/14, JQ 9/12/27, JQ 10/2/25. Concerning the Qing’s inefficient salt monopoly and how it encouraged widespread smuggling, see William Rowe, Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), Ch. 5. For examples of opium smuggling, see DG 12/9/12, DG 18/4/10, DG 18/9/26, DG 18/10/16, DG 19/zheng/24, DG 23/7/23. For examples, see IHP QSZ QL 8/11/2 (maritime shipping to avoid taxation); QL 43/11/1,2,3,7 (jade) JQ 19/2/23 and JQ 19/3/24 (rice), JQ 22/12/9 (women in Guizhou), DG yuan 元/zheng/22 (rice, gunpowder, iron). Contemporary Qing observers such as Chen Shibao believed that the outflow of silver had a devastating impact on the Qing economy, destabilizing the copper-to-silver currency ratio and precipitating what came to be known as the “Daoguang depression.” See Rowe, ibid. For discussion of jianshang and the detrimental transport of Qing goods abroad, see IHP QSZ KX 47/zheng/22 (corn); QL 7/10/30 (rice), QL 10/2/30 (salt), QL 54/1/24 and QL 54/2/8,10,26 (rhubarb), JQ 12/10/13 (gunpowder), DG 12/9/12 (silver), DG 13/4/6 (gold, copper, iron). Concerning jianmin and the sale of opium, see IHP QSZ JQ 18/7/10, DG 11/6/29, DG 14/3/27. Regarding the illegal sale of salt, see QL 6/12/13, DG 4/10/18. Concerning the illegal sale of gunpowder and weapons, see DG 12/9/17. For other illegal jianshang sales, see QL 34/4/29 (saltpeter), QL 43/11/1,2,3,7 (jade), QL 53/2/8,10,26 (rhubarb). On the currency crisis, see Rowe, Speaking of Profit, Ch. 6. See also IHP QSZ QL 3/3/15, QL 3/8/5, QL 6/5/23, QL 14/7/24, QL 14/11/29, QL 56/7/2, QL 58/8/17, QL 59/6/11, 12, 18, 20, QL 59/8/16, Ql 59/9/10, 11, DG 2/12/22, DG 5/11/4, DG 8/11/6, DG 13/7/22, DG 20/4/15.

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26 As the Qianlong emperor observed: “this cohort of villainous merchants only take a monopoly as their mission; they do not think about the difficulties of subjects having to eat.” See QL 3/3/16. 27 For examples, See IHP QSZ QL 3/3/5, QL 3/3/10, QL 7/6/21, QL 9/2/18, QL 10/3/12, QL 12/3/4, QL 13/5/15, QL 14/2/8, QL 16/8, QL 16/8/20, QL 17/2/16; JQ 7/2/19, JQ 11/5/17, JQ 11/6/14, JQ 11/11/9, JQ 15/2/18, DG 2/2/9, DG 2/3/21, DG 2/4/1, DG 2/11/20. For one example of merchants hoarding during a blockade of the Han River, see JQ 7/2/19. 28 Concerning jianshang falsifying records, see IHP QSZ DG 10/5/13; GGB QL 28/11/09 (#403016278), QL 44/2/28 (#022995). 29 For the quote, see IHP QSZ JQ 7/12/16. 30 For an examination of Qing administrative discourse addressing these sectarian leaders, see Chapter 7 of this volume. On impersonating holy men and gods, see GGB QL 44/6/18 (#023088). Concerning deceptions involving false religious practices, spreading heretical doctrines, fraud, and causing disturbances, see for example GGB QL 13/6/29 (#002710), QL 33/3/25–9 (#023307, 023632, 023693, 023746). See also IHP QSZ QL 5/zheng/29, QL 10/9/29, QL 12/4/16, QL 36/11/29, QL 39/10/1, QL 39/10/29, QL 42/11/22, QL 42/12/7, QL 59/3/3, QL 59/9/20, JQ yuan 元/4/23, JQ 17/6/13, JQ 18/10/3, JQ 18/10/23, JQ 18/11/23, 27, JQ 18/12/24, JQ 19/2/8,11, JQ 20/10/30, JQ 20/11/18, JQ 22/6/17, JQ 22/9/10, DG 13/7/20. 31 The frequency of correspondence between identified jian and state discussion of boundary regions is indicated by combining keywords in the IHP QSZ Veritable Records database. “Jian and bian 邊” yields 1,260 dates where both terms are used. “Jian and jiang 疆” yields 1,178 dates where both terms are used. And “jian and yi 夷” finds 924 dates of overlap. 32 Concerning Qing expansion into Inner Asia, see Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2005). On expansion into southwestern geographical peripheries, see Herold J. Wiens, China’s March Toward the Tropics (Hamden: The Shoe String Press, 1954). 33 A recent scholarly estimate puts the Qing population at about 350 million in 1812. See Rowe, Speaking of Profit, 79. 34 Wu Mi observed a direct link between border opening with the gaitu guiliu policies and growing imperial use of the designation Hanjian. See “Hanjian,” 109. 35 One example was the Lin Shuangwen Revolt on the Taiwan “maritime frontier,” where insurgents were often designated as jianmin, as settlers supporting the Qing were yimin. See IHP QSZ QL 18/5/3; QL 18/6/24; QL 18/11/29. Concerning jianmin in the revolt, see QL 48/zheng/21; QL 48/2/3, 23,24; QL 48/5/26; QL 52/zheng/8,10; QL 52/10/20; QL 53/4/7. 36 Concerning illegal smuggling and trade on the maritime frontier, see IHP QSZ KX 18/6/24; QL 9/2/9; QL 12/6/7; QL 14/4/14, QL 24/7/14, QL 26/2/14, QL 35/8/30 (resisting arrest), QL 40/12/9, QL 50/10/18 (trade with foreign merchants). Concerning jade smuggling, see QL 43/11/1,2,3,7. Concerning illegal stockpiling of Mongol grain, see QL 8/12/3. On falsification of land reports, see QL 15/3/29. On gold mining in northern Xinjiang, see Judd Kinzley, “Turning Prospectors into Settlers: Gold, Immigrant Miners and the Settlement of the Frontier in Late Qing Xinjiang,” in Sherman Cochran and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., China on the Margins (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2010), 19–22. Regarding problems of poaching natural resources in Manchuria, see David Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity and Empire in Qing China’s Borderlands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Ch. 2, 268, 270; Seonmin Kim, Ginsing and Borderland: Territorial Boundaries and Political Relations between Qing China and Chosǒn Korea, 1636–1912 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 2–3, chs 4–5; and Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Prinstine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). Regarding

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Hanjian support of Miao rebels, see Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795–1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major Third Series 16.2 (2003): 105–52. Concerning quarantine policies for early Qing Taiwan, see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), Chs 6–8. Regarding segregation of Miao and Han, see Wang, “Hanjian,” 7. For a more general discussion of early Qing policy, see Cheng Chongde, “Qingdai qianqi bianjiang tonglun (xia),” Qingshi yanjiu 98.1 (1998): 14–20. Concerning the Qing court’s desire to keep Manchuria separate and “pristine” in the face of demand for its natural resources, as well as the cultural and political concerns this provoked, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland, and Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur. Concerning a model of the Qing as an empire adapted to multiple environmental-ethnic zones, disrupted by Hanjian intrusion, see Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain. See, for example, Shepherd, Statecraft, Ch. 9. On the Hunan Miao Frontier, see Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” in Pamela K. Crossley, et al., eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 190–227. Regarding Xinjiang, see James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 97–108. For an example, see IHP QSZ QL yuan/7/9 (Qianlong’s views on the Guzhou 古州 Miao). See, for example, Sutton, “Ethnicity,” (Hunan Miao Frontier), esp. 193 (southwest generally); GGB QL 16/12/14 (#007619, Gansu border), QL 43/8/18 (#021076, Guizhou Miao Frontier). Regarding the Guizhou Miao Frontier see, IHP QSZ QL 6/6/29, QL 7/4/29, QL 8/6/12. On the Gansu frontier (comparing the Miao to the Hui people) see QL 10/3/13. Concerning intrusions into Taiwan, see QL 11/5/13, QL 11/12/16, QL 13/8/5, QL 17/2/12, QL 17/3/13. Concerning Annam, see QL 8/4/29, QL 8/8/29, QL 8/10/6, 9/6/29, QL 19/2/30, QL 37/3/13, QL 38/8/11, QL 40/11/22. Concerning the Burma frontier, see QL 32/5/6, QL 32/5/13, QL 32/12/7, QL 33/6/4, QL 34/12/19, QL 42/2/25, QL 42/12/25. For other examples, see QL 41/2/13 and QL 53/zheng/12 (Jinchuan), QL 46/10/18 (Manchuria), QL 47/9/13 (Yunnan). See also GGB QL 33/6–9 (esp. #403025311 and 403026033). See Shepherd, Statecraft; Sutton, “Ethnicity.” See also IHP QSZ QL 11/5/13. See, for example, Wang, “Hanjian,” 8 (selling cudgels); IHP QSZ QL 10/2/30 (selling salt). Concerning jianmin cutting lumber for bannermen and digging ginseng in Jilin, see QL 6/12/24. See also, Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, Ch. 2; Kim, Ginseng and Borderland; and Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur. Sutton, “Ethnicity,” 193. For a prohibition on jianmin intermarriage with Burmese bandits see GGB QL 14/4/27 (#004300), QL 33/6/9 (#403026033). For references to unlawful intermarriage or collusion between jianmin and border peoples, see Wang, “Hanjian,” 7. For related discussion, see Rowe, Saving the World, 291–300; and Song-Chuan Chen, Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 99–101. For examples of this official perspective in connection to the Miao, see IHP QSZ QL yuan /7/9 (“have the hearts of men”), QL 13/7/9 (“stupid, weak, and easily bullied”), QL 14/2/27, QL 31/5/13, QL 31/10/5, QL 32/12/7, QL 39/2/23. Rowe, ibid., 417–26. On the concern of the Qianlong emperor for Hanjian, a focus that may have resulted in consistent distortions in the imperial record, see Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 128. For this analysis, drawn from Yan Ruyi and others regarding the 1795–1797 revolt in the Hunan Miao frontier, see McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 61–7 and Rethinking,

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Political Discourse Analysis 88–9. Concerning exploitation of the Miao and Yao, see IHP QSZ QL yuan/7/3, QL yuan/10/4, QL 9/10/30, QL 14/7/19, QL 14/10/30, QL 16/8/30, QL 17/2/12 (occupying lands), QL 17/6/7 (fraud), QL 20/4/30, JQ 4/6/29. For one interesting iteration of this theme, bringing the British into a larger eighteenth century grouping of non-Chinese yi 夷 meriting appropriate solicitude and protection, see IHP QSZ QL 41/11/26. Donald Sutton observes a difference in bureaucratic perspective between Manchu and Han officials, in which Manchu were more likely to stress the Han/non-Han difference and need to shelter natives, whereas Han officials favored policies of integration and Sinicization. See “Ethnicity” 191–203. This perspective was reflected in a 1727 Yongzheng edict to governors of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi stating that “the Miao are ferocious . . . The Hanjian sell them cudgels and hide among them, inciting them to evil.” See also Wang, “Hanjian,” 6–8 (quote p. 8); Wu, “Hanjian,” 108–9; Sutton, ibid., 195, 199, 205–6; Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 127–32. For examples from the Veritable Records, see IHP QSZ KX 47/11/17, QL 7/4/29, QL 7/6/30, QL 8/10/6, QL 10/3/30, QL 13/8/8, QL 15/zheng/24, QL 17/2/12, QL 19/12/30, QL 24/7/14, QL 25/9/14, QL 31/zheng/16, QL 31/4/28, QL 31/5/13. For related discussion, see Robert H.G. Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Tsai Wei-chieh, “Mongolization of Han Chinese and Manchu Settlers in Qing Mongolia, 1700–1911,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2017. See also Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur, and Kinzley, “Turning Prospectors into Settlers,” 21–4. For related research on this shift, see Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirate: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014); Seunghyun Han, After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Suzhou (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016), as well as McMahon, Rethinking. In one example, Judd Kinzley traces a progression where outlawed jianmin gold miners were, by the late nineteenth century, recast, and redirected, as subject settlers developing extractable national resources. See ibid. The eighteenth-century narrative was largely repeated in connection to the southwestern Miao and Taiwanese Fan. See, for example, IHP QSZ JQ 2/5/2, JQ 15/4/23, DG 6/11/12, DG 14/zheng, 23, DG 18/4/6. For similar rhetoric and categories in reports of the rebellious Guo 猓 people of the Leipo 雷波 and E-mei 峩眉regions of Sichuan, see JQ 7/4/2, JQ 7/6/10, JQ 7/7/8, JQ 7/8/12, DG 18/6/25, DG 18/8/24, DG 19/4/1. In connection to the indigenes of Hainan Island, see DG 12/4/5. Concerning Annam, see IHP QSZ JQ 7/12/19, DG 13/03/1, DG 13/03/25, DG 13/08/27. Concerning the Burma border, see GGB JQ 13/3/22 (#404010305–1). For Zhili, see, for example, IHP QSZ DG 15/10/24, DG 19/4/13. For Jilin, see DG 19/10/21 and 22, DG 21/12/28. For Fengtian, see DG 28/8/2. Concerning the Korean border (occupying state lands, erecting sheds, harassing local populations), see JQ 12/12/11, DG 22/6/15, DG 22/12/20, DG 26/6/30, DG 26/9/28, DG 26/10/5, DG 28/2/23, DG 30/11/10. Concerning Qing efforts to define and isolate the Korean border, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland. Concerning movement into Mongolia, see GGB DG 14/6/10 (#08810); IHP QSZ DG 14/6/18. Concerning movement into Central Asia from Xinjiang, see IHP QSZ DG 8/8/20, DG 9/5/13. Concerning jian activity in Qinghai, see IHP QSZ DG 2/12/7, DG 3/zheng/3, DG 3/2/22. For reports of this activity in Jilin, see IHP QSZ DG 19/10/21 and 22, DG 20/zheng/24, DG 20/12/25, DG 21/12/28. In Liaoning, see JQ 19/10/28, 29. And in Mongolia, see DG/14/6/18 and GGB DG 14/6/10 (#068310). See also IHP QSZ DG 16/2/20, DG 26/6/30.

Treachery at imperial edges 153 58 Concerning the illegal purchase of banner rice, see IHP QSZ JQ 14/6/26, JQ 22/6/28, JQ 25/6/21. Concerning illegal purchase of salt, in exchange for tea and lumber, see JQ 10/2/25. 59 See IHP QSZ JQ 10/2/25 (collusion with banner leaders); JQ 10/2/25, JQ 10/4/18, JQ 12/12/14 (usury), DG 8/8/20, DG 9/5/13, DG 20/2/15 (trade with outer yi). For reports of illegal trading in Qinghai, between Hui and Hanjian see DG 2/8/29, DG 2/10/8, DG 2/12/7. 60 See for example, IHP QSZ DG 2/12/7, DG 2/12/28, DG 3/zheng/3, DG 3/2/22, and DG 3/3/1 (cooperation and conflict in Qinghai). Tsai Wei-chieh argues that this increased in-migration led to the “Mongolization” of local Han Chinese. See “Mongolization.” 61 For examples, see IHP QSZ JQ 8/8/1, 14, 20, 22, JQ 8/9/16, 18, JQ 8/10/16, JQ 15/10/18, DG 7/11/17, DG 7/11/28, DG 11/8/1, DG 15/2/18, DG 15/8/17, DG 15/12/18, DG 21/12/28. 62 For examples, see IHP QSZ JQ 13/9/22 (Xinjiang), DG 2/12/7 (Gansu), DG 19/4/13 (Zhili), DG 30/11/10 (Korean border). For discussion of illegal mining of copper, see JQ 14/8/12. 63 See IHP QSZ JQ 15/10/18, DG 7/11/17, DG 22/4/10. 64 For a good discussion see Dian H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790– 1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), esp. chs 2–3. See also Wang, White Lotus Rebels, 2, 95, 104–5. 65 See Murray, ibid., Ch. 7; Antony, “State, Community, and Pirate Suppression”; and McMahon, Rethinking, Ch. 7. The jianbi qingye policy promoted during the 1796– 1804 White Lotus Rebellion was based in a similar perspective of jianmin, shaping early nineteenth century coastal defense policy. For references to collusion with pirates or foreign merchants, see GGB JQ 1/4/2 (#404000385), JQ 5/3/13 (#404005339). Also see IHP QSZ JQ 7/4/18, JQ 11/11/10 (building ships), JQ 12/2/11, JQ 12/10/13, JQ 12/12/4 (repairing boats), JQ 14/zheng/18, JQ 14/8/17, JQ 18/zheng/21, DG 2/zheng/27, DG 2/3/28, DG 8/11/6. 66 IHP QSZ DG 20/2/15. 67 See, for example, IHP QSZ JQ 18/7/10, DG 10/6/24, DG 10/12/18, DG 11/2/15, DG 11/3/7, DG 11/4/8, DG 11/6/21, DG 11/7/2/, DG 11/7/3, DG 11/7/13 (movement and sale), DG 12/6/26, DG 19/4/4 (developing networks), DG 11/6/13, DG 11/6/26, DG 11/6/29 (growing poppies), DG 3/8/12 (processing opium and opium dens), DG 12/9/12, DG 13/4/6, DG 18/4/10 (outflow of silver and other metals), DG 19/zheng/24 (selling opium to Guizhou Miao), DG 17/6/5 and 6 (hiding the trade). 68 See, for example, IPH QSZ JQ 24/12/18 (encouraging trade), DG 11/3/29, DG 18/9/26, DG 18/10/16 (facilitating trade), DG 11/5/25 (negotiating prices), DG 12/6/1 and 11 (translating and guidance), DG 26/10/20 (disguising foreign ships). 69 For an example criticizing a Mongol prince, see IHP QSZ JQ 10/2/25. A second example, referring to British traders, observes that “the rebellious barbarians are full of tricks. The jianmin of Haikou crave profit and are continuously used by these barbarians.” See DG 21/11/28. 70 Wang Ke found claims that reference to Hanjian appearing in the Song dynasty, but the earliest actual reference is in the Yuan. The term was rarely used before the Qing. See Wang, “Hanjian,” 3–5. The earliest known Qing reference, from 1690 states: “the disaster of the Miao bandits arises from the Hanjian” (p. 6). For a discussion of views on the origin of the term, see Wu, “Hanjian,” 107–8. The earliest reference in the Veritable Records is QL yuan /07/09. Concerning growing use of the term in the Yongzheng period, see Wang, ibid., 7. 71 See the articles in Thomas S. Mullaney, et al., eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), esp. Thomas Mullaney, “Critical Han Studies: Introduction and Prolegomenon,” 1–22 (quote on p. 17). For a discussion of the

