Jonathan Schlesinger's A World Trimmed with Fur delivers fresh insights into Qing borderlands history from Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian sources dating from 1760 to 1830. The volume consists of three case studies: Manchuria's freshwater pearls, wild Mongolian mushrooms, and fur from territories bordering with Russia. The studies are meticulously documented, with forty-five pages of notes following over one hundred eighty pages of text. This work is scholarly, accessible, and valuable for scholars and students; it is also a cautionary tale for the broader public and policymakers.
The Qianlong emperor lauded the environmental diversity of Manchuria, but its wealth—and that of Mongolia—was not boundless. When the Qing conquered China proper, their lifestyles altered the material culture of their new subjects with enormous consequences. Demand rose for resources of the rulers’ homelands, quantities declined, quality was compromised, and corruption intensified. The Manchu and Mongolian sources that inform this work highlight environmental challenges that confronted the Qing and deliver an “altogether different picture of the frontier from the ones we find in published Chinese accounts” (p. 3). Further, Schlesinger argues that “the empire did not preserve nature in its borderlands; it invented it” (p. 4). Efforts to protect the rulers’ native places led to policies of extraction and seclusion that fostered notions of wild, pristine places.
The first of Schlesinger's studies, on Manchuria's freshwater pearls, focuses on the period from pearl harvesting's peak to its decline, from 1785 to 1810. As Qing authorities scrambled to avert disaster, they made the buying, selling, or trafficking of the precious pearls illegal, classifying them as tributary gifts for the emperor. Pearls were evaluated according to five grades, with quotas fixed by quantity and quality. Prizes for exceeding quotas, and punishments for not meeting them, were high. Despite efforts to control the enterprise, the final years of the eighteenth century saw calamitous declines. In 1821, the Daoguang emperor even ordered a moratorium to “‘conserve the energy of hunters’ and to ‘lovingly care for the lives of mussels’” (p. 79). The court established sentries along Manchuria's informal border with China proper, the Willow Palisade, to check for contraband, but the pearls’ popularity doomed them.
The second case study examines Mongolia's long-forgotten “great mushroom rush” (p. 93). Wild steppe mushrooms were treasured for their taste and rarity. In 1818, mushroom picking spread “like a prairie fire,” threatening mushroom survival and undermining regional stability (p. 110). After the court prohibited the practice, it became ever more dangerous—and lucrative. Access to Mongolia's steppe regions and mountains was curtailed. Holy mountains and imperial hunting grounds came to symbolize the dynasty's martial values, masculinity, Heaven, and the state. Laws curbed cross-border trade, and restrictions structured Mongolia's preeminent city, Khüree, as the city was to be male, monastic, and Mongol; women, laymen, and Chinese were officially excluded. While the court was unable to achieve its goals in Manchuria, its policies were more effective and long-lasting in Mongolia, as many of the court-protected spaces are now national parks, precious preserves in a country ravaged by tragic environmental degradation.
The third case study reveals the decline of fur-bearing animal populations and the further costs of human greed. Schlesinger masterfully juxtaposes contradictory sources to highlight differences in accounting for tribute submitted and tribute received, to show that “corruption was endemic in the Imperial Household Department” (p. 164). The regions’ animals came to share an international “synchronicity of scarcity” (p. 130) as trade in their skins spread across borders, ultimately diminishing populations and depriving the court of tribute from lands that it had secured, a condition exacerbated by treaties that ceded huge tracts of their homelands to Russia, which continues to occupy them to this day. The wearing of fur, once seen by Han Chinese as a “barbarian” practice, came to rival silk in popularity and caused unprecedented, “reckless exploitation” of animal populations (p. 168). Sables disappeared in the 1820s and 1830s, “then squirrels in the 1860s, and finally all other valuable fur-bearing animals soon thereafter” (p. 161). Schlesinger details a decimation of a diverse animal population in what was one of the world's richest environments.
Several main themes emerge from this volume: Qing demand for order and ritual; staggering levels of corruption, decades before the “century of humiliation”; and the observation that policies for “environmental change and protection were not tangential to the multi-ethnic construction of the Qing empire; they were central to it” (p. 127). Through analysis of documents produced by and for the trilingual state apparatus, Schlesinger shows how these factors were interconnected. It is commonly asserted that when “barbarians” conquered China they were Sinicized, but when this Manchu-Mongol alliance conquered China, the Han adopted many of their customs, to the detriment of their rulers’ homelands. A World Trimmed with Fur is an excellent historical cautionary account of the staggering impact of local and international market-driven human environmental destruction that all should heed today.