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Political Discourse Analysis development of “Han” as a racial category, see Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992). See Huang Mei, “Qingdai bianjian diqu “Hanjian” wenti yanjiu: yi xinan bianjiang wei zhong,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yunnan University, 2016 (quote p. v). This study is a good overview of Qing imperial views on, and policies for, Hanjian in southwestern regions. See, C. Patterson Giersch, “From Subjects to Han: The Rise of Han as Identity in Nineteenth-Century Southwest China,” in Critical Han Studies, 197–200. Giersch, and others, however, do observe that a distinctive and “increasingly powerful notion of Han-ness” developed over the nineteenth century. See, for example, Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi, “The Han Minzu, Fragmented Identities, and Ethnicity,” Journal of Asian Studies 72.4 (November 2013): 864. Mullaney, et al., Critical Han Studies, Ch. 1. David Atwill notes the “seemingly broad and inconsistent application” of the term Hanjian in relation to the early nineteenth century Yunnan border with Burma and Tibet. See The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 51–4 (quote p. 52). Arthur Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (New York: MacMillan, 1958), 222. Wang, “Hanjian,” 2. For examples, see IHP QSZ JQ 10/2/25, QL 8/10/6, QL 58/9/1. This point is also made and discussed by Wu Mi, see “Hanjian,” 109. Wu, ibid (Annam and Burma). See also, IHP QSZ QL 5/3/15 (Yunnan), QL 32/12/7 (Burma), JQ 10/2/25 (smuggling and illegal trade), DG 22/6/2 (rumors), DG 22/7/7 (cutting queues), DG 22/7/13 and 15 (digging up embankments), DG 22/6/18 and 20 (killing and burning). Joseph Lawson discusses the Hanjian discourse in connection to the Yi of highland Sichuan, See A Frontier Make Lawless: Violence in Upland Southwest China, 1800–1956 (British Columbia: UBC Press, 2017), 35, 38–9. A keyword search of “Hanjian” yields over 300 dates for the middle Qing period in which the term is linked to borderland crimes. See, for example, IHP QSZ QL yuan/7/9, QL 4/4/29, QL 6/2/30, QL 7/4/29, QL 8/4/29, QL 8/10/6, QL 9/10/30, QL 13/7/9, QL 13/7/19, QL 13/8/8. For related discussion, see Yun Xia, Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2017), 15–16. Wu Mi, “Hanjian.” The earliest reference is attributed to the Guizhou governor Tian Wen 田雯 in 1690. See Wang Ke, “Hanjian,” 6–7. Concerning early references to Hanjian abuse of the Miao in the Veritable Records, see for example IHP QSZ QL yuan/7/9, QL 3/4/29, QL 5/6/25, QL 6/2/30, QL 6/3/21, QL 7/4/29, QL 8/10/6, QL 9/10/30. For examples of this perspective, see IHP QSZ QL 13/7/9, QL 14/2/27, QL 31/5/13, QL 31/10/15, QL 32/12/7, QL 39/2/23. In the nineteenth century, similar views were expressed regarding the Guo of highland Sichuan and Li 黎 of Hainan Island. See IHP QSZ JQ 7/6/10, JQ 7/8/12, JQ 8/4/14, JQ 22/5/15, DG 3/6/9, DG 10/11/22, DG 12/4/5, DG 14/6/19, DG 14/8/28. For Sutton’s discussion of Hanjian, see “Ethnic Revolt,” esp. 125–32. In support of his view, he quotes a 1795 edict: “the Miao are stubborn, obtuse, and ignorant. Without the incitement of the Hanjian among them, how would they dare to form gangs and riot? The present resistance . . . must have at its center the plotting of Hanjian; they are truly hateful.” See p. 128. Concerning the different groupings of the Miao Frontier as described by Yan Ruyi, see Yan, Miao fangbei lan, juan, 8–9 and McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 41–51. Yan rarely used either the terms Han or Hanjian. Sutton suggests that ethnic identity led to relatively little Han support of the uprising. See Sutton, ibid., 125–32. For related discussion, see Waley, The Opium War, Ch. 5; Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, Ch. 4; James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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University Press, 1992), chs 3–4; Hsin-pao Chang, Commisoner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), Ch. 5. See Wakeman, “Hanjian (Traitor),” 229–300; Wu Mi, “Hanjian,” 111–12; Yun Xia, Down with Traitors, 17. Yun Xia also notes that “the number of Hanjian mentioned in the Qing official documents increased exponentially during the first Opium War.” See ibid., 17. For use of the terms jianmin and neidi jianmin to indicate collaborators in the coastal opium trade and Opium War, see, for example, IHP QSZ DG 20/4/15, DG 20/5/20, DG 20/6/3, DG 20/8/4, DG 21/6/12, DG 22/10/10. IHP QSZ DG 20/2/29, DG 21/11/28. IHP QSZ DG 21/10/8. See, for example, IHP QSZ DG 21/12/4 (town Hanjian), DG 22/zheng/14 (fishermen Hanjian). Concerning the report of the Hanjian residing in Guangdong, see DG 22/6/1. On Hanjian as the enemy’s “eyes and ears,” see IHP QSZ DG 20/8/6, DG 21/9/6. On Hanjian as guides, see DG 21/5/10, DG 21/9/22, DG 21/11/28, DG 22/zheng/14. On the use of Hanjian disguised as merchants, refugees, monks, beggars, fishermen, entertainers, and soldiers, see DG 22/2/12, DG 22/2/13, DG 22/2/18, DG 22/2/19, DG 22/6/9. On giving information to the enemy, see DG 21/3/13, DG 21/3/17. On spying, see DG 21/9/2, DG 21/11/4. On work as translators and scribes, see DG 20/8/19, DG 21/zheng/8. On spreading rumors, see DG 22/6/2. On killing and burning, see DG 22/6/18, 20. On communication with the British using rockets, see DG 22/4/17 and 20. On sending messages to the capital on behalf of the barbarians, see DG 22/10/2. This perspective was linked to British military success: “if the treacherous barbarians take Ningbo, it is difficult to guarantee that they will not order Hanjian on all sides to watch and wait (for a chance to strike).” See DG 21/10/3. Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, 49. Concerning discussion of this problem, see IHP QSZ DG 22/2/15, 19, 24. See also, McMahon, Rethinking, 113, 176–9; Wang, White Lotus Rebels, 99. IHP QSZ DG 20/3/17. According to Frederick Wakeman, Commissioner Lin Zexu’s 1840 memorials “gave the impression that his worst enemy was not the British but the countless merchants, boatmen, and coolies who dealt with the enemy.” See Strangers at the Gate, 49–50. IHP QSZ DG 22/5/7, 8. See IHP QSZ DG20/4/15 (quote). See also DG 20/6/28, DG 21/3/17, DG 21/5/10. IHP QSZ DG 22/5/4. See also DG 22/7/7. See, for example, IHP QSZ DG 20/12/18, DG 21/3/13, DG 21/10/1, DG 21/10/23 and 24, DG 21/11/21, DG 22/7/17, DG 22/9/9, DG 22/10/10, DG 22/10/11. Mao Haijian, The Qing Empire and the Opium War: The Collapse of the Heavenly Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), ix (James Lawson’s preface). Ibid., x, xvii (Julia Lovell’s introduction). Ibid., xv, 8, 75. For a similar perspective on the imperial classification of the British as yi during the Opium War, see Chen, Merchants of War and Peace, Ch. 5, esp. 99–101. Chen refers to this as a “soft border, erected in the form of an information barrier.” See 155. Mao, The Qing Empire, 263. Chen, Merchants of War and Peace, 100. For instance, Clause Nine of the Treaty of Nanjing, making it legal for Chinese to have exchange and communication with the British, was referred to at the time as the “Hanjian clause.” See Wu Mi, “Hanjian,” 111–12. Wang Ke, “Hanjian,” 8. Wu Mi, “Hanjian,” 113. Ibid. Wakeman, “Hanjian (Traitor),” 229–300. Wakeman, Strangers at the Gate, 50.

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112 Ibid., 50. The popular resistance at San-yuan-li, part of the Hanjian backlash, is often portrayed as an anti-imperial patriotic response. See Polachek, The Inner Opium War, 162–75. 113 Ibid., 165–9. 114 For related discussions, see Wakeman, “Hanjian (Traitor),” 299–301; Wu, “Hanjian,” 113–14; Wang, “Hanjian,” 11. Wakeman observes that the label was one element of twentieth century Chinese political discourse. For the communists, to betray Marxism was to be Hanjian; and for the Nationalists, to be communist was to be Hanjian. 115 Xia Yun observes that by 1900 “one did not have to be Han to be Hanjian,” although the term increasingly indicated ethnic Han who betrayed Han people. See Down with Traitors, 17. 116 Matthew Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3. 117 Mullaney, et al., Critical Han Studies, 15. 118 See Wang, “Hanjian.” Concerning Wu Mi’s disagreement, see “Hanjian,” 113.

7

Marking “men of iniquity” Imperial purpose and imagined boundaries in the Qing processing of rebel ringleaders, 1786–1828

This chapter continues a focus on political discourse (and approaches of Political Discourse Analysis) to again examine disruptive borderland deviance identified by the Qing (1644–1911) imperial regime, in this instance via more detailed exploration of the combined rhetorical, ideological, and administrative response to rebel ringleaders. Examined here are cases of five infamous “men of iniquity” discursively described and physically managed at the turn of the nineteenth century. As these cases reveal, imperial administrations engaged in common processes of identification, manhunts, deposition, sentencing, and execution – efforts that worked together to not just to enact justice, but establish images of the ringleaders as the essence of “great crimes and egregious evil” (zui da e ji罪大惡極). The calculated and recurring simplifications this entailed, in turn, reinforced imperially preferred understandings of rebel organization and association, regional culpability, Qing legitimacy, and transition toward victory. The discussion, however, aims not just to clarify how linked imperial writing and work was done, but also how it varied in a time of bureaucratic adjustment, as the dynasty faced sustained challenges to the maintenance and control of Qing boundary regions. The first case, initiating a shift toward expanded use of civilians in imperial military action, concerns Lin Shuangwen 林爽文 of Taiwan’s 1786–1788 Lin Shuangwen Revolt. The edicts of the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (r. 1736–1795), memorials of provincial officials, military reports, and records of the Grand Council all pose Lin as an irredeemable “chief criminal” (shou fan 首犯). This formal depiction framed the ringleader’s capture, interrogation, transport, and death by “slow slicing” (lingchi 凌遲), signaling the rebellion’s end. It concurrently connected Lin to fellow rebel leaders, members of the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandi hui 天地會), villagers of Lin’s home territory, and Zhangzhou 漳州 settlers generally as evil and beyond the bounds of empire. Following are four cases detailing Qing management of the “Miao King” (Miao wang 苗王) Shi Sanbao 石三保 of the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt, “Heavenly King” (tianwang 天王) Liu Zhixie劉之協 of the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion, “Heavenly King” Lin Qing 林清 of the 1813 Eight Trigrams Revolt, and Afaqi Khoja Jahāngīr (Zhang-ge-er 張格爾) of the 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising. These show a common procedure in which the Jiaqing 嘉慶 (r. 1796–1820) and Daoguang 道光 (r. 1821–1850) emperors took a leading role in condemning

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culprits and pushing for chastisement. In these instances, it was never questioned that ringleaders and close supporters deserved punishment. Intriguing differences arose, however, in the positioning of the leaders in relation to larger circles of associates. “Imagined” boundaries were asserted between rebel lords and warzone populations, suggestive not just of the exploitation of regional social divisions, but also of an expanding embrace of peripheral peoples as compliant, and even border-defending, imperial subjects. This is indicated by the distinction drawn between Shi Sanbao and the “crazed” (dian 癲) Hunan Miao, sect leader Liu Zhixie and peaceful “White Lotus” sectarians, as well as the “perfidious barbarian” (niyi逆裔) Jahāngīr and Xinjiang Muslims.1

Selection of cases for comparison This chapter considers cases of Qing bureaucratic discourse and procedure in the handling of apex rebel ringleaders. The selection of these cases – a mere handful among dozens available – merits some explanation. The choice, in this instance, was made in light of the comprehensiveness and/or distinctiveness of these cases, as well as their ties to boundary management during the troubled transition from the high Qing to late Qing periods.2 Desired were clearly representative challengers on Qing peripheries: those who underwent extended imperial processing, reflective of the fuller range of Qing rhetoric, methods, and resources. In the cases of Lin Shuangwen, Liu Zhixie, and Jahāngīr, these leaders were identified as initial instigators, pursued for years prior to their capture and prosecution, with executions that formally shifted or ended the conflicts. The story of Lin Shuangwen, in particular, seems broadly typical of how such matters were handled from start to finish. Accordingly, his management will be presented as a baseline case of rhetoric and procedure, discussed in greatest detail. Likewise desired in the selection of cases were rebel leaders whose depiction and punishment proved particularly dramatic, potentially reflective of the intervention of powerful leaders (such as emperors), as well as of broader swings in imperial views or policy. Arguably, ringleaders were depicted and punished not just in routine response to imputed transgressions, but to advance specific political objectives relevant to that moment. This fits the circumstances of Liu Zhixie and Lin Qing, calculatedly condemned by the Jiaqing emperor as exceptional even amongst sectarians, as well as of Jahāngīr, considered as alien and thus subject to a broad range of ceremonial (and Inner Asian) chastisement under the direction of the Daoguang emperor. Additionally wanted were cases showing alterations in Qing administration of hinterlands at the turn of the nineteenth century. At hand was a time of not just cascading social crises, arising in two external and three internal boundary regions, but also of a bureaucratic system struggling to preserve order over an enlarged empire. The rebel leaders asserted challenges in peripheral regions that had for decades (if not centuries) been subject to established, if varied, imperial rule. The breakdown they precipitated forced the Qing bureaucracy – and, most

Marking “men of iniquity” 159 notable in regard to ideological formulations, the emperors – to reassess not just how to restore order, but ensure continued stability and civilization. The imperial response, as Yingcong Dai tells us, included a shift toward expanded use of borderland civilians, in battle from the 1780s and in community defense from the 1790s. It was also seen, as Wensheng Wang, Seunghyun Han, and Matthew Mosca observe, in governance from 1799 adjusted to moderate imperial expenditures, circulate intelligence on frontier circumstances, and empower regional literati assistance.3 The sequence of cases presented is intended to trace something of these changes. The first is the Lin Shuangwen Uprising, chosen not just because of Lin’s imperial treatment, but also for the Qing regime’s innovative use of frontier subjects to aid military action – a method repeated on a larger scale in later conflicts. The second is the Miao Revolt and Shi Sanbao as an example of procedure and social vision in an internal non-Han rebellion at the end of the Qianlong reign. The third case is the White Lotus Rebellion and Liu Zhixie from 1799, as the Jiaqing emperor took full control of his administration and advanced more inclusive policies of governance and pacification. Attention to Lin Qing in the fourth case, in the course of pacification of yet another internal boundary region, permits us to ask if Jiaqing’s inclusiveness continued during the Eight Trigrams revolt. The final case of Jahāngīr and Xinjiang rebellion extends the discussion to the early Daoguang reign, a northern frontier, and a second non-Han population. It allows us to consider the potential impact of earlier episodes of pacification, as well as possible connections to what Matthew Mosca terms an emerging “Qing information order” extending (and standardizing) imperial knowledge of disparate nineteenth-century borderlands.

Eighteenth century regulations and procedures Before moving to discussion of the imperial depiction and processing of specific rebel ringleaders, let us briefly review the nature of such governmental action in eighteenth-century China. As will be seen, the Qianlong emperor and his bureaucracy did not simply create the language, categories, procedures, and ritual that they and their successors used to manage insurgent challengers. Rather, they drew upon established juridical and administrative precedent. The framework for determination of, and response to, criminal transgression is outlined in the Great Qing Code (Da Qing lüli大清律例), the basis of Chinese imperial law.4 Added to this were statutes that addressed norms of social and governmental behavior. This included the Da Qing huidian 大清會典, oriented toward the “interior” (neidi 內地) regions of the empire, as well as collections regulating newly incorporated or Manchu-governed border regions, such as the Lifan Yuan zeli 理藩院則例.5 These regulations exhibit significant overlap in language and categories of socio-behavioral deviance – in the manner, say, that the “good” (liang 良) are distinguished from “disloyal” (ni 逆), “rebels” (zei 賊), or “bandits” (fei 匪). They likewise adhere to a common principle of condemnation of challenges to state sovereignty, as well as insistence that direct accessories

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in pernicious plots be apprehended and executed commonly with leading perpetrators.6 These principles, and the language of their expression, are echoed in governmental writing, perhaps most dramatically in the statements of the Qing emperors, reflective of a bureaucratic culture that relied on such accepted texts to frame administrative determinations. Foremost of the crimes listed in the Great Qing Code are the “Ten Great Wrongs” (shi e 十惡), three of which pertain directly to attacks against the dynasty: “plotting rebellion” (“plotting to violate the altars of earth and grain [sheji 社稷]”), “plotting high treason” (harming the ancestral temples and holy sites of the imperial palace), and “plotting treason” (betraying the dynasty through secret service to an enemy power).7 These violations were deemed a capital offense punishable not just by death, but by the more horrific “slow slicing.” As the Huidian stipulates, before such punishment was administered, the detaining officials were to memorialize the throne and obtain an edict indicating guilt, often confirmed by the emperor’s response that the perpetrator had committed “great crimes and egregious evil.”8 The punishment of accomplices to high crimes varied. The ringleader – referred to as the “chief criminal” (shou fan 首犯), “chief transgressor” (shou zui 首罪), “man of iniquity” (yuan e元惡), or some variant – was categorically most culpable and subject to the greatest penalty.9 Those directly in collusion, assisting plots, perpetrating wrongful violence, or committing related offenses, received near or equal punishment.10 What was done with folk beyond this immediate circle, however, was less clearly defined. As Timothy Brook and others observe, Chinese jurisprudence adhered to an ancient tradition of considering not just action but intent in the determination of guilt and punishment. The more remote the association and less willful the action – say, as a result of coercion – the greater the possibility of leniency. Such calculation, they argue, was “carefully graded in relation to the severity of the crime, as well as anticipation of the moral consequences it might produce in society.”11 In effect, deciding who else crossed the line into unacceptable evil, and to what extent, was a matter of immediate imperial interpretation. How, specifically, did the Qing administration respond to identified rebel ringleaders? Here again, the Huidian provides guidelines. Time limits were set for on-site officials to make arrests.12 When captured, the miscreant would be interviewed, with a memorial dispatched noting the crimes perpetrated and results of the interrogation.13 In this process, torture was permissible, if beholden to formal guidelines concerning the means and tools utilized.14 The criminal would thereupon be sent on to the capital for further interrogation by the Board of Punishment, and sometimes Grand Council, with the results communicated to the throne. Upon conclusion, the emperor presented an edict confirming guilt and issued a sentence, almost invariably (as mandated by law) that of “death by dismemberment with the severed head put on display” (cunzhe xiaoshi寸磔梟示). This was to be carried out “without delay” in a prepared execution ground.15 The punishment of dismemberment, or “slow slicing (lingchi),” was both calculated and significant. It involved “the methodical slitting and cutting apart of

Marking “men of iniquity” 161 the body of the condemned in a stipulated number of cuts performed in prescribed sequence.” This was not only physically painful, but also had terrifying spiritual implications. Chinese belief held that cutting disrupted a body’s “somatic integrity,” inhibiting the spirit from both rebirth and the ability to receive sacrifices from one’s descendants. Akin to European capital punishment designed to prevent a soul from entering Heaven, this, too, promised eternal hunger and isolation.16 The measure thus served a purpose common to early modern state executions generally: to assert a regime’s dominance, legitimacy, and natural authority, while extending an example – “deterrence by terror” – that at once shamed offenders and awed others.17 The rationale that Qing leaders themselves provided was that it “made manifest the laws and gladdened the people’s hearts” (yi zhang guo xian, er kuai ren xin 以彰國憲而快人心). That is, lingchi was a kind of ritual, the climax of a longer ritualized bureaucratic process, one that not just illuminated imperial rules and authority, but aimed to instill a deeper public realization regarding where and why dynastic lines were drawn.

Lin Shuangwen of the 1786–1788 Lin Shuangwen uprising We now turn to the case of the “discursive” processing of rebel leader Lin Shuangwen. The Lin Shuangwen Uprising broke out on the western edge of the island of Taiwan, lasting from December 1786 to March 1788. Arising from dissatisfaction with regional Qing administration and dissent between subethnic Zhangzhou and Quanzhou 泉州 settler communities, it officially began when Lin led the Heaven and Earth Society in an attack on government troops.18 That assault sparked a larger uprising of mainly (but not all) Zhangzhou people, whose forces occupied the Zhanghua 彰化 county seat in early 1787, followed by seizure of other key towns. To the south, another ringleader, Zhuang Datian 莊大田, captured the Fengshan 鳳山 county seat. The expansion, however, was bitterly contested and, in areas such as Lugang 鹿港 and Danshui 淡水, pushed back by imperial forces, aided by Quanzhou militia who had organized themselves, and then were officially sanctioned, for local defense. Fifty thousand imperial troops were dispatched to Taiwan under the leadership of Shaanxi-Gansu governor-general Fukang’an福康安 (d. 1796). Upon arrival in December 1787, this leader exploited a new precedent to mobilize civilians for offensive military duties.19 Their action together regained lost lands and pressed Lin’s forces towards the mountains of central Taiwan. Fukang’an besieged Daliyi 大里杙, the center of Lin’s support, breaking it and causing Lin to flee into the highland territory of “raw” (sheng 生) Taiwan indigenes, where he was later captured.20 Lin Shuangwen, as an apex ringleader, was personally and directly defined by imperial authorities. At the outbreak of the conflict, he was identified as a native of Fujian’s Zhangzhou, sharing an “obstinacy” (wan 頑) and rebellious intent with “quite a few” of that region.21 Lin first came to imperial attention in the wake of “treacherous bandit” attacks he led together with Yang Guangxun 陽光勳 and Wang Fen 王芬, identified by Qianlong as “chief evils” to be captured and sent to

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the capital.22 Reference in day-to-day reports used conventional, and seemingly interchangeable, terminology that stressed Lin’s treacherous and immoral nature, such as the label of “treacherous subject” (jianmin 奸民), “rebel” (zeifei), “bandit criminal” (feifan 匪犯), and “disloyal criminal” (nifan 逆犯).23 He was, moreover, accounted as being cunning, “deceitful by nature” (jiaoxia xingcheng 狡黠 性成), abusive, bullying, and larcenous.”24 As the revolt spread, Lin Shuangwen’s leading position sharpened. By spring 1787, memorials also referenced him as a “chief criminal” (shou qu首渠), “chief traitor” (ni shou 逆首), and “great rebel” (da ni大逆) – a status affirmed by imperial edict.25 More fundamentally, Qing bureaucratic discourse defined Lin Shuangwen (as all rebel ringleaders) by his actions. There were distinct patterns of behavior that sparked imperial concern. In Taiwan, this began when Adding Brothers Society (Tiandi hui添弟會) “bandits” (feitu 匪徒) feuded with the Lord Lei Society (Leigong hui 雷公會), “committing arson, kidnapping prisoners, and murdering soldiers.”26 This was followed by several thousand “rebels” (zeifei) and “treacherous bandits” (jianfei 奸匪), led by Lin, who killed soldiers and officials, looted towns, and occupied settlements housing Qing administrative offices.27 A second pattern was detrimental social exchanges both exploited and exacerbated by rebel leaders. Authorities accounted Taiwan as a “maritime frontier” (haijiang 海疆) troubled by unruly “people of the interior” (neidi ren 內地人).28 Migration from Fujian and Guangdong had produced bitter subethnic feuding, while also allowing Zhangzhou and Quanzhou settlers the ability to form a common cause against Qing authority.29 Both Qianlong and Fukang’an feared their capability to spread sedition, and the Heaven and Earth Society, into the imperial heartland, as well as furtive alliances between rebels and highland natives in opposition to state forces.30 A third pattern was the insurgency’s appointment of officials in mimicry of the imperial regime.31 Lin Shuangwen and Zhuang Datian were reported to have established dozens of posts, whose “false officials” led troops, conducted rituals, and collected taxes.32 Even more distressing was Lin’s pose not just as a da mengzhu 大盟主 (great league chief) or da ge 大哥 (elder brother) of the Heaven and Earth Society, but as a rival monarch.33 He had asserted a reign year (nianhao年號) and the reign name Shuntian 順天 (“following the mandate of Heaven”), as well as used flags proclaiming, “Following the Mandate of Heaven, in Accord with the Way” (shun tian xing dao順天行道).34 Lin’s organization had even disseminated handbills employing imperial rhetoric in reference to proclamations of Heaven’s support, Lin’s edicts, and the defense of “our good folk” (wu liang 吾良).35 Qing observers viewed this action as unconscionable, falling under the Ten Great Wrongs. Such treason appropriated the sovereignty of the dynasty, disrespected the emperor, and eroded the symbolic and literal authority of local administrators.36 These transgressions were listed as a qualifier to his name at the start of virtually every bureaucratic discussion of him. Doing so established illicit activity and intent, corroborated images of treachery, and provided blocks of wrongdoing with which to construct a narrative of enormous – even foundational – criminality. At

Marking “men of iniquity” 163 the outset of the uprising, for instance, one report recorded that the “bandit Lin Shuangwen does not fear death, dares to attack the towns, slaughters officials, cuts himself off from civilization, and runs rampant.”37 Qianlong concurred that Lin had “unlawfully assembled a mob, dared to kill officials and officers, and attacked the towns,” adding in following months that the ringleader also “falsely invested officials” and was “treacherous and unlawful, calling himself king and usurping the title of an imperial reign.”38 Administrative statements in the course of pacification thereby shaped a simplified but potent image. Lin was cast as not merely the embodiment of evil, but a focal force that both provoked and guided a mass defection of local people in defiance of properly constituted authority. As displayed, he had clearly committed “great crimes and egregious evil,” generally the phrase concluding recitation of his crimes.39 In this respect, the imperial depiction of Lin Shuangwen resembled that of other rebel commanders, notably Zhuang Datian, although Lin was attributed greatest significance as a unifying force. As Qianlong asserted, “if the chief evil Lin Shuangwen is apprehended, the rebel bands will certainly collapse and they will scatter and flee; it will then not be hard to wipe them out.”40 The ringleader’s capture was considered a matter of dire and sustained urgency. This was in accord with Huidian guidelines, as well as pressed by both the logic of the imperial narrative and strident calls of the Qianlong emperor. A manhunt was launched at the start of the conflict, increasing in intensity under the direction of Fukang’an in the final months of the pacification. Upon hearing that Lin was finally arrested in the highlands on March 2, 1788, the Qianlong emperor effused that this resolution “shows the blessings of Heaven, Earth, and the Gods.”41 Following protocol, Lin was then interrogated in the military camps. Fukang’an’s dispatch to the emperor notes that the rebel acknowledged his crimes and provided intelligence on leaders such as Zhuang Datian, although he resisted full disclosure on his closest confederates. The general considered use of torture to elicit further information, but feared the impact would adversely affect Lin Shangwen’s health and ability to travel.42 Qianlong replied that it could wait until Lin arrived at the capital.43 As this capture became known, the emperor received written congratulations from officials throughout the empire. Their formulaic memorials reiterated established rhetoric concerning the challenger. As one minister noted, “the bandit chief Lin Shuangwen, born in lands beyond, dared under the brilliance of Heaven and changing of the day to gather a mob and create a disturbance. These are great crimes and egregious evil.” He then urged that Lin and his band be eradicated “to extend the laws of the nation above and gladden the hearts of the people below.”44 Qianlong ordered that, in Lin’s transport to the capital, officials en route prepare for the prisoner’s arrival and “take an extra measure of precaution” (jia bei xiaoxin 加倍小心) to ensure that he remained safe. The emperor would monitor this progress and was to be immediately informed if any problems arose.45 Lin Shuangwen was accordingly dispatched together with members of his family and others rebel leaders, some of whom did not survive the journey. As mandated, the administrators responsible sent periodic reports detailing the circumstances.46

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Upon the ringleader’s arrival at Beijing on April 8, 1788, he was again questioned, in this instance with queries concerning his relations with the hill tribes, claims of a reign title, investiture of officials, and recruitment of Quanzhou supporters. Lin, however, proved “evasive,” saying that the natives had defied him and the use of imperial symbols and titles was done without his full understanding.47 The interrogators then posed a question reflective of the imperial narrative encompassing not just Lin Shuangwen, but all rebels: “You are of the August Emperor’s people and were treated well by his officials. You were extended benevolence and compassion, given subsistence, not shown prejudice or made to pay taxes. How could you not show your gratitude and dare to revolt?!”48 In this way, Lin Shuangwen was identified as not just transgressing law, but even the limits of sanity, exhibiting a perverse incapacity to appreciate the bounty that the dynasty offered its subjects. Lin’s rather conventional reply was that “we know of the August Emperor’s love and care for his people,” but were driven to rebellion by corrupt local officials.49 The final summation of Lin Shuangwen’s guilt was presented by Grand Councilor Agui 阿桂 (1717–1797) on April 15, 1788. As he wrote: The rebel chief Lin Shuangwen, under the brilliance of Heaven and the changing of the day, has gathered a mob and run rampant, killing officials and harming towns. He has created dynastic year titles and personally invested false official posts – in all things being unlawful. Truly these are great crimes and egregious evil, beyond what Heaven and Earth can tolerate.50 This statement, a final iteration of imperial assertion, constituted the official representation of Lin as embodiment of transgression. It concluded with a recommendation that “this should be rectified as stipulated by the statutes of punishment to make manifest the laws and gladden the people’s hearts. Lin Shuangwen should be executed by slow slicing according to law with the head of the rebel chief displayed at the entrance of the marketplace.” The plan was submitted to the throne and, having received the emperor’s assent, enacted the same day. As Agui reported, Lin Shuangwen and a confederate, Chen Chuan 陳傳, were brought to a vegetable market where they were beaten with clubs, boards, and razor boards. Thereupon, “the two criminals were subjected to slow slicing. The people looked on as the punishment took place, by the road and from the rooftops, amounting to not less than ten thousand people. Together they cried out their delight. In addition, the heads of these two criminals were placed on poles for all to see.”51 As reported, not only was the prescribed penalty administered, it was publicly witnessed and approved, in all fully realizing the imperial objective of “making manifest the laws and gladdening the people’s hearts.” The execution was the denouement of the Qing narrative of the Lin Shuangwen Uprising. Lin’s (and, soon after, Zhuang Datian’s) ritualized destruction signaled the end of the war, initiating a transition towards closure, imperial glory, and dynastic order.52 This sequence was suggested in statements by Qianlong that apprehension of the “chief evil” would end the conflict, as well as by Fukang’an

Marking “men of iniquity” 165 that “the capture of Lin Shuangwen has destroyed the rebellion” and “the capture of Zhuang Datian has cleared up matters in Taiwan.”53 The day after Lin’s death, the emperor sent edicts to the Grand Council ordering commemoration of victory. They included a preface to portraits of meritorious officials, placards, three stone steles proclaiming “conscientious governance and love of the people” (qin zheng ai min 勤政愛民), and a call to create a formal record of the pacification to illuminate “the gift of the Emperor’s grace and profound favor” (tian en meng hou天恩蒙厚).54 In the months that followed, the Qianlong emperor also authorized twelve “battle copper print” illustrations of military scenes (two of which depicted the capture of Lin and Zhuang), as well as creation of shrines for meritorious officials.55 Lin Shuangwen, as depicted and processed, thus had a calculated place in the planning of the Qing imperial government. But what of the circles of Taiwan folk with whom he was associated, be it by organization, subethnicity, or location? How were they envisioned in connection to “rebel chief” Lin? And to what ends? Here I suggest that in this case, as compared to later cases discussed, imperial views on regional society were sterner, less flexible, and less inclusive, albeit perhaps in transition. As particularly advanced by the Fujian-Zhejiang military governor Chang Qing 長青 (d. 1793) and the Qianlong emperor (if balanced by Fukang’an), not just Lin Shangwen but virtually all Zhangzhou people were deemed suspect and dangerous. This occurred in the context of bureaucratic prejudice against Taiwan’s Han settlers. The new residents were described as “tricky and fierce” (diaohan 刁悍), violent, unlawful, and unrepentant, of a debased character that could not be easily trusted, particularly in times of turmoil or state weakness.56 The revolt, moreover, sharpened imperial distinctions in accord with existing subethnic tensions. Chang Qing, the commander of the pacification until Fukang’an’s arrival in December 1787, stressed the differing character that separated the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou communities.57 Those he deemed “good,” or at least acceptable, were mainly from Quanzhou and Guangdong, particularly communities who aided the state by forming militia and defensive networks. These “righteous folk” (yimin 義民) proved decisive allies, unconnected (as Qianlong said) to the machinations of the Heaven and Earth Society.58 But even they were deemed capable of “foolishness” (yu 愚) leading to hidden treachery or open rebellion.59 Yet more ambiguous in imperial eyes were Taiwan’s indigenous highlanders. Describing them as “people beyond civilization” (hua wai zhi ren 化外之人) with “a nature like birds and beasts” (xing tong qinshou 性同禽獸), both Fukang’an and Qianlong feared their possible collusion with state enemies.60 The representation, however, was not so much of “raw” natives being innately evil as much as being primitive and of a morally blank nature, responding naïvely to greed, awe, or fear.61 The images of imperial allies stood in contrast to depictions of Han settlers closer to Lin Shuangwen and the uprising. Those who actively engaged in rebellion were identified much as Lin was, as “rebel elements” (feitu 匪徒), “treacherous bandits” (jianfei), or “rebels” (zeifei). Resistance leaders, false officials, Heaven and Earth Society brothers, or any who “committed arson, kidnapped

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prisoners, and killed soldiers” were accounted of “great crimes and egregious evil.”62 Qianlong proclaimed that such miscreants “should be eliminated in their entirety!” both because they “know their crimes and cannot be forgiven” and because it would prevent a resurgence of resistance when Qing forces withdrew.63 For captured commanders, punishment mirrored that of Lin Shuangwen. They, too, were interrogated, transported, sentenced, and slow-sliced before mobs, with their decapitated heads put on display.64 From the early months of the pacification, moreover, Chang Qing took a stance of not differentiating followers and leaders, having them both executed.65 The imperial casting of culpability, however, extended further. In accord with regulations, the families of rebel leaders were captured, with the men executed and the women and children enslaved.66 More extensively, a shadow loomed over two larger groups. The first was the folk of Lin Shuangwen’s home territory of Daliyi. Qianlong called them “half rebels,” stating that “although they may not have engaged in revolt, they live together with the rebels and are of two hearts; clearly they cannot be trusted.”67 The emperor ordered a strike on Daliyi and its “rebel band,” leading to the death of hundreds of villagers.68 The second group was the Zhangzhou people, observed by both Chang Qing and the Qinglong emperor as “not good” and inclined to “shelter their countrymen in the rebel bands.”69 Chang Qing memorialized that, “the rebel chief Lin Shuangwen is a Zhangzhou man. Of his followers, all hail from Zhangzhou. This makes it even harder to ensure that there is not collusion between inner and outer.”70 The emperor corroborated this view, calling for the investigation of Zhangzhou people, particularly in relation to seditious links to the Qing interior.71 That is to say, contemporary imperial views tended to conflate Lin Shuangwen with larger alignments of fellow rebels, sympathetic communities, and people of shared provenance, as “commonly vile” (tong e 同惡) and deserving swift retribution.72 There were, however, limits to the severity of this categorization. Ideologically, it was inconsistent with the Qing administration’s orthodox social vision of its people as innately good and capable of correction. Practically, it was unfeasible and threatened to disrupt local society. Chang Qing’s inflexibility was further tempered by the more moderate view of his successor Fukang’an, who put less stress on conflation of goodness with subethnicity, advancing a more flexible standard of compliant behavior. Qianlong clearly understood the logic. In April 1787, he stated that, as a general rule, those who took false ranks or resisted should be punished according to the law, but those who were coerced (“I think not a few”), “confused,” or surrendered should be extended clemency.73 In July, he further promised that those who “quickly repented, abandoned their weapons, and returned to farming” could avoid death.74 Fukang’an, following the occupation of Dayili, extended this reasoning explicitly to the Zhangzhou natives, observing that they were fearful due to their association with Lin Shuangwen and would revolt if pressed too harshly. The emperor concurred, signaling a turn toward greater attention to investigation and mercy for refugees.75 It is unclear to what extent this shift may also have been shaped by Fukang’an’s efforts towards

Marking “men of iniquity” 167 greater military employment of civilians, although certainly his rhetorical forms were echoed in the subsequent cases of pacifications discussed here. It might be observed that clemency is not always inclusion. Zhangzhou settlers continued to be regarded with suspicion, particularly by an emperor who abhorred “treacherous” Han and longed to “forever pacify the maritime frontier.”76 Fukang’an himself noted that “foolish villagers” who surrendered might be permitted to avoid punishment, and some among them even dispatched to catch rebels, but they were “not good” and not to be trusted. “Zhangzhou people,” he stated, “have the evil practice of having gangs that protect their fellow provincials.”77 Qing strategists in Taiwan thus continued to both see divisions between subethnic communities and portray them in moral (if self-interested) terms. On one side were Quanzhou “righteous folk” loyal to the empire; on the other were Zhangzhou “treacherous folk,” largely of a kind with Lin Shuangwen.

Shi Sanbao of the 1795–1797 Miao Revolt The discussion now turns to four cases for comparison with the processing of Lin Shuangwen, considering not just language and procedure in the management of apex rebel commanders, but also how imperial administrations deployed these approaches to assert lines between inner and outer in borderlands conflicts. The first concerns the Miao King Shi Sanbao of the 1795–1797 Miao Uprising (also discussed in Chapter 2). As will be seen, state processing of his challenge followed similar patterns, but with greater distinctions drawn between top leaders and Miao followers. Here, discursive perspectives were articulated by the elderly Qianlong emperor and Grand Councilor Heshen和珅 (1750–1799), but shaped locally by Fukang’an and Sichuan governor Helin和琳 (d. 1796), Heshen’s brother. The close political relationship between these men, and growing power of Heshen to speak on the emperor’s behalf, particularly after Qianlong’s formal retirement in 1795, lent their views substantial influence and uniformity.78 The revolt was an uprising of ethnic Miao 苗 clansmen living on the Hunan Miao Frontier (Miaojiang 苗疆) highlands spanning the Hunan-Guizhou border, sparked by a flood of Han settlers over the eighteenth century. Native lands had been lost, Miao impoverished, and in late 1795 rebel leaders led attacks on settler villages and towns to regain the Miao’s traditional birthright. In response, the Qianlong emperor dispatched Fukang’an and Helin to manage the pacification. Together they formulated plans that ultimately led to deployment of 180,000 troops, recruitment of Miao allies, and an expense of 20,000,000 taels. The command structure of the native resistance was, if anything, even more diffuse than that of the Lin Shuangwen Revolt. Initial military reports, however, identified three Miao commanders central to the conflict － Wu Longdeng 吳隴 登, Shi Liudeng 石柳鄧, and Shi Sanbao – although Wu Tianban 吳天半 and Wu Bayue 吳八月 soon rose to comparable prominence.79 Of these leaders, the village headman and “Miao King” Shi Sanbao was likely the most significant, if rivaled by Shi Liudeng and the “Wu King” (Wu wang 吳王) Wu Tianban.

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In initial assessments, imperial commanders identified concerns defining not just the conflict, but the status of those involved. Similar to reports on the Lin Shuangwen Uprising, this included violence to officials and subjects, as well as rumors of unlawful “appointment of officials” (zuo guan 做官).80 Added to this was Qianlong’s “near obsession” with “treacherous Han” (Hanjian 漢奸), a fear that sophisticated but unscrupulous Chinese of the imperial heartland had manipulated naïve Miao natives and, in fact, secretly orchestrated the uprising.81 There was, in addition, dismay at an outbreak of mass spirit possession – noted in official documents as “going mad” (fa dian 發癲) – in which Miao villagers proclaimed not just the heavenly anointed return of the Miao King, but a reincarnation of the feared early Qing challenger Wu Sangui吳三桂 (1612–1678) in the guise of the Wu King.82 In this context, the depiction of Shi Sanbao largely followed the pattern seen with Lin Shuangwen. Bureaucratic parlance had changed little in terms of general labeling, with Shi referenced as a “chief criminal” (shou fan), “chief evil” (shou e 首惡), “Miao bandit” (Miao fei 苗匪), “disloyal bandit” (ni fei), and the like.83 This prefaced the formal and repeatedly presented list of Shi’s crimes, such as “gathering a mob to loot and pillage,” “slaughtering [Han] guest people,” “burning and destroying homes,” looting granaries, and laying siege to Qianzhou Town.84 These identified offenses similarly counted among the Ten Great Wrongs, as “great crimes and egregious evil” that “reached the limits of crimes (tolerated by Heaven)” (e guan man ying 惡貫滿盈).85 The most distinct difference, beyond indication of Shi Sanbao as Miao and of a “tough and ferocious” (xiong han凶悍) disposition, lay in the deceptions attributed to this apex native leader. Whereas simple-minded Miao villagers might have succumbed to “lunacy,” losing their senses and believing that Heaven had proclaimed Shi a king, Sanbao himself had, as Fukang’an and Heshen both wrote, “feigned madness” (zhuang dian 裝癲 or jie fengdian 借瘋癲) to harness this insanity to his own ill-gotten ends.86 In effect, he had pretended to be possessed (or arranged others to pretend) in order to claim the Miao King mantle. In framing events in this way, Qing administrators thereby ascribed to Shi Sanbao an exceptional sophistication, comparable to that attributed to Lin Shuangwen. He, however, stood in contrast to a general vision of the Miao natives, consistently advanced by the Qianlong emperor, as culturally simple and susceptible – marking Shi as distinctive from his own rank-and-file followers.87 The emperor, now aware of the rebel leaders, repeatedly called on Fukang’an to make arrests, indicative of his continued attention, and use of edicts, to apply pressure on his generals. As occurred with Lin Shuangwen, strident calls couched in a formulaic language of condemnation solidified an image of the rebel lords as central to the uprising. This galvanized a vision of rebel organization, against which the Qing forces then gave themselves a mandate to act. As Qianlong stated in early 1796, for example, “when the chief criminals are captured their bands will naturally disperse and this will further empower our efforts toward pacification and capture.”88 Shi Sanbao’s village was seized and he fled, eventually seeking shelter among the Turen 土人 people, who thereupon surrendered him to Qing forces in May

Marking “men of iniquity” 169 1796.89 According to procedure, Shi was escorted to a military garrison where his deposition was taken, with a memorial immediately dispatched to the emperor. In that report, Governor Helin again observed that the rebel had “feigned madness” and “reached the limits of crimes (tolerated by Heaven),” and that he should be executed together with the captured leader Wu Tianban “to make manifest the laws.”90 Helin’s memorial promised appropriate preparations and quick dispatch of Shi Sanbao to the capital (Qianlong noted that he was “deeply comforted”).91 This was supplemented by memorials sent from other officials attending the transport. Generals Lebao 勒保 (1740–1819) and Feng Guangxiong 馮光熊 (d. 1801), for example, reported with a list of Shi’s crimes (“feigning madness to cause disturbances”), idioms indicating transgression (e.g., “actions intolerable to Heaven and Earth, enraging gods and men alike”), and note of the field agents who would care for the procession at stops along the route to the capital.92 On his arrival in June 1796, the rebel king Shi Sanbao was further interrogated by the Grand Council, to which – echoing Lin Shuangwen’s confession – he recounted his actions, provided intelligence on other insurgent commanders, and responded to the question of how he, having “received the profound benevolence and deep favor of the emperor’s love and support,” dared revolt.93 Shi formally corroborated the established imperial narrative of the rebellion and his relationship to it, if with evasions and declaration that he wanted only to regain lost Miao land. On August 20, 1796, Heshen set this narrative in its most dramatic rhetorical form. Writing of the “exceedingly evil, unreasonable, unlawful, and rebellious Miao” Shi Sanbao, Heshen recounted how Shi’s nephew had proclaimed Sanbao the Miao King, a title which was accepted and wrongfully exploited to “confuse the Miao mob” (shanhuo Miaozhong 煽惑苗眾) and conspire with criminals. Shi had then led the Miao on a killing spree in which they attacked towns, slaughtered officials, and resisted the Qing armies. In addition, he had supported Wu Tianban’s outrageous claims to be the Wu King and a transmigration of Wu Sangui. Together these were “great crimes and egregious evil,” meriting immediate execution by slow slicing in order “to clarify the laws and gladden the people’s hearts.”94 What happened next is not entirely clear. Presumably the Jiaqing emperor, now the reigning monarch, concurred and Shi was executed. Heshen had also requested that news of the “chief criminal” be conveyed to the people of the Miao Frontier, illustrating Qing victory and the fate of imperial foes, although it is unclear how this was done. We find, however, prominent representations of the capture of both Shi Sanbao and Wu Tianban in the battle copper prints commemorating the Miao pacification. Strikingly similar to images of Lin Shuangwen and Zhuang Datian, these pictures pose both enemy submission and a turning point in the conflict.95 What, then, does such treatment tell us about how Qing authorities framed Shi Sanbao in relation to other Miao? Even more than Lin Shuangwen, Shi was regarded as of a kind with fellow apex commanders. Wu Tianban, Shi Liudeng, and Wu Bayue were at this time also censured for feigning spirit possession,

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gathering mobs, and engaging in unlawful slaughter.96 Wu Tianban’s incarceration mirrored Shi Sanbao, but even those that died free, such as Shi Liudeng and Wu Tingli 吳廷禮, were posthumously beheaded and put on display to “shock the Miao folk” and “serve as a warning to foolish Miao.”97 Inclusive culpability likewise extended to minor leaders and diehard followers of the revolt, noted as “rebels” (zeifei), “Miao bandits” (fei Miao), and “disloyal Miao” (ni Miao 逆苗). Qianlong insisted, much as he had during the Lin Shuangwen Revolt, that such supporters too had perpetrated “great crimes and egregious evil” and would be executed according to law.98 Where the imperial rhetoric diverges was the status of those at expanding levels of association, such as fellow Miao villagers, clansmen, and highland residents. In this case, we certainly see prejudicial views of the Miao as violent, superstitious, cunning, fierce, cruel, and “raw.”99 In the course of Qing pacification, however, they were not formally regarded as always rebels, cut of the same cloth, and deserving commensurate censure. Both Fukang’an and the Qianlong emperor noted the large number of Miao who had been compelled or deceived, suffering from a hysteria to which culturally simple natives were deemed prone.100 The accompanying depiction of Shi Sanbao and his associates only served to underscore the dangers that arose when the safeguards intended to protect such susceptible imperial people failed.101 Compared to Qianlong and Fukang’an’s discussion of Zhangzhou people a decade prior, there was a similar agreement to permit the surrender of the coerced, but far greater willingness to redeploy those local Miao en masse to capture rebel leaders and aid the Qing’s military pacification. If this was the perspective of the Qing’s pacification’s top leadership, what, then, accounted for it? Certainly, it linked to the Qianlong emperor’s asserted belief that natives were naïve, vulnerable to the predation of Han Chinese, and best kept separate.102 In this sense, the Miao were placed in a category more akin to that of the indigenous tribes of Taiwan’s highlands than borderland Han settlers. The outlook, however, was also pragmatic. The Miao Frontier lacked clear divisions in the native population such as had permitted the use of Quanzhou people against Zhangzhou rebels in Taiwan. The imperial administration was, concurrently, in a more insecure position, both indirectly due to the outbreak of the White Lotus Revolt in 1796, and directly due to the Hunan government’s corrosive combination of expanding expenses, sapped resources, and colossal waste in military finances.103 The solution, again advanced by Fukang’an based on the Taiwan precedent, was use of civilians to gird defenses and assist the pacification, both with militia of Han settlers and (as Qianlong put it) by “using Miao to attack Miao.”104 This strategy proved decisive, as illustrated when Wu Longdeng defected, captured key insurgent leaders, and fatally divided the native rebel alliance. Encouraging Miao support and redeployment in this way, however, required a social vision that would allow the “surrendered Miao” (xiang Miao 降苗) to be positioned more benignly, as basically good if deceived, subjects of a sort, and distinct from evil leaders, largely irrespective of pre-existing ethnic or regional connections. There had to be a door to their formal (if locally contested) inclusion. Presenting apex

Marking “men of iniquity” 171 rebel leaders such as Shi Sanbao as exceptional, and influential in that exception, arguably enabled such distinctions.

Liu Zhixie of the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion Our second comparison is the Qing processing of the sectarian leader Liu Zhixie. An important “heretical teaching” (xiejiao 邪教) sect organizer, Liu was accounted as a catalyst, then paramount leader, of the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion that burned through the Hubei-Shaanxi-Sichuan border region. Subject to a manhunt starting in 1794, his capture, sentencing, and execution in 1800 showed similar rhetoric and procedure to that applied to both Lin Shuangwen and Shi Sanbao. Circumstances, however, also reveal the impact of the coalescing “Jiaqing Reforms,” as Qianlong’s son advanced strategies of large-scale civilian mobilization.105 Liu’s reckoning served a supporting role, in which he was framed as distinct even from “true” (that is, potentially compliant) sectarians. A challenge to Qing rule emerged in the 1790s when religious sects proclaimed the return of the Niuba 牛八 (heir to the Ming imperial house) and Maitreya Buddha (herald of an apocalyptic age).106 Sectarian faith – transmitted through clandestine networks and shared esoteric scriptures – centered on the “Eternal Unbirthed Mother” (wusheng lao mu 無生老母) and a doctrine of a new era. A universal cleansing of fire and blood was reportedly at hand. Those who repented and learned proper teachings would survive, with a select group granted eternal paradise.107 This threat was complicated by that fact that, as discussed in Chapter 3, the highlands in which the belief spread had for decades already been unruly and largely beyond the state’s reach. The Qing regime branded the sectarian “White Lotus” religion as “heretical teaching,” terms the state used interchangeably, strengthening prohibitions on its practice after the millenarian Wang Lun Revolt of 1774.108 Religious congregations, however, survived in secret and in 1788 a leader of the Primal Chaos (hunyuan 混元) sect, Liu Zhixie, colluded with his master Liu Song 劉松 to proclaim the Niuba and Maitreya.109 The Qianlong emperor, informed of this activity in 1794, ordered a search to locate the proclaimed prophets.110 The Qing’s infamously brutal 1794 investigation reached into Henan, Gansu, Hubei, and Shaanxi, during which imperial authorities captured several notables, including Liu Song, Song Zhiqing宋之清, and Wang Yinghe 王應瑚.111 At the end of 1794, Shaanxi – Gansu governor-general Lebao officially traced the source of the sedition back to Liu Song and Liu Zhixie.112 Liu Song, when interrogated, confessed that he had conspired to proclaim a Niuba and Maitreya, although “this was merely so as to take in the people and attempt to make a lot of money.”113 This insidious act, Qing authorities maintained, was soon emulated by other religious groups, thereby igniting violent turmoil.114 Liu Song was executed by slow slicing, but Liu Zhixie remained at large for the next six years. Bureaucratic descriptions of Liu echoed those of Lin Shuangwen and Shi Sanbao, focusing on a narrative of the duplicity of evil men inciting unsteady fringe subjects. Liu Song and Liu Zhixie were described using stock phrases including

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“falsely naming a Niuba” (nie ming Niuba捏名牛八) and “confusing subjects and cheating money (huo min pian qian 惑民騙錢), with variations such as “collecting money and deceiving the masses” (lian qian huo zhong斂錢惑眾).115 Use of the character nie 捏 (to fabricate an untruth) to indicate the deceit of the Niuba proclamations paralleled the assertion of “feigned” spirit possession directed at apex Miao rebel leaders. More common, however, was attribution of the character huo 惑 (to confuse or delude) to indicate both a process and result of misleading naïve subjects. The “absurd seditious heresies” of the sectarian leaders were, in these terms, portrayed as the product of not just willful acts at enrichment, but efforts to erode the institutional, moral, and spiritual structure of the Qing system. To the time of Qianlong’s death in 1799, the imperial state continued to speak of, and formally advance clemency for, “coerced” rebel followers. And, indeed, efforts to encourage surrender served to weaken insurgent bands.116 Often, however, implementation was marked by a facile conflation of followers with leaders. Yan Ruyi, a prominent Shaanxi official after 1800, observed that the countryside had been devastated, and rebel numbers swollen, as a direct result of the wrongful branding of innocents as enemies.117 In the wake of battles, survivors were interrogated, in some cases with thousands indiscriminately extorted, executed, or condemned. As one captured man noted, “After the uprising began, even the refugees were labeled as rebels by the soldiers and militia and suffered injury or death.”118 This circumstance reflected the ways in which, as Yingcong Dai observes, the Qing military “had shown an inclination to fight this war on its own terms, instead of those of the Qing state.”119 It arguably also echoed broader bureaucratic disdain of unregulated Han migrants, flooding the highland three province border region, as “treacherous” and people who do “not know the way to be good.”120 Certainly it embodied an antipathy toward sectarians that had only grown in ferocity in the wake of the Wang Lun Rebellion, the early 1790s crackdown on “White Lotus” activity, and the sect-based resistance of the initial revolt.121 One grand councilor expressed a common view in a 1798 interrogation: “if you [sectarians] were truly good subjects then you would not be practicing these teachings and you would not have fallen under official investigation.”122 That is, if they were good they would not be sectarians. Official bureaucratic views on the nature of imperial people shifted in 1799, however, when Qianlong died, ending a virtual “regency” under minister Heshen.123 The Jiaqing emperor claimed control of the imperial government and promoted a set of bureaucratic adjustments. The empire was at that moment in a crisis compounded of (as Jiaqing asserted) forgotten virtue, extravagant and dishonest officials, inefficient administration, empty coffers, desperate subjects, and pacification policies that were, in fact, sowing chaos. His response was a calculated restoration: one not just of plans, but of people. This was a conventional approach to regain a more favorable Confucian climate of proper ritual, relationships, and etiquette. The specific correction advanced, however, was focused to fit circumstances and practical goals, promoting key virtues (such as frugality, integrity,

Marking “men of iniquity” 173 and pragmatism), a renewed stress on the innate goodness of humanity, and a vision of subjects that was at once both more encompassing and flexible. Support for reform, in effect, was to be realized by a reaffirmation of who and what Qing people were, pursuant of an asserted need that the folk be regarded, treated, and themselves act, as true imperial subjects. There were several elements to this in the context of the “Jiaqing Reforms.” One was the depiction of Heshen. As argued elsewhere, the prominent sentencing, demotion, and death of this high official moved beyond either justice or revenge. Rather, Jiaqing’s excoriation, in which he marked Heshen as another a “man of iniquity,” spoke directly to the imperial bureaucracy, particularly the patronage network Heshen had built within it. The administrators that had abetted so much abuse were still deemed potentially good, if now suspect and under appraisal. Accordingly, they – and the Qing administration generally – were offered an opportunity for rectification, and restoration of empire, backed by the threatening example of Heshen’s demise if they resisted.124 A second element was the “strengthen the walls and clear the countryside” (jian bi qing ye 堅壁清野) plan for pacification. Intransigent problems of deteriorating infrastructure, social dislocation, destitution, and ineffective military deployment prompted appointment of new military commanders, notably Eledengbao 額勒登保 (1748–1805) and Nayancheng 那彥成 (1764–1833), as well as widespread mobilization of highland civilians. As discussed in Chapter 5, rural populations were to be concentrated within fortified walls and organized to defend themselves, thereby isolating the enemy, at least in theory. As Gong Jinghan龔 景瀚 (1747–1803), the leading advocate of this policy, argued, “if there is one more subject there will be one less rebel.”125 The feasibility of such mobilization, innovated in the Lin Shuangwen and Miao pacifications, was framed by the Jiaqing emperor’s assertion that “officials had forced subjects to rebel” (guan bi min fan 官逼民反). That is to say, local populations might have been deviant or distressed, but most (albeit not all) retained an innate goodness and predilection for loyalty. Accordingly, as Jiaqing affirmed, they were still “our subjects” (wu min 吾民) and “we have heard of the use of soldiers against enemy nations. We have not heard of the use of soldiers against our own subjects.”126 Such pronouncements advanced an inclusive vision of social conditions that offered an imperial embrace, as well as more fully and formally distinguished borderland populations from genuine rebels. A third element of the reforms’ greater inclusiveness was empowerment of Qing gentry as agents of imperial interests. Jianbi qingye, and related public works, were intended to have imperial oversight but local implementation. Organization, rather, was to be led by trusted local elite, who would maintain links to officialdom and work at its behest.127 Qianlong had feared the ills resulting from strengthened literati involvement in imperial affairs. Jiaqing, in contrast, saw greater advantage, and financial necessity, in connecting them to both aspirations and realization of dynastic preservation.128 It was a decision that had fateful consequences. As Wensheng Wang observes, “the suppression campaign after 1799 contributed

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to an intensification of elite participation in local public affairs that facilitated the transition from high Qing state-activism to late Qing elite activism.”129 Here we return to Liu Zhixie who, over years in hiding, largely absent from the revolt, took shape in the imperial imagination as the instigator, architect, and commander of the disturbance: a “treasonous chief criminal” (panni shoufan 叛逆 首犯).130 Liu reappeared to Qing sights in 1800, during a Henan uprising in which his disciple Li Jie李杰 presented the prophet to his followers. “The members of the sect, upon seeing [Liu] all kowtowed,” as they would to an emperor. Li Jie thereupon raised a banner proclaiming, “the Heavenly King Liu Zhixie.”131 The gambit failed, however, and Liu was captured by imperial forces. The Grand Council reviewed the case. As stated in Liu’s formal list of crimes, he had “propagated evil White Lotus teachings . . . falsely named the Niuba and called him a descendant of the former Ming house, named Liu Sier [劉四兒], son of the convicted criminal Liu Song, the Maitreya Buddha transmigrated to earth to aid the Niuba.” In addition, he “planned to confuse the masses and cheat them of their money, and continued to plot unlawful acts.”132 Subsequently, Liu prompted a destructive manhunt, precipitated insurrection, and colluded with the rebel Li Jie, who falsely proclaimed Liu a Heavenly King.133 These were, as was said of Lin Shuangwen and Shi Sanbao, “great crimes and egregious evil” which “incensed gods and men alike” and “reached the limits of crimes (tolerated by Heaven).”134 Liu was accordingly interrogated and induced to confess these sins, thereby justifying his subsequent execution by slow slicing.135 The unusually high profile given to Liu Zhixie’s demise had political benefits. The capture reflected well on the wise governance of the newly invigorated Jiaqing administration. Like the capture of Lin Shuangwen, it also signified a great victory. Arrest of a man purported to be the leader of the resistance dealt – or could be depicted as dealing – a blow to the rebellion, removing its heart and signaling its fall. In addition, as is less well recognized, the representation of Liu Zhixie advanced by the Jiaqing emperor furthered the social vision of the Jiaqing Reforms. As Jiaqing stated, Liu’s iniquity and destructiveness were beyond question. The rebel, however, faced execution “because his crimes can be categorized as extreme, not because he practiced the White Lotus religion.”136 That is, as he informed the Grand Council on October 2, 1800, “the perniciousness was created by [Liu] himself and is unconnected to White Lotus teachings.”137 “Can it be,” Jiaqing asked, “that because the White Lotus sect has Liu Zhixie, this one man, that those who practice those teachings are a bandit band and must be strictly investigated and prohibited?”138 In this way, the emperor deviated from the sterner outlook of his father, who posed sectarian practice as itself a root deviance, placing his emphasis on seditious activity. Sectarians were to be condemned and punished – as Liu Zhixie was – to the extent that they were truly rebellious, not as a consequence of their religious devotion.139 The distinction, softening imperial views of sectarians, was introduced in the emperor’s proclamation of May 21, 1800, “On Heretical Teachings” (Xiejiao shuo 邪教說).140 This discussion proceeded from the tenet, emphasized in the ideology of the Jiaqing Reforms, that the basic nature of the sectarians (and highland

Marking “men of iniquity” 175 populations) was not evil. Many had begun with worthy goals to cultivate themselves into a Buddha or immortal and had adhered to benign practices such as vegetarianism and the curing of disease. It was, in fact, such sincere belief in the power of karma, reflective of innate goodness, that caused them to be led astray.141 The problem (again echoing views on highlanders) was that these folk were often foolish and ignorant. “They do not know how to be good and thus enter upon the path of evil,” lost in desperation, indigence, and fear, then ensnared in treacherous traps offering false hope.142 Nor was this necessarily a problem of sectarian doctrine. “It is clear,” Jiaqing observed, “that the White Lotus teachings and the insurrection [are based on] different principles.”143 Religious distinctiveness did not itself indicate rebellious intent.144 In this assertion, however, the emperor was both co-opting and redefining the nature of the sectarian religion. Its core practices, and the beliefs that sustained them, were here presented as benign and amenable to correct imperial conduct, unrelated to the millenarianism and sedition advanced by prophet challengers. Accordingly, sectarians in theory could also be subjects, provided they behaved properly. As the emperor stated, “if those who practice White Lotus teachings hold to piousness and recite scriptures they are no different from the common folk.”145 Likewise, “if they burn incense and cure illness, and if they are steadfast in their compassion, then there is nothing for the regime to prohibit.” Indeed, the best of these pious folk were formally accounted “good children (chizi 赤子) of our Great Qing.”146 “At present, those who practice the White Lotus religion who are peaceful and obey the law are good subjects. Local officials should not investigate and apprehend them.”147 Jiaqing even proposed that “of those bandits of Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, and Hubei, if they are able to repent their sins and surrender sincerely, then we should make proper arrangements and not ask whether or not they are White Lotus sectarians.”148 Viewed in this way, sectarians were not a distinct group whose members shared inimical traits. Rather, they were simply people, some of whom had associates who had “cheated money, confused subjects,” and turned to revolt.149 Those who engaged in evil activity – most notably Liu Zhixie – were categorically not true religious adherents. Liu had preyed upon innocents, fled imperial justice, conspired with rebels, “fatigued Our soldiers, and harmed Our good subjects.”150 He may have been the official head of the sect, but his iniquity contradicted essential (redefined) principles, revealing that his faith was fabrication rather than reality.151 This matter therefore was to be accounted as a problem of bad men, not religious organizations. The Jiaqing emperor asked: “if one or two Buddhist monks or Daoist priests join the rebel ranks, should we exterminate Buddhism and Daoism altogether?” Indeed not. “If the White Lotus sectarians become insurgents, they should be executed in accordance with imperial law. For those peaceful believers who have not engaged in any rebellious activities, how can we allow their extermination?”152 In the emperor’s assertion of sectarians as potential subjects, contrasted with a demonized sect leader, we thus see an offer of amnesty in the context of an

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ideological conflation of this fringe group with a larger borderland society. Sectarians (and highlanders) were reckoned acceptable precisely to the extent that they embraced order, preserved territory, and complied with the designs of the Jiaqing Reforms. This suggests important and imperially self-interested adjustments to the parameters defining Qing subjects. At least temporarily, differences of religion or “heretical teachings” were effaced as imputed benign intent was parsed and emphasized －“goodness” posed as the mirror opposite of Liu Zhixie’s “evil.”

Lin Qing of the 1813 Eight Trigrams Revolt Before moving on to the final case, on the Qing processing of the Afaqi khoja Jahāngīr in the 1820s Xinjiang revolt, let us briefly consider continuities in one intermediate instance: that of the 1813 Eight Trigrams Uprising and its pacification in the Henan-Zhili-Shandong border region. It is suggested here that the Jiaqing emperor’s rhetorical dichotomy centered on Liu Zhixie, asserting social lines that inclusively positioned peripheral people as likely subjects and imperial allies, was not unique to either Liu or the White Lotus pacification. Rather, as evidenced by the management of the Eight Trigrams ringleader Lin Qing, it continued to be directly advanced by the emperor as well as upheld by key leaders who had risen to prominence from 1799, notably Shaanxi-Gansu governor-general Nayancheng. The Eight Trigrams Uprising was a brief but dramatic conflict initiated by the Heavenly Principle Sect (天理教), a clandestine community with beliefs mirroring those of the outlawed congregations of the White Lotus Revolt. A decade after the end of the White Lotus conflict, members of this sect, led by Lin Qing, launched a failed attack on the Forbidden City in Beijing, with designs to assassinate the emperor. Resistance continued in the provincial borderland sheltering the sectarians, but was suppressed within three months under Nayancheng’s leadership.153 We will not outline here the full story of the pacification, or governmental processing of Lin Qing and accomplices. What is stressed, rather, is the extent to which the plans and rhetoric of the emperor echoed those he had advanced 13 years prior. As a sectarian leader, Lin – like Liu Song and Liu Zhixie – had proclaimed himself a “Heavenly King” and Maitreya, advancing a vision of a turning kalpa and returning Ming ruling house. Upon his capture, within two weeks of the strike on the Forbidden City, this “chief rebel” (shou ni) was brought to the capital, interrogated by the Board of Punishment, confessed a scheme to make money (although he resisted naming confederates), underwent further questioning by the Jiaqing emperor, and was then summarily executed by slow slicing together with three other ringleaders. His head was dispatched to Henan to be displayed as a message to other insurgents.154 There were other parallels in the management of this agitator.155 As occurred in the case of Liu Zhixie, Jiaqing inserted himself directly into the process, using this intervention to define both Lin Qing and the restive boundary society with which he was linked. On October 11, just days after Lin’s capture, he issued an

Marking “men of iniquity” 177 edict, stating that Liu Zhixie had been the instigator of the White Lotus Revolt and “the three provinces were pacified not over a year” after his arrest. “The turmoil caused by Lin Qing,” the emperor continued, “is even more profound than that of Liu Zhixie.”156 Lin was, in this way, identified as exceptional even as a “man of iniquity.” Like Liu Zhixie, he was accounted as a keystone of the conflict, a leading perpetrator that had “caused the disturbance” by “enticing a band of bandits, using wealth and advantage to seduce them into joining the sect,” and “plotting revolt.” This understanding was underscored to the imperial bureaucracy when Jiaqing personally oversaw Lin’s interrogation.157 Discussion of depositions and execution once again provided a discursive context in which to clarify the larger landscape of transgression. An imperial edict affirmed the culpability of those “falsely invested” as officials, along with the followers and family of ringleaders, as indeed all “treacherous criminals who aid evil” (zhu e ni fan 助惡逆犯).158 Determination of punishment ranged from lingchi execution to exile to Xinjiang as banner slaves.159 The Jiaqing emperor, in addition, used this milieu to demarcate the line between “true rebels” (zhen zei 真賊) and “good subjects” (liangmin), including “foolish folk” (yumin) who had been deceived, coerced, or confused into an association with the rebel cause.160 In his discussion of the execution of Lin Qing, Jiaqing emphasized that “although the vicinity has several dozen wicked people, we are unwilling to lessen our love and solicitude for those with the hearts of subjects (chizi zhi xin 赤子之 心).”161 Accordingly, officials making arrests were “not permitted to involve innocent people.”162 As had occurred 13 years prior, imperial edicts also proclaimed that “those who practiced religious teachings but did not follow the rebels,” or innocent vegetarians coerced into rebel gangs, were to be distinguished and not punished.163 These and similar instructions, such as identification of the “coerced refugees” placed at the vanguard of “true rebels,” were passed to, and echoed by, pacification leaders Nayancheng and provincial commander-in-chief Yang Yuchun 楊遇春 (1762–1837).164 In this case, military discipline and social clemency was clearly intended as a means of damage control to maintain morale and prevent a panic that would drive wavering locals into rebel arms. In addition, as during the White Lotus pacification, regional gentry and citizenry were again given a critical role in maintaining local defense and assisting the military. The onset of the conflict prompted the emperor’s call to form a militia, recruit “righteous braves” (yi yong 義勇), and implement policies to “strengthen the walls and clear the countryside” (jianbi qingye).165 As Susan Naquin observes, “this officially sponsored organization of militia also gave the people a way of demonstrating their loyalty and using their power in the interest of the central government; in fact, it clearly put pressure on them to do so.”166 Akin to the Jiaqing reforms discussions, imagined social lines were thereby selectively calibrated: set to gird loyalists, empower defensive organization, and deplete enemy support. In this framework, Lin Qing was posed as a pole of iniquity, defined by his subversion and reflected in the enabling sedition of a finite group of true followers. The pattern, an echo of that created for Liu Zhixie, formally – and conspicuously – offered the imperial embrace to more distant

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associates and denizens of the regional turmoil, relevant to their neutralization or even re-deployment in support of Qing objectives. As observed by Suzuki Chūsei and Zhang Ruilong, however, this was not the end of the story, at least as far as sectarians were concerned. Zhang, in particular, argues that the Eight Trigrams Revolt was a turning point in Qing social policy, as the conclusion of pacification brought stricter rules to locate and eradicate xiejiao. This was enabled by measures such as strengthened baojia systems, harsher laws, banning of religious texts, anti-sectarian education, and promotion of the Sacred Edicts.167 The imperial reaction restricted heretical teachings and their practitioners. One might observe, however, that the shift had a different intent regarding, and impact on, regional populations more generally. Consistent with early Jiaqing era initiatives, an invigorated bureaucratic focus on orthodox teachings and correction of customs worked to more firmly indoctrinate subjects as both loyal and useful to dynastic purposes. The policy, it seems, was also oriented toward the residents of perilous internal peripheries, on and beyond the site of the Eight Trigrams Rebellion, as suggested by the stern educational promotion of the Dingyuan 定遠 sub-prefectural magistrate Ma Yungang 馬允剛 (d. 1822) in highland southern Shaanxi following a brief 1814 uprising.168

Khoja Jahāngīr of the 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising The final comparison is of the Afaqi khoja Jahāngīr, leader of the 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising in southwest Xinjiang. Here again one finds the Qing administration’s template for identifying, processing, sentencing, and punishing apex borderland leaders. Of the cases considered, the treatment of Jahāngīr, as particularly advanced by the Daoguang emperor, most resembled that of Lin Shuangwen in the manner he was identified as the paramount commander whose execution signaled final victory. This image also mirrored that constructed for Shi Sanbao, Liu Zhixie, and Lin Qing in the way Jahāngīr was distinguished from local Muslims, and even fellow clansmen, as an exceptional force of polarizing evil. Indeed, the khoja was accounted not just as a rebel, but a foreign barbarian who had violated Qing borders. That understanding, however, stood in tension with views of administrators such as the general Zhangling張齡 (1758–1838) and Kashgar councilor Wulonga武隆阿 (d. 1831), who more easily conflated Turkic Muslims with the deviance and externality so forcibly attributed to Jahāngīr.169 The uprising centered on the return of Jahāngīr, scion of a venerated line of Tarim Basin religious leaders that had fled to Central Asia following a failed revolt against Qing rule in 1758–1759. Although the Jiaqing emperor believed this line to have died out, it had endured, in contact with Afaqiya kinsmen and remembered nostalgically by Kashgari Muslims. Jahāngīr was of the third generation in exile and his pedigree was not at first recognized. By the time of his successful entry into Xinjiang in 1826, however, the Daoguang emperor knew the peril presented – a threat realized when the khoja sparked a grassroots uprising, seized the oasis towns of Kashgar, Yanggi Hisar, Yarkand, and Khotan, and effectively

Marking “men of iniquity” 179 severed the western Tarim Basin from Qing control. Reassertion of imperial rule required nearly two years, 36,000 troops, 11,000,000 taels, and (as in earlier campaigns) exploitation of the region’s social and political divisions. In this case, Qing authorities drew on the support of the Ishaqiya clans – rivals of the Afaqiya with a legacy of loyalty reaching back to the Qianlong campaigns in Xinjiang.170 One key difference in these circumstances, in comparison with earlier cases, was the relationship of the region to the larger Qing empire. The territories of the Lin Shuangwen, Miao, White Lotus, and Eight Trigram revolts lay either within or bordering the Qing interior, if having special administrative units, legal statutes, and administrators to manage the challenges they presented as imperial peripheries. The Inner Asian borderlands, in contrast, were governed by the Court of Colonial Affairs (Lifan yuan 理藩院). This was a separate branch of government administered by banner officials that relied on imperial-level oversight, separate legal codes (such as the Lifan yuan zeli), and regional military administration, as well as flexible and varied forms of local rule using native elite.171 Transgression in Xinjiang, as part of this larger “Manchu preserve,” was thus subject to differing procedure, such as regulations pertaining to “people beyond the border who commit crimes within the border,” although the principle of execution for plotters and accessories was the same.172 The region was also of more intense personal concern to the Qing monarchs because of their role as caretakers of the Manchu legacy of Inner Asian expansion. The pacification of this uprising was, however, clearly part of a common imperial system. Perhaps the most striking connection was in imperial leadership. As the Daoguang emperor faced the greatest military challenge of his early reign, he turned to men trusted by his father. These included hold-overs of the late Qianlong period such as Zhangling, who had served during the Lin Shuangwen, White Lotus, and Eight Trigram pacifications.173 It also included those risen to prominence during the White Lotus pacification and favored by the Jiaqinq emperor, notably Nayancheng, Yang Yuchun, and Yang Fang楊芳 (1770–1846) .174 These men were at the end of long and varied careers. Their work reflected the thinking and rhetoric of different generations dedicated to the preservation of troubled Qing boundaries. These circumstances shaped the formal identification of Jahāngīr. The Veritable Records state that Jahāngīr – much like the “raw” Miao rebels – was cunning, fierce, cruel, and savage as a jackal.175 The most frequently applied description, however, was ni 逆 (disloyal or rebellious), generally elaborated as niyi 逆裔 (perfidious descendant) and niyi 逆夷 (treacherous barbarian). This terminology, variations on a theme, clarified that the challenger was not just malicious, but alien – beyond the empire or its people.176 The Qing high command, however, recognized that Kashgari Muslims felt a connection with Jahāngīr as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and returned lord. Zhangling and Wulonga reported that Jahāngīr’s supporters “went to their deaths reciting scripture and crying out to the khoja,” displaying a unity and fervor beyond anything seen with Lin Shuangwen, the Miao kings, or Liu Zhixie.177 Daoguang responded in established form that this was merely a sign of Jahāngīr’s ability to “confuse the Hui 回 [Turkic Muslim] people,” seducing them akin to how Liu Zhixie and Lin Qing had duped sectarians.178

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Embracing the methods of his father and grandfather, the Daoguang emperor followed the conflict closely and pressed his generals to find Jahāngīr.179 This was successfully accomplished on February 14, 1828, following the khoja’s flight from Kashgar. Taken by Yang Fang’s troops, he was escorted to a garrison and questioned on February 16. A memorial detailing the capture and confession of the “chief evil” (shou e) was then dispatched to the emperor.180 On February 20, a procession accompanying Jahāngīr set out on an ostentatious four-month trip to the capital, in the course of which attending officials, following protocol, reassured Daoguang that all was progressing smoothly and without ill-treatment of the prisoner.181 During this time, the emperor also received congratulations from subordinates. These memorials exhibited keen understanding of prevailing rhetoric and convention, if little creativity, echoing that Jahāngīr had defied the laws and forsaken the emperor’s benevolence, thereby “reaching the limits of crimes (tolerated by Heaven)” and “incensing gods and men alike.”182 Upon Jahāngīr’s arrival to Beijing, he was interrogated at least twice more, during which he provided details on Qing soldiers being burned alive, having their queues shaved, and being shipped off to the Khoqand khanate.183 On June 25, Daoguang stated that this “man of iniquity” had “repeatedly violated the border checkpoints, harmed soldiers and officials, dared to incite and confuse the [Afaqiya Muslims], gathered Khoqandi and Kirgiz, acted crazed and unrestrained, occupied the four cities, slaughtered high officials, and cruelly harmed the people.” These were “great crimes and egregious evil” meriting execution by slow slicing in order “to make manifest the laws and gladden the people’s hearts.”184 As also occurred with the death of Lin Shuangwen, the expeditious enactment of this punishment signaled the conclusion of the war, soon after yielding plans for reconstruction, as well as Daoguang’s celebratory poetry, memorial steles, rewards and portraits of meritorious officials, eight illustrations of military scenes, and an official record of the pacification.185 This was much the same progression seen in the imperial management of earlier rebel ringleaders. Jahāngīr’s case did, however, exhibit intriguing variations indicative of his status as an Inner Asian challenger, as well as, it seems, the emperor’s personal antipathy. The khoja was not just dispatched with an armed escort, but also a procession of Muslim begs.186 Arriving at the capital together with 2,000 troops, he was “offered as a prisoner” (xianfu 獻俘) at the Temple of the Ancestors (Taimiao 太廟) and Temple of Harvests (Sheji tan 社稷壇), then was presented to the emperor in the ritual of “receiving captives” (shoufu 受俘) – both rarely performed rites previously used to celebrate victory in the Qing’s Inner Asian military campaigns.187 Jahāngīr was thereby marked as an enemy from the steppes, more akin to the seventeenth-century Zunghar Mongol chieftain Galdan than Lin Shuangwen.188 Jahāngīr’s execution also displayed distinctive trappings. Daoguang ordered, in established form, that the khoja be “paraded to the execution ground, where he would be executed by slow slicing, and beheaded with the head put on display.”189 This, however, was not to occur before a faceless mob, but rather before the sons of murdered Manchu ministers, to assuage their fury. Jahāngīr’s heart was then to

Marking “men of iniquity” 181 be cut out and bequeathed to the offspring of the slain Kashgar councilor Qingxiang 慶祥, to be placed on Qingxiang’s altar and “comfort his loyal soul.”190 Such steps suggest particular veneration of the personal bonds between the emperor and his bannermen, if still asserting closure and restoration of imperial order.191 As occurred with previous rebel ringleaders, Jahāngīr’s imperially fashioned image further served to position this apex challenger in relation to others occupying the Kasghar frontier. The Qing administration asserted groupings of common culpability, including the foreign Kirgiz and Khokandi who aided Jahāngīr, as well as Kashgari Muslims who actively aided the insurrection. On site, Zhangling and Wulonga expanded these parameters to include Jahāngīr’s Afaqiya clansmen, and even the fuller range of “foolish,” “cowardly,” and “naturally rebellious” Muslims of the four western cities, as innately connected to the khoja.192 Daoguang, however, insisted on an understanding of Tarim Basin people as imperial subjects, of the realm, if still distinct from those of the “interior.”193 That is, in a manner that echoed Jiaqing Reforms views of Han highlanders and “White Lotus” sectarians, if with a paternalistic disdain also seen in regard to Miao natives, the emperor stressed that these folk were basically submissive and loyal, but had been buffeted by adversity and “confused” by evil men – the foremost of whom was the “rebellious barbarian” Jahāngīr.194 Given the formal status of Xinjiang as “come unto the map” (ru bantu 入版圖), and its residents as Qing people, the emperor rejected Zhangling and Wulonga’s proposals to either abandon direct administration of the Tarim Basin or categorically punish the Afaqiya clan as sympathizers and rebels.195 Instead, he replaced Zhangling with the more amenable Nayancheng.196 This stands in contrast to the Qianlong emperor and Chang Qing’s earlier willingness to lump Taiwan’s Zhangzhou settlers and Daliyi villagers into a broad category with Lin Shuangwen. Indeed, the disparity is particularly stark considering the ancestral homeland, Islamic faith, veneration of pedigree, and kinship that the Afaqiya shared with Jahāngīr – connections that presented a genuine threat to imperial rule. Daoguang’s stance may have been in deference to his father’s clemency or his grandfather’s conquests. As he stated when Jahāngīr was captured, “I feel that Heaven and my ancestors have blessed me.”197 Certainly it connected to pragmatic recognition of his administration’s declining regional effectiveness, so forcefully illustrated with Jahāngīr’s calls for jihad. In a way largely untrue for the Taiwan frontier 40 years prior, imperial preservation of the Xinjiang borderland required an enhanced inclusiveness that divided Kashgari Muslims from external religious, cultural, and political influences, directing native populations back toward the Qing center. In such circumstances, Jahāngīr had to be, as he was, depicted as qualitatively different, perilous in his sway, and inevitably obliterated.

Conclusion This discussion, as a more detailed examination of “text and context” in the study of Qing political discourse, traces the governmental depiction, processing, and contextualization of the rebel ringleaders Lin Shuangwen, Shi Sanbao, Liu Zhixie,

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Lin Qing, and Jahāngīr. The cases span the years from 1786 to 1828, as the empire moved from a period of dramatic border expansion to one of more cautious, and financially circumscribed, attention to boundary maintenance. They also illustrate the opinions of three succeeding rulers (Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang), not just in relation to the rebel lords, but also to the societies of five far-flung imperial peripheries. As we have seen, the Qing administrative management of these ringleaders was broadly structured and culturally rich. It encompassed depiction, manhunts, routine formulaic communications, the emperors’ personal supervision, depositions on site and in the capital, transport, pro forma congratulations, sentencing, and ritualized execution. The bureaucracy had a template for such action, one that prosecuting officials understood and largely followed. A comparison of cases allows us insight into this process, and its interactions of imperial expression and procedure, in the course of successive boundary crises. Four points might be observed. First, as the cases suggest, and in accord with the discussion of the previous chapter, this was a simplifying process. The progression from stylized condemnation to public mutilation served to remake the miscreants into matching images of evil – shaped of greed and deceit, repositories of their respective lists of transgressions. Imperial use of a common vocabulary and categories – physically complemented by common steps of capture, interrogation, and lingchi – made unlike men (and situations) seem similar. It concurrently positioned them prominently in larger, also simplified, narratives of the uprisings. The existence of “men of iniquity,” posed in these terms, attributed both structure and hierarchy to the resistance, as their eradication indicated critical turning points in the pacification process. Second, as also seen in the previous chapter, Qing action was a legitimizing process. To be sure, the regime desired to neutralize commanders for the vital purposes of disabling resistance, gaining intelligence, and asserting justice. It was, however, also to make clear – on social, political, and religious levels – that there was a core iniquity challenging the dynasty’s rightful authority, that this iniquity had been eradicated, and that proper restoration was at hand. Rebel lords, cast as both source and sign of a confounding popular “confusion,” allowed the Qing state to recognize the power of protest and dissenting spiritual belief while utterly refusing to acknowledge its authority or reason. Imperial expression of such enabling distinctions could be taken to elaborate lengths, as seen in the promoted image of Liu Zhixie and Lin Qing as apex evils, as well in the victory rituals and dismemberment chastising Jahāngīr as an alien challenger. Third, the imperial response suggests coalescing language, intelligence, and procedure in relation to borderland conflicts. Matthew Mosca argues that there was a growing contemporary connectedness in the knowledge and management of imperial boundaries – a fusion realized (and ascertained) by moving beyond single localized cases to consider the empire as an integrated unit.198 Although our study considers only one facet of this emerging “Qing information order,” Mosca’s insight is supported by administrators (such as Fukang’an and Nayencheng),

Marking “men of iniquity” 183 posted in multiple Qing peripheries, who accumulated, adapted, and shared into a common body of bureaucratic perspectives. It is also suggested by the manner that the Xinjiang frontier was by the 1820s discursively cast in greater conformity with internal fringe regions. Fourth, the imperial management of ringleaders exhibited variation suggestive of how bureaucratic language, ideas, categories, and rituals could be, and were, adjusted to fit changing circumstances and goals. Calculated response enabled calibrated views of borderland populations: where local folk stood in relation to the “egregious evil” of rebel lords. Under the Qianlong emperor, the culpability of Lin Shuangwen faded into that of the Heaven and Earth Society, rebel bands, and Zhangzhou settlers, whereas Shi Sanbao was more sharply distinguished from the Hunan Miao. In mobilizing civilians, the Jiaqing emperor pushed imperial lines further to differentiate Liu Zhixie and Lin Qing from even other sectarians. Similarly, the Daoguang emperor distinguished Jahāngīr not only from Kashgari natives but from his own Afaqiya clan, clarifying the formal inclusion of Xinjiang Muslims as imperial people. Such calibration reflected the pragmatism of pacifying regimes, offering clemency when convenient while exploiting, or even creating, social divisions. But it indicates more. The trend from the Lin Shuangwen Revolt was of increasing mobilization of peripheral people in the service of the empire’s security and martial aims, at least in internal boundary regions and to 1814. A new initiative was founded on re-articulated ideological premises affirming the capabilities of these locals, girding their status as subjects who could and would provide desired aid. It was a shift that presaged, and likely linked to, more extensive imperial inclusions in the dynasty’s final century: from the massive mobilization of the Taiping pacification, to the creation of Xinjiang province, to the formation of unified strategy in late Qing foreign policy. At the turn of the nineteenth century, “men of iniquity,” as “marked” objects of Qing administrative attention, played a role in these discursive changes, clarifying the preferred distinctions of emperors and senior officials.

Notes 1 Detailed single case studies on the “Miao Kings” and Jahāngīr have been previously published, in Daniel McMahon, “The Qing Response to the Miao Kings of China’s 1795–1797 Miao Revolt,” Hmong Studies Journal 17 (2016): 1–37; and Daniel McMahon, “The Daoguang Response to the Afaqi Khoja Jahāngīr during the 1826– 1828 Jahāngīr Uprising,” Monumenta Serica 65.2 (December 2017): 343–62. These journals have kindly permitted a return to the topics for the purposes of the current discussion. 2 See Cecily McCaffery, “Living Through Rebellion: A Local History of the White Lotus Uprising in Hubei,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of San Diego, 2003; Yingcong Dai, “Civilians Go into Battle: Hired Militias in the White Lotus War, 1796– 1805,” Asia Major Third Series, 22.2 (December 2009): 145–78; Matthew W. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates (Cambridge, MA and

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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Political Discourse Analysis London: Harvard University Press, 2014); Han, Seunghyun, After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Suzhou (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016). Dai, ibid.; Matthew W. Mosca, “Empire and the Circulation of Frontier Intelligence: Qing Conceptions of the Ottomans,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 70.1 (2010): 147–207; Mosca, ibid.; Wang, ibid.; Han, ibid. For a translation of the Great Qing Code, see William Jones, trans. 1994, The Great Qing Code (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). See, for example, Qianlong Da Qing huidian, http://cspis.digital.ntu.edu.tw (accessed October 2016–August 2017) (hereafter: DQHD); Da Qing Huidian zeli, http://cspis. digital.ntu.edu.tw (accessed October 2016–August 2017) (hereafter: DQHDZL); Zhao Yuntian, ed., Lifan Yuan zeli (Beijing: Zhongguo canxue chubanshe, 2006). Jones, The Great Qing, esp. 237 (Article 254); Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 35–7. Concerning the Ten Great Wrongs, see Jones, ibid., 34–6, 346–7. See also DQHD, Xingbu 形部, no.-068-08-_020_000-000_00-02-01 (print version, juan 卷 68). DQHD, Xingbu, no.-068-08-_010_000-000_00-12-05 (print version, juan 68). See, for instance, DQHD, Xingbu, no.-068-08-_020_000-000_00-06-01 (print version, juan 68). Jones, The Great Qing, 237. Brook, Death, 35–7. See, for instance, DQHDZL, Li bu 吏部, no. 026-030-_020_3900_010_00-02 (print version, juan 26). DQHD, Xingbu, no. 068-08_010_000_000_00-01-05 (print version, juan 68); Susan Naquin, “True Confessions: Criminal Interrogation as a Source for Ch’ing History,” National Palace Museum Bulletin 10.6 (January–February 1976): 1–17. Brook, Death, 43–7; Nancy Park, “Unofficial Perspectives on Torture in Ming and Qing China,” Late Imperial China 37.1 (June 2016): 42, 54. Concerning the death penalty, including “execution without delay” and lingchi, see Brook, ibid., 51–5. The terms lingchi and cunzhe were often used interchangeably. For edicts by the Jiaqing emperor (discussing the execution of Lin Qing), see Qinding pingding jiaofei jilüe, comp., Qinggui (Reprint, Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1971) (hereafter: QPJJ) 5:27a, 29b. Brook, ibid., 11–12, 51, 55 (quote); Richard Ward, A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 14, 16. Ward, ibid., 9–13. Concerning the Lin Shuangwen revolt, see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 322–8; and Yu Lihua, “Lin Shuangwen geming yanjiu,” in Tingji (Taipei: Taiwan wenxian weiyuanhui, 1954), 1–25. For governmental sources, see Qingdai Taiwan dang’an shiliao quanbian (Beijing: Xuefan chubanshe, 1999) (hereafter QTDSQ); Qinding pingding Taiwan jilüe (Taipei: Taiwan xinhang yinshuasuo, 1961) (herafter QPTJ); Taiwan Lin Shuangwen qiyi ziliao xianbian, Liu Ruzhong and Miao Xuemeng, eds (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1984) (hereafter TLQZX); Qing shilu, Taiwan shi ziliao zhuanji, Zhang Benzheng, ed. (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1993) (hereafter QSTSLZ); Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, Qingdai gongzhong dang zouzhe ji Junji chu dang zhejian ziliaoku, http://npmhost.npm.gov.tw/tts/ npmmeta/GC/purchase01.html (accessed April–August 2017) (hereafter GGB). Dai, “Civilians,” 149–50. Shepherd, Statecraft; QTDSQ, 795–1680. QTDSQ, 808–9. QTDSQ, 791, 7955–6, 7987. See, for example, QTDSQ, 799–800, 802, 848.

Marking “men of iniquity” 185 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

QPTJ, 860; QTDSQ, 1705. See, for example, QTDSQ, 809, 835, 861, 1147 (edict); TLQZX, 116–18. For related memorials, see QTDSQ, 784–90 (quote on 789). See QTDSQ, 795–804. The scholar Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794–1856) noted that “this disturbance was not of external marauders, but all internal rebels.” See Yu, “Lin Shuangwen,” 1. For related references that “quite a lot” of the Zhangzhou folk were supporters of the revolt, see QTDSQ, 796, 804, 808, 809. For a memorial discussing the potential of Quanzhou settlers and Guangdong Hakka as foes of the Zhangzhou people, see 813. See QTDSQ, 861–2, 965, and 1147. See also Shepherd, Statecraft, 325–6. For a call to strengthen boundaries between “treacherous folk” (jianmin 奸民) and “raw barbarians” (shengfan 生藩), see QTDSQ, 965. See also 966–7; GGB, #403052617. See, for example, QTDSQ, 814; QPTJ, 865. See QPTJ, 860; QTDSQ, 935–6, 1025, 1076–7. For specific leaders appointed by Lin Shuangwen, see QTDSQ, 835, 1751–2. Concerning Zhuang Datian’s “falsely appointed officials,” see, for example, QTDSQ, 823, 1025, 1752. For examples of the application of these labels, see QTDSQ, 835, 1118; QPTJ, 860; QTDSQ, 835, 1117–19, 1140–2. QTDSQ, 835, 935, 959, 1140–2. For these handbills, see QTDSQ, 796, 962, 1017, 1108–9, 1232; TLQZX, 207–14. Regarding the link to the Ten Great Wrongs, see Jones, The Great Qing, 34–6. Concerning related searches for false officials, see QPTJ, 860; QTDSQ, 962, 1025, 1758–9. QTDSQ, 797. QTDSQ, 818, 930–1, 935–6, 988–9. For a list, see 1704–7. See QTDSQ, 797, 799–800, 930–1, 959, 989, 1480, 1662–3, 1680–1. The Qianlong emperor bluntly stated that “the circumstances mandate his death.” See QTDSQ, 959. QTDSQ, 101–920. For related comments, see 819, 1505; GGB, #403052963. For the emperor’s calls to capture Lin Shuangwen, see QTDSQ, 936, 989, 1019–20. TLQZX, 167. For a memorial reporting Lin’s capture, see QTDSQ, 1679. QTDSQ, 1704. For a copy of Lin’s confession, see GGB, #038807. QTDSQ, 1709–10. For this memorial see GGB, #403053230. For other examples, see #403053062, 403053476, and 403053284. QTDSQ, 1681. For a similar edict, see 866–7. It was not unusual for prisoners to perish in the course of transport. See, for example, 1715, 1716–17. See GGB, #403053502 for one example. For this deposition, see QTDSQ, 1730–2. See also 1745–6. For a later report with similar rhetoric, see GGB, #403053566. QTDSQ, 1732. Ibid. For the full memorial, see QTDSQ, 1743–5. For this statement, see 1744. For a Fukang’an memorial outlining the pacification narrative, see GGB, #403053565. For this memorial, see QTDSQ, 1756. For the execution of Zhang Datian, see QTDSQ, 1749; QPTJ, 897. TLQZX, 168. A stele was erected in March 1788 to commemorate the capture of Lin Shuangwen and Zhuang Datian. See TLQZX, 177. See QSTSLZ, 529–34, esp. 529–50. TLQZX, 147177, 180. For a responding memorial, see GGB, #403056436. See, for example, QTDSQ, 784–5, 788, 800, 804, 818, 1505, 1590, 1630–1. QTDSQ, 812–13, 816–18, 821. The Qianlong emperor provides similar views on p. 1505. Concerning Chang Qing, see Arthur W. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943–1944), 19–44, 24.

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58 QTDSQ, 1709–10. Concerning the emperor’s early approval of the mobilization of these people to assist the military in defense and capture, see 821. 59 QTDSQ, 1709–10; Shepherd, Statecraft, 323; see also Fukang’an, QTDSQ, 1640. Concerning recognition of Quanzhou people in the rebel ranks, see QTDSQ, 802. 60 QTDSQ, 1113–14, 1590, 1670–1. 61 For a good summation of these views, see QTDSQ, 1590. 62 For examples of this labels applied, see QTDSQ, 784–5, 789, 791, 795, 796, 1025, 1218, 1758. For condemnation as zui da e ji see 893, 939, 1021, 1025, 1076–7, 1218. 63 QTDSQ, 1025 (former quote), 1155 (latter quote). See also 1147. For early statements of this type by Chang Qing, see 868–9. 64 For examples, see QTDSQ, 893, 1025, 1076–7, 1077–8, 1732. 65 QTDSQ, 869. 66 See, for example, QTDSQ, 1715–16. 67 QTDSQ, 1505. 68 For Qianlong’s order, see QTDSQ, 1020–1. For Fukang’an’s account of the taking of Daliyi, see 1586–7. 69 QPTJ, 814. 70 QTDSQ, 809. For related statements, see 861–2, 862, 1505. 71 QTDSQ, 861862. For Chang Qing’s response, see 863, 868–9. 72 QTDSQ, 861–2, 893. For Chang Qing’s memorial, see 868–9. 73 QTDSQ, 939. 74 See QTDSQ, 1155. 75 Ibid., 1590–1. 76 For edicts expressing these sentiments, see QTDSQ, 1147, 1505–6. 77 QPTJ, 813–14. 78 For a case study of the Qing processing of the Miao Kings, see McMahon, “The Qing Response.” Concerning Hunan Miao Frontier history, see Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The ‘Miao Uprising’ of 1795–1797 Reexamined,” Asia Major Third Series, 16.2 (2003): 105–7; Wu Xinfu, Zhongguo tongshi, vol. 1 (Guiyang: Guizhou minzu chubanshe, 1999), Ch. 4. 79 See, for example, Qingdai qianqi Miaomin qiyi dang’an shiliao, comp., Guizhou provincial archive, 3 vols. (Guizhou: Guangming chubanshe, 1993) (hereafter QQMQDS), vol. 2, 163, 180, 187, 260–2. 80 See QQMQDS, vol. 2, for memorials, military reports, and edicts responding to the violence. For reference to Miao-appointed officials see QQMQDS, vol. 3, 121, 123, 125, 233, 361, 371, 416; Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 119, 123. 81 See Sutton, ibid., 125–32. 82 Ibid., 117–25. Reference to this possession is also found in Shi Sanbao’s confession. See QQMQDS, vol. 3, 230–3. 83 See, for example, QQMQDS, vol. 2, 180, 187, 190, 196, 202, 203. 84 QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 163, 165, 169. 85 QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 167; vol. 3, 228. 86 For use of these terms, see QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 171; vol. 3, 112, 228. 87 Concerning Qianlong and cultural views of the Miao, see Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” in Pamela K. Crossley, et al., eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 190–227. 88 See QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 164, 260–2, 372–4, 396–8, 450–3, 465–7; vol. 3, 116–17, 130–2, 182–4. For Qianlong’s statement, see vol. 2, 396–8. 89 Concerning reports on Shi Sanbao’s capture, see QQMDQDS, vol. 3, 224, 227–9. For the events noted in Shi’s deposition, see 230–334. 90 For Helin’s memorial, see QQMDQDS, vol. 3, 227–9. 91 QQMDQDS, vol. 3, 229–30. 92 GGB, #404000713. For a report on Wu Tianban’s transport, see #404001664.

Marking “men of iniquity” 187 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107

108

109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119

For Shi’s confession, see QQMDQDS, vol. 3, 230–4, 252–8 (quote on p. 257). QQMDQDS, vol. 3, 251–2. See the World Digital Library (www.wdl.org/en/item/7757) for the image. See QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 190–1; vol. 3, 51, 66–7, 96–7, 112–13, 139–44, 231. Concerning Shi Liudeng, whose head was sent to the capital, see GGB, #404001641 and 404001698. Concerning Wu Tingli, see QQMDQDS, vol. 3, 230. See also Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 144–9. See, for example, QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 261. For these and similar views, see Yan Ruyi Miaofang beilan (preface 1820), juan 8; and Yan Ruyi, Leyuan wenchao (hereafter LYWC) (preface 1844), juan 5. See, for example, QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 195–6 (Fukang’an) and 197 (Qianlong). Sutton, “Ethnic Revolt,” 128. Concerning this perspective, see Sutton, “Ethnicity,” 190–227. “Of the funds granted the army,” wrote Yan Ruyi 嚴如熤 (1759–1826), an advisor to the Hunan governor, “twenty to thirty percent is wasted.” See LYWC 5:15a. Dai, “Civilians,” 151–2; QQMDQDS, vol. 2, 261 (quote). Concerning the Jiaqing Reforms, see Wang, White Lotus Rebels, Ch. 6, and Daniel McMahon, Rethinking the Decline of China’s Qing Dynasty: Imperial Activism and Borderland Management at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), Ch. 2. Blaine Gaustad, “Prophets and Pretenders: Inter-Sect Competition in Qianlong China,” Late Imperial China 21.1 (June 2000): 1–40. Ibid., 3–4; Kwang-Ching Liu, “Religion and Politics in the White Lotus Rebellion in 1796 in Hubei,” in Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, eds., Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 282; Barend Ter Haar, The White Lotus Teaching in Chinese Religious History (London and New York: Brill, 1992), 252. Concerning the crackdown, see Blaine Gaustad, “Religious Sectarianism and the State in Mid-Qing China: Background to the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796–1804,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1994, 144–66. Sectarians did not call themselves “White Lotus” followers. See Ter Haar, The White Lotus Teaching, esp. 228, 261, 287. For Liu Zhixie’s statement, see Zhuang Jifa, Zhenkong jiaxiang: Qingdai minjian mimi zongjiao shi yanjiu (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 2002), 196. For Liu Song’s statement, see Qing zhongqi wusheng Bailian jiao qiyi ziliao, 5 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1981) (hereafter QZWBQZ), vol. 1, 25. Gaustad, “Religious Sectarianism,” Ch. 4, esp. 220. Ibid., Ch. 4; QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 341. Concerning captured sectarians, see Gaustad, ibid., 232–44 and QZWBQZ, vol. 1, 1151. Gaustad, ibid., 257; QZWBQZ, vol. 1, 23–5 and vol. 2, 341. See also Xu Zengzhong and Lin Yi, “Liu Zhixie zai Chuan-Chu-Shaan nongmin da qiyi zhong zuoyongde kaocha,” in Qingshi luncong (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 186. Gaustad, ibid., 257–61 (translation on 257). See also QZWBQZ, vol. 1, 39–44, 50. Xu and Lin, “Liu Zhixie,” 186. See, for example, QZWBQZ, vol. 1, 26, 39 and vol. 2, 339–40. Cecily McCaffery, “The Struggle for Hearts, Minds, and Bodies: The Politics of Rebellion in Qing China,” Unpublished manuscript, 15, 21–2. LYWC, juan 6, esp. pp. 10a–11b. For discussion of examples see McCaffery, “The Struggle,” 23–4, and “Living through Rebellion,” 2003, 208 (quote), 221 (and Ch. 4 generally). The widespread nature of these circumstances is reflected in the confessions of captured rebels. See QZWBQZ, vol. 5. Yingcong Dai, “The White Lotus War: A War Fought on the Terms of the Qing Military,” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies,

188

120 121

122 123 124 125

126 127 128

129 130

131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

Political Discourse Analysis Boston, March 24, 2007, 6. Dai argues the military “did not fight wholeheartedly” and sought ways to prolong the conflict for their own profit. This thesis is developed in her excellent monograph, The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). Yan Ruyi, comp., Sanshengbian fangbei lan (1822), 12:43b. In 1842, the scholar Wei Yuan summarized the stereotypical view of sectarians as “traitorous people abusing the pretext of healing illness, and holding fasts in order to falsely compile sutras and spells, inciting the masses and collecting riches.” See Ter Haar, The White Lotus Teaching, 258–89, 260 (quote). Elements of this stereotype were articulated by officials as early as 1769, with roots reaching back to the Tang dynasty. See Daniel L. Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 10, 25–7; Ter Haar, ibid., 248–9. Quoted in Zhuang, “Zhenkong,” 197. Concerning this entrenched imperial prejudice, see also McCaffery, “The Struggle.” Concerning the Heshen regency, Jiaqing reforms, and changing bureaucratic images of Heshen, see McMahon, Rethinking, Ch. 2. Ibid., Ch. 2. Measures to reshape Qing officialdom also included reform of the Grand Council and restrictions on gift-giving. See Wang, White Lotus Rebels, Ch. 6. Yan, Sansheng, 13:30b – 31a. See also Huangchao jingshi wenbian, He Changling and Wei Yuan, eds. (1826–1827) 89:27a – 34b. For discussion of local defense strategists, see Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1970), 41–50, esp. 45–7. Huangchao, 89:14b. For related discussion, see McMahon, Rethinking, 52–3. See, for example, Kuhn, Rebellion, 41–50; McMahon, ibid., 114–23, 143–53; Wang, White Lotus Rebels, 200–3. Wang, ibid. Concerns of the Qianlong emperor’s fear of the selfishness of literati cliques, see Benjamin A. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 278–82. Wang, ibid., 201. Concerning expanded elite activism, also see Han, After the Prosperous Age. Concerning the manhunt for Liu Zhixie, see Gaustad, “Religious Sectarianism,” 253– 305. For arguments that Liu was marginal to the rebels’ leadership, see Xu and Li, “Liu Zhixie,” 193–5; Gaustad, ibid., 301–5. For Jiaqing’s views on Liu’s offenses and position as chief rebel and head of the White Lotus sect, see QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 341–2. QZWBWZ, vol. 2, 191–3. For the quotation, see vol. 5, 104–5. See QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 239–40. See also 341 and 343 for memorials listing crimes such as “confusing and enticing the foolish folk” and “willfully plotting rebellion.” Ibid., 340. Ibid., 340, 341. For the Jiaqing emperor’s criticism, see 344–55. Naquin, “True Confession,” 12. QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 343. Ibid., 340. Ibid. For a discussion of how the Jiaqing emperor was not excessively focused on the control of xiejiao, at least to 1813, see Zhang Ruilong, Tianli jiao shijian yu Qing zhongyede zhengzhi xueshu yu shehui (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2014), 97–102. Shihou, ed., Kanjing jiaofei shubian (Reprint, Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1968), 1–4. The Xiejiao shou was announced in an October 7, 1800 edict. See QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 345–6. Yan, Sansheng, 12:43b – 44a. Ibid., 12:43b.

Marking “men of iniquity” 189 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

155

156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170

171 172 173 174 175

Kanjing, 4. Ibid., 1–2. QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 342. For this reference and translation, see Wang, White Lotus Rebels, 182. QZWBQZ, vol. 2, 342. See also Zhang, Tianli jiao, 99–100. QZWBQS, vol. 2, 343. See also Kanjing, 1, 3–4. Kanjing, 1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2–3. Ibid., 3–4. For this translation, see Wang, White Lotus Rebels, 183. See Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976) for an overview of this uprising. Concerning the processing of Lin Qing, see Naquin, ibid., 184–8. For an edict discussing this matter, see Qinding pingding jiaofei jilüe, comp., Tuojin (Reprint, Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1971) (hereafter QPJJ), 5:25b – 28b. The execution took place on October 16. For examples of the capture, interrogation, and execution of rebel leaders, see QPJJ 3:17ab, 4:36ab, 9:31b. 16:11a – 12a, as well as much of juan 36–7. As Susan Naquin observes, the search for rebel leaders, overseen by the Board of Punishments, continued on for months after the conclusion of the revolt. See Naquin, ibid., 362, fn. 1. QPJJ, 3:8ab. QPJJ, 5:26b. For one edict condemning Lin Qing, see 16:25ab. QPJJ, 5:29a (quote), 26:11b-12a (false officials). For an example, see QPJJ, 36:1b – 2a. For related discussion of these categories of culpability, see Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion, 233. For reference to the distinction between “true rebels” and the refugees or coerced, see for example QPJJ, 9:31b, 37:23a. QPJJ, 5:30b. QPJJ, 5:31a. QPJJ, 1:19a, 10:3ab, 6ab. See also Zhang, Tianli jiao, 105. QPJJ, 9:30b-31a. For edicts calling for the formation of militia and jianbi qingye, see QPJJ 1:16ab, 19b; 10:3b, 7a. Concerning local defense work, see Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion, 232–8. Naquin, ibid., 234. Similar steps, and rhetoric, are also seen in the pacification of a lumber worker uprising in southern Shaanxi in 1814, overseen by Yang Yuchun. See Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 896–7 and QPJJ, 37:30a – 32a. Suzuki Chūsei, Shinchō chukī shi kenkyū (Tokyo: Ryōgen shobō, 1971), 198–9; Zhang, Tianli jiao, 105–25. Concerning Ma Yungang’s work, see McMahon, Rethinking, 119–21, 150–2. For a more detailed examination of this case, see McMahon, “The Daoguang Response.” Concerning the regional history of the khojas, see James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 78–97. For an overview of the history of the revolt, see Laura J. Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations with Khoqand c. 1760–1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), Ch. 4. Millward, ibid., 97–102; Nicola Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration in Inner Asia,” The International History Review 20.2 (1998): 287–309. See Zhao, Lifan yuan zeli, 248, 257. For related biographical discussion, see Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 67–9. For Nayancheng, see Hummel, ibid., 584–7. For Yang Yuchun and Yang Fang, see 896–7. Da Qing Xuanzong cheng (Daoguang) huangdi shilu, comp., Wenqing (Reprint, Taipei: Taiwan huawen, 1969) (hereafter DQXZ), 73:31a, 82:25b, 101:41b – 102:7b.

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176 See DQXZ, 13:40a, 81:12ab, 91:19ab, 97:7a. For the quote see 91:19b. 177 See Pingding Huijiang jiaoqin nifei fanglüe, comp., Cao Zhenyong (Taipei: Wenhai, 1972), 2961–2. 178 For Daoguang’s views on Jahāngīr, see DQXZ, 10:24ab, 12:2ab, 13:40b – 41a, 14:40b, 78:15a, 90:42a, 101:30b. 179 See DQXZ, juan, 92–4 for early proclamations. Concerning the manhunt and capture of Jahāngīr, see DQXZ, 132:16a – 20a and Newby, The Empire, 118–19. 180 See Li Qinpu, “Jiaoping Kashgar zouzhe,” Zhong-Xi wenhua jiaoliu xuebao 5.1 (2013): 4. Online pdf at www.lsjyshi.cn (accessed October 2016). 181 For one example, see GGB, #405012574. 182 For examples of official dispatches congratulating the emperor, see GGB, #058689, 059186, 059183, 059187, 059769, 059711 (quote). 183 Li, “Jiaoping,” 10–15, esp. 11. 184 For these statements, see Li, ibid.,14; DQZXZ,136:18a－20a. 185 Concerning commemoration, see Li, ibid., 2. For Daoguang’s views on how Jahāngīr’s death had stabilized the frontier, see DQXZ, 136:20a. 186 GGB, #405012574. 187 Newby, The Empire, 119; Li, “Jiaoping,” 5. 188 Concerning the Kangxi 康熙 emperor’s (r. 1661－1722) response to Galdan, see Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 203–8. 189 Li, “Jiaoping,” 14. 190 Ibid. The former ceremony had occurred twice before, during the pacification of Kokonor (1724) and Jinchuan (1776). The latter ceremony was performed during pacification of the Junghars, Kokonor, and Jinchuan. See Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 68. 191 The practice of an emperor ordering the removal of the heart of a rebel leader had precedent. One example from the White Lotus Revolt was Jiaqing’s order for punishment of Wang Wanli 王萬禮, to assuage the soul of the general Zhalehanga 扎 勒杭阿. See Qinding jiaoping sansheng xiefei fanglüe (Reprint, Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970), 209:20b – 21a. 192 For this and related labeling, see Newby, The Empire, 107–10, 124, 125; DQXZ, 90:9ab, 105:10b – 11a, 136:19b – 20a; GGB, #057817. 193 See Daoguang’s response, GGB, #405009283. 194 For Daoguang views, see DQXZ, 101:30b; 102:19b – 20b; 136:18b – 19a, 20a, 22a. 195 See Newby, The Empire, 125. 196 See Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 68. 197 DQXZ, 132:18ab. 198 Mosca, “Empire,” esp. 148 (quote), 202–3; Mosca, From Frontier Policy.

Appendix: Yan Ruyi’s “conditions and customs in the mountains”

The following is a translation of the Shaanxi official Yan Ruyi’s嚴如熤 (1759– 1826) summary of the conditions of the early nineteenth-century southern Han River highlands, a vast borderland connecting the contiguous Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Hubei provinces. This work was edited from Yan’s longer 1805 “Sansheng shannei fengtu zashi” 三省山內風土雜識 (Miscellaneous record of conditions and customs in the mountains of the three provinces), a collection of ecological, social, and administrative observations culled over the course of the pacification of the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion. The abbreviated version was then included in the 1814 Hanzhong xuxiu fuzhi 漢中續修府志 (Revised Hanzhong prefectural gazetteer), edited by Yan Ruyi, as the essay “Shannei fengtu” 山內風土 (Conditions and customs in the mountains). Carefully selected, it represents a summary by a seasoned local administrator committed to the management of an unruly highland boundary region, intended to aid other officials dispatched to this locality.1 “Conditions and Customs in the Mountains” gives considerable attention to environment. As this text describes, here was a territory both harsh and dangerous: a vast region cut by steep slopes and filled with sweeping forests of bamboo and timber that “rip[ped] one’s clothing and prevent[ed] one from standing erect.” Frequent downpours swelled its mountain rivers and sent sudden waves of water blasting through its valleys – deluges that mountain people fearfully referred to as “flood dragons” (jiao蛟). Midsummer rain could suddenly crust into hail, hurling icy stones like “sling pellets” and “driving fists” that crushed crops and sent villagers scrambling for the shelter of forests and caves. In some Sichuan regions, the clearing of weather heralded a deadly miasmic mist. And even the earth itself was fearsome – a mixture of loose stones and dirt easily eroded by the downpours, bringing landslides and turning roads to mud and then hard clay. This mountain frontier, however, offered bounties as well as perils. Farming was arduous as upland fields were rocky, laborious to open, and too quickly became infertile, but the sheer expanse of the region permitted easy movement to new ground. The dense wilderness also provided timber and bamboo as a source for both fuel and local industry, as well as more exotic commercial commodities such as tuer 土耳 tree fungi.

192 Appendix Yan’s essay observes, within this environment, a society strikingly different from the Qing heartland. The region had been resettled under the auspices of the Kangxi 康熙emperor (1662–1722). With the population boom of the eighteenth century, a trickle of immigration became a deluge as travelers from Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan (among other provinces) entered the region “in an unending succession.” Those settlers proved restless, loosely rooted, violent, and prone to deviance. Employing traditional slash-and-burn agriculture, they prepared their fields, seeded them with mountain crops (such as corn and wheat) and raised pigs. After a short time, when the lands were depleted, the settlers left them fallow and moved on to new areas. As Yan Ruyi stated, “these people cannot help but drift,” and in their drifting lacked “the bonds of common lineage and surname and do not adhere to proper ritual and ethics.” Rather, calling “together friends and those of a common ilk, they declared themselves sworn brothers” and even formed criminal gangs such as the “Black Coin” (hei qian 黑錢) con men and “Red Coin” (hong qian 紅錢) brigands. There were areas of firmer settlement and vigorous “good subjects” (liangmin 良民), but there too was violence, litigation between landlords and tenants, harassment of commoners, vagrancy, gambling in “wilderness markets,” and the predations of unscrupulous clerks and runners. Cognizant of these circumstances, Yan Ruyi proposed a set of corrective strategies. The first and foremost was to ensure settlement and allow settlers the ability to “protect themselves if troublemakers create disturbances.” To this end, he advocated steps to prohibit gambling, expel vagrants, use local experts, raze bamboo forests, build paper mills, and “civilize subjects and perfect proper customs” through lectures on the Emperor Kangxi’s “Sacred Edicts” (shengyu 聖諭). Linked with this was a call for a more flexible and realistic system of tax collection, as well as greater commitment on the part of regional administrators to assist taxpayers, rein in disruptive soldiers and clerks, process criminal suspects, protect the innocent, and generally understand what measures would be effective. In terms of received policies, Yan was skeptical concerning the suitability of the traditional baojia 保甲surveillance system to regulate a scattered and shifting highland population. But he retained faith in both the “strengthen the walls and clear the countryside” (jianbi qingye 堅壁清野) and “stockade and forts” (zhaibao 寨堡) strategies. The former of these concentrated rural populations within walled compounds, while the latter increased fortification in strategic areas. As a combination, they cut rebels off from sources of men and supplies while impeding insurgent movement such that the army could “catch up and attack.” With their use, imperial “forces were not wearied and the enemy could not endure the harassment,” a local strategy that, in fact, enabled the quelling of the White Lotus Rebellion. Even as a brief text, then, Yan Ruyi’s essay provides a vivid glimpse into an upland internal borderland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Observable is the obstacle of terrain and climate, local impact of New World crops, Qing population growth and movement, community defense methods used during the White Lotus Rebellion, as well as patterns of settlement, tenancy, heterodoxy, marketing, and crime. Also illustrated is contemporary thinking on pacification and its aftermath,

Appendix 193 related to security, taxation, industry, policing, and education, resonant not just with the ideals and prejudices of Qing administrators, but also harder-headed efforts to engage conditions as they actually existed. The pragmatic and empirically based approach Yan Ruyi championed embodied a new direction in early nineteenth century Qing statecraft, focused on enhancing the imperial regime’s capacity to restore, and maintain, the empire’s fraying boundaries.

A note on units of measure The following translation retains the original Chinese units of measure. One li 里 is 1890 feet or approximately one-half a kilometer. One zhang 丈 is 3.3 meters or approximately 141 inches. One mou 畝 is 733.5 square yards or approximately one-sixth of an English acre. One shi 石, a dry measure for grain, is approximately 100 liters. Concerning units of currency, one jin 金 is a metal piece weighing some 50 grams of gold or silver. One liang 兩 is some 50 grams silver. One qian 錢 is a unit one-tenth the worth (and weight) of one liang. One fen 分 is a unit one-hundredth the worth of one liang. Finally, one li 釐 is a unit one-thousandth the worth of one liang.

“Conditions and customs in the mountains:” English translation [Hanzhong] prefecture has few of its original inhabitants. Those such as Defenderin-chief Li 李太尉and Commissioner Zhang 張博望of the Han dynasty and Minister Quan 權文公of the Tang dynasty were from prestigious local families, but they have no descendants that can be verified.2 The so-called old residents (laomin老民) are not from further back than the Yuan [1279–1368] and Ming [1368–1644] dynasties. Since the beginning of the present dynasty [1644], and particularly over the last several decades, the new residents (xinmin新民) have sojourned in this region and established homes. The old residents are still numerous in the areas of Nanbaocheng 南袌城, Yangmian 洋沔, and Pingba 平壩. However, in the areas of the southern and eastern mountains, as well as in Xifeng 西風, Ninglue 寧略, and Liuding 留定, only 20% to 30% of the people are old residents; the rest are new residents. The largest numbers of new residents are from Hubei and Hunan provinces, although there are also many from Sichuan. The second most numerous are from Anhui, Guangdong, and Guangxi. The next most numerous are from Henan and Guizhou. This region has them all. The mountain people (shanmin 山民) cut down trees and opened the wilds. The shaded areas are fertile and within one to two years, the mixed grains will inevitably flourish upon them.3 After four to five years, however, the fields’ soil will have become loose from digging. As the mountain slopes are steep and there are sudden rainstorms in the summer and fall, surges of rainwater create [erosion] scars, leaving channels of stone. When this occurs, it is necessary for the mountain people to find new lands to open and farm. The original fields are then left fallow, sprouting grass and trees that gradually wither and fall to the ground, becoming mud. The mountain people cut down this scrub and burn it to ash so that

194 Appendix they can immediately plant again. They are unable to rely on the primeval forests (laolin老林) for sustained employment, and so move from place to place in search of their livelihood. These people cannot help but drift. The conditions of the land make them this way. In the mountains, the forests are vast and the slopes are steep, having many streams. During the summer and fall, the mountain creeks experience sudden and violent swells in which [water from the seasonal rains descend] in huge, swift waves. The mountain people refer to these flows as “waters [shooting] through bamboo tubes” (zhutong shui 竹筒水). Boats cannot traverse them. Those at the waterside, within a stone’s throw of the far bank, often must wait several days before they can cross. In ancient times, it was said that a wild hen mated with a snake. The hen’s egg was pushed by thunder into the earth, long afterwards hatching a flood dragon. The mountains have a large number of snakes and wild hens, and the common people do not know how to slay flood dragons. When [the dragons/floods] rise up, they crash against the mountains and tear the rock asunder. In the places where the slopes descend into a dell, it often happens that the mountain waters wash away the houses, people, and livestock found there. When the flood dragon rises up, it makes a ge ge sound, like the cluck of a wild chicken.4 While it rages, people rely on the noise to detect it. In this way, they are able to flee before it arrives. The amount established for the land tax does not correspond with the actual conditions of the region. The government recruited people to homestead, levying taxes upon their land. The amount levied, however, was not in excess of several qian and a few fen. Moreover, the plots the government granted were vast, being several li in size. The settlers who lived far from the county seats would pass through the mountains and over their peaks in order to obtain land certificates for these plots. The total land tax levied is [still] not great. As a result, the rent that settlers charge their tenants is not fixed according to the number of mou rented. This practice is different from that of other regions. Before the primeval forests were opened, the land was desolate (lit: “where foxes dwelled and wolves howled”). The original inhabitants called in “guest people” (kemin 客民) from other provinces.5 For a fee of a few jin, they would pick out a piece of land and make up a contract, giving the territory to the settlers to cultivate. These settlers, however, were unable to farm all of this land themselves, so they in turn recruited their own tenant farmers. Over the past several decades, the sub-tenants of these plots have changed seven or eight times. In addition, the land cultivated by one household has been subdivided among several dozen households. The tenant settlers only know those who recruited them; they do not know the land’s original owner. When an original landowner instigates litigation [to get the land back], the seven or eight successive sub-landlords will continue to collect their tenant’s payment for the rights to the land: a sum often amounting to several hundred jin. If the land is returned, then the original owner must compensate the settlers for the labor involved in opening and developing the green mountains. Moreover, [the sub-landlords] must return the land payments that they had successively collected from the tenants. These transactions will vary depending

Appendix 195 on whether the landlord is rich or poor. If the original owner lacks the power to compensate his tenants, then he must allow them to continue cultivating the land for a limited number of years. Drifters (liumin 流民) enter the mountains in the ninth and 10th month.6 In dire straits, collected into groups of a hundred to a thousand people, they move through the region, one after the other, in an unending succession. Avoiding the government roads and eschewing the settler hostels, these people rest in roadside temples, caves, and forests, gathering stones to prop their pots and wood to feed their fires. If the drifters encounter the dwelling of a fellow from their native place, they will draft a land contract and commence opening the wilds. They cut wood into long beams and thatch them with grasses to provide shelter from the wind and rain. They then borrow several shi of mixed grains, planting the seed and reaping harvests over the next several years. Afterwards, the folk either pawn their mountain lands, building multi-roomed earth houses, or else move on to other areas. Several decades ago, millet and wheat were the primary crops of the mountains’ fall harvest. Millet, however, failed to yield the same profit as corn. As a result, corn cultivation has spread throughout the mountain slopes and valleys. Corn grows to be over one zhang high and one stalk will usually yield two to three ears. The mountain people say that corn is more filling than rice. It can be cooked, made into flour, fermented into alcohol, or fed to pigs – all of these things. It is used quite as much as wheat. Consequently, the summer harvest focuses on wheat and the fall harvest focuses on corn. The relative scarcity or abundance of these crops defines the adequacy of the year’s harvest. In addition to dry and moist porridge, the mountain people require salt, cloth, and an assortment of daily necessities. They must obtain these things from the merchants who shoulder their wares and engage in trade, traveling along distant roads. As a result, the mountain people raise pigs. When they have many of them – upwards of several dozen head – they will either herd them down off the mountain or else [slaughter them and] salt the pork to preserve it. They will then sell the product in order to get money for their daily necessities. Bamboo forests grow in the mountains, covering the peaks and valleys. These forests are quite lush and their bamboo can be gathered to make paper. Even if one does not have much starting capital, it is still easy to reap a profit from this plant. As a result, there are paper mills everywhere. The mountains have their hazards and the serpentine trunks and branches of the primeval forests, ripping one’s clothing and preventing one from standing erect, count among them. The bamboo forests, however, create even more trouble. When the bamboo shoots are young and green, their skin cannot be burned. It would be best if the paper mills cut them down. Not only would this bring advantage to the people, it would also root out a source of harm. The new residents of the mountains have come helter-skelter from all directions. They lack the bonds of common lineage or surname and they do not adhere to proper ritual and ethics.7 Rather, they call together friends and those of a common ilk, declaring themselves “sworn brothers” (bai xiong拜兄).8 In addition to

196 Appendix their spouse’s family, they have dealings with these foster relations. In the homes where new residents dwell, there is no segregation of the sexes (nei wai wu fen 內 外無分).9 As a result, not a day goes by that there is not a case of abduction. Their sense of ethical principles has been obliterated, resulting in frequent incidents of this type. Although there are many good people (liangmin) who open the mountains and cultivate the soil, their settlements are isolated and few. They erect sheds and houses in the places where they farm, being scattered throughout the region. Those that they call “neighbor” often have a mountain peak or valley that lie between them. When bandits pillage a farm, those in the vicinity lack the power to either defend their neighbors or keep watch over them. “A single hand cannot clap,” and isolated settlements are unable to give bandits any trouble. The mountain people conduct trade using periodic markets. These markets are sometimes held next to towns and sometimes held in isolated areas, called “wilderness markets” (huang chang 荒場). Although the area within the mountains is largely uninhabited, there is an enormous amount of gambling. In particular, a great deal occurs when the markets gather. When a game takes place, the stakes will often amount to several dozen to a hundred liang in silver. If the loser lacks the money to make good on his loss, he will slip away and become a bandit. Gamblers carry a special self-made box [for their gambling equipment]. They will flip coins and roll dice, but not play majiang or cards. It should be rigorously explained to local officials that if they are able to prohibit this gambling they will destroy the source of the banditry. The mountain bandits are divided between the Red Coin and the Black Coin.10 Those of the Black Coin engage in deception and fraud, keeping their whereabouts a secret and using their craft to fool the local people. Those of the Red Coin form gangs of sworn brothers, uniting together to rob the markets. When soldiers capture a criminal in cahoots with the Red Cash, this criminal’s gang will intercept the soldiers as they proceed on the road. The gangsters call this “firing cannonballs” (da paohuo 打炮火). Border officials should have honesty and integrity, as well as a good grasp of the strategies necessary for local administration. If they are excessively cautious, they will not be able to root out harmful problems. When this occurs, the good folk cannot be shielded. When mountain officials, gentry, and common people go out, they invariably carry weapons so they can defend themselves without worry. The bandits also conceal sharp knives on their persons – small but keen daggers called “yellow eel tails” (huangshan wei 黃鱔尾). When the bandits are pursued and in a tight spot, they will grasp their blades and fight hand-to-hand. If our people lack such formidable weapons, then they will certainly come to harm. What can be done to make the bandits sell their knives and buy cattle? In the mountains, there are all manner of scoundrel – referred to as “leisurely lapping waves” (xian da lang 閒打浪) – that sashay through the towns. When these scoundrels receive a bit of money, they will fritter it away until there is nothing left. If they run into the Guo bandits (Guofei 嘓匪),11 they will join them

Appendix 197 to rob and pillage; but if they run into the government soldiers, they will assist in the apprehension and arrest [of the bandits]. They have no occupation and engage in no profession. Generally speaking, they are not good people. If we can rid the region of these vagrants (you min 遊民), then the banditry will end of its own accord. Concerning plans for maintaining stability in the mountains, support for the drifters should be regarded as a task of the first priority. The drifters should open the mountains and build mills, becoming settled in their work. The folk can then protect themselves and their families when troublemakers (jian tu 奸徒) create disturbances.12 If they take up their shovels and cudgels, striving to be doughty fighters, then the disorder-loving troublemakers will be no match for such a multitude of good people. Pettifoggers and shysters collude with the government clerks, making mountains out of molehills (wu feng sheng lang 無風生浪, lit: “making waves when there is no wind”). When they encounter shed people (pengmin 棚民)13 engaged in a dispute, they will exploit them without mercy. Soldiers also contribute to this insidious activity. One day these soldiers will be summoned to investigate a village and the next day they will be dispatched [elsewhere] to suppress an incident. As the areas to which they go are quite remote, the people there must endure the soldiers’ insults and abuse; they have no way to lodge a complaint. This harsh treatment prevents the villagers from having any joy in their lives. Wise and able officials should pity the peoples’ misfortune and conscientiously investigate its cause, ensuring that litigious pettifoggers, clerks, and runners will be unable to indulge in their insidious tricks. If this is done, then the local drifters will settle down and the bandits will cease to have disregard for human life. This action will destroy the root of the disaster and plug the source of the disturbances. The baojia 保甲community defense system, in its fundamentals, is a good method for stopping bandits.14 In the mountain departments and counties, however, it cannot be implemented outside of the towns. The shed people have no fixed residence. This year, they will be here; next year, they will be there. They may even move several times within the span of a single year. Some of the shed people have built homes, but these are scattered. It is such that those residing there cannot even see the dwellings of their closest neighbors. The squad commanders (jiazhang 甲長) and security group heads (baozheng 保正) [of the community defense network] are separated from one another by a distance of several li to several dozen li. How is it possible for them to maintain constant vigilance? Furthermore, each household is supposed to place a placard [with household information] on their door, as well as gather money for their organization’s expenses. Doing so, however, only feeds the exploitation of the government clerks and runners. The circulation of people through the guest hostels is light, so [the requirement that hostels make reports to the government offices] can only be applied in the towns. The drifters who enter the mountains usually sleep in the old temples and mountain caves. Likewise, the bandits who speed along the mountain paths do not lodge in the guest hostels. Only peddlers trading in mountain products use these establishments. What is more, it is several hundred li from the county border to

198 Appendix the county seat. If the guest hostels are required to abide by this rule and present reports, doing so monthly, then they will suffer constant hardship and sorrow on the road. Within the mountains, there are households that hunt wild animals. In times of peace, they make a living by driving out the tigers and wolves that do harm to the people. These game hunters can fire their guns a hundred times and not miss once. Even the barbarians of the Five Rivers cannot surpass them.15 They also serve as guards and defend the mills from pillaging Guo bandits. They are superb fighters and one of them is the equal of ten strong men. The great generals of antiquity, when striking their foes, would invariably select these hunters for their vanguard. They are of sufficient mettle to be used in the vanguard of our own army. The people of Sichuan and Hubei are meddlesome by nature and, when goaded by the encouragement of pettifoggers, allow inconsequential problems (shu ya que jiao 鼠牙雀角, lit: “mice teeth and sparrow horns”) to blossom into large legal disputes. When the government clerks and runners are handed an arrest warrant [related to these disputes], they view it as a precious commodity. As the borders of the departments and counties are far from the administrative seats, they must journey to take the summoned into custody. Halfway back, they enter a guest hostel and split the bribes they collected, letting the prisoner go. If they are able to get as much as they want, they will inform the prisoner that they do not yet have an arrest warrant and he should light out to a neighboring province before it arrives. If, however, these men are unable to extort the desired bribes, then they may kill the prisoner. In either case, the clerks will tell [the magistrate] that “the prisoner was snatched by a mob of his people on the road back,” then formally request that another warrant be issued. In the cases when the arrested man is actually brought to the county seat, he will be taken to the household of a guardian. The prisoner will remain there for several months and the magistrate will not be able to question him. The clerks and runners are able to obtain largess from both sides of a legal dispute and the fees they receive are substantial. If there is a murder case in which neighbors present evidence, or a robbery case that expands [to implicate others], then they are certain to ruin several dozen households. The people have no way to speak of the misery that these men cause. Indeed, why is it that those who are not clerks become bandits? Local officials must set strict time limits, calculating the day that a case will come to trial based on the distance [that these underlings have to travel]. Court cases should not linger unexamined and the jails should not detain prisoners indefinitely. If the people are protected, then the banditry will stop of its own accord. During the reign of Emperor Kangxi 康熙 (1662–1722), the Shaanxi- Sichuan governor-general Ehai 鄂海 recruited settlers, having them open and cultivate the mountain wilderness of the frontier counties. Wang Lingmu 王令穆 of Xixiang 西鄉 county established [the homesteading project of] “summoning settlers to the guesthouse” (zhao wang guan 招往館). He also assiduously selected gentry and respected elders from the local counties and departments, appointing them “community headmen” (xiangzheng 鄉正) and having them lecture on [Kangxi’s]

Appendix 199 Sacred Edict.16 Lectures were given in the markets of the mountain towns on the first and 15th of each month. Wang Lingmu enjoined local official to vigorously ensure that this was carried out. Local customs were thereby vastly improved and bandits became scarce. Over the next century, elders transmitted the teachings [of the Sacred Edict] with magnificent results. This constitutes an excellent strategy for “civilizing subjects and perfecting proper customs” (hua min cheng su 化民 成俗).17 It can even be implemented on the frontiers! The men that we appoint to perform these lectures should strive to be pure and good. Although the taxes levied in the mountains are light, the people suffer great inconvenience because of them. The total amount remitted by the mountain people is not in excess of a few fen and li. Regardless, their homes are often several hundred li from the department and county seats, and when they go to the towns they are unable to enter the government storehouses to be given a tax receipt. The entire trip takes about 20 days and their few fen and li in taxes end up costing one to two jin. The mountain people are unable to complete their tax transactions in person. Consequently, when the collection begins (kaizheng shi 開征時, lit: “when the military campaign is launched”), powerful and devious people will pay on behalf of the households listed on the mountain tax registers. This is called “cutting the grain.” As the local officials find advantage in collecting taxes early, they do look into how the payment is conducted. Consequently, the tax receipts are given into the hands [of the intermediaries] and they intentionally delay [returning them their rightful owners]. The next year, when tax collection begins again, these powerful and devious people demand repayment from the registered households, explaining that each family is indebted for the original amount in taxes, plus interest and traveling expenses. They will not return the tax receipt [preventing the family from paying further taxes] unless there is a payment of several jin. Good administrators should collect the tax payments whenever they are given, or else they should periodically travel to the countryside, overseeing the collection of taxes in areas near the taxpayers. In the cases where the debt is less than three liang in silver, they should permit payment in the form of copper currency. This will succor the people while hastening the remittance of taxes. The rugged regions of Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong provinces have lofty and imposing stone mountains. These “stone mountains” (shi shan 石山) are in fact composed mainly of stone, with little earth or rubble. The hills [of the ShaanxiSichuan border region], however, are different, being composed of loose earth and rock. During the spring and summer, they bear heavy rains that continue for 10 days at a stretch. The earth becomes mud, without sufficient strength to adhere to the stones, and huge boulders tumble down from the mountain peaks. Travelers remain on the alert for these falling boulders long after the rains have cleared up. Cultivation is possible in the mountain regions that possess a mixture of earth and stone – this is their virtue. Local conditions, however, make it difficult to repair the local roads. When the earth turns to mud, and is afterwards baked by the hot sun, the ground becomes rock-hard and is difficult to break with either hoe

200 Appendix or spade. Men may be recruited to dig up and level the earth, but when the next heavy rain falls, boulders accompany it and the roads will again be heaped with stones. What is more, the roads are covered with creeping vines and clusters of bamboo that spring back after they have been cut down. The misery of travelers in these areas is far greater than that of travelers elsewhere. In the mountains, stones are numerous and prone to drift. Loosely mixed with the mountain soil, they inevitably fragment during long downpours. At first glance, a precipice may appear to stand erect upon a foundation of solid stone, but after a long rain it will gradually collapse. As a result, the stockades and forts built upon cliffs often sink large posts into stone-filled holes in order to keep the structures firm. The Sichuan areas of Bashan 巴山, Huayang華楊, Heihe 黑河, and Qingmu 青木 have great mountains and deep forests, like a well opening to Heaven. These areas are often overcast and rainy. When the rains clear, a dense fog containing large amounts of sulfuric gas emerges, contact with which will incur the ailments of bloating, malaria, and dysentery. Midsummer, there are hailstorms throughout the region. The small hailstones are like sling pellets and the large ones are like driving fists. This hail – formed from solidified noxious ether (yin qi 陰氣) – crushes the corn and mixed grains. As this occurs, people and livestock anxiously seek shelter in the forests and caves. The falling hail descends in a line approximately several dozen li long and not more than a few li wide. If the crops are not yet mature, then – after the storm – the farmers will prop the plants upright and pat the earth around them. In this way they can still be harvested. In the mountains, there are those who cultivate the tuer 土耳 fungi. They cut down the timber of the qinggang 青棡 tree and erect a frame. The following year, they trim the fungi that sprouts on these logs. The wood frames are accommodating and can be used up to three years. When the fungi has been collected from one frame, the collectors will make a new frame of qinggang wood that they can harvest later. In addition, there are also fungi-collectors that use a different kind of wood, gathering pine for their cultivation. “Strengthening the walls and clearing the countryside” (jianbi qingye 堅壁清野) is an excellent strategy for controlling invaders; when implemented, its efficacy is assured.18 Looking at the case of the pacification of the three provinces (i.e., the White Lotus Rebellion), we find that the recommendation to use “stockades and forts” (zhaibao 寨堡) was implemented in the fifth year of the Jiaqing 嘉慶reign (1800). The mountain people constructed stockades in narrow passes, and in the Central Plains (zhongyuan 中原)19 people dug moats and built forts. Their livestock and food were then secured inside. When the folk received word of the rebels’ approach, they retreated into their stockades and forts, relying on the strength of these fortifications to defend themselves. When the rebels came, there found no men to impress and no food to rob. As a result, their strength ebbed away and they were swiftly quelled. The policy of “stockades and forts” is an assured means to defend the people and destroy an enemy. The rebels did not use government roads when they

Appendix 201 skittered through the mountain valleys. As a result, the soldiers, although pursuing with the fullest vigor, always remained one to two days behind them. This occurred because there was no one in front of the rebels who could block their way. After the stockades and forts were built and manned with militia, the enemy was held at bay whenever it entered a defended pass. The army was thereby able to catch up and attack. In such cases, it was rare if our forces did not achieve a great victory. The mountain people are simple, strong, and brave. They can endure fatigue and are accustomed to danger. They cannot be compared to the mentally vacuous (qi fu 氣浮) and physically frail people of the Central Plains. The rebels often referred to them as “native panthers” (tu baozi 土豹子), using them to wear down our troops. The army divided up the roads and set up posts on the mountain ridges. The rebels, however, simply passed over the mountain peaks, coming like tigers and going like mice. The troops that pursued them could find no trace of their passage. The mountain people, however, did not have this problem. Everything that the rebels could do, the mountain people could also do. What is more, they had lived in the region their entire lives and were even more familiar with the rebels’ paths than the rebels were themselves. When these people trained in the militias, we found it prudent to discuss [local conditions] with their leaders. The common people did not eat the government’s food, so it was difficult to govern them with regulations. They enjoyed victory, but could not endure defeat. If several of them were harmed, the rest would scatter, their morale shattered. When the rebels came and the people did not wish to attack them head on, they would divide up the roads and conceal strong young men in the contours of the mountain rock. The large rebel bands that passed by inevitably had a few dozen weary stragglers at the rear. The young stalwarts would spring forth and intercept these men, making it possible to capture them all. The stockades at the front implemented this strategy, as did those at the rear. As a consequence, the rebels invariably suffered losses whenever they passed a fortification. When the rebels bivouacked in a region, the nearby stockades and forts would select robust men to approach them in the dead of night, firing at them with cannons and muskets. These men were unable to kill many rebels, but the activity kept the enemy from getting any rest. Inevitably terrified, the rebels would withdraw. Moving to a different area on the following day, they encountered a similar reception. Consequently, they became even more exhausted and restrained and even more of them were captured. Our forces were not wearied and the enemy could not endure the harassment. This is a sublime way for local troops to harry rebels.

Notes 1 Yan Ruyi, “Fuzhi shannei fengtu,” in Yan Ruyi, ed., Hanzhong xuxiu fuzhi (reprint, Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1968) 21:6a – 11b. For a discussion of Yan Ruyi’s service in the Han River highlands, see Daniel McMahon, “Restoring the Garden: Yan Ruyi and the Civilizing of China’s Internal Frontiers, 1795–1805,” University of California, Davis dissertation, chs 4 and 5.

202 Appendix 2 “Defender-in-chief Li” was likely Li Ling 李陵, a Chinese general of the Han dynasty who was forced to surrender to the Xiongnu. “Commissioner Zhang” was Zhang Liang 張良, the famous strategist and minister serving Liu Bang, the Han dynasty’s founder. Finally, “Minister Quan was likely Quan Deyu權德輿, a poet and minister of the Tang dynasty, as well as bearer of this rare surname. The translations for the titles of these notables are drawn from Charles Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). 3 The “mixed grains” (zaliang 雜糧) indicate food grains other than rice and wheat, such as barley, buckwheat, and millet. 4 The ge ge 閣閣 noise noted here was probably the sound of rocks colliding as they moved with the surging river water. 5 Concerning hill country immigrants designated as “guest people” (ke min 客民), see Stephen C. Averill, “The Shed People and the Opening of the Yangzi Highlands,” Modern China 9.1 (January 1983): 87, and Sow-Theng Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin and their Neighbors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 46, 61, 65. 6 The “ninth and 10th month” were determined according to the lunar calendar, indicating roughly the period of October and November. 7 “Proper ritual and ethics” (lijiao 禮教) constituted the teachings and values central to the Qing empire’s Confucian orthodoxy. For a discussion of this orthodoxy in historical perspective, see Kwang-Ching Liu, “Socioethics as Orthodoxy: A Perspective,” in K.C. Liu, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 53–102. 8 Concerning sworn brotherhood groups in the Han River highlands, see Liu Cheng-yun, “Kuo-lu: A Sworn-Brotherhood Organization in Szechwan,” Late Imperial China 6.1 (June 1985): 56–82. 9 Concerning the importance attributed to gender segregation in late imperial China, separating the “inner” (women) and “outer” (men), see Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 7, 15. 10 The translation “Red Coin” and “Black Coin” are drawn from Liu Cheng-yun, “Kuolu,” 67. 11 For a discussion of contemporary Guofei 嘓匪, also referred to as the Guolu 嘓嚕 – mountain criminal gangs – see Liu, ibid., 56–82. 12 The classifications jiantu 奸徒 and jianmin 奸民 indicate frontier troublemakers and rebel collaborators. See McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 54–5, 302–3, as well as Chapter 6 of this volume. 13 Concerning “shed people” (pengmin 棚民), another classification for hill immigrants, see Averill, “Shed People.” Yan Ruyi associated the shed people with the liumin drifters. In this he was somewhat distinctive from contemporary officials who often equated them with criminals such as the Guolu. See Eduard B. Vermeer, “The Mountain Frontier in Late Imperial China: Economic and Social Development in the Bashan,” T’oung Pao 77.4–5 (1991): 324. 14 For a discussion of the baojia 保甲 system – “one of the most important subadministrative apparatuses [of the Qing system of governance]” – see Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960), 43–57. 15 The “barbarians of the Five Rivers” were the native people of the Hunan Miao Frontier, such as the Miao and Gelao. 16 For a discussion of Kangxi’s “Sacred Edict,” a list of 16 maxims relevant to the moral and social behavior of imperial subjects, as well as the lecture system by which it was publicly transmitted, see Hsiao, Rural China, 84–229. 17 Concerning the Qing educational policy of “civilizing subjects and perfecting proper customs,” see William T. Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite

Appendix 203 Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), Chapter 12, esp. 407. 18 Yan Ruyi was discussing events that occurred during the 1796–1804 White Lotus Rebellion, 10 to 15 years prior. Accordingly, the discussion is translated in the past tense. 19 “Central Plains” (zhongyuan 中原) is a designation indicating China or the lower reaches of the Yellow River. In Yan Ruyi’s writings, it referred to lowland areas, matching designations such as neidi 內地 (“land of the interior”). See McMahon, “Restoring the Garden,” 16.

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Index

accommodation 6, 7–8, 25, 29, 69, 70, 79; importance as approach bridging Chinese nationalist and New Qing History perspectives 87–9 bao (fortification) 9, 99, 117; definition 112n6; planning for the Miao Revolt 120–2; planning for Pushi region 100–2, 110–11; planning for the White Lotus Revolt 122–4; related defensive thinking 119–20 Chinese nationalist historiography 4–5, 16n18, 32, 34, 38–9, 43n64, 45n83, 69, 87–9, 94–5n116, 95n121 chi xue (blood drinking oath) 57, 66n49, 79, 81 colonialism 1, 23, 33–5; colonial representation 34–5, 43–4n68; Manchu colonialism 34; related concept of Qing imperialism 43n62 Dabashan highlands 74–5; see also Han River highlands demonological messianic paradigm 56, 66n52 Eight Trigrams Revolt 176–8 environmental systems 1, 23, 29–31 fadian (going mad) 5, 53–5, 56, 59, 60–1, 67–8n79, 168, 169 fengshui 9, 99; connection to Chinese martial endeavor 104–9; definition and history 101–3, 113n28; during Qing period 109–11; fengshui attack 106–7, 114n43, 114n44; promotion in Pushi region 103–4 Fu Nai 110, 118, 120, 121–2

gaitu guiliu (change native chiefs and return to direct rule) 72, 142, 150n34 Gelao (people) 52, 81–2 geomancy see fengshui Gong Jinghan 118, 120, 122–4, 173 Great Lakes region 6, 7, 24, 25, 70, 72, 78, 87 Guolu (bandits) 76, 77, 196–7, 202n13 Hanjian (treacherous Han) 53, 57–8, 61, 79, 132, 134–5, 138–9, 141–3, 147, 152n50, 153n70, 156n114, 168; changes in late Qing discourse of 145–6; and Opium War 143–6; see also jian (treacherous) Han River highlands 6, 7, 9, 74–5, 91n26; Yan Ruyi essay on conditions 193–201 Heshen 59, 167, 169; Qing representation during the Jiaqing Reforms 173 imperial shorthand 132–4, 147 Jahāngīr 11, 63–4, 157–9; Qing representation during the Jahāngīr Uprising 178–81 Jahāngīr Uprising 178–81 jian (treacherous) 2, 11, 57, 131–2, 134–6, 146–7, 162; jian criminality 135–7, 197; imputed activity on frontiers 137–41, 197; jianmin (treacherous subjects) 132, 134–5, 136, 188n121; jianshang (treacherous merchants) 132, 134–5, 136, 137, 141, 142, 144, 146; jian-yi relations 11, 13–14, 132, 138–9, 141, 144 jianbi qingye (strengthen the walls and clear the countryside) 119, 120, 127n46, 153n65, 173–4, 192, 200–1 Jiaqing Reforms 111–12, 118–19, 124–5, 172–4; emperor’s formal views on sectarians 174–6

Index Kashgar 8, 28; during the Jahāngīr Uprising 178–80; in the early twentieth century 82–6, 94n100 liangmin (good subjects) 9, 14, 119, 120, 133, 147, 175, 176, 177, 192, 196 lingchi (slow slicing) 14, 157, 160–1, 164, 169, 171, 174, 176, 177, 180, 182, 184n15 Lin Qing 157–9; Qing representation during the Eight Trigrams Revolt 176–8 Lin Shuangwen 11, 135, 157–9; Qing representation during Lin Shuangwen Uprising 161–7 Liu Zhixie 11, 157–9; Qing representation during the White Lotus Rebellion 171–6 Macartney, George 83, 84–6, 93–4n88; Lady Macartney 84–5 Miao (people) 6, 15n7, 28, 36, 50, 52, 78, 167; attacks on Pushi 100–1; connection to Hanjian and Han 57–8, 79–80; “cooked Miao” 81; correction plans 122; “good Miao” 80; like an “illness” 120; prejudicial views of 170; spirit possession 53–5 Miao Frontier 2, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 51–3, 78–9, 99, 120–2; Pushi region 100–2 Miao kings 5–6, 28, 49–64, 79, 168; Miao King legend 50; Wu King 49, 54, 56, 59, 62–3, 66n52, 79, 168 Miao Revolt 7–8, 9, 13, 49–64, 79–82, 99, 100–1, 120–2, 167–71 middle ground 6, 7, 13, 25, 28, 69, 70–1; “middle ground moments” 6, 7–8, 69, 73–4, 87; perspective in Qing studies 71–3, 87 military culture 3, 8, 14, 110, 111, 125 New Chinese Military History 8 New Military History 1, 8–9, 17n24, 99 New Qing History 1, 2, 3–4, 12, 23, 32–3, 38–9, 69, 87–9; New Qing History 2.0 33 New Western History 25, 71 Niuba (scion of the Ming ruling house) 63, 136, 171–2, 174

219

Opium War 143–6 pays d’en haut see Great Lakes region Political Discourse Analysis 2, 10–12, 17–18n33, 18n34, 18n35, 131, 157 prophets of renewal 50–1 regional comparison 12–13, 23, 35–7 region-centerism 1, 23, 27–9 Scott, James 1, 5–6, 28, 49–51 Shi Sanbao 11, 53–4, 55, 56, 59; Qing representation during Miao Revolt 167–71 Skinner, G. William 30; regional systems analysis 30–1 slow slicing see lingchi (slow slicing) spirit possession see fadian (going mad) strengthen the walls and clear the countryside see jianbi qingye (strengthen the walls and clear the countryside) Tarim Basin 28, 63, 178–9, 181 Turner, Frederick Jackson 2, 12; frontier thesis 23–6, 33 White, Richard 1, 6, 7, 25, 69 White Lotus Revolt 6, 9, 11, 14, 77, 122–4, 171–6; Emperor Jiaqing on “White Lotus” sectarians 174–6; first-hand account of 200–2; “White Lotus” sects 171, 176 xiejiao (evil teachings) 133, 136, 171, 174–6, 178 Yan Ruyi 6, 51, 52, 75, 81–2, 99; and the essay “Shannei fengtu” (Conditions and customs in the mountains) 191–3; on Han River highland fortification 122–3; on Miao Frontier fortification 121; on Pushi fortification 100–2, 110; translation of that essay 193–201 Zomia 28, 50–1, 52, 54, 63, 64, 78